Progressive Pirates? Who Knew?

Artist David Lester designed the trailer for Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, a Graphic Novel, which offers a sample of the book’s dynamism as well as its lively appeal to socialist readers of graphic novels.

Marcus Rediker’s landmark study, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age  (2004) brought the subject out of the realm of media history into real life as experienced by hard-pressed, brutally treated workers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. That they fought back collectively and sometimes created communities of a sort, until captured and executed, is a story of class conflict forgotten. Thanks to Rediker and Lester, with a little help from this reviewer, we have a fresh historical way of working class life and drama.

Beacon Press, Feb.2023, 124pp, $17.00