Publisher's Synopsis
Preface by Angela Davis, who was mentored by Marcuse at the start of her career as an activist/scholar.
There are many books by and about Marcuse. There are no other comics. This is the first graphic novel treatment of this cultural giant and his times.
Also the first graphic book by City Lights, similarly to how Rad American Women A-Z was our first foray into children's literature, this is our first published graphic book.
To present Marcuse's work in comic form makes the importance of his vision "new" in many ways, one of which is tracing its affinity to the critique and vision of the Occupy Movement.
Paul Buhle, one of the book's editors, has edited many other graphic nonfiction books, and many of them extremely successful. The Beats (2010) was reviewed in Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, Miami Herald, and the Boston Globe, and received praise from Cory Doctorow and Studs Terkel. His newest project, Red Rosa (2015), was excerpted in The Nation.
Both a primer on Marcuse's life and work and an attempt to reinforce Marcuse's confidence in art as an intrinsically revolutionary force.
This book is made in the vain of a historical novel with the addition of allowing space to explicit many of Marcuse's ideas on culture, politics, and philosophy.
Andrew Lamas, one of the editors, is on the board of the International Herbert Marcuse Society, so the book has direct ties to the main organization devoted to studying and keeping Marcuse's works relevant in contemporary culture.
The political intention behind this book is to support the utopian tradition, in times of repression. Fascism and neo-fascism prove there are worse things than liberal capitalism, but Marcuse's life, as depicted in our book, argues for the idea that liberal capitalism is not freedom, and therefore not good enough for human beings.
We also hope to intervene in intellectual history discussions by rescuing "critical theory" from its reputation for defeatism. Culturally, we seek to reinforce Marcuse's confidence in art as an intrinsically revolutionary force rather than an accomplice of quietism.
Pursuing blurbs from those in the indepdenent comics/nonfiction comics world & the philosophy/cultural critique world including Patrick Rosenkranz, Art Spiegalman, Bill Kartapoulous, Joe Sacco, Ed Piskor, Sarah Glidden, Noah Van Sciver, Ariel Dorfman, Brad Evans, Robin D.G. Kelley, Slavjo Zizek, Henry A. Giroux, and a lot more.
