Activists! by Joyce Brabner, Mark Badger and Wayne Vansant, Reviewed by Ron Evry

ACTIVISTS!

Reviewed by Ron Evry

Gratuitous Anarchist Scene from The Fourth Sex, directed by Michel Wichard

Activists! by Joyce Brabner, Mark Badger, Wayne Vansant
Reviewed by Ron Evry, “Firing Line,” TCJ #178

Comic book readers often like to talk about the potential of the medium for education, literary significance and, once in a while, social change. But most readers are hard pressed to point out particular comic books that have had any kind of marked effect on things.

There are some that come to mind, however. Former Governor Wilder handed out copies of Batman: Seduction of the Gun to members of the Virginia Legislature to help passage of a gun-control law. There is also the CIA-produced “how-to” comic book on guerrilla sabotage that was handed out to the Contras in Nicaragua. This book had a powerful social effect, both directly, in causing pain and injury (and perhaps even deaths), and also indirectly, as copies of the book surfaced and revealed to the public some of the horrible lengths to which the American intelligence machine was willing to go.

But it could be said that the effectiveness of a comic book (or comic books) on society is more intimately achieved — that some comics can influence a person’s beliefs and thus cause that person to do things that may affect the rest of the world. This can be achieved by exploring social themes in “entertainment”-type comics, from simple telegraphed sermons on prejudice in the latest issue of X-Men, to the sublime portraits of humanity expressed in a Will Eisner graphic novel or an issue of Love and Rockets.

The introduction to Activists! mentions a comic book, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, produced in the late-’50s for the Fellowship of Reconciliation organization by the Al Capp studios. Thousands of copies were distributed throughout the south via church groups and local civil rights organizations.

Martin Luther King, Jr: A Profile, by C. Eric Lincoln wrote:

During this period too, with the continuous aid of his friend Lawrence Reddick, Dr. King managed to carve out enough time to respond to what many had urged -- he wrote his own account of the Montgomery bus boycott. At the same time, he assisted Reddick in preparing a biography of himself that would follow his own book by a few months. In February, both tasks were substantially completed, and the manuscript of Stride Toward Freedom was delivered to the publisher. Work on Reddick's Crusader Without Violence continued at intervals throughout 1958.

Both books clearly show that Martin King's commitment to nonviolence was growing rather than abating. From time to time, he put forth tentative proposals for direct action -- massive stand-ins in voting booths, for example, and sit-ins in white schools -- but these ideas evoked little response from his colleagues. He welcomed the continuing efforts of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and in 1958 he became a FOR member, confirming his by now deep-going commitment to pacifism as well as to the strategic validity of nonviolence as a method. In February, 1958, the FOR opened a Southern regional office in Nashville. Its secretary, a young Nego Methodist minister studying at Vanderbilt University, James M. Lawson, joined with Glenn Smiley and Ralph Abernathy in a reconciliation team which for two months visited communities in eight Southern and a few Northern states, holding seminars and workshops at Negro churches and colleges. They took with them copies of a newly published FOR "comic book" -- Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story -- prepared by the FOR staff in consultation with Dr. King and executed by the Al Capp Organization with the aid of a $5,000 grant from the Fund for the Republic. During the next two or three years, some 200,000 copies were distributed, seeding the ground for nonviolence. Also in wide use during this period was a pocket-size FOR leaflet, How to Practice Nonviolence. A new edition of Richard B. Gregg's The Power of Nonviolence went into production, its revisions including a chapter on the Montgomery Movement and an introduction by Martin Luther King.

In 1960, four teenagers staged the first “sit-in” at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina that lasted 80 days and steamrolled into a movement that would eventually smash legal segregation from the south. One of the teenagers credited the King comic book as an inspiration for his belief in non-violent action. Copies of Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story very rarely turn up these days, because most of them were destroyed. It was, quite literally, a dangerous book to own back then.

The effect of the King comic book was not unlike tossing a pebble into a big brook, with the little ripples turning into tidal waves. Joyce Brabner hoped to have the same effect with Activists! While much of her previous efforts in comic books were socially significant, the stories in books like Brought to Light and Real War Stories were mostly meant to create a sense of outrage. Activists! is different in that each of the four stories in the comic point to successful non-violent actions by ordinary people.

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