Life as a young boy in my the McCoy household centered around three things: Star Trek, sports and World War II movies. I've seen more John Wayne flicks than John Wayne. I knew the names of the bridge crew of the Enterprise before I could name most of my friends parents. And don't get me started on sports or the creative way my own dear father was known to use profanity while watching our local Detroit teams play (and trust me, the man was a master.) It really kind of sucks then that I'm not more excited about sharing an experience that involved both George Takei from ST:TOS and World War II.
Don't get me wrong. They Called Us Enemy by George Takei et al. is actually a very well written and well drawn graphic novel. (I'm going with the name "graphic novel" even though novel implies fiction and They Called Us Enemy is a true story because there is no word or phrase for a comic book that's non-fiction, at least to the best of my knowledge and belief.) I just kind of wish it hadn't been written.
Listen folks, I know that the United States has done some screwed up stuff in its past. I have a BA in History, I've studied a bunch of it. From the Indian Wars (and yes, conquest is common throughout history, but paying a bounty for scalps of your enemies is not) slavery/racism, etc. None of that is good and all of it bothers me, but I can't help but have a special hatred of the internment of Japanese citizens of the United States at at time when Hitler was killing camps full of Jews a little bit worse than the rest of it. Maybe I'm wrong for that, but it is what it is.
For all of that though, They Called Us Enemy is a well written, entertaining, touching and oddly honest depiction of what George Takei went through when his family was forced into a camp. I say oddly honest because he speaks of train trips from camp to camp almost fondly when I would have expected nothing but vitriol. He also makes a point at the end about Americans being willing to talk about the camps and about the beauty of American democracy even if it does screw up at times. It would have been very easy for him to be much more bitter and he's not. That says a lot about him as a person.
The story is told simply but well. This is not some unreadable treatise by some academic hack. It almost feels like sitting on my grandma's couch cracking nuts and listening to my grandpa tell stories. The writers of this story hit the perfect note. I followed the story from place to place and from event to event easily. Some of it I could readily sympathize with.
We get a really good look at young George and the Takei family. He does his best to show his readers his parents point of view. His pride in his father's accomplishments and hard work is both obvious and well deserved. His pride in his mother's accomplishments and ingenuity is both of the above as well. Sneaking a forbidden sewing machine into an internment camp was quite the trick and it was every bit as necessary as it must have been frightening to pull off.
The art in the book is simple but beautiful. It's well drawn and pulls the reader in but it's not too much. It's this weird mix of "we need to use the art to tell the story" and "we need to keep the art from getting in the way of the story" and somehow Harmony Becker pulled it off. I don't know how that's possible, but I saw it with my own eyes. Her drawings depict what happened but without any type of an artistic flourish. This was art that was written by someone who was dedicated to sharing a story and not by someone who wanted to show off.
I'll take it one step further: The art in They Called Us Enemy is all in black and white and that was a great choice. I like it for two reasons. One is that I grew up on black and white World War II movies and the monochrome look is not just nostalgic, but it evokes that old world feeling for me. With the lack of color I'm transported to a time that feels familiar even though it was over three decades before I was born. The other reason is a little more complicated, but I'll try to explain it like this:
There are some things that just need to be shown in a somewhat muted manner. I'm not saying they should be silenced, but I am saying that too much color can give a somewhat celebratory mood. No one goes to a fireworks show to see black and white explosions. Patriotic types in the US (and this is a group I belong to) talk about the "red, white, and blue" and not some monochromatic depiction of the American flag.
Another black and white comic I talked about, Maus, used a black and white color scheme to good effect as well. It is good to keep somber subjects (and the internment of Japanese citizens is certainly something that no one should be proud of) in a darker, more solemn setting.
I find it necessary to repeat something I said about Maus though: I would be careful giving this type of a comic to a young person, or a classroom full of them, if they didn't have the historical background to go with this. I linked my Maus review earlier. There were some statistics I pointed to at the time regarding the fact that younger people aren't taking the Holocaust as seriously as they should be. I sometimes wonder if that's because of things like comic books about these events.
I've been told that works like Maus and They Called Us Enemy are the only way to get the emotional impact of their respective events across. That may very well be true. It's also true that most people don't take things they read in comics seriously. I know that Spiegelman and Takei both intended their work to bring attention to important subjects and get a message out. I just hope that their work doesn't accomplish the opposite of what they intended.
So if you're going to hand a copy of They Called Us Enemy to a young person, make sure you give them some historical background. Make sure that they know this is one family's story and that there were many more families and camps than just the ones in the book. And make sure they know this isn't some made up story. That it actually happened. But read They Called Us Enemy and share it because it's both a good story and an important one. Just do it right.
Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Watch Towers
They Called Us Enemy - Expanded Edition
George Takei, Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott. Art by Harmony Becker
Top Shelf Productions, 2019
They Called Us Enemy - Expanded Edition is available for purchase at the following link. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.
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