Derf Backderf Revisits America’s Radical Cartoonists in The Dissidents
Derf Backderf’s new graphic novel returns to the artists of The Masses, the radical magazine whose cartoonists became caught up in the political conflicts surrounding America’s entry into the First World War.
Derf Backderf has returned to a group of cartoonists he first discovered as a student more than four decades ago.
His new graphic novel, The Dissidents: Autocrats! Vigilantes! Communists! And Cartoonists!, was published by Abrams ComicArts on September 15. The 344-page book tells a story built around the artists of The Masses, the radical magazine that brought together some of the most distinctive political cartoonists working in the United States during the 1910s.
The subject has been with Backderf since his student days at Ohio State University.
In a recent interview with Matter News, published ahead of his September 23 appearance at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Backderf recalled that he was drawing political cartoons for Ohio State’s student newspaper, The Lantern, when he began looking for artists who might provide inspiration.
Lucy Caswell, then one of his professors and a central figure in what would become the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, pointed him toward the cartoonists of The Masses.
Their work stayed with him.
The Dissidents
Autocrats! Vigilantes! Communists! And Cartoonists! brings Backderf back to the political cartoonists whose work first caught his attention during his years at Ohio State.
Discovering The Masses
The Masses began publishing in 1911 and became a home for socialist politics, literature, journalism and political art. Its contributors included artists such as Art Young, Boardman Robinson, Robert Minor, Cornelia Barns and Henry Glintenkamp.
Backderf told Matter News that he gradually learned more about the cartoonists and the government campaign against the magazine. The idea eventually developed into The Dissidents, although work on the book itself began about three and a half years ago.
The book does not simply reproduce that history.
Backderf uses a fictional cartoonist, Joe Hertle, to move through a story populated by real artists and historical figures. Joe becomes involved with The Masses as the political atmosphere in the United States changes during the First World War.
Original cartoons from The Masses appear throughout the graphic novel.
Backderf has said that including them was part of the project from the beginning. He wanted readers to encounter the work itself rather than only read about the people who produced it. Finding suitable reproductions required research in private collections and at the Library of Congress.
Cartoonists Under Pressure
The political environment surrounding The Masses became increasingly difficult after the United States entered the First World War in 1917.
The federal government moved against anti-war publications under wartime legislation. The Masses lost access to the mail, ceased publication, and members of its circle faced federal prosecution over material opposing the war and conscription.
That conflict between political art and government power is at the center of Backderf’s book.
It is also one of the reasons he believes the story deserves to be remembered. Speaking to Matter News, Backderf said the cartoons themselves, and in many cases the names of their creators, have largely disappeared from public memory. His aim was to bring the artists and their drawings back into view and show why the work had such force in its own time.
As a student, Backderf kept Robert Minor’s At Last a Perfect Soldier above his drafting table without initially knowing much about the artist who had drawn it.
Decades later, Minor is one of the historical cartoonists who appears in The Dissidents.
A Book Built from Archives
Research for The Dissidents took Backderf to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum and the Library of Congress.
Unlike Kent State, where he could draw on testimony from people who had lived through the events, this story required him to reconstruct a world more than a century old from archives, autobiographies and surviving issues of The Masses.
Backderf told Cleveland Magazine that he read the magazine’s entire six-year run while researching the book.
That research also allowed him to reproduce original work by The Masses artists within his own pages. The result places Backderf’s fictional narrative alongside the political cartoons that inspired the project in the first place.
Pages from The Dissidents
Selected pages from the book. Click any image to open the gallery.
From Political Cartooning to Graphic Novels
Backderf’s interest in this history also connects with his own beginnings as a cartoonist.
According to the Wexner Center, The City appeared in more than 150 newspapers over nearly 25 years. Backderf is also a recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for political cartooning.
With The Dissidents, he returns directly to political cartooning, but through the form that has defined the later part of his career.
The focus this time is not his own generation. It is a group of artists whose drawings appeared more than a century ago and whose names, as Backderf notes, are now unfamiliar to many readers.
Back to Ohio State
Backderf will return to Ohio State University on September 23 for a discussion and book signing at the Wexner Center for the Arts.
The event begins at 7 p.m. and centers on The Dissidents and the political cartoonists behind its story. Backderf is an Ohio State alumnus, making the appearance a return to the campus where he first encountered the work that eventually led to the book.
Backderf himself has drawn parallels between the period covered in The Dissidents and contemporary American politics. In his Matter News interview, he compares aspects of the Wilson administration’s treatment of dissent with developments he sees in the United States today.
Those comparisons are Backderf’s own. The historical story at the center of the book began with his interest in the cartoonists themselves and what happened to them.
The Dissidents brings that work together again: the artists, the magazine they drew for, the political conflict around it and some of the original cartoons that became part of that conflict.
Sources
- Derf Backderf delves into the past, finds lessons for the present with The Dissidents Matter News
- The Dissidents Abrams ComicArts
- The Dissidents with Derf Backderf Wexner Center for the Arts
- Graphic Novelist Derf Talks Ohio Comic History, Wartime Cartoons and New Book Cleveland Magazine
- Derf Backderf on The Dissidents At Length
