Students for a Democractic Society: A Graphic History
By Harvey Pekar
Hill and Wang

In terms of the his career trajectory, Students for a Democractic Society: A Graphic History can largely be viewed as something of a companion piece to Harvey Pekar’s last book, Macedonia—or, perhaps more appropriately, the next logical step in the author’s one man attempt to redefine the educational possibilities of sequential art.

It’s a surprisingly lonely pursuit, in light of the fact that the form is steadily becoming acceptable academic fodder. Amongst Pekar’s contemporaries, the clearest example of a graphic novel as text book is unquestionably Art Spiegelman’s Maus, to this day regarded as the watershed book in the push to accept the medium with the same weight as novels and other traditional harbingers of academia. Other notable works have emerged subsequently, such as Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, a lovingly researched bio-comic look at the Canadian politician’s life.

One would be hard-pressed, however, to cite a prominent author in the field who has devoted the same time and effort as Pekar as of late. The author, most widely recognized for his pioneering autobio work, American Splendor, has more recently turned his efforts outwards. Last year’s Macedonia told the story of the titular nation, anchored by the travels of Pekar’s co-author, Heather Robinson, sharing much format-wise with Joe Sacco’s Palestine, an influence that Pekar himself noted in the creation of the book (and during his brief appearance in the narrative), hastening to point out, however, that Robinson’s own pursuits were decidedly more academic than Sacco’s own self-proclaimed war junkie motives.

It terms of structure, SDS is something of a departure from its predecessor, opting to do away with the single protagonist format that held together Macedonia, instead relying on a decidedly more expositional format to describe the genesis of the titular progressive campus organization, its infamous offshoot, The Weathermen, and the eventual dissipation of both groups. In terms of the sheer amount of information conveyed by Pekar’s text, the method is fairly effective, but ultimately suffers in terms of storytelling for its near complete lack of character development.

Without an outsider such as Sacco or Robinson to hang the story on, however, the long history of the group is difficult, if not impossible to funnel  through a single character, as no one person comfortably encapsulates the group’s long and complicated history, from its birth as the Student League for Industrial Democracy in the 1930s, to its rebirth in recent years. Instead, Pekar made the wise decision to section of the book, devoting its large first section to a 50-odd page overview of the group, along with artist Gary Dumm, while handing over the second section to pieces written by former SDS members and drawn by a litany of artists, including Dumm and Macedonia’s Ed Piskor.

The vignettes that compose the second section contain most of the book’s strongest moments, offering a diverse spectrum of the people, events, and points of view that make up the SDS’s history, and by the time you’ve read a few, it becomes clear that Pekar’s section is meant more as a primer for the uninitiated than as the book’s main course.

Taken as a whole, the book is a valuable history lesson about a time and place so intregral to recent American history, and so inextricably tied to the birth of the underground comic book form that has, over time given birth to books like Maus, Louis Riel, and American Splendor. It will also hopefully serve as a reminder of the power of medium to not only tell a story, but to educate at the same time.

–Brian Heater