Sprawling yet perfectly balanced, his two-page compositions wrap the reader up in Hall's thoughts ... Martínez' pages can be a bit overcrowded at times, with snarls of hectic lines obscuring his clever effects. But his versatility is amazing. He draws all sorts of complex scenes—from the interior of a log cabin in Nebraska to an Ahogi cavalry charge (a frontal view, no less!)—seemingly effortlessly ... Martínez' innovative techniques are crucial to Wake's success ... Hall's eloquence and frank emotionalism are transcendently realized in Martínez art, beckoning the reader inexorably into this story—even the parts that only take place inside Hall's mind. With its remarkable blend of passion and fact, action and reflection, Wake sets a new standard for illustrating history.
Far from playing a marginal role, Hall’s work reveals women who were at the heart of organizing and leading revolts across the vast and pernicious expanse of the slave trade ... In telling these stories about which there are often gaps in the written record, the graphic component of the book becomes all the more important. Wake utilizes visuals–illustrated by comics artist Hugo Martinez–to full effect, and it behooves the reader to spend time studying what goes on in the background ... The graphic novel format lends itself exceptionally well to conveying this intersection of past and present, enabling readers to see it visualized on the page ... Given the paucity of historical data (although she has meticulously extricated a remarkable amount of it, despite being denied access to key records by the present-day corporations borne from slave-profits), Hall gives life to history by alternating narrated accounts of the facts-as-we-know-them, with passages reconstructing how the stories may have played out. She puts flesh on the bones of history, bringing stilted historical legal language to life with narratives that are stirring, emotional, inspiring ... The stories depicted in Wake are difficult ones–Hall reflects on the trauma that historians of the period often experience while studying it–and yet laying these truths bare, telling these stories with such pride and power produces a deeply inspirational effect ... a superb accomplishment on every level, and a book that every American needs to read.
... embraces a more significant, more authentic history of resistance ... Hall has offered up this ancestral pain and used it as a lens through which we might attend to those previously rendered invisible. The book’s unmistakable and unapologetic power is amplified by Martínez...His work evokes multiple symbols. Slave ships power through waves that look like both water and flames. They are an excellent accompaniment to Hall’s stories within the story ... Hall has written, and Martínez has illustrated, an inspired and inspiring defense of heroic women whose struggles could be fuel for a more just future.
These alternating sections of memoir and historical fiction are held together by a cohesive and reflexive narrative, mirrored in illustrator Hugo Martínez’s delicate and sinewy lines, which move and angle to suggest the busy-ness and frisson of a world that always exceeds itself ... Like many works in Black Studies, Wake is committed to envisioning the things we know to be true, but that have, by design, been made difficult to prove ... Toggling between the present and the historical past, between the paucity of recorded details and the undeniability of historical events, Wake turns a rebuttal against the designed difficulty of empirical proof into the grounds for its own story. It’s this meta turn that fascinates, for it so brilliantly makes use of the positionality of the character Rebecca. Her actions, her embodiment, her movement through the world, all dramatize the complexities of being a Black woman in a white supremacist patriarchy ... we begin to know something without having been given any words we can cite to prove, or even just point to, where our knowledge comes from ... The memoir sections, in other words, don’t tell us what it’s like to be Rebecca, so much as they set the intellectual and personal aspects of her project in juxtaposition. The distribution of the life to images and the work to words makes powerful use of the comics medium, inviting the reader to sit with epistemological as well as formal connections. The visual world of this text, the comics that illustrate but more often propel the story, does something that work in Black Studies also does, though in a medium the field has rarely engaged. Wake accomplishes what the best work in Black Studies aims to do: not just to teach us something new, but to teach us how the very shape of our knowledge could be different ... wonderfully turns what might seem like a limitation or a lack of objectivity toward acts of learning and creating. It pushes past the limits of what’s possible, to tell us a story that wasn’t but now can be.
Hall has done some incredibly thorough research to find these missing women and tell their stories as vividly as she can ... In general, though, the art by Hugo Martinez doesn’t add much to Hall’s powerful story, which is a shame, given the inherent potential of the graphic format. The emotional power of creating characters, settings, visual pacing are singularly missing from the art form, which contents itself with visually echoing the text rather than expanding beyond it. If the story were printed as text only or heard as an audio book, there wouldn’t be the sense of missing an important part of the narrative. The one advantage of the graphic format may be that it makes a tough story more accessible by breaking it up over more pages, allowing the reader the rest of the page turn. If the format brings more readers to this important history, that’s reason enough to welcome the graphic illustrations ... a good place to begin retrieving this past. High school students should be especially eager to read this history, a sense of 1700s America they won’t find in their textbooks.
The details are often tantalizing, heartbreaking and scarce ... Martínez’s black-and-white drawings carry enough detail to reconstruct these lives but look loose enough to feel evocative and poetic ... especially powerful when treating the visual culture of slavery ... is operating in the wake of slavery, and in a state of being awake to the past, a process Hall frames as both devastating and grounding.
Illustrator Martínez works in stark black strokes to convey the urgency of this ugly legacy. His images reveal how we live in the wake of the past, by depicting glimpses of wraith-like reflections of slavery’s history in today’s puddles and store windows ... Heartbreaking yet triumphant, Hall’s vivid reconstructions bore laser-like into a history long hidden. Her engaged scholarship adds back facts that have been stricken from many histories, and it empowers current lives and activism. Highly recommended for educators and for all adults and teens concerned about the United States’ promise, past, and future for its diverse peoples.
Martínez’s dramatic woodcut-style illustrations are the perfect complement to Hall’s clear-eyed, impactful storytelling. Underscoring Hall’s insistence that we live in history’s wake, a single frame often encompasses multiple worlds—an eighteenth-century gallows reflected in the window of an NYPD van, a contemporary construction site reminiscent of the sinewy, roiling sea people were forced to travel in chains. A necessary corrective to violent erasure and a tribute to untold strength, this awe-inspiring collaboration should find a wide audience.
A vividly illustrated account of Black women rebels that combines elements of memoir, archival research, and informed imaginings of its subjects' lives ... The black-and-white illustrations nicely complement the text and elevate the artfulness and the power of the book, which begins and ends with scenes depicting women-led revolts aboard a ship Hall calls the Unity. An urgent, brilliant work of historical excavation.
... nuanced and affecting ... Hall’s singular look at these women, along with her own experiences and resilience, highlight how entwined the past and present really are. Martínez’s resonant black-and-white art cleverly integrates historical scenes into the present-day narrative. Plus, his roomy panels and full pages leave space to breathe, and to reflect. Readers will be left with plenty to think about.
