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Henniker comic artist and educator Marek Bennett gives readers a look at the Civil War through the eyes of a Union soldier from Henniker in his new graphic novel The Civil War Diary of Freeman Colby, Vol. 2: 1863, which he will present at the Hopkinton Town Library on Thursday, June 13, and at Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord on Wednesday, June 26. The book is a follow-up to Bennett’s 2016 graphic novel The Civil War Diary of Freeman Colby. While poking through some boxes at the Henniker Historical Society looking for inspiration for his next comic, Bennett came across the diary of Freeman Colby, a teacher in Henniker who enlisted as a soldier in the 39th Massachusetts Regiment of the Union army during the Civil War. “I got hooked on the story [Freeman Colby] was telling,” he said. “When you see a movie about the Civil War, the story is compressed to fit into an hour or two, and you don’t get a sense of the day-to-day, but Freeman Colby’s narrative gives more details and a really different sense of the Civil War and what it was like to be in a Union regiment in 1862.” The Civil War Diary of Freeman Colby is a 352-page comic adaptation of the diary in its entirety. The diary ends abruptly, and Bennett thought the book would be the extent of his work with Freeman Colby’s story, but after the book was published, Freeman Colby’s great-granddaughter contacted Bennett, offering to share 80 pages of letters written by Freeman Colby during the Civil War that her family had kept and passed down. Bennett accepted the letters and started working on The Civil War Diary of Freeman Colby, Vol. 2: 1863, but creating a coherent narrative from the letters proved to be more challenging than simply reproducing the whole diary, Bennett said “In the diary, [Freeman Colby] writes everything out, and it supplies me with everything I needed, but with the letters, there are some empty gaps,” he said. That led him to take a different approach. Rather than focus only on Freeman Colby’s experience as the first book does, Bennett decided he would provide a more comprehensive look at the Civil War, but still through the eyes of Freeman Colby. “[The first book] is nonfiction, but nonfiction doesn’t always mean complete,” he said. “At that point, I had to wonder, do I trust [Freeman Colby] as a narrator to be historically factual and tell the complete story, or do I have to step away from that one-person account and include other voices to get the complete story?” Vol. 2 weaves together Freeman Col-
by’s letters with accounts from other people affected by the Civil War, some of whom knew Freeman Colby and some for whom there is no documentation that they and Freeman Colby ever Courtesy photo. met. For the latter, Bennett used some fictional elements to place Freeman Colby into those accounts, one of which comes from the Civil War notebooks of Walt Whitman. “I don’t believe Freeman Colby and Walt Whitman ever met, but I’ve made things a little more flexible so that the experiences in Walt Whitman’s texts are also seen and experienced by Freeman Colby,” Bennett said. “I feel OK about doing that [fictional aspect], because even though it’s not a fact that Freeman Colby experienced those things, it is a fact that thousands of people did, so there is a larger historical truth there.” Other accounts come from Jonas Bacon, Freeman Colby’s childhood neighbor and friend who was also a private; Fannie Dawson, an enslaved woman from Fredericksburg who confronted her masters; Sarah Low, a volunteer nurse who ran a ward at Washington’s Armory Square Hospital; and Abraham Tuckson, an enslaved man who returned to the South to find his family. Bennett’s Freeman Colby comics are done with black felt-tip pens and consist primarily of stick figures. The animation is purposefully “kept as simple as possible,” Bennett said, so that it “leaves everything up to the imagination” of the reader. “I’ve never found a photograph of Freeman Colby, and I don’t think it’s right to bring my own guesswork into it,” he said. “I’d rather draw him as a circle with two dots and a line than be historically inaccurate.” Bennett has plans to pen Freeman Colby volumes 3 and 4, which will include more of Freeman Colby’s letters and other Civil War accounts from 1864 and 1865. Marek Bennett presents The Civil War Diary of Freeman Colby, Vol. 2: 1863 Author readings: Thursday, June 13, 6 p.m., at Hopkinton Town Library (61 Houston Drive, Contoocook) and Wednesday, June 26, 6 p.m., at Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S Main St., Concord) More info: marekbennett.com