After launching my But I Digress column and blogging about the literacy crisis, imagine my delight when I discovered graphic novel versions of three books that were fundamental to why I became a bibliophile: Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), and Fahrenheit 451. I hadn’t read these novels in an entire generation, and upon asking my kids about them—two adults and one six months away from eighteen—I learned that these seminal texts are not universally taught anymore. Despite all three of my kids attending the same high school, my oldest had read none of these novels, nor had my middle child; my youngest had read only Fahrenheit 451. I checked out all three and required that they read them during summer break like old times.
I joined my kids, not having planned on re-reading these books if not for the adaptations.
Animal Farm
I’ve never had much to say about George Orwell’s Animal Farm because it’s one of the most “complete” stories I’ve ever read. It’s a straight-up allegory of the Russian Revolution and the country’s transition into its Stalinist era, leaving little room for nuanced interpretations or insights. Since we’re on the other side of the Cold War and capitalism has run amok, it feels as though we’re moving toward neo-feudalism. Presently, our—that is, people below the millionaire tax bracket—collective ability to keep data centers out of our communities is limited. The “bourgeois” buy land and park them near us while brokering deals with the state so there’s little recourse for private citizens to resist their encroachment and subsequent environmental destruction. Well, arson is an option, but USians are cowards.
I hope to stumble upon a utopian fiction depicting how socialism works. Ironically, its most notable advocate is Jesus:
“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” ~ Matt 19:24
Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” ~ Matt 19:23
“So the last will be first, and the first last.” ~Matt 20:16
I would argue that socialism is perfect because it doesn’t exist fully in practice anywhere on Earth. I’m not sure if a people or nation or tribe has tried it in earnest throughout history. We’ll likely have to wait until heaven to experience it because humans suck.
Fahrenheit 451
Again, I alluded to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 while launching my But I Digress column, suggesting that book burning is no longer necessary because USians voluntarily don’t read. I’m glad that I re-read it because I had forgotten its ending, Guy Montag pulling a Book of Eli. Yeah, I know the former inspired the latter, but the latter is cooler. It was additionally interesting revisiting Bradbury forward where he discloses the inspiration for Montag’s strolls with Clarisse originating with his being profiled by the police while he’s out late on a walk. It’s rare reading about a white man experiencing this.
I lament how USians didn’t learn from Bradbury’s writing about parlor screens. USians buy cheap and obnoxiously large flatscreen televisions to watch not movies, but propaganda. Fox is the most-watched channel in the United States. Disgusting. The only saving grace is that Millennials and Gen Z stream, so we’re not captured in the ratings. In Fahrenheit, Montag turns the screens off when his wife’s friends visit and they’re incapable of holding a discussion of substance. Yeah, that’s me interacting with folks at work when I was close to the Toledo, OH border. Thankfully, we’ve not arrived at firemen behaving like the SS and burning houses down for owning or reading books, but ICE exists.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
I’m looking around for cameras reading 1984 in 2026 because it reads like parody rather than the satire Orwell intended. Where do I even begin? The four ministries— the Ministry of Truth which doesn’t merely spread lies, but changes plain facts to conform to the government’s ideology; the Ministry of Plenty fakes prosperity like manipulating stock markets but keeps the destitute population thankful for scraps; the Ministry of Peace perpetuates war; the Ministry of Love reprograms the dissenter’s minds with torture. I resist summarizing a work like 1984, but living under this administration, it feels as though they use Ingsoc as a playbook. When I see a word like “double-think,” I remember when 45/47 ran the first time while lying profusely and the complicit media entertained the idea of living in a “post-facts” world. When I see “thought-crime,” I think about the war against DEI.
Birthers, Anti-VAXXers, and flat-earthers made creationists hold their beers. People out here dying by the thousands to COVID to own the libs. Today, there’s over 500 cases of a parasite causing “explosive diarrhea” that the CDC has yet to identify because it’s run by a man who brags about a brainworm and other nonsense.
USians really gonna die by dumb. I imagine Bradbury and Orwell thought folks would wisen up, but both of them underestimated the role of white supremacy in their calculations. In fact, that’s always been the rub about canonical (white) (male) authors; their privilege protects them from white supremacy, so their writings rarely address it. Rarely, because shout-out to writers like Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Lillian Smith I suppose.
The most unsatisfying aspect in this commitme to racieraommitment toure racial erasure is the illustrators’ combined failure to address racism. I’ll give Bernardi Odyr a pass because Animal Farm is an anthropomorphic allegory. Tim Hamilton and Fideo Nesti, however, are without excuse. Every time I read internet outrage about race-bending, forced diversity, or similar BS, I am reminded how there are white people who can live and die without experiencing a single meaningful interaction with a Black person. For this reason, Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is evergreen. It is one thing when a white author (un)intentionally excludes Black people in their work, but these graphic novel adaptations are twenty-first century productions: Fahrenheit 451 in 2009, Animal Farm in 2020, and 1984 in 2021. Consistent with my ongoing disappointment with illustrators in graphic novel adaptations, these books ain’t much to look at. Hamilton’s characters are barely intelligible on the page; I squinted to distinguish the difference between Millie’s friends, and Montag’s fire chief couldn’t have been more generic as were the exiles he finds in the conclusion. Likewise with Nesti, his art direction featuring plain, nondescript characters fits the novel’s setting and subject. But if a panel contains 20+ character faces and none of them are ethnic, I have to believe this is an intentional, conscious decision. Without a Margaret Atwood-like class system explaining where minorities might be invisible, I suppose there’s no hope in Bradbury or Orwell’s worlds for humans to triumph, because we—Black people—are survivors, yet we’re nowhere to be found in these dystopias.