Marx and Engel Lite - A Cartoon Manifesto

A Cartoon Manifesto | National Review Online

By Amity Shlaes  May 28, 2014

Capital may be stalling. But watch out for Capital.

The first Capital is, of course, the anti-wealth bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by the French professor Thomas Piketty. As much projectile as book, Capital was hurtling forward, seemingly unstoppably, until journalists and scholars began to discover flaws in its data. Still, around the time many pundits expect Capital to wipe out — i.e., within a couple of weeks — a second Capital will be entering the intellectual marketplace. This one is Haymarket Books’ new illustrated edition of Das Kapital, by Karl Marx. In other words, Piketty can rest easy: Marx’s Capital Illustrated will continue his class war even if he himself flags. Haymarket Books confirms as much when it describes this volume as “economics for the 99 percent.”

Serious cartoon books like Marx’s Capital Illustrated have been around for a while. For years now teachers have relied on a cartoon version of A People’s History of American Empire, the 1980 book by the progressive historian Howard Zinn. Lately, however, such cartoon books have been proliferating wildly, becoming so numerous that they now can claim to their own category, the oddly named genre of the “graphic novel.”

Counterintuitive as it may sound, these graphic novels not only feature nonfiction but also lend themselves enviably to difficult nonfiction topics. …

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