WGTB Reviews The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes & Paul Rivoche

By any account the Great Depression was a terrible event in the history of our world. Precipitated by a massive stock market crash on 29 October 1929, it carried on for a decade and turned the global economy on its head. It also precipitated the modern welfare state, leading for the first time to massive government involvement in the economic affairs of most Western states. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes, first released in 2008, is a book that examined the Great Depression from a free-market perspective and argued that it was unnecessarily prolonged by state involvement in economic affairs and it was largely this government interia that was to blame for it lasting up until the Second World War. The book reviewed today is the graphic retelling of Shlaes' book, released earlier this May and drawn by Toronto-based artist Paul Rivoche.  

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (Graphic Edition), Amity Shlaes & Paul Rivoche, Harper Perennial, 2014, $19.99 (US)

Of course, the "dismal science" as Thomas Carlyle described it, is massively complex and rooted in a long and debated history. Indeed, it's almost impossible to debate economics without getting political and at times it's easy to predict a person's stance on a smaller issue if their other, economic view is known. So to provide a little background we'll firstly take a broad look at the history of economics with the hope that you leave this review with a better sense of what the debate is all about.  

Economics Emerges

Although humans have been trading since the dawn of time, for the sake of brevity, this account will start with an entity that emerged when the medieval period transitioned to the early modern: the Joint Stock Company. First introduced in the Netherlands with the Dutch East India Company, followed shortly thereafter by the English East India Company, the Joint Stock Company was a means by which individual investors pooled their wealth in the form of joint-ownership of a larger venture in order to mitigate the risks that came with sending ships to far-off lands in search of wealth. The investors of Joint Stock Companies reaped the rewards if their ships returned, but could also transfer (sell) their shares if they needed to as well.

Print of the Dutch East India Company shipyards 1726 by Joseph Mulder.

The rise of this new corporate structure coincided with the rise of what was later named "Mercantilism" and the two went hand-in-hand. Mercantilism was a form of state-sponsored economics that involved governments using their military and laws to prevent their colonies (mercantilist countries were almost universally European) from trading with anyone else. Naturally, this encouraged the proliferation of Joint Stock Companies, which were created by their respective Crowns, but also encouraged resentment in some of the more enterprising and prosperous colonies of the world: the Thirteen American colonies being a prime example of this. 

So in the same year that America started its revolution, Mercantilism was challenged outright by an intellectual from the most powerful mercantilist state in the world: Great Britain. Beginning in the late 17th-century, Europe and America underwent an Age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a period when the prominent thinkers of these continents, turned towards an emphasis on reason and individualism rather than tradition. Scotland, having joined England to form the United Kingdom in 1707, had an especially robust period of enlightenment and it was one of its thinkers that emerged as the most coherent voice for Enlightenment-based free market economics. His name was Adam Smith.

Statue of Adam Smith on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.

Born in Fife, in 1726, Smith was educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford before returning to Edinburgh to continue his work at the university there. In 1776 he would publish An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, now most often known by the latter portion of its title. While this book cannot be called a manifesto or polemic of capitalism, it is still largely regarded as the seminal treatise* in what is now labeled Classical Economics. In Wealth of Nations Smith spoke of the enlightened self-interest of economic trade as well as the danger monopolies had to the economic betterment of a country. He wrote: 

A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures. The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked, by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments, whether they consist in wages or profit, greatly above their natural rate. The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the contrary, is the lowest which can be taken, not upon every occasion, indeed, but for any considerable time together. (Book 1, Chapter 7)

Industrial Revolution

In the late 1700s something also started in the UK that would change the face of the world: the Industrial Revolution. While not a revolution in the flag-waving sense, it transformed economic production into something almost unrecognisable only decades earlier. Gone were small rural cottage industries and large land-holders extracting wealth from tenant farmers, to be replaced by steam and coal powered factories in massively expanding cities which were populated by low-skilled workers. Of course, as the established economic order was turned on its head, critics started to emerge, most notably German radicals Karl Marx and Frederich Engels. 

Marx and Engels, writing in their critique Das Kapital (1867) saw capitalism as an inherently exploitative relationship between the capitalists and workers. Because the workers were paid for work at a fixed wage, they contributed more than they received from their wages and were kept in chains by this relationship. The naturally corollary envisioned by Marx and Engels was the workers of the world uniting to end this relationship in a worker-centred socialist utopia. This notion, argued for in an earlier polemic The Communist Manifesto (1848), saw a socialism of armies of workers; state control of credit and banking; and the near complete state dominance of all areas of economic production.     

The grave of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery in London, UK.

Decades later when the Great Depression came around, there was debate as to how to deal with it. The prevailing thought in the United States remained the classical liberalism of Adam Smith but this wasn't universal: only a decade earlier the Russians had turned to Marxian socialism in their revolution of 1917. So while the United States never came close to becoming the next socialist republic, it was British economist John Maynard Keynes, already famous for his critique of the Versailles treaty, in his work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), who rose to challenge the established economic order. Keynes argued that in order to save capitalism from itself, (and thereby turning any communists aside) government needed to step in and spend massively on infrastructure to get the economy moving again. Keynes based this on the idea of Aggregate Demand determining the overall health of an economy and when the private sector led to inefficient macroeconomic (large scale) outcomes, it was the public sector that needed to step in and pry the pump. This could include massive spending projects like bridges, buildings or public works, but could also include just paying people to dig holes and then paying others to fill them in again. Keynesians belived that if people started working, they would buy things and this would cause upward spiral towards economic prosperity. 

Neo-Keynesism found a home in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis with even conservatively-minded governments in the United States and Canada implementing massive spending programs. For example, George W. Bush's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) saw the US government buy assets and equity from financial institutions in order to shore them up. Across the border, Canada's Economic Action Plan involved massive spending on roads and other public infrastructure. More recently, Quantitative Easing which sees central banks such as the Federal Reserve or the Bank of England buy specified amounts of financial assets from commercial banks (Citibank or RBS), thereby pushing the prices of these assets up and raising their prices, all the while increasing the amount of money in the economy.      

Lawyer and long-shot GOP 1940 Presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie narrates The Forgotten Man. The portions of the book where he tells the story are done in red. The rest of the book is black and white. All art by Paul Rivoche.   

All of which brings us to the The Forgotten Man and its examination of the push-pull of government control over the economics of the Great Depression and the "New Deal", a Keynesian effort by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his brain trust to exert more state control over the economy. The story is faux-narrated by Wendell Willkie, a long-shot Republican party candidate for the 1940 presidential election who saw state-encroachment of the economy, not as a good thing, but as an interfering menace that stood in the way of real recovery by stifling ingenuity and market correcting forces. Below are some images, and if you read carefully, you'll notice the debate between state and market forces and how they are manifested in political debates around other issues including income inequality or wage and price controls.

At the 1932 Democratic Convention in Chicago candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt, the patrician New York State governor took his party, which was made of up liberal northerners and conservative southerners, to the left of the political spectrum.

A depiction of the ligitation of the case A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States. 

The Forgotten Man also walks the reader through not only the economic debate and the FDR advisers, but also the legal dimensions of the New Deal policies as well. A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935) was one of the cases before the Supreme Court of the United States that saw Americans challenge FDR's laws and in this particular instance saw that honourable court render the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional. In this instance the debate centred around Schechter Poultry selling chickens, but also focused on wage and price controls, work hours and unionization. The Court found in favour of Schechter but this did not stand in the way of more centralizing laws and soon even SCOTUS would relent, ending soon after what is called the Lochner era of American jurisprudence.  

The view from the SCOTUS bench in The Forgotten Man.

The Lochner Era, from the decision of Lochner v. New York, 198 US 45 (1905), a period of laissez-faire judicial decisions based on liberty of contract and the 5th and 14th Amendments, ended in the mid 1930s.  

The inauguration of the second term of President Roosevelt. Until that time no President had so much power concentrated into his hands. Roosevelt would serve an unprecedented four terms in office, dying in office on April 12, 1945. Because of Washington's refusal to accept a third term nomination, no president until then had gone past two terms. Since the passing of the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution (1951) no president is legally permitted to sit more than two terms.

After the policy and the ligitation, The Forgotten Man takes the reader to the place where poverty and economic downturn hit the hardest: the life of the everyday American. Indeed, the book's core thesis is that it was the centralizing decisions made by a powerful political and legal elite (as well as their benefactors who ran the programs) that were the real sources of the pains of the Great Depression, with the victims being the namesakes of this book. Rivoche's art works very well at portraying these men, women and children and the starkness of black and white works brilliantly with the overall message.  

Paul Rivoche draws a collective farm.

All of which makes this story of economics, law and history a very enjoyable read. Indeed, if you enjoyed the prose edition of The Forgotten Man you will most certainly enjoy this book too. Amity Shlaes' lessons are masterfully told by Paul Rivoche and although the ideological slant might not be your cup of tea, it is never-the-less a thought provoking account of the Great Depression. Admittedly, I tack towards the author in terms of my own economic and political thinking, but please don't let that take from the valuable lesson and photo-realism that makes this book an excellent addition to anyone's library of history or sequential art. Economics is a topic that in all likelihood will be forever debated, but it is my hope today that you're leaving WGTB with a better sense of the topic. 4/5 STARS 

 

*A treatise is a formal, systematic and written examination of a singular subject. They are typically longer than an essay and go to the very essence or principles of the subject.

WGTB Reviews: Andre The Giant: Life and Legend by Box Brown

As a boy who grew up in the 1980s it was impossible to ignore the World Wrestling Federation. Hulk Hogan, Rowdy "Roddy" Piper, Junk Yard Dog, Jimmy "Superfly" Sunka; these names were ubiquitous in the schoolyard and you needed to understand the basics to take part in almost any conversation. For me, while I was never allowed to stay up and watch the WWF Saturday Night Main Event, I never-the-less gleaned as much information as I could about the goings-on of Hulk and crew on the after school and weekend shows that were scattered across television. André the Giant: Life and Legend by Box Brown tells the story of one of the most memorable characters of the '80s wrestling boom, a remarkably large man named André René Roussimoff also known as André the Giant.      

Andre the Giant: Life and Legend, Box Brown, First Second, 2014, pp. 240, C$19.99 or US$17.99

Born in Grenoble, France to Boris and Mariann Roussimoff, themselves of Polish and Bulgarian ancestry, André had the rare condition of "giantisim", itself caused by the body's over-production of growth hormone or, to use the medical term, Acromegaly. André's condidition was both a gift and curse and he was 240 pounds (109 kg) by the time he turned 12. At about that same time, he dropped out of school to work on a farm. Eventually, he would apprentice for a trade and find work in a factory before moving to Paris where he briefly worked as a mover. But it was in the French capital that he would be scouted by a local promoter and find the job that would make him a household name: professional wrestler.

André was big as a child but originally only ever envisioned life on the farm. All subsequent art from Box Brown's Andre the Giant: Life and Legend.

Six months later and wrestling under the name "Geant Frerre", André took the wrestling world by storm and soon was off to Japan. After time in Asia, he made his way to Montreal in 1972. While in Canada, André became a smash hit and soon sold-out the venerable Montreal Forum on a regular basis. But this success was short lived: it became obvious to all that his size meant few could beat him in the ring. This forced André to meet with American promoters Verne Gagne and Vince McMahon Sr. who soon brought the Frenchman to the United States and set up a schedule where he wouldn't wear thin on American audiences. Eventually, André became a sensation in America and as the World Wide Wrestling Federation became the WWF and the 1980s wrestling boom took hold, André the Giant became a key part of that increasingly television-based spectacle. He remained a WWF stalwart until his final on-air performance in 1991 and would pass away only months after that.       

André always towered over his competitors as well as his fans.

Box Brown's Andre the Giant: Life and Legend walks its reader through the amazing story recounted above. Full of tidbits and antidotes about André's life, as well as insights into the wrestling business and first-hand accounts of the Giant's exploits, this is another example of why comic biographies can be so enjoyably informative. Simply put, I would never read a 240 page book about André the Giant. Sure, he's an interesting person, but limited time means limited books. But Life and Legend took me a fraction of time that a prose tome would, yet in that time I managed to gather a great deal of information, insight and amusement.  

André size often meant that people wanted to take a crack at him and he was bullied quite often. However he sometimes made things difficult for himself too. 

Box's storytelling is fair to all parties involved and while much of the information is taken from secondary sources (which are listed in the Source Notes at the back), the book is well documented and has a good mix of unknown stories and welcome analysis. Indeed, while the book is clearly an informed labour of love of both André and wrestling by Brown, it's not gushing or bogged down by jargon and is therefore accessible to someone who isn't overly familiar with this performance sport. Brown takes pains to document certain key events in both the history of the WWF and André's life, with the match between Hogan and André at Wrestlemania III given special prominence. It's here that the reader comes face-to-face with André's devotion to his business and fans and it's impossible not to appreciate him after reading this.  

Hulk Hogan body-slams André the Giant at Wrestlemainia III. Brown explains what made this event important to wrestling and how hurt André actually was when he performed in this match   

Brown's art is very good and reflects the story of André with compassion, care and sincere interest. As you can see from the posted images, the artwork isn't detailed or photo-realistic, but never-the-less has a dignity, respect and gravitas that is needed to tell the tale of André's life. Things weren't easy for this man. Yes, there were advantages to being big, it was also a considerable burden. Box Brown's work is a worthy telling of this story and a credit to the comic storytelling medium. 4/5 STARS

The Slacker's Option: An Old Comic Book Cover

Dear Readers,

Our sincere apologies for not writing this past month: your humble blogger has been busy with a major life event this June. But things should be back to relative normality within a few weeks and once this happens, WGTB should be back at the pace of one or two postings per week about comics, books and the occasional film. First up will be a review of the new legal thriller Bay Street by Canadian author Philip Slayton.  

In the meanwhile, please enjoy this cover of Pep Comics #1 featuring "The Shield". Pep is the predecessor of Archie Comics.

Cheers,
WGTB

Pep Comics #1 (Jan 1940) Reprinted in Supermen: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941, Edited by Greg Sadowski (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2009)

WGTB Reviews The Life and Times of Conrad Black: A Wordless Biography

Few Canadians are more polarizing than Baron Conrad Moffat Black of Crossharbour. Born in Montreal, Quebec to beer baron George Montegu Black Jr., and his wife, the daughter of an insurance magnate, Jean Elizabeth Riley, Black was educated in such bastions of the Canadian establishment as Upper Canada College and the Trinity College School (both Toronto in the area) before completing degrees at Carleton, Laval and McGill universities, finishing in 1973. Education notwithstanding, it was seven years prior that Black started down the road towards what he is best known for – being a newspaper proprietor – when he purchased the fledgling Quebec-based Eastern Townships Advertiser in 1966. This would lead to Black and his family starting the investment company Ravelston Corporation and the systematic acquisition of newspapers across the globe over the course of the next three decades. Black and the companies he controlled would eventually go on to own such influential broadsheets as the Chicago Sun-Times, The Jerusalem Post and Britain's Daily Telegraph.
 

The Life and Times of Conrad Black: A Wordless Biography, George A. Walker, The Porcupine’s Quill, 2013, pp. 221, C$22.95

But all this would change in July 2007 when – after a very public trial – he was convicted in a Chicago court of corporate fraud and sentenced to six and a half years in a US federal prision. He would go on to serve only three and a half years after which he returned to Canada where he currently resides in a tony Toronto neighbourhood. The Life and Times of Conrad Black: A Wordless Biography by George A. Walker is an unorthodox treatment of the above story done through 100 prints of wood engravings. So while this book is not a graphic novel in the conventional sense of the phrase, it is nevertheless a very interesting take on one of the most loquacious and controversial Canadian exports of recent memory.

Lord Black, the Baron of Crossharbour was given a Life Peerage by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2001. This was opposed by Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who citing the 1919 Nickle Resolution, a motion in the Canadian House of Commons that prevented Canadians from recieving British honours, forced the two parties to go to court. The case Black v Chretien in the Ontario Court of Appeal saw Black lose his case and subsequently give up his Canadian citizenship. All images from The Life and Times of Conrad Black.    

The book starts with a well written introduction by the author who explains the purpose and goal of the book, making it clear this is not a hit piece and should not be viewed as one. Rather, the book tells the story of Conrad Black's life through masterfully crafted images and transitions one image at a time from his earliest beginnings to his resettlement in Canada after prison. As a long-time reader of comics, I have often heard that the panels of graphic storytelling should be thought of as the highlight moments of a longer narrative such as a TV show, film or novel and this book takes that to an extreme. In 100 images you see such mountains as Black being made a member of the Order of Canada and valleys as his incarceration by the US government. Other significant images include meeting Pope John Paul II, a significant event for a convert Roman Catholic and Black sweeping the floor of a prison cell. 

Conrad Black after purchasing the Daily Telegraph. The "Torygraph" was an extension of Black's conservative ideology in the UK.    

Pope John Paul II was a towering figure in conservative politics of the 1980s and Black, having been received into the Church in 1986, would not have missed an opportunity to meet the pontiff.

But it would all come crashing down in 2007 when Conrad Black was convicted of fraud in a Chicago court.

This is an interesting book and as mentioned, a very unorthodox telling of Conrad Black’s story. As a work of art it is a very well done and an accomplishment in so many ways. It does lack as a work of history; not having the information to give readers a sense of who this man is. But that's clearly not the point, and the book in so many ways is a superlative expression of Black's flawed and complicated humanity. And in this respect it's very good. When Black achieves, he is represented as doing such. When he fails, he is fairly represented as well. In this reviewers mind, the above cited image of Baron Black of Crossharbour sweeping a prison floor remains the most potent and is emblematic of not only Black's failings, but how fleeting each and every one of our own successes can be. With a $22 price point it is an expensive purchase for what amounts to a half hour read, but it is still an interesting and well crafted work of art. Read in conjunction with a solid history, it would certainly be valuable at highlighting the key moments in Conrad Black's life, giving the reader a much better sense of who Lord Black is.  

Admittedly, before his fall from grace, I was an admirer of Black and this is what attracted me to the book. Having read his books on US presidents Roosevelt and Nixon, I continue to admire him as an historian, but as a convicted felon the lasting image I'll have of him is that of carrying Bankers Boxes of corporate documents from his Toronto office. Nevertheless, like the subject of the book or not, The Life and Times of Conrad Black: A Wordless Biography and its 200 images is a remarkable account of the life of a remarkable individual and a very interesting "read" overall.  4/5 STARS

WGTB Reviews Robotech Voltron #1

The first novel I ever attempted to write was a Star Trek/Star Wars crossover. I was a teenager and the story began with heroes Kirk and Spock blasting through a wormhole where they came across an Imperial Star Destroyer and found themselves in a shooting battle. This type of story – a property crossover – wasn't original and had been tried many times over, especially in comic books. For example, when Marvel owned the licences to the Hasbro properties GI Joe and Transformers, they produced a four part crossover mini-series in 1986. More recently, Star Trek: The Next Generation crossed with the BBC’s Dr. Who in 2012 in an eight issue mini-series by IDW. And just a couple months ago, IDW further announced that it was going back to the Hasbro well with Joes and Autobots being mashed together again, this time in an ongoing series beginning in the summer of 2014. 

Dynamite Entertainment's Robotech Voltron Vol.1 #1 (December 2013) Written by Tommy Yune, art and letters by Digital Art Chefs Team, pencils and digital inks by Elmer Damaso, Production Manager: James L. Parabay. Supervisor for colours and letters: Melvin Calingo 

So it was with these past comics in mind – as well as a dose of cautious nostalgia for two properties I loved as a kid – that I picked up Voltron Robotech #1, the first issue of a new five issue mini-series by Dynamite Entertainment. To this day I still read and enjoy the 1980s Comico Robotech comics and have always wanted to see Voltron as a comic book. (I do not know of another Voltron comic series.) That said, the aforementioned caution comes from the fact that while both properties are anime, other than that they don’t have a whole lot in common. Voltron for instance takes place in a distant future or universe that has a magical quality to it, while Robotech is a harder and more military-focused science-fiction. Below are two pages from the comic dealing with the Voltron and Robotech properties respectively.  

This page focuses on the Voltron aspect of the comic...

...and this one the Robotech.

So how did a comic merging the two properties together do? Well, while I’m always a little hesitant to judge a series on the merits of one issue, I have to say for the most part I was underwhelmed by this comic. Sure, in this short introduction to the story, the creators needed to re-establish two universes – no easy task – but I found much of the opening aspects of the comic rather unnecessary. For example, the first three pages consist of the old Voltron Peter Cullen TV voice over, and this could have been easily finished in the splash. From there I found the rest of the book sparse with its written story-telling almost devoid of captions that would have been very helpful in explaining how these two diverse stories were coming together. Blending two established canons is very difficult, and the book should have errored on the side of more information rather than what they did in issue #1. 
   

What on Earth indeed?

That said, the art of this book is good and has a classic anime feel to it. The colour palette is rich, as would be expected of this sort of book, and there are no surprises with the panels looking much like anything that's been seen a hundred times before in either Voltron or Robotech. Because of this, if you're inclined to read this type of comic, I'm not going out on a limb in telling you that you already know exactly what you're getting.  

All above images from Robotech Voltron #1 (December 2013) 

But overall the story just lacked a coherent punch to really excite me. Make no mistake, I'm very forgiving of these first issues and will pick up the second. But this is largely on the strength of my affection towards these properties rather than the first issue. Things could turn around, but as things stand it's unlikely I’ll buy #3. For that to happen the second issue will have to have much stronger story-telling and give us more of the great characters we know from both of these properties. Combining these two properties was a cool idea, but because it's otherwise a lacklustre comic book, issue #1 of Robotech Voltron only gets 2.5/5 STARS.