Sarah Mirk
Khris Soden (illustrator)
The Dill Pickle Club
2011
Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party is a collection of scholarly essays on the histories of a number of Black Panther chapters outside of Oakland. While Comrades features the BPP in a number of mid-sized American cities such as Indianapolis and Winston-Salem, there was no essay on the Black Panthers chapter in Portland Oregon. A small organization devoted to publishing materials about Portland history called The Dill Pickle Club (now called Know Your City) has published a small (quarter-size) comic book titled Portland’s Black Panthers (available on their website and also through Pioneers Press) that gives a brief, illustrated history of that particular, less acknowledged and celebrated, chapter of the party.
The story of the Portland Panthers follows a similar pattern to the chapters of other cities as discussed in Comrades. Founders Kent Ford, Percy Hampton, and others came together to protect the local black community from police harassment and relentless racism, and struggled to provide a variety of social service (including breakfast programs for children and testing for illnesses) to the poor. While Portland’s Black Panthers does detail a large degree of conflict with local law enforcement, FBI, and the political establishment of the city, it also more or less portrays the chapter as fairly successful in achieving its goals of improving the conditions of Portland’s black community.
As far as I can tell from their respective websites author Sarah Mirk and illustrator Khris Soden’s interest lies in telling the (forgotten) history of the city of Portland through the comics form. Portland’s Black Panthers is one volume of a set of ten comics about different aspects of Oregon’s history, other topics include the state highways and voting rights for women. Each set is written by Mirk and illustrated by a different artist. Soden’s drawing style for Portland’s Black Panthers is very crisp and linear with little to no use of shading throughout the publication.
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