By Zack Quaintance — Cartoonist Nate Powell — who illustrated arguably the most important comic of the last decade, the March trilogy, which depicts the U.S. Civil Rights movement as influenced/experienced by the late Rep. John Lewis — has a new book out this week, Save It For Later: Promises, Parenthood, and the Urgency of Protest. Save It For Later is a unified graphic novel played out in a mosaic of essays that range from intensely personal accounts of parenting over the past five years, to heavily-researched looks at the military iconography being increasingly splashed on civilian vehicles. All of these essays are poignant and thoughtful, and my early take is that Save It For Later has immediately earned itself a place on the list of best graphic novels for 2021, a place it will certainly still hold at the end of the year.

Perhaps the easiest quality to discuss within Save It For Later — and presumably the one that will capture reader attention first — is the structure. This book consists of seven essays in comics, completed at different times and marked with a timestamp. The essays aren’t disparate, not truly, as they all seem to share a broader goal of depicting, dissecting, discussing, and just feeling life immediately before, during, and immediately after the Trump presidency. The emotional core has to do with parenting amid a time of terrifying upheaval and national reckoning, be it with the reasons others voted for Trump or — in one especially poignant moment — how do you tell your young daughter that the bad guy won? It’s all intensely powerful, and I found the book reflecting my own life and feelings back at me throughout, doing so in a way that recalled moments and feelings I’d perhaps suppressed a bit once they were over. Save It For Later is in this sense the best sort of memoir — never feeling self-indulgent and instead using Powell’s personal experiences as evocation for a wider whole, pushing readers to remember and examine similar moments in their own lives.

The standout piece in the book is perhaps the least personal…yet still very personal. It feels a little separate from the wider mosaic around parenting and family life, if only because it involves the most research and also traces its roots back to before the Trump era, as Powell told me in our recent phone conversation. I’m talking here of About Face, the book’s fifth essay, the first version of which was originally published online in 2019. About Face ranks as one of the best anthropological discussions about a certain brand of modern American culture I’ve read in any medium, involving an attention to details, choices, and cultural movements that directly fueled the January 6 terrorist insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, giving the piece (which I’ll remind you was completed two years prior) a sense of prescience.

In About Face, Powell dissects the militarization of civilian vehicles in today’s country. The dark windows, the Punisher skulls, the lifted trunks, the giant tailpipes. The way that these vehicles — which are at all times a sort of extension of self — lend drivers the feeling of being dangerous and at war, of imposing a passive sort of fear on the roads and their countrymen at all times.

It’s a piece loaded with carefully-considered points, research that clearly took much time to complete, a years-long fascination with a trend that many (myself included) have mostly ignored, and expert narrative chops that draw connections and push the reader to imagine these vehicles if they were on the roads in simpler times.

This entire book is good, but About Face is essential reading for all Americans.

And what makes this entire book work is Powell’s vast talents as a cartoonist, oscillating with precision between pieces rooted in the aforementioned research, quiet moments with his daughter, and intensely personal song lyrics that make for stunning comics poetry.

With Save It For Later, Powell continues to establish himself in the upper-echelon of American storytellers in any medium, adding what is at once an evolution and a compliment to recent works like March and Two Dead. Read this book now, before it appears on all of the 2021 literary best of lists.

Graphic Novel Review: Save It For Later - Promises, Parenthood, and the Urgency of Protest

Save It For Later: Promises, Parenthood, and the Urgency of Protest
Writer/Artist: Nate Powell
Publisher: Abrams ComicsArts
From Nate Powell, the National Book Award–winning artist of March, a collection of graphic nonfiction essays about living in a new era of necessary protest In this anthology of seven comics essays, author and graphic novelist Nate Powell addresses living in an era of what he calls “necessary protest.” Save It for Later: Promises, Protest, and the Urgency of Protest is Powell’s reflection on witnessing the collapse of discourse in real time while drawing the award-winning trilogy March, written by Congressman John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, this generation’s preeminent historical account of nonviolent revolution in the civil rights movement. Powell highlights both the danger of normalized paramilitary presence symbols in consumer pop culture, and the roles we play individually as we interact with our communities, families, and society at large. Each essay tracks Powell’s journey from the night of the election—promising his four-year-old daughter that Trump will never win, to the reality of the Republican presidency, protesting the administration’s policies, and navigating the complications of teaching his children how to raise their own voices in a world that is becoming increasingly dangerous and more and more polarized. While six of the seven essays are new, unpublished work, Powell has also included “About Face,” a comics essay first published by Popula Online that swiftly went viral and inspired him to expand his work on Save It for Later. The seventh and final essay will contextualize the myriad events of 2020 with the previous four years—from the COVID-19 pandemic to global protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to the 2020 presidential election itself—highlighting both the consistencies and inversions of widely shared experiences and observations amidst a massive social upheaval. As Powell moves between subjective and objective experiences raising his children—depicted in their childhood innocence as imaginary anthropomorphic animals—he reveals the electrifying sense of trust and connection with neighbors and strangers in protest. He also explores how to equip young people with tools to best make their own noise as they grow up and help shape the direction and future of this country.
Buy It Digitally: Save It For Later via comiXology
Buy It Physically: Save It For Later via Amazon

Read our interview with Nate Powell!

Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.