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Marx for Beginners

By Leoy Douresseau
December 13, 2003 - 09:18

Of the three Pantheon Books "For Beginners" series I've read, I found MARX FOR BEGINNERS the most difficult to read, understand, and finish. Cartoonist Rius (pseudonym for Mexican cartoonist Eduardo del Rio) admits in his introduction that Karl Marx, author of THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO and the father of communism, and his work are difficult subjects to tackle in a small book. Rius basically uses a little under 140 pages to define Marx and his work in what we'd call a graphic novel. So does he succeed or does he fail? The answer is a little of both.

Rius crams the origins of Marxist philosophy, history, and economy, while having to also give abbreviated histories of capital, labor, the class struggle, and socialism. Oh, of course, there should be at least a little bio of Charles (Karl, in German) Marx. At times, it's a wonder that Rius will be able to do all of that, but surprise, he does. By the time, I finished reading the book, I understood Marx better than I did when I first tried to read The Communist Manifesto.

He puts everything in the proper context so that the reader might understand how mankind, property, labor, and authority created the atmosphere that would spur Marx's life work. He also makes Marx's densely academic writing understandable to the layman, and one can't help but read this book and catch Rius' obvious "leftist," Marxist leanings.

Rius is supposed to be one of the originators of the comic book as documentary cartoon book. He is a political cartoonist whose strength lies in caricature and doodling. You don't have to go far into this book to see that his kind of graphic narrative has a different narrative flow. Here the ideas, or words, carry the story/information along and the drawings are merely illustration, in a sense, almost like decoration. Art and text don't really embellish each other, and the art ends up being more like flavoring than accentuation.

So this might be graphic narrative by default, and the book is interesting especially in that it's the kind that will challenge the perceptions of what is comic book or graphic novel. Thus, Rius succeeds in explaining Marx, but his cartoon book is more "words with pictures" than "words and pictures."

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12