A Carleton professor has released the first of a four-part graphic novel of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto and is working on the rest.
George Rigakos, an associate professor in the law department, said his inspiration came from other graphic novels dealing with similarly serious topics.
“I’d like to think I invented the idea,” Rigakos said via email,“[but] at the time that I thought up the idea of turning the Communist Manifesto into a comic book I was already reading a number of other graphic novels like Logicomix and Maus.”
Rigakos said he even believes Marx and Engels themselves would have published the Communist Manifesto in graphic novel format had it been more commonplace.
“I think that, if Marx and Engels were around today, there is a very good chance that they would have published the Communist Manifesto in a graphic format from the start,” he said.
Red Quill Books, a “peer-reviewed academic publisher” of which Rigakos is chief editor, published the Communist Manifesto – Chapter One: Historical Materialism in both English and Spanish, Rigakos said. German and French translations are expected any day, he said, adding that all four volumes are expected to be out by the end of April.
“There’s already been tremendous interest and so we’re doing what we can to get the other three volumes out as quickly as possible,” he said.
While Rigakos edits the graphic novels, he said an Argentinean artist who goes by the pen name of Red Viktor has done all the illustrations.
Rigakos said he supplied Viktor, who works for Enroc Illustrations out of a Buenos Aires studio, with a script, caption box placement and the images he wanted in the panels.
“What I found particularly enjoyable was seeing how Viktor took some of my ideas and ran with them, coming up with images that were even better than my own mind’s eye,” he said.
Rigakos said one of the biggest impediments has been the medium of graphic novels itself, rather than the script.
“People do not get comic books or graphic novels, even though they have entered the mainstream of artistic expression in the 21st century,” he said.
Rigakos points to right-wing blogs as an example. “People have already started writing . . . that the intent of a comic book version of the Manifesto is to brainwash children,” he said.
He said not only do the authors of these comments presume graphic novels are for children, but they presume that “university students are, like a bad characterization of children, simpletons and ideological dupes that do not critically engage with literature but swallow it hook, line and sinker.”
Rigakos dismissed these comments as “nonsense.”
“It’s just another way of discussing an absolutely essential document for understanding the development of 20th-century politics,” he said.
Rigakos said he believes the Communist Manifesto works well in “comic book format” since it has a clear start, struggle and triumph.
“It has villains and heroes,” he said. “The bourgeoisie dehumanize, they profane, and are compelled to exploit at the risk of extinction. The proletariat are [oppressed] but they will triumph. They simply have not learned that they can wield power over the machines and capitalists that exploit them. The communists will show them how.
“It’s actually a rather romantic text, isn’t it?”