Sometime during my school years, probably in junior high, a teacher handed me the novel News from Nowhere by William Morris.  I was told it was a utopian novel and since I liked science fiction, I might find it interesting.  Needless to say, I did.  It was different than many of the sci-fi novels I had read—mostly mass-market paperbacks portraying technical futures of war, conquest and resistance—yet maintained the hopefulness implicit in the more general concept of science fiction of a potentially better world in the future.  The story itself is a dream of a socialist future (in the late twentieth century) that is the result of a civil war begun in the aftermath of a fictional massacre of workers in London in 1952.  My curiosity led me to Morris’ other novels Pilgrims of Hope and The Dream of John Ball.  These led me to Marx and Engels and The Communist Manifesto.  Eventually, I discovered the numerous other talents and creations of Morris; his furniture and home interior designs, his poetry and even his political organzing.

I tell this story of my interaction with the work of William Morris to introduce a new biography of Morris titled If I Could But See It: A Graphic Biography of William Morris.  As the title infers, this is a graphic work.  The author is former Boston Globe cartoonist and illustrator Nick Thorkelson, whose previous work includes a graphic biography of radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse.  In addition to Thorkelson, there are fourteen illustrations from Sharon Rudahl, who was part of the founding collective that created the classic underground comix Wimmen’s Comix and has contributed to several collections of what is now known as graphic non-fiction.  The editing work was done by two masters of the genre Mary Jo and Paul Buhle.  The result is a visionary and imaginative telling of Morris’ life and work; his loves and relationships, his decorative work and his political speechmaking and organizing.

Speaking of those politics, suffice it to say Morris was often on the cutting edge of socialism’s early decades.  Always more of a utopian than a scientific socialist, his understanding was still quite anti-capitalist and anti-colonial.  The latter position was not always a popular one even among certain socialists in the years which were historically the heyday of the British Empire.  In a manner all too similar to today, the imperial mindset infected the thinking of western thought, a phenomenon that all too often led thinkers from the right to the left to assume that imperialism was just how things were supposed to be.  From Disraeli’s blatant colonialism and war mongering to the liberal Gladstone’s support for peasant rebellions in Hungary but not in Ireland, the arrogance of the British colonial mind tainted the political thinking of many if not most, often making it difficult for some in the socialist movement to see the contradictions in their politics.  Morris was not one of them.  He was clear about the nature of capitalist exploitation, its need for colonialism and imperialism and the lack of common interests between those who work for others’ profit and those who profit from others’ work.

The graphic format of storytelling used to be almost completely maligned.  Comics were considered to be trashier than pulp paperback novels with even less validity among intellectuals.  Other than the Classics Illustrated series of comic books that condensed classic literature into thirty-page comic books in the latter half of the twentieth century, there were few if any attempts to provide intellectual content in the genre.  Superheroes, teenagers, US war “heroes”, and Disney ducks and dogs were the commonly understood elements of comics, especially after the government intruded and forced the industry to enforce a code that eliminated most horror and lust from the pages of comic books.  By the end of the 1960s, however, the popularity of so-called underground comix had brought lust, weirdness and politics (mostly anarchist and leftist) back to the funny pages, so to speak.  This expansion of the comics genre brought a new intellectualism to the format—not often but often enough.  As any student of comics knows, the first lengthy graphic novel that achieved both popularity and respect from the “cultured” classes was Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a fictionalized take on the Holocaust.  As for graphic biographies, the first one I can recall (besides war stories in comics like Sgt. Rock and such) is Spain Rodriguez’s biography of anarchist revolutionary Nestor Makhno which first appeared in Anarchy Comics in 1978.  In the last twenty or so years, at least a dozen graphic biographies have been published, many of those regarding leftist and bohemian personalities edited by one or both of the Buhles mentioned above.

If I Could But See It does the work of William Morris justice.  The pages are laid out in such a manner that neither the text or the art diminishes the other, while the text is easy to follow from balloon to balloon.  The pages introducing each chapter reproduce some aspect of Morris’ famous wallpaper designs, while the artwork and text drawn by Sharon Rudahl that follows Thorkelson’s biographical section of the book illuminate Morris’ writing and underline its meanings.  The conversational afterword authored by the editors provides a meaningful and concise discussion of Morris and his circle, art, politics, utopian visions, and even a mention of surrealism as they relate to the legacy of Morris, the future of comics and the world itself.  They end their essay and the text with these words: “With the book at hand, the dialogue continues.”  And so it does.