Fight the Power!: A Visual History of Protest Among the English-Speaking Peoples

Named one of Rough Trade’s Best Books of 2013

According to Gandhi, the Four Stages of Protest are as follows: First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. Then you win!

In Fight the Power!, comics authors Sean Michael Wilson and Benjamin Dickson team up with illustrators Hunt Emerson, John Spelling, and Adam Pasion to show how this process has been played out again and again throughout history--and has slowly but surely led to hard-won rights for the people along the way. Focusing on the English-speaking nations, Wilson and Dickson chronicle the struggles of the Luddites and Swing Riots in the early 1800s, through the Irish Rebellions that lasted through 1922; from the suffragettes in 1918 to Rosa Parks and the bus boycott of the mid-1950s; from the trial of Nelson Mandela to the Occupy movement that has only just begun. By illuminating the variety of protests--and the valuable connections among them--through an accessible art form, Fight the Power! shows that there is a point to the struggle, fight by fight, win by win.

Sean Michael Wilson is a graphic novel writer from Scotland, living in Japan. His books are often on themes of history, biography and social issues. He has had more than 20 books published with a variety of US, UK and Japanese publishers, including: AX:alternative manga ( 'Best ten books of 2010', Publishers Weekly), Parecomic (with an introduction by Noam Chomsky, his first contribution to a book in graphic form), Fight the Power! A Visual History of Protest Amongst the English Speaking Peoples' (intro by Tariq Ali) Portraits of Violence, with Dr Brad Evans (intro by Henry Giroux) , and several manga versions of  Japanese classics, such as The Book of Five Rings, Hagakure and The 47 Ronin. In 2016 his book 'The Faceless Ghost' was nominated for the prestigious Eisner Book Awards, and received a medal in the 2016 'Independent Publisher Book Awards'. In 2017, his book Secrets of the Ninja won an International Manga Award from the Japanese government - he is the first British person to receive this award.

Benjamin Dickson has written short stories for a number of publishers including Heavy Metal Magazine, Self Made Hero and Ctrl Alt Shift, for whom he wrote "Not One Minute of Silence"  (Illustrated by Warren Pleece), a true account of police brutality and murder in Colombia. He is also the writer of the action comedy Santa Claus vs the Nazis (illustrated by Gavin Mitchell, published online by Aces Weekly) and the award-winning Falling Sky. He also works part-time with mental-health service users as a community artist. Dickson lives in Bristol, UK.