NELSON MANDELA

South African revolutionary Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1994), adapted in graphic form.

The original found millions of readers worldwide. Since comics often cross cultural boundaries and enable semiliterate and beginning readers to gain easier access to texts, this could find an even more diverse audience. In the foreword, Mandela writes that, for older readers “whose eyesight is not what it was, there is the option of simply looking at the pictures.” That good-natured remark is characteristic of the man. The story opens with his birth in 1918 and the giving of his all-too-appropriate birth name, Rolihlahla, “troublemaker.” The Mandela family was removed from its village by magisterial decree, the first in a long line of encounters between Mandela and authorities working to serve the apartheid state. The drawings, produced by the Umlando Wezithombe collective of graphic artists and illustrators, are detail-heavy and sophisticated, though most of the white characters are on the cartoonish side, all snarls and drool. One major exception is Bill Clinton, who figures in the later pages and whom the artists capture in a perfectly nuanced pose, left hand on chin, pensive look on brow. The story line takes the reader through the complexities of the apartheid regime and Mandela’s legal troubles with it, and his release from maximum-security prison at Robben Island after decades of imprisonment as anticlimactic as it was in real life. It also depicts his near-overnight transition from outlaw to national leader with much the confusion and uncertainty that Mandela himself must have felt. “You know that you are really famous the day you discover that you have become a comic character,” he writes.

An inviting portrayal of a legendary political leader.