Just Read: The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part I by Larry Gonick

Yes, that's a long title, but you ain't seen nothing yet! Look for a post on the next book I read (maybe later tonight), which has an even longer one.

This is essentially the fourth volume of Gonick's long-running Cartoon History of the Universe, re-launched as Volume 1 with a slightly different title for what I presume are pure marketing reasons. It's otherwise exactly like the earlier books, with Gonick as the narrator (occasionally on-panel) and guide through history.

Gonick has a bias towards tolerance, peace, and prosperity, which can be a handicap for a historian; history is generally the record of the opposite of all those things. (I also suspect Gonick will come across as more of a contemporary liberal the closer that his history gets to the present day, but that isn't much of an issue when he's writing about squabbles between kings and popes. This is overview-level history, covering a couple of hundred years across the entire globe, so it can get sketchy at times. But Gonick is good at providing telling details to anchor the reader, and just putting the history into comics form works in his favor -- we can see the different characters, so he doesn't have to continuously repeat who they are.

I wouldn't rely on this as your one reference for world history in the 1500s and 1600s, but it's a nice overview, and I do like the way Gonick tells these stories. (Even if the stories themselves are about war, pogroms, genocide and other unpleasantnesses far too often. But, then, that's what history is: the record of what assholes humans are to each other.)