What do you think?
Rate this book
Front Lines: A Lifetime of Drawing Resistance
192 pages, Paperback
Published February 10, 2026
6 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
[See my different review in the upcoming Spring 2026 issue of Fifth Estate.]
Biography beginning this book takes us to Bessarabia, the historical region in Eastern Europe now mostly in modern-day Moldova. Pogroms pushed the author’s family out, and they found themselves in America and the 1920s Palmer raids. (Some artists now are accumulating material for future work reflecting on the 2020s ICE Noem raids.) The family fled in 1921 after a pogrom and the threat of The Black Hundreds, a reactionary, monarchist, and ultra-nationalist group known for extremism and incitement of pogroms. In 2016, The Irbis Cossack group, a modern nationalist, ultraconservative organization based in St. Petersburg, Russia, known for pro-Kremlin stances and symbolic actions welcomed Donald Trump with an invitation. The first reproduced original artwork here condemns this invitation as “Return of the Cossacks” with additional panels of family history. In the block writing typical in this art, Bietila calls out the implications of this association:
Taking down the right wing’s chaotic Dear Leader bookends this book with an explainer of the Trump Foxconn con in Wisconsin over several panels of “Don’t Be Conned by Foxconn”. World War 3 Illustrated first published the work in No. 49 (2018). Midway there are B&W photos of multiple banners including the author’s artwork in protest of Trump-DeVos education policies. But Trump is not even a theme here.
Bietila’s own life, work, and actions are the theme as well as her own education. An important phase is Brooklyn College. She started in 1964 with real education a season before:
Over a chapter’s worth of text interspersed with graphic novel-like panels the author details Brooklyn College Vietnam antiwar student demonstrations. Among audacious and impactful protests and demonstrations detailed here is that Fifth Estate profiled as “Terrorists Invade Bridal Fair” (No. 74, March 5-19, 1969). Further feminist triumphs include the RAT "Strike!" cover. This “cover was never forgotten. It came to be an iconic image chosen by women's history academia to represent the fiery beginning of second-wave feminism. The cover depicts women from the student movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Viet Cong. In the winter of 1996, I stumbled on it hanging near the entrance to the iconic show Counterculture: Alternative Information from the Underground Press to the Internet at Exit Art, a major New York exhibit space. The RAT "Strike!" cover was exhibited at the Interference Archive show Rebel Newsprint in 2013 as well as at Cooper Union and other New York shows celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the women's liberation movement.” In early 1970, a coalition of women, including members of the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.), took over the male-controlled underground newspaper RAT Subterranean News in New York City to protest its sexist workings. Bietila says of the Lower East Side organization, “Like many left groups, it was a boys' club. Most of the women were girlfriends of these movement honchos and were relegated to doing the typing and making the coffee. It was clear that I was not subservient or girlfriend material. (Spoiler alert: Two years later, women took over RAT. My artwork was often on the cover and throughout the paper, and the first issue after the takeover was written in my own hand lettering.)”
Building on a direct involvement direction, Bietila relates in the chapter “Becoming a Nurse” on attaining RN status and join the Medical Committee for Human Rights Baltimore chapter “often called on to be street medics for demonstrations at the Capitol. Ambulance units are not permitted to enter an area where there is active conflict going on, so activists who are medical professionals or have been trained to provide first aid are an important part of demonstrations. It is a special skill to handle injuries from confrontations between demonstrators and police, a skill not taught in medical or nursing schools.” Banners and photos recount here involvement with the MCHR and “the five-month Indigenous cross-country march from Alcatraz Island to Washington, DC, demanding that Indigenous treaty rights be recognized…” A rather eerie drawing shows another event Bietila supported as a medic, “the 1977 demonstration of Iranian students against the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, on an official visit to Washington, DC. They wore masks to protect their families in Iran from retribution…” The haunting paper masks are recalled in artwork.
Bietila encourages the reader to get off the sidelines with specific pointers on practical techniques. As observed by Cris Siqueira, cartoonist and co-owner of Lions Tooth Bookstore:
Bietila works “across many different media, including stencils, paint, block printing, ink on scratchboard or silkscreen, cardboard, cloth, papier-mâché, and photography-whatever suits the project.” Practical tips and advice are taken from puppet and costume protests in Milwaukee against the CIA: On stilts, a “bloodsucking Military Mosquito was accompanied by General Augusto Pinochet.” Adding further details to the Milwaukee period of a rather peripatetic career, the sturgeon seen on the cover (compare the version of the artwork on pages 87and 177) also had a puppet presentation. We readers are gifted with simple, practical directions on the making of a cardboard sturgeon: “…first, the pieces are cut, scored, and folded. Next, they are fixed in place, joined using a sword stapler, masking tape, and wood glue, and then covered in places with papier-mâché. Bicycle boxes are nice and big sources for materials.” The straightforward mud stencil can inspire just like the literally illustrative cantastoria presentation method. Painting, drawing, and illustration tips include a group project like that undertaken for the "Whose Schools" banner. “We tape the fabric to the wall and project the art with an LED projector from a laptop. The image is traced with chalk or pencil onto the fabric and then placed on a table for the group to paint. We provide a color picture as a painting guide.” Other techniques include woodblock and other printmaking methods often accomplished as a collaborative group. This includes linocut prints of the style I saw (and purchased) when Bread & Puppet Theatre visited my area. Scratchboard art, murals, and posters add to approaches such as the outdoor installation to protest cyanide in mining as part of “Tombstones at the Wisconsin Capitol”. Working with The Milwaukee Mining Impact Coalition taught Bietila “about the dangers of mining metallic sulfide ore…” From a list of rivers poisoned by mining worldwide the group “made a mobile graveyard, with tombstones dedicated to these rivers. The group scavenged wires from election signs and recycled bicycle-box cardboard. With the group's research, I came up with motifs reflecting the location of these rivers in the world….” Thus, an art build comes together.
As a mother, Bietila directly participates with a second generation. “In 1996, my sixteen-year-old younger son, Smitty, told me that he was going to Active Resistance (AR), an international anarchist gathering being held in Chicago that he had read about in the Fifth Estate… Smitty wanted to help make giant puppets with David Solnit, a California activist who was leading what is now called an art build. With all the risks I'd taken and close calls I'd had when I was young, the overprotective mother mode kicked in with a vengeance. So I went to AR too and brought several friends from the UWM street theater group. The gathering was much more than an art build. It was a weeklong event with workshops and strategizing sessions, delicious vegan meals, and mass camping inside a closed spice factory. My son was right. It was wonderful. …Giant puppets became a worldwide phenomenon during the time of the antiglobalization movement.”
Biography beginning this book takes us to Bessarabia, the historical region in Eastern Europe now mostly in modern-day Moldova. Pogroms pushed the author’s family out, and they found themselves in America and the 1920s Palmer raids. (Some artists now are accumulating material for future work reflecting on the 2020s ICE Noem raids.) The family fled in 1921 after a pogrom and the threat of The Black Hundreds, a reactionary, monarchist, and ultra-nationalist group known for extremism and incitement of pogroms. In 2016, The Irbis Cossack group, a modern nationalist, ultraconservative organization based in St. Petersburg, Russia, known for pro-Kremlin stances and symbolic actions welcomed Donald Trump with an invitation. The first reproduced original artwork here condemns this invitation as “Return of the Cossacks” with additional panels of family history. In the block writing typical in this art, Bietila calls out the implications of this association:
TRUMP FLAMBOYANTLY PROCLAIMS HIS IRRATIONAL WHIMS LIKE A TRUE CZAR. HE COMMANDS TOADIES TO SCAPEGOAT IMMIGRANTS, MEXICANS & MUSLIMS, IMPRISONING EVEN CHILDREN. WHEN HE WAS MADE AN HONORARY COSSACK IT WAS CLEAR THAT THEY RECOGNIZED ONE OF THEIR OWN.
Taking down the right wing’s chaotic Dear Leader bookends this book with an explainer of the Trump Foxconn con in Wisconsin over several panels of “Don’t Be Conned by Foxconn”. World War 3 Illustrated first published the work in No. 49 (2018). Midway there are B&W photos of multiple banners including the author’s artwork in protest of Trump-DeVos education policies. But Trump is not even a theme here.
Bietila’s own life, work, and actions are the theme as well as her own education. An important phase is Brooklyn College. She started in 1964 with real education a season before:
The summer before college, I worked at a racially integrated summer camp in the Catskills run by communist-influenced, antiracist organizers from my neighborhood. I learned about people a year or two older who had joined civil rights marches and voter registration drives in the South, as well as some guys who were moving to Canada to avoid the military draft. At night, after the campers were tucked in, the camp counselors sat around a campfire, where I learned that the US was at war with Vietnam. I felt physically shaken by the realization that the US was not a democracy but instead the number-one imperialist power after World War II's destruction of Europe. One of the other counselors was in the newly formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and gave me the name of the student who was starting a chapter...
The New Left introduced me to unvarnished history and critical thinking. This changed my life."
Over a chapter’s worth of text interspersed with graphic novel-like panels the author details Brooklyn College Vietnam antiwar student demonstrations. Among audacious and impactful protests and demonstrations detailed here is that Fifth Estate profiled as “Terrorists Invade Bridal Fair” (No. 74, March 5-19, 1969). Further feminist triumphs include the RAT "Strike!" cover. This “cover was never forgotten. It came to be an iconic image chosen by women's history academia to represent the fiery beginning of second-wave feminism. The cover depicts women from the student movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Viet Cong. In the winter of 1996, I stumbled on it hanging near the entrance to the iconic show Counterculture: Alternative Information from the Underground Press to the Internet at Exit Art, a major New York exhibit space. The RAT "Strike!" cover was exhibited at the Interference Archive show Rebel Newsprint in 2013 as well as at Cooper Union and other New York shows celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the women's liberation movement.” In early 1970, a coalition of women, including members of the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.), took over the male-controlled underground newspaper RAT Subterranean News in New York City to protest its sexist workings. Bietila says of the Lower East Side organization, “Like many left groups, it was a boys' club. Most of the women were girlfriends of these movement honchos and were relegated to doing the typing and making the coffee. It was clear that I was not subservient or girlfriend material. (Spoiler alert: Two years later, women took over RAT. My artwork was often on the cover and throughout the paper, and the first issue after the takeover was written in my own hand lettering.)”
Building on a direct involvement direction, Bietila relates in the chapter “Becoming a Nurse” on attaining RN status and join the Medical Committee for Human Rights Baltimore chapter “often called on to be street medics for demonstrations at the Capitol. Ambulance units are not permitted to enter an area where there is active conflict going on, so activists who are medical professionals or have been trained to provide first aid are an important part of demonstrations. It is a special skill to handle injuries from confrontations between demonstrators and police, a skill not taught in medical or nursing schools.” Banners and photos recount here involvement with the MCHR and “the five-month Indigenous cross-country march from Alcatraz Island to Washington, DC, demanding that Indigenous treaty rights be recognized…” A rather eerie drawing shows another event Bietila supported as a medic, “the 1977 demonstration of Iranian students against the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, on an official visit to Washington, DC. They wore masks to protect their families in Iran from retribution…” The haunting paper masks are recalled in artwork.
Bietila encourages the reader to get off the sidelines with specific pointers on practical techniques. As observed by Cris Siqueira, cartoonist and co-owner of Lions Tooth Bookstore:
"Front Lines isn't just the fascinating memoir of force-of-nature cartoonist, painter, and activist Susan Simensky Bietila, it is also a handy manual for anyone looking for inspiration on how to align their artistic practice with their political ideals in a truly meaningful way. Absolute essential reading for those of us who want to use our creative power to enact change in the real world."
Bietila works “across many different media, including stencils, paint, block printing, ink on scratchboard or silkscreen, cardboard, cloth, papier-mâché, and photography-whatever suits the project.” Practical tips and advice are taken from puppet and costume protests in Milwaukee against the CIA: On stilts, a “bloodsucking Military Mosquito was accompanied by General Augusto Pinochet.” Adding further details to the Milwaukee period of a rather peripatetic career, the sturgeon seen on the cover (compare the version of the artwork on pages 87and 177) also had a puppet presentation. We readers are gifted with simple, practical directions on the making of a cardboard sturgeon: “…first, the pieces are cut, scored, and folded. Next, they are fixed in place, joined using a sword stapler, masking tape, and wood glue, and then covered in places with papier-mâché. Bicycle boxes are nice and big sources for materials.” The straightforward mud stencil can inspire just like the literally illustrative cantastoria presentation method. Painting, drawing, and illustration tips include a group project like that undertaken for the "Whose Schools" banner. “We tape the fabric to the wall and project the art with an LED projector from a laptop. The image is traced with chalk or pencil onto the fabric and then placed on a table for the group to paint. We provide a color picture as a painting guide.” Other techniques include woodblock and other printmaking methods often accomplished as a collaborative group. This includes linocut prints of the style I saw (and purchased) when Bread & Puppet Theatre visited my area. Scratchboard art, murals, and posters add to approaches such as the outdoor installation to protest cyanide in mining as part of “Tombstones at the Wisconsin Capitol”. Working with The Milwaukee Mining Impact Coalition taught Bietila “about the dangers of mining metallic sulfide ore…” From a list of rivers poisoned by mining worldwide the group “made a mobile graveyard, with tombstones dedicated to these rivers. The group scavenged wires from election signs and recycled bicycle-box cardboard. With the group's research, I came up with motifs reflecting the location of these rivers in the world….” Thus, an art build comes together.
As a mother, Bietila directly participates with a second generation. “In 1996, my sixteen-year-old younger son, Smitty, told me that he was going to Active Resistance (AR), an international anarchist gathering being held in Chicago that he had read about in the Fifth Estate… Smitty wanted to help make giant puppets with David Solnit, a California activist who was leading what is now called an art build. With all the risks I'd taken and close calls I'd had when I was young, the overprotective mother mode kicked in with a vengeance. So I went to AR too and brought several friends from the UWM street theater group. The gathering was much more than an art build. It was a weeklong event with workshops and strategizing sessions, delicious vegan meals, and mass camping inside a closed spice factory. My son was right. It was wonderful. …Giant puppets became a worldwide phenomenon during the time of the antiglobalization movement.”
Displaying 1 of 1 review