Customer Reviews

Gettysburg: The Graphic Novel

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About halfway through Gettysburg, a photographer arrives to record the aftermath of the battle. "Such a picture conveys a useful moral," he muses, as he focuses on a body lying on the battlefield. "It shows the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry."

The same could be said of Gettysburg: The Graphic Novel. War is often spoken of in terms of great masses of soldiers advancing, retreating, or flanking the enemy. C. M. Butzer brings the battle down to the atomic level, showing individual soldiers fighting in the woods, charging with bayonets drawn, and staring up, dumbstruck, as a cannonball hurtles down upon them from the sky. And he does not flinch from the horrors of war; after the battle, he shows bodies scattered on the battlefield and a soldier nonchalantly carrying an armload of amputated arms and legs.

In just 80 pages, Butzer sets the scene, depicts the battle and its aftermath, and shows the movement to create a national cemetery on the site, as well as Lincoln writing his speech and the ceremony at Gettysburg.

This is a lot of material, and the first half of the book is too compressed. The initial skirmish at Gettysburg is over with in three pages, and the action is hard to follow. The generals speak in sound bites and then disappear. We catch a brief glimpse of a field hospital, a short exchange with the governor of Pennsylvania, a snatch of conversation among the cemetery planners. Butzer compensates for this with copious notes in the back of the book, in which he fully explains each scene and adds more historical details. This makes interesting reading, but it would have been even better if it had been integrated more fully into the narrative.

While this part of the book is hard to read, it also succeeds in doing something only a graphic novel could do: It puts the reader inside the story. It's one thing to read an account of a battle, but quite another to look down the dusty streets of Gettysburg and see the Confederate troops advancing while the local African Americans move out to safer territory.

Once Lincoln appears, about halfway through the book, the action slows. We see Lincoln riding the train to Gettysburg and meditating in silence in his hotel room. Then we get to see a rare sight: The delivery of the Gettysburg Address in its original context, at the battlefield, and preceded by a long, fiery speech by the famous orator Edward Everett. When Lincoln takes the stage, the stillness is palpable. As Lincoln delivers the speech, Butzer backs away from literal reality, illustrating the words with depictions of the full pageantry of American civil rights history, from the Revolution and the founding fathers to union marches, suffragists, and a gay liberation parade.

Butzer's figures sometimes look stiff and awkward, but he is very good at setting the scene and conveying emotion. And that's the real value of Gettysburg: it does more than just present the facts, it puts the reader in the heart of the story, providing a rare look at history from the inside out.

-- Brigid Alverson

As someone who picked up this book, not because of a curiosity about Lincoln, but because of an appreciation for the graphic novel as a medium, I was pleasantly surprised: C.M. Butzer's skill as a storyteller is readily apparent and lends itself wonderfully to the task of relating an important slice of history to young readers. Throughout, Butzer's compositional choices speak to a creator who is well versed in the tradition of the medium and, that this book was produced for a young audience belies the sophistication it is imbued with. My only complaint is similar to reviewer B. Russo's: I would like to see Mr. Butzer bring his formidable talents to bear and stretch his legs on a lengthier project.

As both a civil war buff and comic book junky, I often wondered why a product like this had never been created (I suppose it takes the bicentennial of Lincoln's birthday to motivate the publishing community).
I found the book gave an interesting perspective on the battle itself, which surprised me given the amount of media previously dedicated to the event (the Gettysburg motion picture and several made for TV renditions). The difference was the author's ability to let the reader inside the minds of the characters, similar to a novel, while the artwork allowed one to sit back and enjoy the action.
My only criticism is that i would have liked to have seen this expanded into a several part series, instead of just one publication.

Call me a Yankee, but I feel that Gettysburg: The Graphic Novel is a subtle and beautifully drawn depiction of the Battle of Gettysburg and the Gettysburg Address that followed it. Butzer is a talented artist, but he does not present a simplistic version of history. This is a taste of war, appropriate for pre-teens while not hiding the grim realities of battle.

The text is drawn from letters and first-person accounts, and the images reference historical photographs of the events. The notes that accompany the drawings are an integral part of this book and one of its most important elements--the detailed references should give young readers a starting point for further research.

This book will not appeal to Southern apologists: it does not hide its pro-Lincoln bias nor its reliance on historical sources. It successfully suggests a subtle reading of history--for example, Lincoln's quiet (cough) before scattered applause suggests the quiet acceptance of the address itself.

This short, accessible graphic novel about one battle of the Civil War is a visually appealing introduction to a contentious period in American history. Butzer's interpration of the Gettysburg Address, both romantic and modern, is beautiful and moving.

First, Happy President's day... this book review by Bernice is in honor of the brave men and women that have fought throughout history for our freedom.

This book is NOT on kindle, which is a shame... However, it is worth every penny and the space it takes on the shelf!

I originally purchased this book because my 8 year old daughter had to do a February project about President Lincoln. This particular daughter does not like to read but she enjoys pictures and I thought she would enjoy seeing AND reading the story and ....I was right.

This graphic novel is so well illustrated and so well written that my daughter was able to grasp a measure of the war and the importance of the time and more.

She was able to explain to me what they were fighting for in a way that proved to me that she wasn't just parroting the words she heard in the classroom but understood.

This is a graphic novel, and while the illustrations are fantastic... it is a novel about a very bloody battle. There are wounds, dismembered limbs and descriptions of the town as it struggles with more wounded people then healthy. However, I don't think that the artist went out of the way to be overly gory, and the medium is black/white with no red which is helpful in NOT highlighting some of the gorier aspects of war. There is a portion in the book where the artist renders the famous photos of Timothy O'Sullivan.

In short I was incredibly impressed with this work.

I wish for my daughter that she would start to enjoy reading more... and in the absence of that, I hope that we can find her books like this one to engage her.

Read more book reviews by Bernice at [...]

One of the best features of this graphic novel is that it is not all that graphic in terms of depicting the blood and other gore of the battle. Drawn in subdued tones of light blue and light gray with black and white, Butzer keeps it solemn, which befits the horrific results of the battle.
He also is very specific in keeping within the bounds of historical accuracy, after the last panel there is a section where he gives his references and admits when a conversation has been "invented", albeit within the bounds of what is known about the principals of the situation.
I was very impressed by this as a work of history as well as art. Butzer is to be commended for his attention to historical detail; this book could serve as a primer in history classes when the subject is the battle of Gettysburg. One of the most intriguing points is that an image on page 18 has a bullet hole in a window. This was a tribute to the only known civilian casualty of the battle, Ginnie Wade, struck by a stray bullet while she was baking bread. The sequence of captions depicting the history of the nation and the struggle for civil rights that includes the passages of the Gettysburg address is a work of genius.

GETTYSBURG: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL is almost exactly what it proposes itself to be: a graphic-novel account of the Civil War's Battle of Gettysburg and its aftermath, culminating with Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

It's obvious that Butzer has done his research on this one, as you can see if you flip to his bibliography at the back, but I kept wishing that this research could have been presented in a manner that would be easier to understand. Even with a decent knowledge of the Civil War's political and historical climate, the first several pages of Butzer's account were difficult to follow, long on images and short on explanatory text. The author/illustrator appears to have foreseen this complaint, and has included in the back of the book a panel-by-panel discussion of the historical background for each page of the comic, but I kept wanting that information to be made available to me on the same page as the images.

The narration picks up after the battle has ended and the Union must care for its sick and wounded; from here on, Butzer's arresting visual narrative is bolstered by quoting from the journals and letters of people who were actually present, including a local nurse and the photographer sent to document the battlefield carnage.

I will say this for Butzer: the images themselves are beautiful. Rendered in black, white, and a gray-blue reminiscent of both Union and Confederate uniforms, these drawings capture the atmosphere of Gettysburg before and after the battles with the same harsh clarity as famous photographer Timothy O'Sullivan, some of whose original prints from Gettysburg are reproduced by Butzer as drawings.

By the time the graphic novel presents the Gettsyburg Address itself, Butzer is in fine form, juxtaposing images of the crowd gathered to consecrate the new national cemetery and moments in American history, past and future, that seem to be encapsulated within Lincoln's speech. The final image of Lincoln as he walks away through the now-empty graveyard is evocative and sparse, sending chills up my spine.

Still, if you are looking for an interesting place to start learning about Gettysburg or the Civil War, you might want to start with something that will give you all the facts up front, instead of relegating them to ten pages of notes in the back. Based purely on the art content, I'd give this book 5 stars, but the difficulty following the story, especially of the battle itself, detracts from the artistic experience and makes it hard to determine how effective this graphic novel is as anything other than a series of evocative images.

Reviewed by: Candace Cunard

I picked this book up to read from a local library becuase it is a grapic novel. However I was not impressed.

Butzer is an extremely good artist and he has that gouing for him. I also his style of art. But it appears that he may be into revisionist history about the Civil War. In the opening pages he writes the conflict was sparked by slavery. As if that were the one and only reason, period, no exceptions. But slavery was not the one and only issue that caused the war. There were many factors involved such as economic reasons among others that caused the war. it is a common misconception and favorite tool of revisionist historians and Yankee sympathizers that salvery was the only reason for that un-Civil War. Don't fall for that. Besides, most southerners did not own slaves. They could not afford to even if they had supported slavery. (Not every southerner at that time was a racist or supported the institution of Slavery and this is something a lot of biased Civil War History does not point out either). Only the well to do or rich were able to. There was also slavery in the North for a time and among many northerners the attitude toward Negros were not much better then in the south. So Yanks were not totally innocent either. The other thing is the South had every right to secede. It is in the U.S. Constitution that states can secede from the union. The leadership of the southern states were only following in part what was laid out in the Constitution. For this they were invaded illegally and called rebels. Nice huh? Once one studies real un biased history on the War of Northern Aggression you will find this out. But since the old saying goes the victors write the history books those facts are often not pointed out.

Had Butzer not been so one sided the novel would have turned out much better. This book will appeal to Yankee sympatizers, revisionist historians and those that still blame the South of any age.

As a caution for a book aimed at children and teens there is also referneces to the gay rights movement.

Gettysburg: the graphic novel gives a very brief account of the battles that took place, and then dedicates the rest of the book to the building of the National Cemetery and the speeches by Edward Everett and President Lincoln at the dedication of Gettysburg National Cemetery.

Presented in graphic novel style, this book could have been a wonderful illustration of these most decisive days of the United States' Civil War. Instead, it appeared as a odd piece of "feel-good" propaganda, giving the idea of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address as setting in motion a whole chain of civil rights movements. Apparently the author did not research the Emancipation Proclamation very much; Lincoln freed the slaves in the Southern states (states he had no jurisdiction over at that time) and did nothing for the slaves in the Northern states that were still in the Union. It's interesting to note that at the time of the war, there were more "Free Blacks" (as they were called) in the Southern states than they were in the Northern states.

And, with such a focus on slavery, a child that reads this novel is going to come away with the untruth (that is still being taught in our schools) that slavery was the cause of this war. States Rights were the issue, not slavery. But, Butzer is very specific in letting the reader know that the "repulsive institution of American slavery" is the direct cause of the war.

In addition, Gettysburg: the graphic novel is grossly biased in favor of the Union side, to the point still referring to the Confederacy as "Rebels"! Is this a contemporary account? Or an educated historical rendering? Or, perhaps neither. Butzer also misrepresents, hopefully accidentally, General Lee's orders to forage for food by illustrating it with looting. Anyone who has studied General Lee and his armies knows that he did not allow looting and that provisions were paid for, granted it was in Confederate money, but that is still not the looting that was illustrated.

Gettysburg: the graphic novel is also, unfortunately for a book supposedly drawing on "primary sources", cursed with historical inaccuracies. For example, the gatehouse to Evergreen Cemetery is shown as being built as part of the Gettysburg National Cemetery. That gatehouse was built in the 1850's and was standing when the battles were taking place. Perhaps he meant to show that it was being fixed from the damage? So it's just an error by negligence and not an outright falsehood then?

Sadly, the bibliography was not included in the ARC, because I would like to have seen the sources Mr. Butzer used that listed Lincoln's African-American Valet, William Johnson, as his "friend" (as well as on several other points). I think this was another case of the author attempting to color the reader's view of Lincoln.

Overall, this was a poorly written book and while it not might fool a reader who has previously studied up on the subject, it should not be given the chance to fool readers who don't have prior knowledge. Giving this to our children to read is placing prejudice and inaccuracy in their hands in the guise of truth and I adamantly advise against it.

The book has not been received as of 12/22/2010, although I was notified it would arrive 12/15/2010. I am questioning the seller's reliability. PLEASE TRACK AND NOTIFY ME OF NEW SHIP DATE.