"Displacement" by Kiku Hughes, quick review

Right off the bat, we're just going to link to Tamiko Nimuras's review on DiscoverNikkei.org, which is better informed than our opinion.

We were looking at the books available through OverDrive, a library digital lending service, when we saw Displacement by Kiku Hughes. Specifically, we recognized the art style - Kiku Hughes' guest comic about asexuality for Oh Joy Sex Toy was part of our journey to realizing we were ace - and we remembered thinking her comics were very good.

And Displacement was certainly good.

This is a comic about the internment of Japanese citizens in the United States of America during World War 2. It's a time travel story, but it is not about time travel, it's about history, and ignorance of it, and tangibilities of it, and aftereffects of it. And explicitly places this eighty-years-past atrocity in the context of more modern atrocities, and connects resistance to that to resistance to these.

It's historical fiction, first. And it uses the format well. It shows us insides of camps, in tangible details: smells, temperatures, censorship, propaganda, and resistance.