black arms that support you
Cartoonist: Ben Passmore
Publisher: Pantheon Graphic Library
Publication date: October 2025
Review by Ian Thomas
Black history produced for mainstream audiences (e.g., published on mainstream or widely distributed channels) tends to omit the hiccups, false starts, hypocrisies and incongruities inherent in the movements they seek to portray, thereby stripping black history of its character and essence. The reasons for this are probably too complex to explain in such a short review, but include the concepts of safety, respectability, and of course marketability. After all, a book on a subject that might not otherwise reach an audience is better than no book, and even a simple story is all the better if it shows the character of the subject, but there is a lack of material that takes full account of the time-consuming work and impasses that come with resistance and revolution.
In cartoonist Ben Passmore’s latest work, Embrace You with Black Weapons: A History of Black Resistance (Pantheon Books), he deftly removes the pitfalls that come with collapsing labyrinthine histories into simple narratives. Rather than take on the impossible task of distilling events and movements down to agreed-upon facts, talking points, and cultural contributions, he seeks to find his place within them. The story begins with Ben, the main character, lounging in an easy chair in sweats and slides, watching footage of St. Anthony Police Department officer Jeronimo Yanez’s 2016 shooting of Philando Castile on his cell phone. The killing took place in front of Castile’s daughter and her girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and sparked international outrage after Reynolds shared video of the interaction and the moments that followed on Facebook Live. Passmore shows both sides’ interactions in the same speech bubble, peeling away the smartphone screen to reveal the small pressures that come with life, but only depicts the aftermath of the event, with Officer Yanez keeping his gun pointed at the dying driver and Reynolds pleading with Castile to “Stay with me, baby!”
As Ben’s father passes burning police cars and BLM and anarchist graffiti on his way to visit him, it becomes clear that the resulting social unrest is right outside Ben’s front door. A beret in kente fabric and decorated with black power buttons sits atop his long white dreadlocks. He chides his son, saying he is “fighting for liberation” indoors and not on the street. As Ben rummages through a bag of revolutionary literature brought by his father, he questions his place in the fight and has a hunch that his biracial identity will not be welcomed among the protesters, who will mistake him for white. “A real cannon is better than a dusty book written by some old sad nigger,” Ben tells his father.
Although this tongue-in-cheek exchange expresses these serious concerns in a light-hearted manner, the existential nature of the conversation is deeply felt, culminating in Ben’s father slapping Ben over the head with a copy of William Ivy Hare’s Carnival of Rage, about the New Orleans race riots that followed the shootout between African American activist Robert Charles and white police in July 1900.
In true comic book fashion, this blow to the head eventually leaves Ben incapacitated, and he awakens as a witness to the events that led to Charles’s rebellion, beginning a tour of the countless black rebellions and riots of the past century that unfolds as a series of episodes observed (and commented on) by the protagonist.
Despite its seriousness, Passmore’s assessment of the armed resistance is consistently humorous – “Dad, beam out, I won’t be killed by the bullets in Gone with the Wind!” But “The Black Arms” is funny because “if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.” A kind of method. The development of resistance and movement that Ben witnesses again and again feels completely just, completely inevitable, and completely doomed from the beginning. “And what if black people tried to organize? What if they tried to protect themselves,” Passmore wonders, looking at an impressive montage of rebellions. “Well, the history of white riots speaks for itself.”
Similarly, Passmore remains true to the anarchist perspective that informs much of his previous work (such as Your Black Friend and Sports Is Hell), making the case for egalitarian autonomy and eschewing hierarchies. In The Black Arms, Passmore shows how a movement’s fragile seams are just as likely to be torn from within by careerism, misogyny, and ego as it is to be thwarted by infiltrators and adversaries. That’s the nature of fighting a war in enemy territory. From Charles, Passmore’s time-travel sends his comic version to witness Marcus Garvey’s work with the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the black capitalist vision of nonviolent resistance of the civil rights movement. More importantly, Passmore provides readers with a depiction of the MOVE uprising and subsequent bombings, as well as characterizing its formative years by the violence he perpetrated on the streets of Los Angeles as part of the Eight Trey Gangster Crips, also known as Monster Kodi. Passmore is quick to point out that even in an era of nominal nonviolence, armed resistance was necessary. “Fannie Lou Hamer, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had shotguns in every corner of her bedroom,” he writes. “She said if the crackers came to attack her, she would ‘never write to mom again.'”
When you search for “graphic adaptation” or “graphic history” online, many results are often bland combinations of writers and artists that appear to have been orchestrated by publishers, or adaptations of existing texts. Of course, there are exceptions that reflect the true artistry of comics in their subject matter. Gord Hill’s comic adaptation of his “500 Years of Resistance” comes to mind. Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon’s adaptations of 9/11 Report and Torture Report are similar, where the medium’s visual subjectivity and Colon’s decades of experience with caricature cannot help but betray a certain cynicism and skepticism toward the documents they purport to reveal and clarify. However, most posts in this genre read like illustrated Wikipedia articles. If you read carefully, you might think that these services are trying to capture viewers who would miss (or misunderstand) the subject matter at hand if it were available on another channel. From a cynical perspective, they are simply SKUs that exist to capitalize on powerful movements and cultural curiosities without any political risk or commitment. These can be used to make end caps or tabletop displays for Juneteenth or Black History Month. The facts may be accurate, but their blend of lackluster portraits and medium-distance compositions carefully strips away their radical spirit and imbues them with a sense of historical distance, so their subjects can be admired rather than imitated.
Black Arms to Hold You Up is stodgy and lopsided, with no interest in the solid rhythms that defined the history of big-box graphics. Although the content is almost entirely historical, Passmore directs his own context through a contemporary lens and invites readers to do the same. Unique at first glance, Passmore’s bold use of a bright but limited palette really sets it apart. Although Passmore’s pages are dominated by black and gray, her use of velvety red as the book’s only color is stunning. It attracts the eye and emphasizes emotions, good or bad. The film conveys the anger of a shooting, the passion of love, the agony of internal strife, and the solidarity of a community coming together to slowly move the world away from its racist status quo. This use of color emulates the small press trend of lithographic printing, which is a flat color superposition. Here, the use is more considered than aesthetics.
As a whole, Black Arms to Hold You Up is a thorough depiction of racial injustice and the glacial pace of change won through even the most radical efforts. Passmore does not shy away from slurs, stereotypes, or problematic iconography. Rather, he accepts them as aspects of true recollection, while at the same time recognizing the absurdity and profoundness of their significance. “It feels weird to be holding a watermelon around this scream,” Ben said during an impassioned lecture by Ramona Africa of the MOVE collective. And his portrayal of the Bard figure, like the white gloves favored by both Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, underlines the influence it has on a cartoon lineage that still lingers today.
Passmore’s history represents the best of what the comics medium has to offer. As a visual discipline that allows and embraces the compression and decompression of time, Passmore is able to frame and contextualize disparate elements in ways that film or prose would never allow. Even the simple interaction between Ben and his father that kicks off the action is full of foreshadowing. His father, dressed in the radical garb of his generation, provided revolutionary documents that changed his son’s worldview and its possibilities. “I don’t care about that tragic mulatto! You’re black and I’ll make sure you know what that means,” he tells Ben.
“Isn’t it just high blood pressure and a power slide?” Ben asks, not looking up from his phone. Although the white T-shirt and sweatshirts he wears speak of ordinariness, radical notions of race and resistance are more deeply woven into the social fabric of his daily life as a result of the experiences of generations that preceded him.
Passmore’s sanitized history of resistance is more instructive than the bookshelf’s equivalent of graphic history that has been dehumanized to serve questionable notions of black excellence and social status. Although Mr. Passmore does not land on armed resistance as the only true method, he realistically assesses its advantages and disadvantages. After all, charting a path forward always depends on time, location, and hundreds of moving parts and changing conditions. Failure is what opens the way to victory, and by charting the slow and arduous path of self-defense, Passmore gives readers a clear vision of what is needed and what is at stake.
“Black Arms to Hold You Up” is available now
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