Next time someone tries to tell me graphic novels aren’t “real books” (yes, it still happens; no I can’t believe it either), I’m going to throw David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson’s The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History at them. Literally. They’ll either catch it and read it, or it will hit them in the head and knock then unconscious, which is what they deserve for holding on to opinions that are outdated, outmoded, and just plain wrong.

I learned more from this 98-page graphic novel history than I did from Chernow’s 818 page biography of Hamilton or anything I had to read for my college course on the WWII Pacific theater… and I had to read a lot for that class. (Okay, I was supposed to read a lot.)

Regardless, I – a whole-ass adult with a bachelor of arts, a masters in theology, and a bachelors in science who read 117 books last year – was not only lacking in knowledge regarding this very important part of my own country’s history, I didn’t even know that I didn’t know.

That is disgraceful.

And “They didn’t talk about it in school” only goes so far. I graduated from high school in 1996. That was 24 years ago. Two and a half decades. That is plenty of time to make up the deficit.

You all have an advantage in that I am here telling you about The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History, and you should plan to make time to read it. You are out of excuses.

If you’ve been with us here at The Roarbots for a while, you know I’m generally a Fan of Things David Walker Does – from superheroes to history – and he continues to impress.

Though The Black Panther Party does have more text than some of his other work, it’s still very much broken into manageable chunks as fits with his philosophy of making history accessible to folx at all reading levels, and I love the way he hits pause on the story at perfect break points with short biographies of key players in the movement. I also found the condensed “context” pages that appear throughout to match events in the Black Panther Party timeline to other events in the Civil Rights movement and in the larger world to be both functional, in that everything was laid out together, and helpful, in that I was able to flip back if I needed a reminder.

Dialogue, one of Walker’s specialities, added to the whole rather than distracting from it or trying to act as an entirely separate entity, giving the reader a more personal connection to what might otherwise feel abstract, especially in its honesty.

Anderson’s art is the perfect accompaniment, very much in keeping with the palate of the 60s and 70s without having the garish or glaring edge that sometimes pops up in an attempt to access the decades of free love and war protests. That isn’t the story Walker and Anderson are trying to tell. The lines and blocks in The Black Panther Party are sharp and clean – this isn’t wishy-washy hippie shit – this is a story about promise and disappointment and desperation and the attempt to carve out a future when the mountain is fighting back. It’s spare and stark, the perfect accompaniment to enhance Walker’s words.

The reach of The Black Panther Party isn’t limited to what was. It also reminds us to take a look at what is. All those problems we like to pat ourselves on the back for having fixed? Those fundamental and systemic issues that we rooted out and tossed in the trash? That’s a pretty illusion we’ve been living. We may have slapped some concealer over them. Sprinkled some glitter. But if the last four years have taught us anything, it’s that we haven’t fixed jack. Systemic racism is still rampant. The economic inequality that accompanies it? A vast gulf. Police brutality? A biased justice system? We haven’t made progress in the last 60 years; we just learned how to pretend.

That. Is. Not. Okay. Which is why reading The Black Panther Party should make you angry.

We all breathed a little more easily when Biden was finally sworn in. Felt as though a weight had been lifted. And yes, it has. And yes, we should celebrate. But if you consider yourself an ally, then you need to remember our job didn’t stop on inauguration day. If anything, that was our first day of real work. But we’ve already had our chance to speak, which means we need to take the opportunity to do something else. We need to demand the table be expanded or announce we’re giving our seats up to those who haven’t had the same opportunities – those who have been waiting hundreds of years to be heard.

The Black Panther Party A Graphic Novel History by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson is out now from Ten Speed Press.