Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's influential New York Times bestseller exposed the brutality of this nation's founding and its legacy of settler-colonialism and genocide. Through evocative full color artwork, renowned cartoonist Paul Peart-Smith brings this watershed book to life, centering the perspective of the peoples displaced by Europeans and their white descendants to trace Indigenous perseverance over four centuries against policies intended to obliterate them.

Recognized for his adaptation of W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk and his extensive expertise in the comics industry, Peart-Smith collaborates with experienced graphic novel editor Paul Buhle to provide an accessible introduction to a complex history that will attract new generations of readers of all ages. This striking graphic adaptation will rekindle crucial conversations about the centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regime that has largely been omitted from history.

An imaginative and riveting tour de force that tells the powerful (The New York Times Book Review) story of women-led slave revolts and chronicles scholar Rebecca Hall's efforts to uncover the truth about these female warriors who, until now, have been left out of the historical record.

Women warriors planned and led revolts on slave ships during the Middle Passage. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history.

Wake tells the riveting (Angela Y. Davis) story of Dr. Rebecca Hall, a historian, granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery. The accepted history of slave revolts has always told her that enslaved women took a back seat. But Rebecca decides to look deeper, and her journey takes her through old court records, slave ship captain's logs, crumbling correspondence, and even the forensic evidence from the bones of enslaved women from the negro burying ground uncovered in Manhattan. She finds women warriors everywhere.

Using a remarkable blend of passion and fact, action and reflection (NPR), Rebecca constructs the likely pasts of Adono and Alele, women rebels who fought for freedom during the Middle Passage, as well as the stories of women who led slave revolts in Colonial New York. We also follow Rebecca's own story as the legacy of slavery shapes her life, both during her time as a successful attorney and later as a historian seeking the past that haunts her.

Illustrated beautifully in black and white, Wake will take its place alongside classics of the graphic novel genre, like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Art Spiegelman's Maus. This story of a personal and national legacy is a powerful reminder that while the past is gone, we still live in its wake.

Sacco brings the conflict down to the most human level, allowing us to imagine our way inside it, to make the desperation he discovers, in some small way, our own.--Los Angeles Times

Rafah, a town at the bottommost tip of the Gaza Strip, has long been a notorious flashpoint in the bitter Middle East conflict. Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident, in 1956, that left 111 Palestinians shot dead by Israeli soldiers. Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing, that day in Rafah--cold-blooded massacre or dreadful mistake--reveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war.

In a quest to get to the heart of what happened, Joe Sacco immerses himself in the daily life of Rafah and the neighboring town of Khan Younis, uncovering Gaza past and present. As in Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, his unique visual journalism renders a contested landscape in brilliant, meticulous detail. Spanning fifty years, moving fluidly between one war and the next, Footnotes in Gaza--Sacco's most ambitious work to date--transforms a critical conflict of our age into intimate and immediate experience.

What makes a city a city? Who says? Drafted over decades out of a dialogue between artist and author Nika Dubrovsky, the late anthropologist David Graeber, and Nika's then four-year-old son, this delightful and provocative book Cities Made Differently opens a space for invention and collaboration. Fusing anthropology, literature, play, and drawing, the book is essentially a visual essay that asks us to reconsider our ideas about cities and the people who inhabit them. Drawing us into a world of history and myth, science and imagination, Graeber and Dubrovsky invite us to rethink the worlds we inhabit--because we can, and nothing is too strange or too wonderful to be true.

With inspired pictures and prompts, Cities Made Differently asks what a city is, or could be, or once was. Sleeping at the bottom of the ocean? Buried in lava? What were those cities of long ago, and what will the cities of the future be? They might be virtual, ruled by AI, or islands of beautiful architecture afloat in seas of greenery. They might be utopian places of refuge or refugee camps as far as the eye can see. On land, underground or aloft, excavated or imagined, cities, this book tells us in provocative and funny ways, can be anything we want them to be--and what we want them to be can tell us something about who we are, what it is to be human, and what's possible when we make way for wonder.

Cities Made Differently exists in two versions, one for reading and thinking, the other, downloadable at a4kids.org, for drawing and dreaming.

Best Art Books of 2024, Hyperallergic

She put in her work, but there's so much left to do. Begun in the Antebellum era, the song of suffrage was a rallying cry across the nation that would persist over a century. Capturing the spirit of this refrain, New Yorker contributing cartoonist Caitlin Cass pens a sweeping history of women's suffrage in the U.S. -- a kaleidoscopic story akin to a triumphant and mournful protest song that spans decades and echoes into the present.

In Suffrage Song, Cass takes a critical, intersectional approach to the movement's history -- celebrating the pivotal, hard-fought battles for voting rights while also laying bare the racist compromises suffrage leaders made along the way. She explores the multigenerational arc of the movement, humanizing key historical figures from the early days of the suffrage fight (Susan B. Anthony, Frances Watkins Harper), to the dawn of the New Women (Alice Paul, Mary Church Terrell), to the Civil Rights era (Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker). Additionally, this book sheds light on less chronicled figures such as Zitkala-Sa and Mabel Ping Hua-Lee, whose stories reveal the complex racial dynamics that haunt this history.

The interiors include 4 foldouts, most notably a 4-page map detailing where women could vote in the US in 1919, leading up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Impeccably researched and rendered in an engaging and accessible comics style, Suffrage Song is sure to spark discussion on the vital issue of voting rights that continues to resonate today.

A History of Japan in Manga tells the action-packed saga of Japan from its misty origins up to the present day. Epic battles, noble Samurai and duplicitous leaders are all portrayed in modern manga fashion! The lively stories in this book include:

• The Dawn of Japan: The Birth of Buddhism and the transition from hunters--gatherers to agricultural societies of ancient times
• The Genpei Wars: Davage battles between the Taira and Minamoto clans that led to the powerful warlord Minamoto no Yoritomo naming himself Japan's first Shogun
• The Onin Wars: A decade-long struggle for domination of Japan in which thousands of Samurai fought and tragically lost their lives
• The 47 Ronin: Loyal Samurai who vowed to avenge the death of their master, choosing honor over surrender and being forced to commit mass ritual suicide as a result
• The Satsuma Rebellion: A dramatic last stand by Samurai loyal to the Shogun who revolted against the new Meiji government and its plans to finally modernize Japan
• And many more!

WHO BELONGS IN AMERICA? The latest installment of the World Citizen Comics Line, Born in the USA, tracks the history of immigration to the United States, highlighting the twists and turns in the nearly three-hundred-year-old national debate to decide who gets to call themselves a US citizen.

The words carved into the Statue of Liberty make a simple promise-- America will provide a home for anyone in search of a better life. However, the true story of immigration to America is full of complication and caveats.

Born in the USA tracks the history of immigration to the United States, revealing how economic interests and political winds have sculpted Americans' thoughts about who belongs in the USA. From black enslavement to Chinese exclusion and the modern-day debate over birthright citizenship, Lawrence Goldstone and James Otis Smith reveal the dissonance between the American Dream and the American Reality.

If you have ever suspected that heavy water is the title of a bootleg Pink Floyd album, believed that surface tension is an anxiety disorder, or imagined that a noble gas is the result of a heavy meal at Buckingham Palace, then you need The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry to set you on the road to chemical literacy!

The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry, a collaboration between preeminent scientist Professor Craig Criddle of Stanford University and cartoonist Larry Gonick, is a complete and up-to-date course in college-level chemistry. In engaging and humorous graphic style, the book covers both the history and the basics, including:

Early ideas and techniquesElectrochemistryOrganic chemistryBiochemistryEnvironmental chemistryPhysics as chemistryAnd much more!

You don't need to be a scientist to grasp these and many other complex ideas, because The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry explains them all: the history and basics of chemistry, atomic theory, combustion, solubility, reaction stoichiometry, the mole, entropy, and much more--all explained in simple, clear, and yes, funny illustrations. Chemistry will never be the same!

An explosive exhibition of art by a celebrated cartoonist chronicling America's march toward right-wing authoritarianism.

Museum of Degenerates invites you to a delirious display of art by one of contemporary America's most original and incendiary political cartoonists. Eli Valley's extraordinary work is a scathing indictment of the entire American polity, with a particular focus on the issues of Israel and Judaism at a time when these have moved to the center of public debate and action.

In these pages, Valley tips a homburg to German expressionists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix who featured in The Exhibition of Degenerate Art, a 1937 Munich show that sought to ridicule the work of artists critical of Hitler's fascist regime. In an aesthetic that is strikingly original, Valley also draws on early twentieth-century American Yiddish cartoons and the work of artists who created the helter-skelter exuberance of MAD comics in the 1950s.

Valley's own art, accompanied here by extensive descriptions of its genesis and context, is a howl of protest against the political, cultural and media elites driving America into an authoritarian abyss. Here is anger, pure and hot, expressed in exquisite detail and, often, disturbingly funny.

From community activism to the halls of government, pop-culture, arts, and beyond, Latinos have shaped every aspect of American life. Nevertheless, these significant figures and their contributions are often left out of our textbooks. Sí, Se Puede, named after the Yes, We Can motto of the United Farm Workers, brings Latino history in the U.S. to the forefront.

The book follows a group of Hispanic-Americans as they embark on an interactive museum tour to meet Latino heroes they may not have learned about in school. The high tech, immersive exhibit allows the tour group to virtually travel through time, visiting the Hispanic Union soldiers of the Civil War; marching with César Chávez and Dolores Huerta in the farmworkers struggle; going to space with Ellen Ochoa, the first Latina to leave Earth's atmosphere; meeting the youngest woman to ever serve in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; and more. This ensemble of unlikely friends discover the rich history of Latinos in the United States, and gain new insights into their own American experiences.

Sí, Se Puede shines a spotlight on the often-overlooked Latino heroes throughout US history, bringing their stories to life through the sequential action, illustrated characters, and lush color palette of a graphic novel.

Adapted from the bestselling grassroots history of the United States, the story of America in the world, told in comics form

Since its landmark publication in 1980, A People's History of the United States has had six new editions, sold more than 1.7 million copies, become required classroom reading throughout the country, and been turned into an acclaimed play. More than a successful book, A People's History triggered a revolution in the way history is told, displacing the official versions with their emphasis on great men in high places to chronicle events as they were lived, from the bottom up.

Now Howard Zinn, historian Paul Buhle, and cartoonist Mike Konopacki have collaborated to retell, in vibrant comics form, a most immediate and relevant chapter of A People's History: the centuries-long story of America's actions in the world. Narrated by Zinn, this version opens with the events of 9/11 and then jumps back to explore the cycles of U.S. expansionism from Wounded Knee to Iraq, stopping along the way at World War I, Central America, Vietnam, and the Iranian revolution. The book also follows the story of Zinn, the son of poor Jewish immigrants, from his childhood in the Brooklyn slums to his role as one of America's leading historians.

Shifting from world-shattering events to one family's small revolutions, A People's History of American Empire presents the classic ground-level history of America in a dazzling new form.

Harrowing and graphic re-telling of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster from the creator of George Orwell's 1984 graphic novel.

This graphic and harrowing account of nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl in April 1986 follows the dozens of human stories cruelly affected by disaster.

From the engineers and firefighters to doctors and soldiers, the children and families in the surrounding towns and villages to the animals in the forests - they all make up the story of Chernobyl, a mosaic of victims who paid the price for distant politicians' ambitions and arrogance.

Co-hosts of the popular podcast Gaslit Nation outline the authoritarian's playbook, illuminating five steps every dictator needs to take to successfully amass and maintain power.

Do you crave the power to shape the world in your image?

Can you tell lies without blinking an eye?

Do you see enemies all around you?

If you answered yes to all of the above, then this is the job for you! And if becoming a dictator sounds intriguing, well, you've just stumbled upon the playbook that will guide you step by step towards making your big lie a reality.

Join Gaslit Nation co-hosts Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa, with artist Kasia Babis, on a journey from riches to even more riches. They'll show you how to consolidate your authority, silence your critics, weaponize your citizens, and even prolong your inevitable downfall!

Dictatorship! It's easier than you think.

In the early-20th century, strikes and union battles were common in industrial centers throughout the US. But nothing compared to the class warfare of the West Virginia Mine Wars. The origins of this protracted rebellion were in the dictatorial rule of the coal companies over the proud, multi-racial, immigrant and native-born miners of Appalachia.

Our illustrated history begins with Mary Harris Mother Jones's arrival at the turn of the century. White-haired, matronly, and fiercely socialist, Jones became known as the miners' angel, and helped turn the fledgling United Mine Workers into the nation's most powerful labor union. Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living, was her famous battle cry.

In 1912, miners led by stubborn Frank Keeney struck against harsh conditions in the work camps of Paint and Cabin Creeks. Coal operators responded by enlisting violent Baldwin-Felts guards. The ensuing battles and murderous events caused the governor to declare and execute martial law on a scale unprecedented in the US.

On May 19, 1920, in response to evictions by coal company agents, gunshots rang through the streets of a small-town in Bloody Mingo county. In an event soon known as the Matewan Massacre; the pro-union, quick-draw chief of police Smilin' Sid Hatfield became an unexpected celebrity--but also a marked man.

Events climax with the dramatic Battle of Blair Mountain that pitched the spontaneous Red Neck Army of 10,000 armed strikers against a paid army of gun thugs in the largest labor uprising in US history and the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War.

This graphic interpretation of people's history features unforgettable main characters while also displaying the diverse rank and file workers who stood in solidarity during this struggle.

Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Times, Forbes, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and NPR, Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio is a moving and troubling story about the bitter price of dissent--as relevant today as it was in 1970.

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard gunned down unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University. In a deadly barrage of 67 shots, four students were killed and nine shot and wounded. It was the day America turned guns on its own children--a shocking event burned into our national memory.

The fatal shootings triggered immediate and massive outrage on campuses around the country. More than four million students participated in organized walkouts at hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools, the largest student strike in the history of the United States at that time. It was a day that shocked the nation and helped turn the tide of public opinion against America's war in Vietnam.

A few days prior, 10-year-old Derf Backderf saw those same guardsmen patrolling his nearby hometown, sent in by the governor to crush a trucker strike.

Using the journalism skills he employed on My Friend Dahmer and Trashed, Backderf has conducted extensive interviews and research to explore the lives of these four young people and the events of those four days in May, when the country seemed on the brink of tearing apart.

In this award-winning and powerful graphic novel, Derf Backderf takes us back to the age of the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon, Woodstock, and the Cold War and explores, in words and images, a scene of tragedy: the campus of Kent State University, where National Guard Troops attacked unarmed protestors and killed four students (Allison Beth Krause, age 19, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, age 20, Sandra Lee Scheuer, age 20, and William Knox Schroeder, age 19).

Lies destroy. Disinformation tears at the fabric of democracy.

A Firehose of Falsehood: The Story of Disinformation breaks down disinformation tactics and offers tools for defending and restoring truth.

From Darius I of ancient Persia (522-486 BCE), to blood libel of the Middle Ages, to Soviet disinformation tactics and modern election deniers, Teri Kanefield and Pat Dorian show how tyrants and would-be tyrants deploy disinformation to gain power.

Democracy, which draws its authority from laws instead of the whim of a tyrant, requires truth. For a democracy to survive, its citizens must preserve and defend truth. Now that the Internet has turned what was once a trickle of lies into a firehose, the challenge of holding on to truth has never been greater. A Firehose of Falsehood offers readers these necessary tools.

Run, Eisner Award Winner for Best Graphic Memoir, is an essential graphic novel, whether for the home or the classroom. First you march, then you run. From the #1 bestselling, award-winning team behind March.

This follow-up to the #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novel series March is the continuation of the life story of John Lewis and the struggles seen across the United States after the Selma voting rights campaign.

To many, the civil rights movement was capped with the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. All too often, the depiction of history ends with a great victory. But John Lewis knew that victories are just the beginning.

John Lewis was one of the preeminent figures of the movement, leading sit-in protests and fighting segregation on interstate busways as an original Freedom Rider. He became chairman of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington. He helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Summer and the ensuing delegate challenge at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. And he co-led the march from Selma to Montgomery on what became known as Bloody Sunday.

In Run, John Lewis and longtime collaborator Andrew Aydin reteam with Nate Powell--the award-winning illustrator of the March trilogy--and are joined by L. Fury, making an astonishing graphic novel debut, to tell this often-overlooked chapter of civil rights history.

In sharing my story, it is my hope that a new generation will be inspired by Run to actively participate in the democratic process and help build a more perfect Union here in America.--Congressman John Lewis

Run recounts the lost history of what too often follows dramatic change--the pushback of those who refuse it and the resistance of those who believe change has not gone far enough. John Lewis's story has always been a complicated narrative of bravery, loss, and redemption, and Run gives vivid, energetic voice to a chapter of transformation in his young, already extraordinary life. --Stacey Abrams

New York Times Top 5 YA Books of the Year - Top 10 Great Graphic Novels for Teens (Young Adult Library Services Association) - Washington Post Best Books of the Year - Variety Best Books of the Year - School Library Journal Best Books of the Year