If you’ve never heard of Peter Dunlap-Shohl, I’m not surprised. As a cartoonist for Anchorage Daily News for decades, he’s one of those Alaskan things that Alaskans know of, but which don’t migrate to the lower 48 (or what Alaskans call “Outside”). I first heard of him when I bought his first title My Degeneration for my graphic novel collection at my previous community college library, in which Dunlap-Shohl wrote intimately about what it was like to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s at an early age.
Now, amazingly, Dunlap-Shohl has released his second graphic novel and he picked a tougher topic, if that’s possible. Probably unknown to most Outsiders, Alaska only became a state (the 49th) in 1959, but its history of federal government department presence (one being the Atomic Energy Commission) predates that. When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, most scientists did not know what the full extent of damage or radioactive fallout would be. They didn’t know if the damage would last or how long the radioactivity would persist. After the war and as the Cold War began, bomb tests continued for more than a decade all over the world. Dunlap-Shohl tells the story of the AEC’s attempts to use Alaska and its people as a test site to answer questions about both the atomic and hydrogen bomb’s not-so-charmingly-called “non-military uses.” But he casts a wide net—he tells the story from his background as an Alaska native, and the book takes on a memoir/political statement tone as only a book written by an Alaskan can.
Dunlap-Shohl’s art lines are jittery, slashy, and awkwardly misshapen, his human shapes and anatomies a flurry of pen lines, somehow capturing the essence of the shape, thing, or person he intends to portray; they escape being classically proportionate. This accentuates the seriousness of the topic, but writing is where Dunlap-Shohl excels.
The switch from the black and white prologue to the full-color chapter one communicates the hard about-face in American life that dawned after the dropping of the bomb in World War II. For instance, page 12 is incendiary in its use of color, but it’s the WRITING, again, where the comic is particularly enjoyable, if that’s possible in so dark a topic. (For example: “Not that we needed MORE ways to die in the Far North. Alaska already had PLENTY of ways to kill its inhabitants.”) It’s an excellent way to introduce young and old to Alaska’s unique history and its importance during the Cold War. I’d already read my share of Alaskan history, but if you’ve never heard of the DEW line, the 1964 earthquake, Elmendorf, The Tundra Times, or the long military, airflight, and federal government program history of Alaska, boy are you in for an introduction! I thought this title was going to be about Edward Teller’s attempts to use a nuke to dig a harbor on the west coast of Alaska (described in minute detail in the excellent book The Firecracker Boys, by Dan O’Neill), but it’s about a lot more than that. I learned a lot of Alaskan history I didn’t know.
Like most journalists, Dunlap-Shohl has a self-deprecating black sense of humor that I instantly took to (“What could possibly go wrong?” or on page 53: “How does compulsory exercise fit with freedom?” “Shut up and run, Commie”), but it’s possibly not to everyone’s taste. I would place this title firmly in the adult section. Some of his claims have been disputed; for instance, Cannikin has also been described as an attempt to understand the way bomb fallout propagates through water and earth, not, “to appease the right wing.” Nevertheless, his page orientation, absence of frame lines, and completely black pages to heighten the suspense about Cannikin is very effective and shows a master at work. The next 13 pages have no words, and hardly any drawings, but are heartbreaking.
This is a compelling addition to other graphic novels that discuss the bomb, like Jim Ottaviani’s Fallout and Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb. Since the film Oppenheimer (based on the book American Prometheus) is out and getting lots of press, this title, along with the others mentioned, would make a compelling display within any library. This title includes four and a half pages of footnotes for the reader to learn more about the events in the book.
Nuking Alaska: Notes of an Atomic Fugitive
By Peter Dunlap-Shohl
Graphic Mundi, 2023
ISBN: 9781637790472
Publisher Age Rating: 16+
NFNT Age Recommendation: Adult (18+)
