Direct Action Gets the Goods

A real group effort, this book appears to have been organized by The Graphic History Collective with the additional contributions of Althea Balmes, Gord Hill, Orion Keresztesi and David Lester. This short nonfiction comic was published by Between The Lines in 2019.
No warnings, this probably makes very excellent classroom material.
As far as The Graphic History Collective, they've produced some pretty cool stuff and I would highly recommend that everyone check out their website of the same name - see link in the description. I previously reviewed their books May Day Comics and Drawn to Change before the great channel reset. I should really re-review or at least re-post them one of these days. Too many books, so little time! I do have a hold on their book 1919: A Graphic History of the Winnipeg General Strike so look for that content in the future as well. It looks very good. They've also done a whack of posters.
Focusing in on the individuals named on the title page. Gord Hill shouldn't be a new one to any of y'all, but if you haven't checked out my reviews of his books The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book and The Anti Fascist Comic Book you really really should!
Althea Balmes, according to the bio section is "a multidisciplinary visual storyteller and arts educator interested in collaborative creative expression. Her work is informed by Filipino culture, her diasporic experience, and her background in anthropology, international development, and interest in decolonial aesthetics. She takes a self-reflective, intersectional, and constructivist approach to arts education to help build bridge communities."
Orion Keresztesi "is an artist and activist inspired by the history of working people's struggles - how they have shaped the world we live in and how they can help us to do the same today. He works as a research and policy analyst for the Nova Scotia NDP cauus. He is a member of the SEIU Local 2."
And David Lester is "the guitarist int he underground rock duo Mecca Normal. The duo has been cited as an influence on the social movement known as Riot Grrl. His poster of anti-war protester Malachi Ritscher was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He is the author/illustrator of the Gruesome Acts of Capitalism and the graphic novel The Listener. He designed the labour movement's weekly newspaper Solidarity Times during the strike of 1983 in British Columbia. David is currently working a graphic biography of Emma Goldman." Which sounds very interesting and I really will need to check out this other work.
Other people who contributed to this collection include Sean Carleton, Robin Folvik, Charles Smith, Julia Smith and Charles Smith.
Since I bring this up all the time, I'm not the keenest on nonfiction books that aren't super obvious with author personality. As I always bring up I don't believe that objectivity exists, and getting to know authors helps me figure out if what they say is trustworthy or not. That said, I feel besides the very upfront support for strikes it's a pretty cut and dry retelling of a series of strikes. It reads well, but the editorializing is kept to the pretty obvious working class history, that the collective is pretty upfront about supporting. No hot takes.
To put a finer point on the topics covered by way of description. We start with the 1800s, 1820 being the first action taken by Cree boatman who refused to work for the Hudson Bay Company in Oxford House, Manitoba thru to the present day. The timeline at the back of the book finishes with the Postal workers strike that happened back in 2018. Ginger Goodwin comes up, so definitely check out the biography comic I reviewed about him here. Clocking in at 60 pages, including acknowledgements, introduction, timeline, notes and bibliography, and contributor bios, this is a very fast read. But an excellent and intriguing introduction to striking in Canada. Something I need and you probably do too, as strikes re-enter the public consciousness.
How is gender and sexuality treated in the book? Crickets when it comes to sexuality, the gender (as far as the apparent cis binary goes) women get a lot of playtime both visually and the narrative.
Race was a highlight. Part of the introduction also highlighted that as a goal of this collection. The flawless integration of colonialism and capitalism, highlighting the strike resistance of people Indigenous to the land stolen by so-called Canada.
Class is an obvious focus of the book, but it was nice to see this with at least a certain level of intersectionality going on. Who should run the world? The people who actually do stuff!
Ability vs disability wasn't totally overlooked in that dangerous working conditions chew people up. There's also a person sitting in a wheelchair at a direct action. This is more then some books like this I have reviewed, but certainly barely scrapes by on the minimum.
A fast paced read that successfully hits the mark it was aiming for, I rate this book four out of five stars.