Told through letters exchanged between two young Quaker siblings in 1863, Dash Shaw’s new graphic novel portrays the dilemma facing a devotely pacifist Quaker family when their teenage son leaves and enlists in the Union Army against his family’s wishes and moral precepts. Drawn in a subdued, meditative linear style and inspired by actual Civil War journals, the book is a poignant account of one family’s struggles during the Civil War that presents issues of religious faith, and civic responsibility, within a deeply religious community forced to contend with the social dislocation and the relentless carnage of war. In this seven-page excerpt, the son, Charles, writes to his sister Fanny as his unit marches into the South, detailing his first sighting of enslaved Black people, and describes his unit’s military objectives. Discipline by Dash Shaw will be published in October by New York Review Comics.
