On Raymond Tyler and Paul Buhle’s Partisans

Comic books depicting men at war were quite popular during World War Two, particularly among soldiers,  as Paul Buhle and Raymond Tyler note in the afterword to the new graphic history of anti-fascist resistance that they edited.  Their anthology of illustrated stories about partisans in Greece, Yugoslavia, Russia, Holland, Italy, Hungary, France, and Spain offers a new look at “the good fight” against Hitler’s and Mussolini’s fascist armies. In the postwar Fifties, before the Sixties advent of “underground comics” and the subsequent development of graphic novels,   inspired American artists like Harvey Kurtzman in Two-Fisted Tales drew scenes of blood and guts combat featuring Allied forces against the Axis.   Partisans could be regarded as a corrective or revision of those earlier war comics,  which left out pictures and dialogue related to the saboteurs and guerrillas, men and women who fought behind enemy lines, or within territory occupied by Germany and Italy. The partisans blew up train tracks, assassinated fascist military men, participated in general strikes,  circulated resistance newspapers, helped defeat fascists across Europe.

While I don’t particularly enjoy watching war films or reading colorful illustrated stories of men and women killing one another, or even avoiding their own deaths in acts of resistance to fascism,  I was glad to read the stories In Partisans for a number of reasons.  First of all, these recollections and tributes are visually striking, full of color and eye-catching drawings.  The episodes are also surprisingly life-affirming,  often based on the testimony of survivors who withstood imprisonment and torture, and risked their lives to resist the tyranny of strongmen.  Tales told in the first-person voices of survivors, some of whom were quite young in the 1940s, combined with graphic images of their militant and subversive actions against units of larger armed forces,  show it is possible to overcome huge odds and resist well-armed, well-financed oppressors with small arms and great dedication.

The diverse backgrounds and different geographic locations of the resisters introduced in these stories also present an optimistic reading of history: anti-fascism can arise anywhere, in the most oppressive and dangerous of situations, and while the fight against tyranny often requires secrecy and undercover work on the part of those engaged in resistance,  those underground risks can now be disclosed,  remembered and deservedly celebrated by historians and illustrators, as they are in this book.  After reading Partisans, one might conclude as Woody Guthrie did in one of his songs: “All of you fascists bound to lose.”   (Guthrie’s guitar famously displayed the words: “This machine kills fascists.”  Perhaps Partisans should have a similar slogan pasted on its cover: “This book kills fascists!”)

Individuals are named; and their heroic efforts,  shown in blood red and dark forest green ink,  along with some stark black and white imagery, receive some poetic justice — new public recognition of daring resistance that begins to compensate for the many years these anti-fascists had to remain hidden “underground” in Europe because discovery meant capture and execution.

A number of partisan women receive special recognition, too. Trina Robbins and Anne Timmons give “Three Dutch Girls,”  teenage partisans, the public attention they never could enjoy when they worked secretly with the  resistance in Holland. Sharon Rudahl’s tale about how “Secret Agent” Josephine Baker smuggled “intel across borders, [in] music scores riddled with invisible ink, maps and film sewn between costume linings”  shows that while she lived in occupied France,  the famous entertainer did far more than sing and dance in a banana-covered skirt.  Frances Bannerman, amid some intriguing recollections of her years as a young woman in Mussolini’s Italy,  lists some of tasks that anti-fascist “stafette,” mostly women couriers, were expected to perform: “Ride a bike, assault a truck at a checkpoint,… keep quiet, not concern herself with more than what she needs to report,  make a silly face, defend herself from nuisances.” Pictures of Frances making a silly face and riding a bike with rifle and first aid kit attached add some merriment to the story,  although her work was hardly a complete lark.

As Raymond Tyler notes in his story about Soviet Partisans,  beautifully illustrated by Gary Dumm and colored by Laura Dumm,  “Partisans were an irregular force made up of anti-fascists.  ‘Irregular military’ just means a military made of regular people and not uniformed armed forces.”   Throughout the book, these  “regular people” hand-drawn in pen-and-ink are the main characters. There are no superheroes here, although some of the action shown is as fast-paced, dangerous, and violent as conflicts faced by Batman and Wonder Woman.

Not all of the anti-fascists in Partisans carry guns.  One of my favorite pages introduces Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Eluard and Elsa Barraine as part of the French “national writers’ front” that worked “in parallel to the Maquis,” the French partisans, whose story is illustrated by Daniel Selig.  Artists also have their work discussed in a story by Kevin Pyle, who surveys the huge sculptures that honor the efforts of anti-fascists in Yugoslavia. “From 1945 to 1961, over 14,000 such monuments known as Spomeniks were built throughout Yugoslavia,”  notes Pyle, “thousands of Spomeniks form an archipelago of tremendous sacrifice and victory.”  Many of these monuments are now neglected and decaying, which may be all the more reason to remember them as Pyle does with illustrations and text.

Unfortunately, although concerned mainly with events of the 1940s,  this new graphic history of anti-fascist resistance is a timely, inspiring volume. I would have liked to be able to say that these stories about underground sabotage and aboveground fighting against fascist armed forces are welcome tributes to past defenders of freedom, and leave it at that; but in 2025,  people around the world once again face fascist threats to democratic government, to free expression and cultural diversity, and once again it is time to resist. We need to march again, speak out again;  and to circulate  books like this one that recalls past struggles and reminds us that they can be won.

To that end, Partisans should be widely distributed and read.   Purchase and donate a copy to a high school,  a university, to a public library, to your niece or nephew, grandchildren, neighbors.   The book also should be included on some history and art class reading lists, along with graphic histories of Paul Robeson, Emma Goldman, the Wobblies, the Jewish Labor Bund, Che Guevara, Bohemians, all of which Paul Buhle and his associates have commendably written, illustrated and edited.  As far as I know,  none of these volumes have yet been condemned by Donald Trump and his acolytes, or removed from library shelves after complaints;  that would only increase the demand for them, I suspect.  (“Trump calls Partisans a bad book” is a headline that would sell many copies.) Keep these books in circulation,  give them to others as gifts, and also read them   – an act of resistance to fascism in which all of us can participate.