Going to school, at some point, the subject of slavery will come up in History class. I’ll admit that not every teacher gives the subject its due lesson. Some teachers would teach what’s in the textbook, and when I was going to school, it wasn’t much. I remember in one grade it was just one paragraph. When it came to black history, it fell upon my family to teach me.

That’s how I first heard of Denmark Vesey and his slave revolt in South Carolina and of Harriet Tubman, her being the “great Conductor” of the Underground Railroad. Of course, you cannot talk about the evils of slavery without talking about Nat Turner. His story was recently retold in the movie Birth Of A Nation. The film gave viewers the full breadth of his story. In comics his story has been told a few times, but none more eloquently than in Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner.

We open somewhere in Africa, where a group of slave catchers attack a small fishing village and put one such family into bondage. As each man, woman and child are stripped of clothing heads shaved neatly, and branded, making the humiliation endlessly distressing. As they board the ship, the trip was the closest thing to a nightmare, rats everywhere, people dying next to each other and bodies piled up in a tight space. A disturbing but inevitable scene ends this issue. One that the reader will never forget.

Overall, an honest and heartbreaking portrayal of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It’s a comic that’ll stay with you. The story by Kyle Baker, though brief in dialogue, drives home the horrors of slavery. The art by Baker is beautiful. Altogether, this issue gives the raw truth about how slavery starts.

Story: Kyle Baker Art: Kyle Baker
Story: 10 Art: 9.7 Overall: 9.8 Recommendation: Buy