Title: The Lost Colony: The Red Menace by Grady KleinGenre: Graphic Novel
Annotation: Propaganda reins supreme in a time where people choose to blame the world's woes on society's outcasts.
Review: In a world where conspiracy abounds and people are surrounded by wars and rumours of wars, sometimes a book is just what we need to illustrate the current state we find ourselves in. The Red Menace proves to be the kind of mirror that we need to see that. Using early settler conflict with the Native Americans, author Grady Klein paints a portrait of blind patriotism and profiteering that mirrors our country's present dilemma at home and abroad. Inhabitants of a secluded island fight the politics of misinformation in order to live peaceable lives.
General Sherman Krutch is stuck in his mind fighting "the Red menace" -- or American Indians, as it were -- even though the Indian wars are now over. Married to the general's daughter, Governor Snodgrass continues to profiteer from the perceived threat of these "evil Injuns," playing up the legend of "wartime hero" Johnny Crevasse. Stuck as outcasts in this story, fugitive slave Louis John and his barkeeper companion Joseph Padre -- or Jo' Pah' -- fight the cultural subjugation that surrounds them. Both of them must confront their identities and embrace who they are, even as society tells them that they are the source of its ills.
Perhaps our leaders today would do well to read Klein's comic parody and realize that playing off people's fears and insecurities does nothing to solve problems. Eventually, the truth of every matter comes out. War for injustice causes always fails, and in The Lost Colony, misinformation and greed likewise meets a karmatic end.
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