REVIEW: Alan Jenkins and Gan Golan — 1/6 The Graphic Novel (SECOND ISSUE)
Harvard Law Professor and New York Times bestselling author Alan Jenkins and Gan Golan’s bone-chilling new project 1/6: The Graphic Novel has just come out with its second issue, further chronicling a world we may actually see. As the first issue of 1/6 illustrated, Jenkins — along with bonafide talent Will Rosado — showed martial law declared, the election interference scheme coming into solidity, and tanks rolling down Capitol Hill.
Seems like something, depending on life experience, you’re used to seeing in hit movies — particularly dystopian future pieces from Hollywood filmmaking in the 2000s. The names Children of Men, V for Vendetta, Equilibrium, The Thirteenth Floor come to mind. Or, dating earlier, the literary masterworks of equally socially decayed vistas and hellscapes of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan, or — to reference Dick again — the more immediate Man in the High Castle. Emphasis on the latter, in contemporary form. But the idea such pieces would be in actuality prophetic, even in a hypothetical sense, is nothing short of stunning when one thinks of the United States of America.
What Jenkins, Golan, and Rosado are concocting, however, is not even prophetic. Prophetic is a bit too loose and removed a term to apply to what 1/6 ponders, assesses, analyzes. We’re not dealing with fiction in the panels of each of the issues. We’re dealing with a complete and justifiable calculation about the fall of the world’s superpower, and most importantly, said superpower’s model of democracy. We’re dealing with depictions of what the key players themselves have said, both on the 2024 Trump campaign trail, as well as the more radical members of the Trump Administration since its populist inception on day one of January 2017.
“We’re in a comic book moment in our culture, for better and for worse. Almost all of the biggest blockbuster movies for the last 15 years have been based on comic books,” Professor Jenkins has been quoted, in an article featured in the Harvard Law Today. “The thing about the comic book medium is that if you’re 80 years old in the United States, you grew up on comic books and if you’re eight, you’re growing up with comic books.”
He also states, “We wanted to bring empathy to all of (these) characters…There are some bad guys in this comic book, but we felt that recognizing the humanity in all of our main characters, even ones who we would not agree with in real life, was really important — both for a compelling story and also to bring in people who might otherwise be dismissive of the story itself.”
Christine Perkins, the writer of the Harvard Law Today article featuring the aforementioned interview with Professor Jenkins, sums up the crux of 1/6’s inception perfectly. In it, she writes: “The comic genre has a long history of tackling themes related to social justice and inequality, and challenging authoritarianism, said Jenkins, sharing images from a collection of comics, including an image of Black Panther fighting the Klan, Captain America hitting Adolf Hitler in the jaw in an issue that came out several months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and another of Superman grabbing Hitler and taking him to the International Court of Justice, which did not exist at that time.”
Colin Jordan
