In his 1962 essay titled “The Creative Dilemma,” James Baldwin wrote, “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” Baldwin goes on to state that the role of the artist is to reveal the deeper truths of the society they live and work in; a situation which ultimately means that the artist is always at war with that society. It may be what he calls “a lover’s war,” but it is a war nonetheless. The ideal result of this struggle between the artist and the society they live in is progress towards greater social justice. Of course, art cannot change society on its own, but it can change people who in turn can change society.

Artist Susan Simensky Bietila has been moving people in just this way for over sixty years. After breaking free of the social restrictions and expectations of her parents and their culture in the early 1960s, Bietila joined the antiwar and anti-racist movements of the time, marching, organizing and creating art for political posters and the burgeoning underground newspaper movement, specifically the New York City paper The Subterranean Rat. By 1969, she was also already part of a growing feminist movement as a member of Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.) For those who don’t know (or don’t remember), The Rat had one of the larger circulations of an underground paper; it was political, countercultural and, like too many other New Left and counterculture organizations in the 1960s, almost as sexist as the mainstream culture. In early 1970, the women working for The Rat (mostly as typists, secretaries and other such jobs) took over the paper and changed its focus. Indeed, the lead editorial in the first issue following the takeover was a searing attack on the sexism of the counterculture and New Left written by Robin Morgan and titled “Enough of All That.”

After leaving The Rat, Bietila hired on with the National Guardian, a leftist paper established in the 1940s that was shifting from an Old Left attitude to a more modern approach, incorporating the New Left and Black Liberation politics that dominated the expanding US Left. As part of this shift, the paper hired Bietila to do some graphics work in addition to her writing. Ultimately, as her newly released memoir Front Lines: A Lifetime of Drawing Resistance reveals, Bietila ended up working as part of the collective that produces the World War Three Illustrated comics series. She continues to do so in addition to organizing and creating art for political groups and manifestations.

The memoir is filled with comics telling stories of protests against pipelines and mines, posters opposing the US wars, and collages for the front pages of newspapers she worked on. In between the graphics are brief textual explanations that place the artwork in both historical and personal context. The comic art is strikingly powerful and demands a response, hopefully one that addresses the grievance being described. The works represent current abuses of power and those from history.

David Lester has drawn a number of what might be termed graphic histories. Three of them have involved working with historian Marcus Rediker and historian and comics editor Paul Buhle. These include the newly-published presentation of the rebellion by several dozen Mende people kidnapped by slavers enroute to the Americas on the ship known as the Amistad. Titled The Black Schooner: Rebellion on the Amistad, this attractively composed book re-tells the story of the rebellion, the arrests of the rebels and the trials that followed. In the retelling, the books composers return the focus back to those who rebelled, giving them the agency often denied in most tellings; an agency they of course deserve.

For those reading this text who remember the Steven Spielberg film on the Amistad, they should easily recognize the difference between his rendering and that of the composers of The Black Schooner. As Buhle notes in his afterword, summing up the works of WEB DuBois and CLR James, “Black people had, contrary to previous histories and popular expectations, fought for their freedoms.” My stating this is not to diminish the role previous portrayals played in bringing the history of the fight against slavery in the United States to the public, but to emphasize that there is considerably more to the story. It was DuBois and James—two Black scholars—who first made this evident; it is Rediker, Lester and Buhle who have continued to carry this history forward, inspired by Black liberation groups in the US and around the world.

Lester’s artwork is sharply inscribed, his black and white portraits of the rebels’ representative of their resolute and righteous struggle; the story is told from the viewpoint of a ten-year old girl named Magru who was among the kidnapped. It moves quickly from the rebellion (portrayed rather graphically by Lester) to the freedom fighters’ flight up the Atlantic coast and ultimately to the moment they are back in their homeland many, many months after their uprising unfolded. It’s a history told through art and from the perspective of the many, not the few; the oppressed, not the oppressor.

Bertolt Brecht is supposed to have once said, “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” Leon Trotsky wrote something similar in his 1924 text Literature and Revolution. The truth is that it doesn’t matter who said it and how or when, but that its sentiment is a revolutionary sentiment. The art discussed here and displayed in the two books discussed underline the truth and revolutionary essence of this sentiment.