COMICS AND THE LABOUR movement have a long and entwined history that could begin with 18th-century satiric and editorial cartoons. Even if we take the definition of comics to be multi-panel sequences rather than single panel images, there is still a century of material for contemporary cartoonists to cite. One branch of this tradition is strip cartoons that poke fun at those who have not yet come to class consciousness, such as the 1910s Industrial Workers of the World Mr. Block series by Ernest Riebe in The Industrial Worker. Another branch is orientation comics produced to teach new workers about their unions and workplace issues. A third important type of labour comic is devoted to commemorating important moments in labour history. No less educational than satiric or orientation comics, contemporary labour history comics tend to also have close aesthetic ties to the radical traditions in alternative, underground, and indie comics pioneered by Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb in the 1960s. They often eschew the regular panel grids and realistic styles of mainstream comics for more fluid, disruptive layouts and expressionistic caricatures that echo the woodcut tradition of early-20th century proletarian art, pamphlets, and posters.
This is the context for the nine short Canadian labour history comics collected in the Graphic History Collective's (GHC) anthology, Drawn to Change: Graphic Histories of Working-Class Struggle. As the editorial collective explain in the Introduction, in the early 2000s the GHC received Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada funding to create accessible materials to raise awareness of Canadian working-class history. The first collaborative work they published was May Day: A Graphic History of Protest (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2012). Following its success, the GHC solicited proposals from new cartoonists for short comics for website and potentially print publication. To their credit, the GHC applied for all available funding to provide the artists with at least an honorarium, and there was clearly an effort to include female cartoonists in a field traditionally dominated by men. Guided by Paul Buhle's and Howard Zinn's commitments to popular history as a politically transformative tool, the GHC seeks to reclaim comics as a working-class art form that can inspire hope. The final product is this volume of Canadian labour history comics that tell inspiring, although not always politically successful, stories of 20th-century working-class organizing that includes Indigenous, feminist, and immigrant worker struggles.
Brief introductions by labour historians and organizers precede each of the comics, and Acknowledgements and Notes appear at the end of each chapter to cite sources and suggest further reading. Members of the GHC contributed to the writing of many of the chapters.
Various combinations of Sean Carleton, Julia Smith, and Robin Folvik co-wrote five of the nine comics, two are illustrated and written by a single artist, and two are based on the words of historical figures themselves. There is quite a lot of variation between these black-and-white comics. The first chapter, "Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Canada, 1880-1900," uses Sam Bradd's sketchy cartooning style and plenty of typed text by Carleton, Smith, and Folvik to tell this story of a movement that, while flawed, is still inspiring. The same team collaborated on Chapter 6, "Madeleine Parent: A Life of Struggle and Solidarity." This comic reveals how Parent's lifelong commitment to labour and feminist issues charted some of the most important struggles of the 20th century.
One of the most visually interesting and lesser known stories appears in Chapter 2, "Working on the Water, Fighting for the Land: Indigenous Labour on Burrard Inlet." Illustrator Tania Willard (Secwapemc Nation) and cowriters Folvik and Carleton focus on the 1910s and 1920s struggles of Squamish longshoremen and the organization of Indigenous workers on Vancouver's waterfront, ending with today's fight by the Coast Salish to protect the land and sea. This sequence is less text-heavy and the arresting large-scale images, reminiscent of 1930s proletarian linocuts, challenge colonial portraits of Indigenous peoples in settler colonial painting and photography.
David Lester is the artist and writer of chapter three, "The Battle of Ballantyne Pier," a first person narrative about his grandfather's involvement in this 1935 strike by Vancouver longshoremen often overshadowed by that year's On-toOttawa Trek. Lester employs similar techniques to those in his graphic novel, The Listener (Winnipeg: ARP, 2011), alternating between pen, acrylic, and watercolours to create evocative, expressionistic scenes interspersed with self-portraits as he recounts the story. The complex visuals and personal connection to the events make this one of the most affecting comics in the volume; others, while equally historically important, over-rely on narration to produce the feeling of reading an illustrated textbook rather than getting inside the events themselves. The one shortcoming of Lester's comic, which it shares with at least four others, is the use of typed text rather than hand lettering. This is another way some of the chapters seem overly academic and visibly anxious about allowing only the visuals to carry the story.
A good example of how hand lettering is a powerful expressive tool is illustrator Kara Sievewright's sequence based on the words of Bill Williamson, "Hobo, Wobbly, Communist, On-to-Ottawa Trekker, Spanish Civil War Veteran, Photographer." This is a fascinating life narrative conveyed in a variety of experiments with page layouts that has a suspenseful, cinematic feel. Equally bold in visual style is Nicole Marie Burton's "Coal Mountain: The 1935 Corbin Miner's Strike," which seeks a personal angle on the collective struggle by inventing a young female narrator, "Grade." Ron Verzuh's introduction explains she is based in part on recollections of Grace Roe, a former Corbin resident. Burton's detailed illustrative style captures the setting exquisitely, and she plays with various angles of framing to bring us in close to the angry faces of strikers and pull us out for a bird's eye view of police violence.
The final three chapters jump ahead to more recent decades. Chapter 7, "An 'Entirely Different'Kind of Labour Union: The Service, Office, and Retail Workers' Union of Canada" highlights a new kind of organizing when, as Joan Sangster observes in her introduction, "socialism, feminism, and democracy figured prominently." (145) Co-written by Smith, Folvik, and Carleton and illustrated by Ethan Heitner, this comic has a playful visual style that echoes 1970s comics and social justice posters. Although it disbanded in 1986, SORWAC'S gains in higher wages and improved working conditions for white-collar women is only one of its achievements. The comic concludes that its alternative approach to unionization and especially its grassroots, democratic structure is a lasting legacy. David Camfield introduces Chapter 9, "The Days of Action: The Character of Class Struggle in 1990s Ontario" by noting the irony that recent struggles are often less familiar than older moments in working-class history. Illustrated by Orion Keresztesi and written by Doug Nesbitt and Carleton, this comic depicts the antiTory protests in Ontario between 1995 and 1998 as a form of mass direct action and fight for social justice that is "also a sobering story of working class defeat which contains important lessons for radical organizing today." (164) Keresztesi illustrates this story of popular protest and union divisions in an appropriately kinetic and unruly style that belongs to the tradition of counter-cultural zines and comics. It ends on a hopeful note that workers must learn from past mistakes and "organize radical solutions from the bottom up." (173) The title of the final chapter, "Kwentong Bayan," translates literally to "community stories" and focuses on Filipina live-in caregivers in Toronto from 1971 to the present. Credited to a collective of Filipina Canadian artists, including Althea Balmes and Jo SiMalaya Alcampo, this is a fitting conclusion to a highly collaborative volume, as the comic not only emerges from community voices but depicts solidarity amongst Filipina and Jamaican domestic workers.
Worth noting is the volume's high quality production in a large format on thick glossy paper. This gives the visuals room to breathe and lends the collection a physical weight more common to art books than textbooks, suggesting that it belongs on the coffee table as much as on the bookshelf. Although no volume such as this could achieve full geographic coverage, it is a bit disappointing that the stories are all based in Ontario (apart from Parent's early activism in Quebec) and British Columbia. There are many more labour history comics to be drawn about Prairie, Atlantic, and Northern Canadian struggles, while several of these short comics could easily be expanded into full-length narratives. The care and quality of this collection sets a high benchmark for future Canadian labour comics and shows how a popular art form can invigorate working-class history.
University of Winnipeg
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