Many people have discussed the role of Nat Turner as a hero, the biblical references, and other aspects of character and storytelling. You beat me to it, so now I’m left wondering how to talk about a text that doesn’t even (really) talk itself. A strong lack of words, save for the occasional diary entry, place most of the storytelling work on pictures. That’s not to say pictures aren’t capable of such an endeavor, they do so all the time in children’s books. But this is a different monster entirely, and as a text that drives home important themes on slavery, morality, literacy, and human nature, it must work harder than the average children’s book. I felt compelled in particular by the way Baker uses revelation of information to help keep my attention high, despite the lack of words.
As I read, I found I frequently asked myself, “wait, what just happened?” One way Baker weaves his stories–while also helping keep readers focused on the story, despite its lack of words–is through his revelation of information, which often sends the reader back several pages to understand exactly “what just happened.” This technique shows up early on and continues through much of the book, though I noticed it does taper off a bit as the violence gets extreme, since the violence becomes the story. When the story opens we see a lot of people living somewhere. Their dress and setting don’t resemble that of a plantation, but I’ll admit I didn’t notice this at first (11–13). When we see the images on 14 and 15, of horses with guns charging in, an immediate sense of time and place comes into the pages. We’re most likely in Africa during a slave raid. After realizing this, I immediately flip back to the beginning to see what I missed, and notice that some of the hints of time and place are in the drawings’ intricacies, though they still rely on the future pages to help make sense and add to the narrative thread of the story.
Similarly, on the boat a baby is born and juxtaposed by images of sharks (41). An interesting, pictorial use of foreshadowing when we later see the role of both the baby, mother and sharks. When the new mother begins running on the deck, I first interpreted this as a fight or flight response of a scared new mother, trying to protect her child (50). Turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong, as we see definitively when she bits the slaver’s arm (54), allowing her own child to fall into a shark’s jaws where it will forever remain outside the grip of American slave owners.
These images help reveal the power that pictures actually have in graphic novels. Subtle depictions can help confuse the reader before forcing him to return to earlier pages to understand what exactly just transpired in the story. In this way, Baker constantly plays with our expectations and helps reinforce characters’ motivations and actions by forcing us to re-read. In this sense, each picture is worth many thousands of words. And each picture forces us to consider how words shape texts, even graphic novels, and helps show that they may not be as important in storytelling as we previously believed.
I think this works does appear to be a throwback to earlier means of storytelling. Someone mentioned it reminded him of hieroglyphics, and I can see that. I also mentioned in my own post that the sepia tone of the pictures lends itself to having an authentic quality. Thinking about it now, at first I was surprised at the lack of words, but now I find myself wondering if words could even be effective with the tale. So much is given in the pictures that I was constantly forced to say “What is going on here?” for several seconds before digesting it fully, and I think words would clash with this graphic novel’s ability to relay the NT story.