The Underground Abductor Bigger & Badder Edition is also better

How do you make the already good, even better? That beautiful bacon, spinach, and garlic pizza is great when it’s small, but when you make it a medium or large and it reaches a new level. Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales, The Underground Abductor-An Abolitionist Tale was good, but the Bigger & Badder Edition is just that. All of the books in the Hazardous Tales graphic novel series that we’ve read have been entertaining and educational to some degree. Ironically, it was their initial size always left us wanting more. Imagine seeing a painted or drawn work of art that is great, but one whose small stature handicapped its enjoyment.

The first Bigger & Badder Edition, which was Donner Dinner Party, elicited the same reaction from us. Cut from the same cloth, The Underground Abductor is a great graphic novel that also has a mighty hook. You think that you know the person while you’re reading the graphic novel, but it’s not referring to them as you know them. There must be untold other chapters of information relative to slavery, abolition and the history of North America in the mid-1800s. You’ll be thinking something along those lines as you’re mentally trying to figure out the mystery heroine, Araminta.  

Because The Underground Abductor is a story about the Underground Railroad, its roots are born from a dark topic. Slavery existed, it was a horrible practice that was started in Portugal and operated as a triangular commerce trade across the Atlantic Ocean between North America, Europe, Africa, and South America. The graphic novel does a great job of addressing the evil, pain, and cruelty that set up her story and the canvas that it was built upon.

It’s important to state that it doesn’t whitewash history. The graphic novel balances the harshness of those times, the way that slaves and their families were treated with measured reality in a way that textbooks struggle to. A large factor in that is due to the fact that it’s presented in a graphic novel. Graphic novels reach audiences that other types of written mediums are unable to do at certain levels. Similarly, fans of cinema will remember how the audience reacted to The Little Mermaid when it first came out in 1989.

It was a cartoon. It was an animated movie. Both of those things are true, but the caliber of the film elevated it to something that brought in adult movie-goers who previously only thought of animated movies as kid’s stuff. Those older readers, middle school and up, can experience the same thing if they check their ego at the spine of the book and realize that we weren’t taught everything in school the first go around.  

Wait, Harriet Tubman suffered from narcolepsy and often had visions of the future? She also helped northern ships navigate rivers that the south had mined. Yeah, both of those things happened, plus so many more aspects than the overview of ‘Harriet Tubman helped slaves run away to the north via the Underground Railroad’. It’s a subtle shift in names from Araminta to Harriet Tubman, one that’s addressed in the book and will have you wondering what other facts school books might’ve omitted.

Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales The Underground Abductor, Bigger & Badder Edition offers as much fun and knowledge as you allow it to have with you. It’s presented and packaged in a manner that even the mildly curious will enjoy the graphic novel and be attracted to its content. However, there will always be those contrarian students who won’t delve into something, regardless of its quality or enjoyment, simply because they see it as educational. In those cases, it’s their loss and it means that more of the Hazardous Tales books will be available to check out and those Bigger & Badder Editions will be around for those who really enjoy a bigger palette.

Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales, The Underground Abductor, An Abolitionist Tale Bigger & Badder Edition is by Nathan Hale and available on Amulet Books, an imprint of Abrams Books.

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