They Called Us Enemy - Expanded Edition Written by George Takei, Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott. Art by Harmony Becker

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.

They Called Us Enemy

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Hive, Story by Brannon Braga Art by Joe Corroney

 

So, I found this while I was looking for things to link with my Wesley Crusher post and I figured I'd check Star Trek:The Next Generation: Hive out. I'm glad I did, too, because it was a lot of fun. I mean, I've loved ST:TNG since "Encounter at Farpoint" (Yeah, I know the first couple of seasons were slow. Ten year old me was so excited to see Trek episodes that he and his father hadn't seen that he didn't give a rip.) and it looked like something I might be interested in, too.

And I mean it was totally original too, because Trek had never done anything with time tra...

Errrrr...

There was this new species called the Bor....

Uhh...

Okay, so the story was new but the plot elements were familiar. I'm okay with that though. It's like there's a reason that they use this stuff. It must work or sumfin'.

I mean, who hasn't watched "The Best of Both Worlds" and loved it? If you're a Trek fan, I mean. My daughters don't like Trek (Not my fault. I tried) so they probably haven't seen it, but like, non-Trekkies (Trekkers if you prefer, I guess. I grew up using the older term.) wouldn't even know what I was talking about. And, of course, everybody's favorite Trek movie is ST4: The Voyage Home and that's all about time travel and whales and "nuclear wessels" and the Dark Ages, and...

Look, it's been a minute, okay? Let's just say that with Trek you can pretty much throw in time travel and either the Borg or Klingons and it's all good. And Hive was good. The story is all about Picard, and Data and Seven and how they have to save the galaxy from being overrun by the Borg. And yes, there is some time travel involved because Locutus/Picard has to travel back in time to prevent himself from doing something that ruined the whole freaking timeline.  Somebody take his cookie away.

The story is engaging and moves well. It probably comes closer to the TNG movies than the series, but that's true of a lot of the new stuff.  It's an action story and it works. I read the whole thing in about ten minutes using a Kindle app on a cell phone. No, that's not my favorite way to read a comic book/graphic novel but I've got KU so I did it that way to save eight bucks. Although, honestly, if you use the clicky feature that they've created for comics, it does work pretty well. The app automatically pops a window describing how to use it if you're not familiar.

The artwork is magnificent. The Borg are wonderfully rendered. We can recognize the familiar faces that we should be able to recognize. But more importantly, there are big space battles and they look really cool. Yeah, I know I'm supposed to use big technical terms and talk about sight-lines and whatever, but I'm an SF/F geek, not an art geek. You'll have to get your technical lessons from someone else. Seriously. I can barely remember which end of the pen goes on the paper. What I do know is what looks good from a layman's perspective and Hive is beautiful.

I could just page through this thing and look at the pictures and be happy. That's weird for me, because I'm  more of a story guy, but I really did enjoy the art. It was well drawn but it felt familiar. I could look at the pictures of Locutus/Picard (depending on the point in the story) and hear the words spoke in Sir Patrick Stewart's voice, not just because I was a fan but because it looked so much like him and that's kind of a thing for me.

See, when I was a wee little Jimbo and was first getting into comics, I got confused sometimes reading comics with the same characters but different artists. I get that different artists have a different take and that's one of the things I love about comics. It's a lot easier to recognize a variation on a look at forty-six than it was at six, too. The fact remains that we need to know who we're looking at and Corroney gives us characters that have his take on them but are alike enough in appearance to the actors to make things feel comfortable.  And look, I'm not here to debate who drew the definitive Silver Surfer, I'm just saying that familiarity is a good thing, especially when you're dealing with some of Trek's most beloved characters. 

And speaking of Trek's most beloved characters...

The plot of Hive makes an immense amount of sense when viewed through the lens of what one would expect of the characters involved. Some harsh actions are taken but they make sense in context of the people we're dealing with. Say what you want about Picard, he never shied away from doing what he had to when it came right down to it. He'd hem. He'd haw. Then he'd do exactly what he was hesitating about. It more or less works that way here. He does what he has to do because he has to do it.

I've always had a fascination with the Seven character as well and she really shines here. Her actions show an empathy and a humanity, mixed with a bit of Borg and their obsession with perfection. Hive gives her a really well written arc, a mission that only she can accomplish and a believable reaction to the way things go. I really liked the fact that Braga seems to have considered her dual nature and done right by her.

There really aren't a lot of appearances by other members of the various shows. I'm okay with that. They wouldn't have added much to the story anyway. I remember reading something by Leonard Nimoy talking about how he didn't do Star Trek: Generations because his character would have served no purpose. Braga was smart in following a similar principle and not throwing characters in just to say he did.

Bottom Line: 4.5 out of 5 Vulcan Artifacts

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Hive
Brannon Braga, Joe Corroney
IDW, 2013

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Hive 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.

About the Maus Thing

A school district in Tennessee has banned teaching a graphic novel (That's a fancy term for a really long comic book.) named Maus. Maus is a take on the Holocaust, retelling the story with the Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The school board states that they banned it because of nudity and bad language. 

For the record, I have purchased (and never got around to reading) a copy of the book for myself that I lost in the move when I got divorced and have gifted another copy to my oldest daughter. I also have a BA in History and my senior thesis/capstone paper was written on the involvement of the Heer, the German Army (not to be confused with the Wehrmacht which was the Nazi equivalent to the Department of Defense) in the Holocaust. I have read everything from translations of primary sources in the form of German After Action Reports to transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials to Ordinary Men to various writings of Omer Bartov...

The list goes on. 

Then add to that the fact that, at least according to my father I have some Jewish ancestry (meaning that I am in some way related to every one if the oeople who died in those camps or from the mass shootings), and well...

You'd be hard pressed to find a person who believes more strongly in the importance of Holocaust education than me. I mean that sincerely.

Boobies and bad language happen in the real world and, honestly, you can't accurately recount some events without the atmosphere of profanity and exploitation that those elements add.

And yet...

I'm not a big fan of using things like comic books/Hollywood movies as educational aids to begin with. The amount of historical inaccuracies that creep into one of these works is unreal. I seriously (and I KID YOU NOT) took a course in Japanese history in college in which we read a scholarly paper detailing the historical inaccuracies in The Last Samurai. If I recall correctly, and I may not since it's been awhile, it spanned somewhere in the twenty-five to thirty page range. 

If you've seen Glory, you know that the Fifty Fourth Massachusetts Regiment was not issued uniforms when they first arrived. Of course, what you know is wrong. The Fifty- Fourth most certainly did suffer from racism and discrimination. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or an idiot (possibly both if they think you're dumb enough to believe them) but they got their uniforms. Now, the scene where they're paid a smaller wage and therefore refuse to accept payment is one hundred percent true. It's complicated. We were shown Glory in high school. We all took the work to be one hundred percent accurate. I mean, our teacher showed it to us, right? Except that it wasn't and that has altered our perception of history.

As another example, there was the movie The Tuskegee Airmen. In that movie, we see two senators arguing about the existence of a flight program for black men in the military. The senator from New York (I think, it's been awhile) is in favor of the program. His southern counterpart is not. The debate was real. The two senators depicted in the movie are not. And yes, Eleanor Roosevelt really did fly with one of the Tuskegee Airmen shortly before they deployed to Europe, so that part is real. It gets complicated. The Tuskegee Airmen came out after I graduated from high school, so I'm not sure if it was ever used in a classroom or not. I can only say, that despite viewing the movie so many times that the VHS tape I purchased it on fell apart and was eaten by my VCR, I never saw it in a classroom.

Please, if you value your life don't even mention the phrases "historical accuracy" and "John Wayne movie" in front of a college professor. Since I value mine, DEFINITELY don't mention it if I'm standing between the two of you. If and when I see a real fact in a work featuring John Wayne, I promise to inform you of its existence. Given the fact that my father and grandfather (on my Mom's side) were both John Wayne fanatics I've seen a lot but I'm not able to name one movie that got anything right. Actually, that's not technically true. There really were Green Berets in Vietnam. Granted, they called THEMSELVES, US Army Special Forces...

Anyway...

I cannot comment on the historical accuracy and inaccuracies in Maus because I haven't read it other than the obvious. Jews and Nazis were both human beings and not animals. I'm willing to bet that there are a lot more than inaccuracies than just that and I'm pretty sure your average junior high school student is smart enough to know that. And yes, I am aware that Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, based his work on interviews with his grandfather. That doesn't make them one hundred percent copies though, and I'm not sure I trust this book to get it right. 

The Left, of course, is screaming racism because that is what the left does. The problem with the Left and their Critical Social Theory (which encompasses Critical Race theory but also things like the LGBT and Feminist movements) is that they refuse to consider causes outside of race, gender, orientation, etc. When they refuse to consider causes outside of those bounds then everything is going to come up either -ist or -phobic. That's just life. Considering whether nudity and profanity are proper fare for a junior high audience would never have crossed their mind because they are blind to even understanding the argument, let alone evaluating it.

So, while I believe in Freedom of Speech and the Press, I don't believe that a persons right to say or right something entitles them to have their works used as a teaching aid. We wouldn't use a movie stating that there is no need to balance equations in either an algebra or chemistry class because of Freedom of Speech. And so, what I'm actually saying here is that I'm not sure Maus was the correct book to be teaching to kids anyway. It should've been left in the library for a curious student to find if they went looking later. It was, after all, watching John Wayne movies with all their inaccuracies that led me to love history in the first place. There are factual works that could have been used to teach the Holocaust Unit. So, for my money, I'd prefer that Maus and other works of historical fiction be kept out of classrooms, even if I have praised them previously.

Maus
Art Spiegelman
Pantheon, 1986

Maus and related works are available for purchase at the links below. If you click the links and buy literally anything from Amazon I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.