Hill and Wang editor Thomas LeBien, who has overseen the development of a diverse series of non-fiction graphic novels and graphic biographies tackling subjects as diverse as the 9/11 Commission Report, the U.S. Constitution, Ronald Reagan and Isadora Duncan, has two new graphic novel projects scheduled for Fall 2009 and beyond. The first of these previously unannounced projects is a biography of revolutionary Leon Trotsky by artist/writer Rick Geary, who created J. Edgar Hoover: A Graphic Biography for Hill and Wang.
Geary’s idiosyncratic art style and penchant for getting the historical details exactly right, which worked so well in his Treasury of Victorian Murder graphic novels (published by NBM), functions with equal effectiveness in the realm of historical biography as evidenced by his stellar biography of F.B.I. director Hoover. Geary appears to be an inspired choice to illustrate the life of Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary who lost out in power struggle with the more authoritarian Stalin (Trotsky is the model for the character “Snowball” who is vanquished by the Stalinesque “Napoleon” in George Orwell’s Animal Farm).
Geary’s Trotsky graphic biography is tentatively slated for September of 2009. Still farther out on the schedule is a History of the Middle East written by Harvey Pekar. Although Pekar is a master of the subjective side of graphic novel reportage, as in his long-running autobiographical American Splendor series, he has proven with his grasp of details, documents, and historical facts in Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History, his first book for Hill and Wang, that he is equally adept at the kind of objective historical approach typical of the historical graphic novels that LeBien edits. Like President Harry Truman, Pekar is a voracious and critical reader of history and his grasp of the history of the
