Remembrance Day

Today is Remembrance Day.

This is the day Canadians stop our busy lives to commemorate -- each in our own way -- the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918: the moment the guns of the Great War fell silent. Equally, we also use this moment to remember all who have served and died in the service of our country, including Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent and Corporal Nathan Cirillo, two servicemen who were murdered last month because they were members of the Canadian Armed Forces. 

Image from 2 Name Books' The Eternal Glimpses of War (2014) Written by Jarrett Mazza with art by Dave Franciosa and letters by Chistopher Barrett.

To mark this solemn day I have assembled some images from a comic I purchased in the Small Press Section of this year's FanExpo in Toronto. Written by Jarrett Mazza, drawn by Dave Franciosa and lettered by Christopher Barrett, it is a self-published eight page book detailing a poem called The Eternal Glimpses of War.  

A close up of the above image.

This book is both a touching tribute to those who have fought and died for our country, but also a well-crafted example of the power of graphic storytelling. It does not glorify war, rather it protrays equally, both the horror that Canadian soldiers experienced in those distant lands, as well as the important role each of us has in remembering them. It's also an example of some of the gems one can find in the Small Press Section of a convention and I wish the creators of Eternal Glimpses a very successful future in the industry.  

The horrors of war in The Etnernal Glimpse of War.

Thank you for reading, and above all, thank you to the women and men who have served Canada and its allies through the course of our history. We are forever in your debt. 

Lest We Forget

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.

Addendum Review: Showa 1939-1944: A History of Japan by Shigeru Mizuki

A few months ago I reviewed a graphic novel by legendary Japanese artist Shigeru Mizuki and released to English-speaking audiences by Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly. Quite simply, it was fantastic and towards the end of the review I mentioned there was a follow-up coming in June 2014. Well, I recently read that second volume and have to say it is even better than the previous edition. The most recent portion of Mizuki's epic account of Japan in the early 20th century, Showa: A History of Japan 1939-1944  took his story into the late 30s and early 40s which saw the Empire of Japan attack the United States of America and the bulk of the war in the Pacific. 

Showa 1939-1944: A History of Japan, Shigeru Mizuki, Drawn and Quarterly, 2013, pp. 548, C$24.95

I don't have much substantively to add to my previous review, but have captured some choice images for you to enjoy and hopefully this will give you an additional sense of just how masterfully drawn and insightfully told both of these books are. Simply put, Muzuki is an outstanding storyteller and I hope you read/buy/enjoy these remarkable books. Suffice it to say, Showa 1939-1944 gets a near perfect 4.7/5 STARS (the highest we've ever given) and so you really enjoy the images below, we've captioned them with some history to explain their historical significance. Thanks for stopping by!   

This panel is especially interesting. We all know of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which was signed by the Soviet and Nazi foreign ministers in August 1939 and promised non-aggression between those two totalitarian states. But the treaty had Pacific ramifications too. Because of their invasion of Manchuria (China), the Japanese also had an undeclared border war with the Soviet Union in the late 1930s which was of concern to both governments. Earlier, in November 1936, the Nazis and Japanese has also signed an Anti-Comintern Pact against the Russians and then in April 1941, the Japanese and Soviets, in an effort to limit exposure on their western and eastern flanks, signed a Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact. Apparently Hitler was not very pleased. 

  

An image from a Japanese warship on the eve of the Pearl Harbor Attack. While President Roosevelt had made efforts to involve the US in the Second World War, it was the Pearl Harbor attack that brought the Americans into the war in a very violent fashion. Shortly after the Japanese declared war, the Germans followed suit.    

Mizuki's scene from the Battle of Midway which took place in June 1942, seven months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Midway Atoll is north-west of the Hawaiian archipelago and was considered a key strategic location of the Pacific. The Battle of Midway itself is considered one of the most important battles of the Pacific war and Japanese war leader Admiral-Marshal Isoroku Yamamoto proved quite prophetic when he promised his government: "I can run wild for six months … after that, I have no expectation of success". Yamamoto was very close to the mark because Midway was the turning point of the Pacific War and started the American push into the Japanese "Co-Prosperity Sphere".  The Harvard trained and English-speaking Yamamoto said in reference to Pearl Harbour: "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." He was right there too. 

The USS Enterprise. The "Big E" was the most decorated US naval ship in the entire war.  

An image from the Battle of Sunda Straight. Mizuki's black and white images of air and sea battles are hauntingly serious and accurate.  

Here's more use of black and white to describe the naval war in the south Pacific Ocean. 

But despite Mizuki discussing a very serious topic, he also takes care to maintain levity, wit and humour throughout the story...

...and at one point even includes an instance where he had a very disgusting mishap with an army latrine. Uck!

But ultimately Mizuki comes back to the futility and waist of the Japanese war effort and the derangement of Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō. Here the prime minister talks about a Japanese parade down Whitehall (London) and imperial battleships in New York harbor.

Exploring Japan Through Comics: WGTB Reviews 47 Ronin: The Tale of the Loyal Retainers & Showa 1926-1939: A History of Japan

When you think of Japan, you might think of electronics, bullet trains and Mt. Fuji. Or perhaps it’s sushi and the plethora of talented baseball players we have seen in North America in recent decades. Whatever it is one thing is certain: Japan is a fascinating and complex place with remarkable people. I know this personally because in the early 2000s I was fortunate to live and work there for a year. It was truly a memorable experience and I've since always been on the lookout for material on Japan, especially when it relates to its amazing history.  

47 Ronin: The Tale of the Loyal Retainers, Mike Richardson & Stan Sakai, Dark Horse Books, 2014, pp. 152, US$19.99

Which is why when I noticed two graphic novels recently at the local bookstore, I just had to have (and review) them. They were 47 Ronin: The Tale of the Loyal Retainers by Mike Richardson and Stan Sakai and published by Dark Horse Comics and Showa 1926-1939: A History of Japan by manga legend Shigeru Mizuki and published by Canadian publisher Drawn and Quarterly. Both books are enjoyable examinations of two key periods in Japanese history, the former being that of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868) and the latter of the early Showa period. "Shōwa" which translated means "enlightened peace" is the posthumous name given to the era of the reign of Emperor Hirohito which lasted from 1926 to 1989.  

Showa 1926-1939: A History of Japan, Shigeru Mizuki, Drawn and Quarterly, 2013, pp. 560, C$24.95

It's a truism to say that Japan has a very long and complex history. Indeed, the Emperor (Japan remains the only state to have kept the title "Emperor" for its monarch) claims issue from a line that reaches back five thousand years. The reason for this is that unlike European monarchies which seem to attract dynastic rivalries and wars, revolutions or parliaments who simply select distant relatives over closer yet undesirable ones, (Here I speak of King George I who, upon ascending the British throne, overtook more than fifty other candidates because they were Roman Catholic), the Japanese emperor has always been sacrosanct with the actual power found in the office of "shōgun" (Japanese for "general") who even with dictatorial powers would never consider eliminating the sacred emperor.

Modern Japanese history can be said to begin in the seismic year of 1603, when the warrior Tokugawa Ieyasu was declared Shogun and started a dynasty that would rule Japan until power was taken back by the Emperor over 265 years later in the Meiji Restoration of 1868. In the two and a half centuries the Tokugawa shoguns ruled Japan the country found a measure of stability and order. The backbone of the the Tokugawa Shogunate were the samurai, a military nobility of warrior-retainers who maintained the feudal system of government and had as their ethos "Bushido", a chivalric concept that stressed loyalty, martial prowess, honour and if need be: death. Indeed, death was often occasioned by one’s own hand in a from of ritual suicide called suppuku. The Tokugawa Shogunate gradually built this system into law and – along with the self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world – led to a stable yet isolated society that remained largely unchanged until the US Navy arrived in Tokyo harbour in 1853, an event which spurred forth efforts that led to the Meiji Restoration and subsequent modernization.  

47 Ronin is a story that epitomises the samurai ethos of medieval Japan. It tells the story of Lord Asano, a daimyo lord who is called to Edo (Tokyo) in 1701. During this period the law required lords to attend the capital for a period so the Shogun could maintain control over them. While in Edo, Lord Asano does not play the courtier’s game and when he refuses to pay a corrupt official he subsequently becomes the target of provocation and insult until he draws his sword in the Shogun's palace, a crime that comes with the punishment of death. After Asano is forced to commit seppuku, 47 of his loyal retainers, now themselves ronin or masterless samurai plot posthumous revenge and eventually take action. 

A splash from Dark Horse's 47 Ronin

The art is great at conveying feudal Japan without...

The book is an enjoyable book and worthy investigation into Japanese history and samurai culture. Richardson's writing presents an old story in a accessible and amusing way and while I was often told in Japan that it is a country of nuance, this isn't so much the case and anyone interested in Japanese culture can pick it up and enjoy it. Much same can be said for Stan Sakai's art, which, while saying it has a juvenile quality to it would be unfair, it is never-the-less powerful and refined in a uncomplicated way. All of this brings about a collection of artwork that is not over-the-top or silly but a worthy interpretation of a great story. 4/5 STARS 

...the romanticizing that is often found in Western depictions of the samurai culture.

The 47 Ronin is a old and complex tale. "To know this story is to know Japan" reads back cover of the Dark Horse edition. I'm not sure if this is true, but it is a national legend and 47 Ronin is a worthy retelling of it.  

Our second book takes us well past the Meiji Restoration and into the early portion of the reign of Hirohito. By the end of First World War, Japan was starting to flex its geopolitical muscle. A surprise victor in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and entering on the side of the eventual winners of the First World War, Japan was spurred forth by these successes in the early 1900s and this had lasting ramifications. In Showa 1926-1939: A History of Japan Shigeru Mizuki examines much of the Japanese aggression of the early 20th century through the eyes of his own childhood. Born in 1922 in a town on the southern edge of the largest island of Honshu, Mizuki's work is both a history of the early Showa era and an autobiography of his early life and the struggles he experienced in a country that was both a expanding and militarizing. It tells a story of not just family and school struggles but also the Japanese response to the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923), the Great Depression, the Washington Naval Treaty, military expansion into Korea and China and ultimately joining the Axis powers in the lead up to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The personal and historical are intertwined in Showa 1926-1939: A History of Japan by manga legend Shigeru Mizuke. Here he draws his first day of school.

The historical aspects of the story are made with a non-manga clarity. Here Showa discusses the Great Depression.

I've not enjoyed comic book history like this in a long, long while. Showa is not only a great book, but also a great way to learn about Japan. In an interesting and excellently chosen feature, the funny and more personally inspired vignettes are more cartoonish, whereas more photo-realistic images are chosen for historical events. This all lends itself to textual and pictorial gravitas where it's needed and a sense of humour and valuable comedic insights when they're needed too. Living in a tumultuous and changing economic and political climate is never easy but this book makes fine work of that while at the same time not leaving the reader in a depressed state. All of this leads to a fine work of graphic storytelling that is an amazing combination of politics and personality in the early Showa era.* 4.5/5 STARS

The Washington Naval Treaty, which limited Japanese naval expansion yet was still signed by that country, was denounced and terminated by the government in 1934.  

Like the above image, Showa uses a more photo-realistic vantage to express important events. Here is a depiction of the Japanese invasion of China.

In one of my classes years ago, an especially vocal student told me that I would never be able to truly understand Japan because I was not Japanese. While I suspect this was a true statement, I have never let it stop me from learning about this country. If you're like-minded or simply enjoy good graphic storytelling, then consider picking up either 47 Ronin or Showa. Both are excellent introductions into their respective periods of history for either the casual and serious student of Japan and well worth the read. Thanks again for stopping by WGTB and I hope you're having a great summer.

*In May 2014 a sequel to Showa 1926-1939 called Showa 1939-1944: A History of Japan was released by Drawn and Quarterly. It has not yet been read by the reviewer.