By Zack Quaintance — Year of the Rabbit is a new graphic novel from writer/artist Tian Veasna, based on a harrowing true story he lived through as a child. That story is his family’s struggle to survive/flee the reign of the violent Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, following that group’s seizure of power in 1975. What emerges is a memoir comic of sorts that does not quite feel like a memoir comic. Instead it reads as a tense and harrowing story of escape, dotted with devastating-yet-important notes from a history largely unknown to many in the United States. 

When we first enter the story, Tian Veasna himself is not yet born. His family is prosperous, and his father is a respected physician in Cambodia’s capital city, Phnom Penh. A war is on between the Khmer Rouge and the establishment. It’s a war the Khmer Rouge soon win. In the early throes of this story, there are many shades of gray. It is unclear what the Khmer Rouge victory will mean for the country and for the family at our story’s center. What follows is a slow degeneration into fear, chaos, and intensely violent corruption. 

Phew. It’s a lot, and it’s a heavy story throughout. Heavy yet compelling. As noted above, it’s set in the context of an actual historical event that is thoroughly under-discussed and largely unexplored by most Western media. Perhaps it is less so in France, but here in the U.S., it’s possible to go through all levels of education (right up through undergrad) and only be vaguely aware of the reign of Khmer Rouge. This story gets that. 

It has an inherent grasp that its audience is likely to be unfamiliar with even the basics of the story: the timeline, the geography, the climate of the country, etc. With this in mind, Veasna deftly includes orienting infographics at the start of each chapter, ranging from maps of Southeast Asia to telling propaganda-styled cartoons to humble lists of the items the people were allowed to own at the height of the Khmer Rouge. These infographics are brief and occasional, yet they so thoroughly enhance the experience of reading Year of the Rabbit, adding such a fascinating and informative layer to the book. The tense narrative (a family must survive) pulls readers through like rope thrown as a lifeline, while the infographics dole out a thorough understanding of the larger issues in play: the politics, the history, the implications of the tumult. Skillfully told and masterfully depicted, Year of the Rabbit will entertain and inform all at once.

By the time I got to the third act of this book, I had finished jotting notes for this review, so suspenseful and tense was the story. In fact, I found myself so thoroughly invested and engrossed that tears came to my eyes at three separate occasions, doing so out of fear, terror, and a third emotion I can’t share here because it may be considered a spoiler. 

Overall, this is a story about extremism, about what can be enabled by total ideological justification, about the corruption that takes hold when large groups of people are left at the mercy of the few. While the vast majority of this story is set in the 1970s, there is a timely message related to the morality and function of taking in political refugees fleeing violence at home, about doing so because it’s right but also because those coming to our shores have much to share and offer. It is, in the deepest sense, a message about empathy and unification, and it’s never felt so vital. 

Year of the Rabbit
Writer/Artist: Tian Veasna
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Year of the Rabbit tells the true story of one family’s desperate struggle to survive the murderous reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge seizes power in the capital city of Phnom Penh. Immediately after declaring victory in the war, they set about evacuating the country’s major cities with the brutal ruthlessness and disregard for humanity that characterized the regime ultimately responsible for the deaths of one million citizens.
Release Date: January 21, 2020

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