Derf Backderf · Astiberri · 2022
Kent state received the Eisner Award 2021 for the best book based on real events to tell, drawing on rigorous documentation, as American soldiers ended up shooting a handful of young people singing at Kent State University on 4 May 1970. Four people died, nine were seriously injured. Backderf alternates the personal stories of the students (his hookups, his music, his studies…) with information about the general climate of the country to explain how an incomprehensible massacre was created. Young Americans at the time were being forcibly recruited to fight in the Vietnam War., which Nixon had just extended to Cambodia. The students are scared and angry, the soldiers who go to the university to control them, nervous and exhausted. Wild rumors spread among them, like the students are armed and trained, or that they have placed snipers on the rooftops of the university. But what there are are informants and agents provocateurs who have infiltrated the student body to burst the anti-war movement from within.. We are in the middle of the Cold War and anti-communist paranoia is at its peak. Kent State is a revealing graphic novel that tries to explain to us how the US army was able to shoot to kill young compatriots armed with stones and chants.. S.M.
