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Summary
Summary
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
As the civil rights struggle heats up in Texas, two families-one white, one black-find common ground.
This semi-autobiographical tale is set in 1967 Texas, against the backdrop of the fight for civil rights. A white family from a notoriously racist neighborhood in the suburbs and a black family from its poorest ward cross Houston's color line, overcoming humiliation, degradation, and violence to win the freedom of five black college students unjustly charged with the murder of a policeman.
The Silence of Our Friends follows events through the point of view of young Mark Long, whose father is a reporter covering the story. Semi-fictionalized, this story has its roots solidly in very real events. With art from the brilliant Nate Powell ( Swallow Me Whole ) bringing the tale to heart-wrenching life, The Silence of Our Friends is a new and important entry in the body of civil rights literature.
Author Notes
Mark Long is a video game designer and producer living in Seattle. The Silence of Our Friends is based on Long's childhood experiences with the civil rights movement in suburban Houston, Texas.
Jim Demonakos founded Seattle's annual Emerald City Comicon, as well as The Comic Stop chain of retail stores. He has written, edited, and promoted a variety of books for different publishers throughout his career. He lives in the Seattle area.
Nate Powell is an Arkansas native and Eisner Award-winning cartoonist whose works include Swallow Me Whole (an LA Times Book Prize finalist), Any Empire , and (with co-authors Congressman John Lewis and Andrew Aydin) the March trilogy, the final volume of which won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Powell is the first cartoonist to receive this honor. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 6 Up-The year 1968 was a tense time to be growing up in Houston. Mark Long, the white protagonist of this gripping graphic novel-like Mark Long, the author-is the son of the local TV station's "race reporter." The more contact his dad has with civil rights protesters and law enforcement, the more motivated he becomes to speak up against racism at work and at home. Bigotry, police brutality, and civilian violence, as well as nonviolent marches and sit-ins, are depicted from the point of view of young Mark, his father, and a black activist and his family who become acquainted with the Longs. Well-chosen scenes-among them a prison rodeo and a black church service-move the story along while illuminating it from many angles. Dialogue is so natural as to be completely unobtrusive. Powell uses a mixture of large and small panels along with a variety of frame compositions and points of view to give the book a cinematic realism. From this intimate vantage point, racist incidents are shockingly ugly, while happy domestic moments-as when the kids from both families belt out "Soul Man"-are unself-consciously beautiful. The youthful protagonist and graphic-novel format will plunge readers into a time that can seem very distant. Ideal as a class read, absorbing for solo readers.-Paula Willey, Baltimore County Public Library, Towson, MD (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
From the opening scene, this graphic novel written by Long and Demonakos is compelling. Set in Houston in 1968, it tells the story of two families-one black and one white-who are witness to and participants in events that shaped the South in the late 1960s. The novel is a loosely autobiographical account of the Long family, who moved from San Antonio to Houston in 1966, and experienced the protests, violence, and struggle for freedom that characterized the Third and Fifth Wards. Long's father had moved to Houston to take a job as a local television reporter, and there he met Larry Thomas, the editor of an antipoverty weekly. This graphic novel presents an engrossing narrative about race in America, while honestly dealing with a host of other real-world issues, including familial relationships, friendship, dependency, "other"-ness, and perhaps most importantly, the search for common ground. Powell-an award-winning cartoonist in his own right for Swallow Me Whole-tells a story in pictures that is just as compelling as what Long and Demonakos tell in words. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Set in Houston in 1968, this graphic novel is based on Long's childhood memories of the events surrounding a little-remembered incident from the civil rights movement. As the students of Texas Southern University gear up for a demonstration involving Stokely Carmichael's Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, smaller satellite confrontations around town hint at the violence to come. The story unfolds from two sets of eyes, those of a white TV reporter (Long's father) and a black demonstration leader. Deciding that men of conscience have got to join together, the two forge a friendship that crosses the color line, is not looked upon favorably by either of their communities, and gets tested when the demonstration turns ugly. Powell is one of the finest young cartoonists around, and his artwork with full-bodied figures, a loose compositional style, and inky black-and-white tones unflinchingly mines the drama of both petty slashes of racism and larger instances of civil unrest. All the more powerful for its unfortunate familiarity, this account also shows how small acts of humanity can outclass even the most determined hatred.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
LYNDA Barry's excitable, bittersweet cartoons and collages are practically a cultural fixture, like little black dresses or "The Simpsons." So it's a welcome surprise to discover she actually had a formative period. BLABBER BLABBER BLABBER (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95), the first volume of a projected complete-works series called "Everything," compiles Barry's early comic strips, drawn circa 1980, when she was still groping toward her sensibility and developing her recurring characters. Still, there's not a lot you could call juvenilia here, beyond a pasted-in 1972 drawing of a creature emerging from a can of "tomato monster soup" (captioned "I drew this in the ninth grade and felt incredible afterward") - except in the sense that her mature work aspires to be juvenilia, to extract nervous comedy and pathos from the way young people explain the world to themselves. The samples of Barry's long-running strip "Ernie Pook's Comeek" collected here are mostly one-off absurdist gags rendered in an arch, brittle new-wave style. (She really liked drawing decorative patterns.) "Two Sisters," a short-lived series in which 9-year-old twins chatter to each other about things that are very important to them - dogs, identity, John Travolta - explores the territory Barry would conquer later on. A third series, "Girls and Boys," which actually concerns grown women (tormented doormats) and men (pigs and blowhards), is bracingly furious, hammering at the gentility of the four-panel gag-strip form with pen-in-fist crudeness. In one episode a woman in a grocery store has a sample of meat shoved in her face, followed by a cameraman's microphone. "Best meat I ever had," she manages to say, staring vacantly and spitting out the food in little bits. Certain comic book characters seem to live in a permanently sun-dappled teenage afternoon. Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips's LAST OF THE INNOCENT (Icon, paper, $14.99), the sixth in their "Criminal" series of loosely connected noir graphic novels, imagines what might happen to those kids once they age off the drugstore spinner rack. It's 1982 and Riley Richards, the murderous narrator, longs to return to his days as an all-American suburban teenager, with two girls (one from a wealthy family) sparring for his affections, a gluttonous best friend with a funny nickname, and a life that seemed to be all malt shops and punch lines. Then he starts killing to recapture his dream, and things get more complicated. Brubaker uses his cast's familiar relationships to reflect the way nostalgia glosses over the grimness of the past with cartoonish simplicity. And Phillips, using jagged pen-and-ink work and a shadowy palette in the book's grimy '80s sequences, devises a neat trick: drawing '60s-era high school flashbacks in a style close enough to the broad, bright-hued slapstick of old "Archie" comics to get the point across. THE Dutch artist and designer Joost Swarte has a tremendous reputation among cartoon-art aficionados, given his tiny body of comics work. The answer to the title of his 40-year retrospective, IS THAT ALL THERE IS? (Fantagraphics, $35), is: "Pretty much, yeah." The dozens of strips translated here are chronologically scrambled, shuffling Swarte's taboo-popping early work with later, subtler formal experiments. Some stories vaguely follow the contours of old adventure comics, some are smutty gags (like a vignette involving a retirement community for used condoms), and many are just excuses for his favorite character, the huge-quiffed schlemiel Jopo De Pojo, to stumble from one scene to the next. Plot is beside the point. Swarte is more concerned with formal purity, and with making the deep structures of cartooning visible. He pares his art to mechanical, hard-edged vectors and curves: caricature triple-distilled into symbolic visual shorthand, with every line canted just so. His geometrically precise, nearly architectural drawings are the bridge between the Tintin creator Hergé and contemporary artists like Chris Ware, who wrote this volume's foreword. In May 1967, there was a violent confrontation between the Houston police and Texas Southern University students who had been participating in civil rights protests. The police shot several thousand rounds of ammunition at the student dorms, one officer was killed (apparently by friendly fire) and five students were charged with his murder. THE SILENCE OF OUR FRIENDS (First Second, paper, $16.99) is a fictionalized account of Houston's tangled racial politics that spring as experienced by Mark Long, whose father was then a television reporter. Written by Long and Jim Demonakos, the book convincingly depicts the systemic racism, blatant and subtle, that suffused and corroded everything during that period. It takes significant liberties with the events around the T.S.U. riot in favor of a tidier dramatic arc centered on the tentative friendship between Long's white family and that of an African-American teacher and activist. (One scene involves white and black kids dancing together, just a hair anachronistically, to Sam & Dave's "Soul Man.") What elevates the story above screenplay bait is the fluid, rugged artwork by Nate Powell, who wrote and drew the excellent graphic novels "Swallow Me Whole" and "Any Empire." His imagery amplifies the effects of the book's multiple perspectives - the overwhelmed kid's-eye view of uneasy family dynamics and open Texas spaces, the hyperkinetic chaos on campus, the cropped literalism of TV newscasts. Michael Zulli has been drawing comics for over 25 years, although he's probably best known for a handful of collaborations with Neil Gaiman, including work on the "Sandman" series. THE FRACTURE OF THE UNIVERSAL BOY (Eidolon Fine Arts, $27.99) is the first graphic novel Zulli has written himself. He spent six years on it and raised money through Kickstarter to publish it as an oversize hardcover. (It's available in some comics stores and through sellers of comics online.) The story is a rambling meditation on a lifetime of nonspecific heartbreak, with a nameless protagonist who looks rather like the artist encountering angels and harpies, being tortured and miraculously restored, and so on. (In his acknowledgments Zulli says the character isn't meant to be a self-portrait; he just couldn't afford to hire a model.) As a story, "Fracture" is sentimental and overripe: at one point, Jesus turns up to chat with the middle-aged hero and agrees with him that the human condition is a lot like "Charlie Brown and the football." But lordy, can Zulu draw. Most of the book is set outdoors, and its vistas are outlandishly Romantic: fields of flowers, tangled forests and marshlands palpable down to the last blade of tall grass, birds and animals rendered with minute attention to texture, human bodies posed in Laocoönish torment. Regard it as a prog-rock album in comics form - indulgent, bombastic, technically astounding - and its morose grandeur becomes kind of thrilling. Douglas Wolk is the author of "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Worte and What They Mean." He writes frequently about comics for The Times.
Library Journal Review
Local TV reporting was not a glam gig in the late 1960s, especially when it covers racial ferment in the South. Long grew up in a KKK-leaning white Texas neighborhood, and his family walked a dangerous path in befriending an African American couple involved in the civil rights movement. In this lightly fictionalized account, Long's reporter father overcomes hesitation and supervisor prejudice to provide testimony that helped free five students accused of killing a white policeman during a sit-in at Texas Southern University. The sit-in was intended to protest harassment by hostile locals who had injured a black child while driving dangerously and yelling insults along the campus main drag. The title derives from a Martin Luther King quote: "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends." VERDICT A moving evocation of a tipping point in our country's regrettable history of race relations, Long and Demonakos's story flows perfectly in Eisner and Ignatz Award winner Powell's (Swallow Me Whole) graceful and vivid yet unpretty black-and-gray wash. A concise time line would have been helpful as back matter. Great for history classes and interested readers, teen through adult.-M.C. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
