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Nat Turner #1
Book Released: 13 July 2005
Review posted: 31 July 2005
Writer: Kyle Baker
Artist: Kyle Baker
Publisher: Kyle Baker Publishing
5.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by John L. Daniels Jr.
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Imagine a beautiful sunny morning. You are working in a field
tending to your own vegetable garden with your children. They are
helping you and you are laughing and smiling with them knowing that
the work is strenuous but the work is bringing you all together as a
family. Then thundering hooves are heard and you realize something is
wrong. You sense danger not for yourself but for your children.
Then you are chased like an animal. All the men and women around you
are captured, stripped, branded, and placed on a sailing ship. You
are bought to a land you have never seen and then sold as property.
Now you are someone else’s property, tending to their gardens and
vegetable fields.
Kyle Baker, the Eisner-winning artist who currently draws
Plastic Man for DC comics and who also drew the Marvel graphic
novel Truth: Red, White & Black about the African-American
Captain America that preceded Steve Rogers, brings a sequential art
depiction of the legendary slave turned freedom fighter Nat Turner.
“Slavery is a situation where one
person does all the work and somebody else gets all the money.
“When creating a book denouncing slavery, it is kind of
important that the guy who writes, draws, letters, colors and designs
the book get most of the money. Any other situation would kind of
render the book’s argument moot.”
—Kyle Baker,
quoted from an article at popimage.com.
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Baker’s artwork is visually stunning with pencils that tell the
story of slavery and the coming of Nat Turner. The story itself was
expressive and engrossing from the first panel to the last in this
first issue. The panels are all black and white and detailed and
contain almost no dialogue at all. The only word bubble doesn?t even
contain words, but the dollar sign which in detail expressed the
whole motivation for slavery.
Baker’s message was clear and soul wrenching. The actual story was
taken from the testimony of Nat Turner from the official court
records of his trial. This historical and factual presentation is
enduring and informative for any comic book reader. This is the first
of four in the miniseries, an incredible and historic journey that
needed to be expressed.
Emotionally stirring — eyes are the key to the soul —
every panel will touch the soul of each individual reader in a
certain way. Being an African-American, I was deeply touched by this
quality-produced title and its story, expressed so eloquently with so
few words.
—CCdC— Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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