Cindy Vallar's Blog - Posts Tagged "diversity"

Tell No Tales: Pirates of the Southern Seas by Sam Maggs

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


While plundering the Caribbean, La Sirene barely escapes an encounter with a fearsome machine that navigates the sea belching black smoke. Captain Anne Bonny and her crew – Mary Read (the quartermaster and Anne’s current lover), Kati (gunner and Miskitu refugee), Mimba (navigator and maroon), and Sarah (healer and rich girl of mixed parentage) – refuse to allow this newcomer to thwart their pillaging. They sight a Spanish galleon, but before they can attack, the monstrous steamship reappears. When Mary catches a glimpse of its captain, she warns Anne to flee. They seek the safety of the galleon, even though the Spanish don’t take kindly to pirates.

Knowing La Sirene is no match for this new enemy that seems to be stalking them, Anne sets sail for Jamaica. Once on the island, Mary reveals what she knows – the man targeting them is the ghost of Woodes Rogers, a man who made a pact with the devil. This revelation is confirmed when Calico Jack Rackham, Anne’s former lover whom they meet at a Jamaican tavern, reveals that pirates are vanishing in large numbers.

Never one to turn tail and run, Anne is determined to put an end to this new enemy. But how? A vision reveals there is a way, but to succeed the Sirens must display bravery, cunning, conviction, strength, and kindness. Of course, nothing is as simple as it seems and the best laid plans always go awry, as Anne and her Sirens soon discover.

Set in the Caribbean in 1715, this graphic novel is loosely based on history and, if readers can suspend disbelief, an intriguing divergence from the normal Anne Bonny-Mary Read story. The drawbacks here as regards Woodes Rogers as the villain are that he is very much alive in 1715 – he doesn’t die until 1732 – and has returned to London from a voyage to Madagascar, rather than being in the Caribbean. Another negative element to the story is that it glorifies piracy to some degree. There are also a few confusing situations where readers have to infer what transpires.

Before the members of the crew are introduced, it’s difficult to determine whether the graphics portray females or males, and that may be the intent since Maggs and Wells “wanted to reclaim some of our lost history – the history of women and non-binary and queer folks that must have existed, but has been hidden or kept quiet.” (157) Therein lies the value of this retelling. This is the story of individuals who are marginalized and/or shunned by society. They want acceptance for who they are, rather than what society wants them to be.




View all my reviews