AUTHOR: script by Pablo Durá, drawing by Carles Esquembre, color by Ester Salguero
PUBLISHER: Evolution Comics, Panini España
GENRE: Graphic Novel (adult historical fiction)
READER’S NAME: Jennifer R. Ottman
 

La brigada Lincoln is a graphic novel about the Lincoln Brigade, also known as the Lincoln Battalion, the group of around 2,800 American volunteers who fought on the side of the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War. While it is historical fiction, with invented dialogue and a few other clearly fictional elements (most notably, a ghost who serves as a framing device and the voice of the protagonist’s conscience), the protagonist and most or all of the other characters are real historical people, and the novel largely follows the historical facts.

The protagonist, Oliver Law, was an African American who joined the Communist Party in Depression-era Chicago and, like the majority of the volunteers, travelled to Spain under Communist auspices. A U.S. Army veteran, he rose quickly through the ranks of inexperienced, poorly trained, and poorly equipped volunteers, becoming the first African American to command an integrated military unit, albeit not one that was part of the U.S. military. When he was killed in action on July 9, 1937, less than six months after arriving in Spain, he was acting battalion commander.

The novel briefly touches on Law’s Chicago activism at the outset, introducing him to the reader as an increasingly committed fighter for economic justice and racial equality and a firm supporter of the worldwide anti-fascist cause, but the overwhelming focus is on his time in Spain. In his interactions with his (mostly white) friends and comrades, his superior officers, and other individuals he encounters at the front, including a pioneering female foreign correspondent and a Japanese camp cook, and in his experience of battle, he is shown developing as a leader and wrestling with his responsibility for the lives of the men under his command.

Visually, the graphic panels are dominated by human figures rendered in lightly stylized but broadly realistic form, with most pictorial elements outlined in black, contrasted occasionally with a background done in unoutlined washes. In sections devoted to conversation among the characters, the art sometimes seems to take a back seat to the verbal exposition, but it comes into its own in the extended set-piece battle sequences, which effectively convey the chaos and limited field of view of infantry combat.

While Law struggles to balance his feelings of guilt over his comrades’ deaths with his devotion to the cause for which they died, however, there are no other shades of gray in La brigada Lincoln’s moral universe, even if the graphic novel’s somber palette includes its fair share of the color. Not only is the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War presented simply and solely as the fight to stop the advance of fascism in Europe — a perspective that does accurately reflect the motivations of many of the foreign volunteers, but one that overlooks the domestic complexities of the war — but all internal weaknesses of the Republican side, a fragile coalition notoriously beset by infighting and disorganization, are left out of the picture.

Although readers knowledgeable about the war may recognize the impact of these problems in some of the battlefield events depicted (dubious strategic priorities, promised support that fails to arrive, etc.), the graphic novel itself simply presents these events from the point of view of the soldier in the trenches, as unconsidered facts of life. Indeed, Spaniards of any kind, either fighters or civilians, are practically absent, except for the brigade’s Nationalist battlefield opponents (and even many of them are Moroccans who served in the Spanish Army in North Africa, another historically accurate but underexplained element that comes across primarily in pictorial form).

At the same time, Law’s story and that of the Lincoln Brigade as a whole is one that has obvious intrinsic interest for American readers and that deserves to be better known, and the graphic-novel format offers a potentially inviting introduction to it. In addition, the writer, Pablo Durá, may already be familiar to some American graphic-novel readers, since he has previously contributed to several English-language comic books published in the United States. If a new introduction was written to fill in some of the background information about the Spanish Civil War that Spanish readers might already be familiar with, the text itself would be fairly straightforward to translate and could be of interest to a range of older teenage and adult readers. The level of realistic violence, including a graphic depiction of a lynching (recalled by one of Law’s comrades as he explains his commitment to the fight for equality and justice), makes it unsuitable for younger children.