Under the Banner of King Death

And today’s pick is Under The Banner of King Death by David Lester and Marcus Rediker with Paul M. Buhle. Published by Beacon Press in 2023.

The text is an adaption from Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age by Marcus Rediker – copywrite 2004.

Content notes for executions, the slave trade, whipping, guns, and sex.

Keywords that came to mind reading this volume were queer, anarchic, racial diversity, retirement, consensus, and illegitimate.

A collaborator on some titles I’ve discussed previously, including 1919 Winnipeg General Strike by Graphic History Collective and Direct Action Gets the Goods – Graphic History Collective you can check out my previous bio of David Lester in the latter review. Not to mention that I’ve also picking up Prophets Against Slavery Review and am reading it as we speak, which was another collab between Lester and Rediker.

Scrolling through Marcus Rediker’s website… He’s apparently a Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh who self describes as historian, writer, teacher and activist. He also apparently made the jump from Twitter to Blue Skies last month. Did that myself recently and would highly recommend.

And finally, I have read a number of comics edited by Paul M. Buhle. For better or worse I profiled him in my review of the apparent yawn fest that was Eugene V. Debs_ A Graphic Biography. But I would probably recommend picking up Ballad of an American_ A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson by Sharon Rudahl instead if you are looking for more interesting examples of his other work.

Overall I really appreciated how expressive and kinetic the pages were. A really engrossing read that communicates a lot of history through very compelling storytelling.

A few lines that really stood out to me were “The ravaged body of the pirate is a key to understanding the real history of those who sailed under the banner of king death, the infamous black flag, the pirates jolly roger. Trapped in a deadly machine called the deep -sea sailing ship, sailors who turned pirate fought a furious battle for survival. Routinely maimed in the course of their work, bilked of their wages, fed rotten provisions, and beaten around the deck by captains with tyrannical powers, these seafaring men (and a few women) built a radically different life on a pirate ship… The alternative social order of the pirate ship was all the more impressive because it had been created by the (so called)”villains of all nations” workers of many races and ethnicities who, according to conventional wisdom, in their own day and in ours, were not supposed to cooperate. Any given pirate ship might have English, Irish, Greek, Dutch, French or Native American crew members. African and African American seamen played an especially prominent role as they freely and subversly sailed Caribbean and North American waters near the coastal slave plantations from which many of them had escaped.” I appreciate how Rediker is so effortlessly able to contextualize pirates in such a radically different way then we often see them. Not only in terms of class but also in terms of other marginalized identities.

That isn’t to say everything was sunshine and roses. That’s never how people living in community goes. But in a world (both then and now) that only sees violence as legitimate when carried out by the state, or at the very least against someone more marginalized then you… pirates are everything that capitalist empires don’t want us to learn from.

Overall my only real complaint is that I wanted more. But such is life I suppose. Fitting with the entire philosophical exercise of the thing, the narrative of the graphic novel doesn’t follow any great man of history narratives. Big names are highlighted alongside what might be seen as a more average experience. We see representation of many different kinds of relationships, some different kinds of gender presentation, and how consensus decision making works. We also see the pirates having fun, playing music, eating drinking and dancing.

Turning our focus to the artwork, it is of a style that can be a bit hit or miss for some. I appreciate how dynamic, expressive and varied it was. Balancing out the practical choice of going with a greyscale color scheme. The use of line was probably my favorite.

We also get a brief look into Lester’s process in the afterward by Paul Buhl “Lester… says that he sought to bring the reader ‘back in time’ offering his own version of artwork that ‘has more in common with the black and white etchings of Hogarth than with the color work of the art of the EC Piracy series’ watercolor, brushes, pencils, and pen – in some cases Lester takes inspiration from the famous pirate films by cutting up drawings and reassembling them to create a ‘kind of movement in slow motion’ giving the reader time to linger on the page. In previous graphic novels, Lester created scale models or clay structures when penciling drawings for the script. For this book he built a scale model of an eighteenth-century galleon, so as to draw the ship from any angle. Before each day of drawing he would study the model galleon’s progress to get a sense of how it must have been, spatially, to have ‘lived in that wooden world’.”

A tiny apology for the extended quotes but it was pretty interesting so here we are.

Looking at the different political aspects I want to highlight in every one of my reviews I feel like we have already touched on almost all of them with the exception of place. We certainly had a fairly strong sense of being at sea in general, but Lester (as illustrated by that quote) also spent a decent amount of effort building out the specifics of The Night Rambler.

Wrapping things up, while it will probably be off-putting to some I appreciated the mix of fact, speculation in the form of fictional story telling, and political analysis that make up this slim easy to read volume. I was impressed with just how much I got to chew on and would generally recommend. Five stars because I felt like I learned a lot and I was impressed with the format.