Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo Brings News of the Election

28 pages, PDF, mature themes

From the foreword, written in 2023:

I wrote this before Israel (and the United States) began its current genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. If I were to write this now, the tone would be very different. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

When Jules Verne wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the United States Congress had recently passed the Compromise of 1850, a package of five bills that strengthened chattel slavery at a time when the anti-slavery movement was at its peak. Nearly every corner of the earth was at war or on the brink of it. Can anyone  imagine how hopeless the average person felt at the time?  I’m certain you, the reader in 2023, can.

So Verne wrote a bit of his wishes and a bit of himself into the novel. The naive French academic Professor Annorax becomes enamoured with Captain Nemo.

Nemo. The antidode to the world’s ills. A man who shows his anti-imperialist vigor, not by fighting, but by spending his days in the eternally sovereign Nautilus. In fact, Nemo was once a Polish man whose family was killed by Russians. But this detail was changed to avoid controversy, and Nemo’s background was kept vague. His family was killed by a nonspecific nation, and so he sought nonspecific revenge. The book was political, and it achieved mass acclaim upon release.

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Originally made for my 6 month comics intensive to help students recover from burnout (https://www.patreon.com/PollyGuo)