
Re-inventing Huckleberry Finn. Again.
This graphic novel reminded me of the pleasure I once enjoyed reading Classics Illustrated comics as a child: the bright colors, the vivid drawings, the story flowing from one panel to the next in a cavalcade of images, they all fed my young imagination. It’s how I first “read” The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Treasure Island, and other classics.
The book industry officially recognized graphic novels as a unique genre in 2001, and ever since then they have become increasingly popular, particularly with younger readers. Over the years, they have continued to gain visibility and legitimacy as an art form, especially after 1992, when Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the holocaust, won the Pulitzer Prize.
Though primarily a visual art form, the graphic novel can convey narrative, nuance, and insight. This is certainly the case with Big Jim and the White Boy, a re-imagining of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It joins other recent retellings, or extensions, of Mark Twain’s classic, like Robert Coover’s Huck Out West (2017), where Huck as a young man witnesses the “winning” of the West—the gold rushes, the homesteaders, the Indian wars, the massacres—that was a formative chapter in this nation’s history; or like last year’s National Book Award-winning James (2024) by Percival Everett, retelling Twain’s tale from the point of view of the enslaved character Jim.
This story is set in three distinct time periods: the turbulent 1850s and ‘60s leading up to and including the Civil War; and then 1932, when Jim and Huck are old men, lifelong friends recounting, and often humorously correcting, each other’s memories of their past; and then in contemporary times, when a descendant of Jim’s is teaching a university course on Huckleberry Finn.
This imaginative story framework allows the creative team of David Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson to show the reality of slavery in mid-19th century America, telling stories of the Underground Railroad, of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, and of the eventual war itself. It also allows them to provide background on Twain’s 1885 book, including the actual people on whom the characters of Huck and Jim were based.
Each age rediscovers and, to some extent, re-invents the past. Big Jim and the White Boy uses the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a springboard to deepen, expand, and enrich our understanding of the American past that produced this classic work.
This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (March 15, 2025.) Reprinted with permission.