Classic Comic Review: Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is kind of hard to read.  It was written in 1851, and that automatically makes the novel difficult for a lot of readers.  Some sentences are long, and the dialogue is filled with dialects and accents that over-sensitive readers today might (and probably would) find offensive.

Still, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was kind of an influential novel, and it sold a lot of copies.  It shocked readers with its portrayal of slavery in the United States south and helped inspire the abolitionist movement.  Several pejorative terms (which I’m not going to get into because I’m not that kind of blogger) came from this book, but many people today don’t understand the foundation of these pejoratives.

Even though I’ve never read Uncle Tom’s Cabin from beginning-to-end, I HAVE read this classic comic book.  It was in a stack of Classics Illustrated comic books that my dad kept and let us read.  I’ve outgrown comic books to some extent, but I’m interested to see how this 1946 (reprint) comic book version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin holds up today.

In today’s environment, reviewing a 1946 (reprint) comic book version of an 1851 story that deals with slavery can be a bit risky, but hey, that’s just the kind of guy I am!  If you’re interested in what a classic comic version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin looks like, watch the video below.