Arsenal Pulp Press has announced two graphic novels for fall 2023 release, Erdoğan: A Graphic Biography—The Rise of Turkey’s Modern Autocrat, by writer Can Dündar and artist Anwar, and 40 Men and 12 Rifles: Indochina 1954, by Marcelino Truong.
Erdoğan is a graphic biography of the Turkish president, a conservative Islamist who rose to power as a reformer but has ruled the country as an autocrat, stifling dissent, violating the human rights of LGBTQ+ people, and waging war on the Kurds. Author Dündar knows of this firsthand: He was the Editor in Chief of the center-left newspaper Cumhuriyet and was arrested in 2015 after the paper published photos of the Turkish intelligence agency shipping arms to ISIS fighters in Syria. He is currently living in exile in Berlin, having been sentenced in absentia to 27 years in prison.
“We want to tell Erdoğan’s story in an untold way,” Dündar said in a statement accompanying the announcement. “Everything in this book is fact checked, precise, and thoroughly documented. The graphic novel format has become a new form of journalism and this book illuminates how Erdoğan rose to power to become one of the most powerful leaders in the world.”
The graphic novel, which was originally published in Turkish, German, French, Italian, and Arabic won the 2022 Atomium Comic Strip Prize; the Turkish-language edition was prohibited from publication in Turkey. The 336-page paperback will be released on October 3, 2023, with an MSRP of $24.95.
40 Men and 12 Rifles: Indochina 1954 marks a new direction for Truong, whose first two books, Such a Lovely Little War and Saigon Calling, were memoirs that drew on his experiences as the young son of a Vietnamese diplomat during the Vietnam war. 40 Men and 12 Rifles is a fictional tale set in a slightly earlier era, just before the fall of Dien Bien Phu and the end of the first Indochina war, about a young man from Hanoi who wants to be a painter but is sent to the country to manage the family’s property and ends up becoming an unwilling member of Ho Chi Minh’s People’s Army. The 296-page paperback will be released on October 3, 2023, with an MSRP of $28.95.
“Many people in the West constructed a very romantic and almost lyrical image of the Vietnamese anti-colonial resistance and revolution,” Truong said in a statement accompanying the announcement. “One should not be blinded by the undeniable heroism of the Vietnamese people during the Indochina wars, to the point of not perceiving the undeniably oppressive nature of the Vietnamese one-party National-Communist system.”
Source: ICv2
