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A review by outcolder
Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History by Harvey Pekar
4.0
When people start chattering about SDS I usually have to suppress an eye-roll. It is important to remember though that the hippies were the good guys.
About a month before I was born, the National Guard opened fire unprovoked on peaceful demonstrators at Kent State, killing four and injuring nine. A few years later, I was for a short time a child living on an army base. In the home I grew up in, the line on SDS was that it was set up by the government from the beginning as a surveillance thing to get all the freaks and activists on one list. Later, I learned about the Port Huron statement and the Yippies and the Weathermen and so had this image of well-meaning, privileged white people forming a group to support the civil rights movement and labor but very quickly being infiltrated by the feds and breaking up in to warring factions. That is more or less how this comic tells it, too.
I wanted to read this for Pekar's cranky, working-class take on SDS and I was surprised to find that in the lengthy opening chapter Pekar is very sympathetic to SDS. I think one thing that I often forget about 60s college students is that a lot of them were the first in their families to go to university. Yeah, they are college kids, but they didn't grow up in some bubble.
Two thirds of this book are the more personal stories of individual SDS members. My favorites were the one about the woman from the woman-only college who is doing all the printing and postering on a nearby co-ed campus when a women's liberation lecture makes her realize that she can say "no" to men. I was also impressed with the story about the SDSer who gets drafted and just keeps on SDSing so he gets court-martialed like a million times.
The most interesting from a "hey, that sounds like something we should do nowadays" perspective is the ERAP stuff where SDS help poor and working people get active by facilitating meetings, printing newsletters and flyers, and canvassing neighborhoods. What's that New Left line about an Interracial Movement of the Poor? Seems like that would need a new name but the basic idea is excellent.
I also like how both the Maoist faction and the Weather Underground types come off as jerks. There are a bunch of stories about more common sense activists triumphing over these wannabe leaders.
I would have liked more of Pekar's personality. I guess he didn't want beef with these cats or something because I don't think he really says everything he thinks about this weirdness. That could be because he is collaborating with Buhle?
Another minus I think is Dumm's female characters... they are all drawn the same. Maybe the hair changes but they all have the same body. It is particularly distracting when he draws several women together and they all have the same breasts. It's like clone club or something. I never noticed that in his art in American Splendor, and I think maybe that points to another plus about this book, that there are enough women characters and that they talk to each other so that you might notice that they are all drawn the same. While I'm on the subject, there seem to be more stories by men about falling hard for women who aren't all Victorian about sex than stories about women being like, "Just because I have sex with you once or twice doesn't mean we are engaged."
My last little nit-pick is that I wish there had been more about the early years, when it was a small organization and everyone looked like season one of Mad Men but was talking about communism and democracy and stuff like that. That generation is getting really old and if there is going to be a proper oral history of those cats, the historians better get cracking. Not to be morbid, but... anyway, it is harder to find those people and there are far fewer of them than the thousands of hippies in the "glorious" anti-Vietnam War years... but ... but... I want more stories about people joining the Freedom Riders and stuff like that. So I wish maybe they had tried a little harder to get those guys on board or even some of the bigger names like Hayden. It seems like they got one dude from the founders and ... he is so awesome that instead of waxing nostalgic, he talks about how SDS reformed in 2006 and how there is now this nationwide multigenerational movement. Yeah, man. Right on.
About a month before I was born, the National Guard opened fire unprovoked on peaceful demonstrators at Kent State, killing four and injuring nine. A few years later, I was for a short time a child living on an army base. In the home I grew up in, the line on SDS was that it was set up by the government from the beginning as a surveillance thing to get all the freaks and activists on one list. Later, I learned about the Port Huron statement and the Yippies and the Weathermen and so had this image of well-meaning, privileged white people forming a group to support the civil rights movement and labor but very quickly being infiltrated by the feds and breaking up in to warring factions. That is more or less how this comic tells it, too.
I wanted to read this for Pekar's cranky, working-class take on SDS and I was surprised to find that in the lengthy opening chapter Pekar is very sympathetic to SDS. I think one thing that I often forget about 60s college students is that a lot of them were the first in their families to go to university. Yeah, they are college kids, but they didn't grow up in some bubble.
Two thirds of this book are the more personal stories of individual SDS members. My favorites were the one about the woman from the woman-only college who is doing all the printing and postering on a nearby co-ed campus when a women's liberation lecture makes her realize that she can say "no" to men. I was also impressed with the story about the SDSer who gets drafted and just keeps on SDSing so he gets court-martialed like a million times.
The most interesting from a "hey, that sounds like something we should do nowadays" perspective is the ERAP stuff where SDS help poor and working people get active by facilitating meetings, printing newsletters and flyers, and canvassing neighborhoods. What's that New Left line about an Interracial Movement of the Poor? Seems like that would need a new name but the basic idea is excellent.
I also like how both the Maoist faction and the Weather Underground types come off as jerks. There are a bunch of stories about more common sense activists triumphing over these wannabe leaders.
I would have liked more of Pekar's personality. I guess he didn't want beef with these cats or something because I don't think he really says everything he thinks about this weirdness. That could be because he is collaborating with Buhle?
Another minus I think is Dumm's female characters... they are all drawn the same. Maybe the hair changes but they all have the same body. It is particularly distracting when he draws several women together and they all have the same breasts. It's like clone club or something. I never noticed that in his art in American Splendor, and I think maybe that points to another plus about this book, that there are enough women characters and that they talk to each other so that you might notice that they are all drawn the same. While I'm on the subject, there seem to be more stories by men about falling hard for women who aren't all Victorian about sex than stories about women being like, "Just because I have sex with you once or twice doesn't mean we are engaged."
My last little nit-pick is that I wish there had been more about the early years, when it was a small organization and everyone looked like season one of Mad Men but was talking about communism and democracy and stuff like that. That generation is getting really old and if there is going to be a proper oral history of those cats, the historians better get cracking. Not to be morbid, but... anyway, it is harder to find those people and there are far fewer of them than the thousands of hippies in the "glorious" anti-Vietnam War years... but ... but... I want more stories about people joining the Freedom Riders and stuff like that. So I wish maybe they had tried a little harder to get those guys on board or even some of the bigger names like Hayden. It seems like they got one dude from the founders and ... he is so awesome that instead of waxing nostalgic, he talks about how SDS reformed in 2006 and how there is now this nationwide multigenerational movement. Yeah, man. Right on.