REVIEW: The British Are Coming Vol. 1
The British Are Coming Vol. 1
By Rick Atkinson, Nora Neus, and Frederico Pietrobon
320 pages/10 Speed Graphics/$35
Adapting prose storytelling to a graphic novel is tricky. Sure, it’s easier to visualize colonial America than describe it in words, but you also need to ensure readers know what they’re looking at and why. In this adaptation of Rick Atkinson’s same-titled book, so much context is missing that it’s a breezy, empty read that won’t enhance the reader’s knowledge.
We open in 1773 and the night of the infamous Boston Tea Party. So, right from the start, we’re missing vital information. This needed to begin with the 1765 Stamp Act, which really set the colonies on the path to independence.
We meet people with a close-up and an arrow providing us with a name, but nothing else, so when John Adams, for example, shows up on page 4, he’s a lawyer and nothing more, little seen again in the narrative.
Nora Neus and Frederico Pietrobon leisurely take us from event to event between 1773 and March 1776, leaving some juicy stuff for volume two. But it’s a limited view. Nothing occurring below Virginia is discussed, the first Continental Congress is ignored, and the vital impact of the January 1776 publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense is entirely missing. We periodically go to England to see King George III froth, but the divide between colonists—rebels and Tories—is missing.
Instead, we are treated to leisurely depictions of marching, their rebellion suffering from degrading conditions due to little funding, and way too much time spent on the ill-fated attempt to conquer Quebec, and too little time on the theft of cannons from Fort Ticonderoga.
It appears Neus took the dialogue from primary sources, correspondence, and journals, but it’s formal and doesn’t at all sound like people speaking to one another or even the reader.
The book is nice to look at, easy to read, and robs the subject of the grit and personalities that shaped a new nation. Better the reader find the source material or watch the recent Ken Burns documentary series.
