How do you tell an official history of a group as decentralized, multifaceted and mercurial as the Students for a Democratic Society, the 1960s activist organization that fought against the Vietnam War and for social justice? Particularly now in the 21st century, a good 40 years after the group’s heyday—long enough that the dust they kicked up has settled, but also long enough that much of their history is at risk of being forgotten, and they’re best known for giving rise to the radical splinter group the Weathermen?
If you’re SDSer Paul Buhle, you enlist famed autobio comics writer Harvey Pekar, one of Pekar’s American Splendor collaborators Gary Dumm and as many people who were there as possible to assemble a graphic novel-style history that’s as many-headed as SDS itself was.
In Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History (Hill and Wang), Pekar and Dumm boil as much of the group’s history as possible down into a 50-page story, a fairly delirious summary that flies by in a series of names, places, statements, acronyms, meetings, sit-ins and actions.
This is the first half of this “graphic history,” and it reads a bit like a history textbook—there are no characters or story arcs, just the dry facts, presented in steady four-panel pages of Pekar’s narration and Dumm’s black-and-white artwork.
The latter is a particularly perfect choice for the material, as Dumm’s stark style is representational enough to be realistic, and features stocky character designs with lots of cross-hatching that evokes the art of ’60s underground comix without aping them. Rather, Dumm’s style is a perfect balance between the comix of the day and the alternative-weekly strip style of today, looking as much like Ward Sutton’s as R. Crumb’s.
The more fascinating portion of the book is the back half, which is also written by Pekar and drawn by Dumm ... except when it’s not.
This section is devoted to shorter, personal accounts from Buhle and other SDS members. A half-dozen other artists join Dumm on this section, including Wes Modes, who illustrates two short stories about Kent State and the Weathermen; James D. Cennamo, who cartoons an engaging story about being a little kid and starting his own SDS chapter for his peers in Brooklyn; and Josh Brown, who writes and draws a section entitled “My Mimeographed Career,” in which he mixes cartoons and collage to walk us through his work from back then.
It’s in these stories, a sort of cartoon oral history, that the political becomes personal and the book really comes alive.
Viewed from 2008, after the disappearance of the draft, the legalization of abortion, the institutionalization of civil rights and other victories for the activists of the era, the world of the SDSers can seem a bit alien to those of us who weren’t there, which makes a history like this—one that’s as visual as it is verbal—so valuable. It’s not quite like being there, and it’s perhaps not even the next best thing to being there. But it is the next best thing to that, and perhaps as close as a book can ever hope to get you.