The Black Schooner

Rebellion on the Amistad, A Graphic Novel

Reviews

“A necessary and unique, expectation-shattering chronicle.”
—Library Journal, Starred Review

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“Lester’s well-suited illustrations are sketchy, heavily shadowed and roughly crosshatched, and add a heightened sense of emotional tension and inescapable immediacy that resonates across the centuries of racial reckoning to come. An evocative, incisive, and powerful piece of graphic history.”
—Kirkus Reviews

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“The graphic novel, deliberately choosing history over cinema, tells much of the story through contemporary interviews as well as journal entries of the rebels. The choice of a graphic novel is deliberate, since most of the published interviews were accompanied by portraits . . . The Black Schooner tells [an] important story, in a way that’s both accessible and engaging.”
—Freedom Press (UK)

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“In his third graphic novel covering American history ‘from the bottom up,’ Vancouver artist David Lester has pushed his black and white graphic talents to a new intensity.”
—The BC Review

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“Lester’s artwork is sharply inscribed, his black and white portraits of the rebels’ representative of their resolute and righteous struggle . . . It’s a history told through art and from the perspective of the many, not the few; the oppressed, not the oppressor.”
—Counterpunch

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“The Black Schooner is a vivid and graphic depiction of the 1839 Amistad rebellion. . . . Lester’s powerful black-and-white art depicts their story, from the uprising on the ship to their subsequent imprisonment in the US and concluding with their return to Africa.”
—Gord Hill, author-artist of The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book