Review time! with ‘Under the Banner of King Death’

“Oh what is this I cannot see, with icy hands gets a hold on me”

Hey, it’s a pirate comic! No, I’m not waiting until 19 September to review this, although I was tempted. We must forge on, though! This is published by Beacon Press, and it’s adapted from a book by Marcus Rediker. In the foreword, Rediker writes that David Lester, who drew it, also adapted it, and I’m not sure how much he changed. But that’s that!

This is a fictional story, but it incorporates a lot of what we know about pirates, although it feels like Rediker, in trying to make his point, leaves out some of the darker aspects of the life of a pirate. What point is that? Rediker’s theme is that pirate ships were an example of “democracy from the ground up,” as the people who became pirates had been tortured by captains, enslaved by Europeans, denied a place in society by their gender, and basically marginalized in every way, so when they became pirates, they turned the ships into places where everyone had a vote and everyone had a voice, and the captain was answerable to the crew and could be replaced easily by a vote. Now, I don’t know how much of this is bullshit, just as I don’t know how much of the idea of pirates as bloodthirsty villains is bullshit, but I always look askance at a history that paints too rosy a portrait of something in the past. This book feels a bit too good to be true, in other words. But maybe it’s all true!

Rediker uses a simple story to make his points. In the 1720s, two sailors – John, an escaped slave, and Ruben, a Dutchman, are impressed onto a ship and forced to work for a martinet captain. John already has experience being a pirate, and he convinces the others to rebel, partly because John knows he’ll be sold back into slavery as soon as possible, which is even worse than working on a sailing ship. He meets Mark on board the ship, and the three of them become leaders of the revolt, with John getting elected captain after their mutiny is successful. Mark reveals to John (and later, to the crew) that he’s really a woman, Mary, and she and John start having sex. They head off to Sierra Leone, free some slaves, head back to the Caribbean, capture a British officer but spare his life, and get overrun by British sailors in a big battle. John, Ruben, and Mary are taken to New York, where Ruben is hanged, John is sent back to South Carolina as a slave, and Mary is allowed to bear her child before they hang her. All’s well that ends well!

This is an interesting look at piracy from the point of view of the pirates, and not necessarily a romanticized view of them, with the peg-leg and eye patches and fancy overcoats and whatnot. On the one hand, its verisimilitude makes it a fascinating read, and it gives us a nice look at the conditions sailors lived under during the 17th and 18th centuries and why they might be willing to turn to piracy. The true bad guys in the book, as always, are the fat-cat businessmen back in London, who can’t conceive of any peon deciding that the life of a sailor sucks and he might want to be management instead. Rediker and Lester go through the nuts and bolts of piracy quite well, so this “view from the ground” is different from most fictional accounts of pirates, which usually begin with the pirates already pirating. The book does well with that.

On the other hand, it still feels like too much of a fantasy. People still suck, and if you put people together and give them a bit of power, they’re going to screw it up, and this relatively rosy view of democratic pirates feels a bit too optimistic. Pirates still attacked merchant ships that weren’t bothering anyone, and they still killed people. I have no doubt that pirates would have freed slaves, but they were merciless in other areas. And the fact that one of them is a woman is fine, but the fact that nobody has a problem with her or tries to rape her doesn’t really feel realistic (not that I want her to get raped, but it’s still odd that they just roll with a woman on board as easily as they do). Men suck, and even cheerful pirates who go around freeing slaves and voting for their captains would probably think less of a woman. It just feels like Rediker is trying a bit too hard to make these pirates paragons of freedom, and while that’s not the worst thing in the world to do, it simply feels too unrealistic at times.

Lester does a nice job with the artwork, bringing the world of the 1720s nicely to life. He’s not great at action, but that’s okay, as the book only has a few brief fighting scenes, and Lester does some other things to make up for the stiffness of his characters. He uses very nice, rough pencils and lots of shading, which gives his work a kind of lived-in feel, showing the tough conditions in which these characters exist. His watercolors (so to speak) and ink washes give the book a languid, tropical feel, which, given the latitudes in which the pirates operate, works quite well. He does some clever things with the art, too. On some pages, he overlays rougher pencil-and-ink figures on the “painted” scene, making the scene more chaotic or giving the scene an overriding symbolism. In some places, he “cuts” a panel to create a stuttered kind of motion, spreading a moment out just a little to create a sense of the characters moving. He flicks paint across the page as blood instead of showing it coming from one specific person, which helps heighten the sense of violence in the scene. He also does a nice job showing the way the pirates dressed – their clothes are shabby, necessarily, but they still tried to preen a bit, and it’s a nice contrast to the more sumptuous but less flashy fashion of the aristocrats. It’s an interesting way to show the division of the classes, and Lester does it well.

This is an enjoyable book, but its lack of a solid through-plot hinders it a bit. The utopia of the pirate vessel is a bit hard to take, and by not showing the “dark side” of piracy (besides, of course, the fact that they’ll all get hanged if they get caught), this feels a bit too unbalanced. I don’t know if the book it’s based on had more of that, but it just feels like the book is holding some things back, and that’s too bad. Still, it’s an interesting comic that takes a good point of view of the piratical life, and the art is neat. So that’s nice!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆