In Kent State, an epic rendering of the massacre and its prologue

Reading Derf Backderf’s latest “nonfiction graphic novel” is an immersive experience. Once I started Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, about the shootings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, I forgot I was reading, following along as tensions became hostilities and erupted in increasing violence. I found myself lost in the book’s power to recreate the conditions of the event, recreate the animosity of government leadership, recreate the feelings of the students.

I am so impressed. Even though he was only 10 years old at the time, Backderf gets it right: the frustration of the KSU students, their anger at President Richard Nixon for escalating an unwanted war in Vietnam, their fear of the military draft, their horror of being sent off to battle and possible death in a foreign country. (I was not an eyewitness, but I was a KSU student that year. His words and images ring true.)