Our Members Be Unlimited: A Comic About Workers and Their Unions

Activist and comics journalist Wallman debuts with a convincing, transfixing graphic history of the impact and future potential of unions. He opens by sharing his personal experience as an Amazon warehouse worker, where he made meaningful bonds with his coworkers amid the brutal, highly regulated confines of the job and attempted to bring others on board with the idea of unionizing. The narrative moves on to document historical and recent strikes and other labor actions, including the 1941 Disney animators strike, the 1975 Iceland women’s “day off,” and the 2013 Bangladeshi garment industry demonstrations. A lengthy debate between an abstracted human-figure and an anthropomorphized bull volleys through drawbacks and benefits of unions. “We’ve probably never been this alone, in a time when coming together couldn’t be more important,” opens the pro-union figure. Wallman also tackles concerns about automation: “We often forget that those who write the robots’ code... are workers.” His updated agitprop style, which recalls Peter Kuper, mixes panels and double-page spreads in bright colors with cartoonish figures. Characters rip through pages, backgrounds and symbols morph, and scenes spool in cinematic/flip-book style. The pages are jam-packed with info, and some academic arguments, yet the engaging layouts avoid anything remotely like a lecture—it’s more an extended and annotated rallying cry. This is a dynamic, persuasive look at labor power. (Sept.)