In one, she seems to peer through a worn document into a vast whirlpool in which sailing ships founder, perhaps carrying crucial letters with them beneath the waves. Sprawling yet perfectly balanced, his two-page compositions wrap the reader up in Hall's thoughts. Martínez manages to do just that - not just with his drawing of Hall's silhouette in the reading room, but with a dozen other ingenious gambits. How do you draw what's going on in their mind as they sort, filter and finally assemble scattered facts into a meaningful story of the past? From the outside, a working historian just looks like someone sitting at a table for hours on end. What's hard is illustrating the historical process: squinting one's way through sheaves of correspondence, scanning documents for any mention of a key name, and simply thinking a lot. The battles, the journeys, the ceremonies, the action - that stuff is easy to draw. There are numerous graphic novels about history, of course, but the creators always focus on the historical events themselves. It also expresses something that may never before have been depicted in a comic (or anywhere else, for that matter): What it feels like to do historical research. With this one choice, he conveys multiple emotions at once: Hall's grief, so consuming that it wrenches her out of the flow of everyday events, and her identification with her subjects, two women whose fates are invisible in the historical record.Īuthor Interviews Comics Hero Barry Windsor-Smith Is Back, And He's Brought Something Monstrous She's sitting at a table in a crowded reading room, but Martínez sets her apart from the other visitors at this moment by drawing her as a reverse silhouette - a white void in the midst of the otherwise busy scene. I'll never know what happened to Sarah or Abigail," Hall realizes, throwing her head back and flinging up her arms in a gesture of agonized frustration. But was the woman Abigail or Sarah? Was she executed, or eventually released? The letters don't say. Sifting through 300-year-old documents, Hall finds that this woman remained in prison for years while the governor corresponded with officials back in Great Britain about a possible pardon. She has found that two women named Sarah and Abigail were both sentenced to death in the wake of the revolt, but the authorities delayed one of the women's execution because she was pregnant. Martínez draws Hall - a trained historian and lawyer - at the New York Historical Society, reading the records of a 1712 slave revolt in the city. There's a particularly expressive drawing near the front of Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez' Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts that sums up what's unique about this graphic novel.
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