More Weight
A Salem Story
With scathing insights into America’s commodification of tragedies, Ben Wickey’s More Weight is a humane, absorbing graphic novel.
With dual storylines set in the 1860s and 1690s, this sobering text vivifies the Salem witch trials and their evolving aftermath. In a time “when every word is made an accusation, and every whisper kills,” Giles Corey lives in Salem with his kind, practical wife, Martha. The former—a scamp in his youth; bitter in his old age—names the latter as a potential witch in supposed confidence. He discovers too late that idle words cannot be called back.
One among many falsely accused, Martha is an indomitable heroine who scoffs at the very notion of witchcraft. Her only true acts of defiance are challenging her husband’s vices and teaching her half-Native American son, Benoni, to read. Throughout the trials, she remains steadfast. Giles, meanwhile, is plagued by regrets; unable to beg forgiveness from Martha, he refuses to speak a lie again.
In the 1860s, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow imagines a walk through town with his old friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, the latter lamenting his family’s connection to the trials. Later yet, the persecutions become the bedrock for an industry of revelry: “a thousand dead zeitgeists wail and rattle their chains upon every street … the present imposes itself upon the past.”
The illustrations are moody and involving, applying gray scale to life in Salem circa the trials. Spots of color are used to signify violence and strong emotions; there are shadowed forms in secret conversations and sepia tones for memories. Hawthorne and Longfellow’s musings employ a more vibrant palette, and contemporary Salem, with its dedication to distorting and capitalizing on its unsavory past, is rendered in brilliant full color. Munchian facial expressions and bulging eyes convey the heightened emotions of tense moments, and the authors’ musing slope through town is somber and haunted.
A monumental graphic storytelling achievement, More Weight exposes the dark truths behind the Salem witch trials.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
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