From Slavery to Freedom is a comic book that was apparently published by the MPLA prior to Angola's independence. The copy that I've read is available online at the Marxists Internet Archive; it was first published in English in 1976 by a San Francisco communist publisher called the Peoples Press. The English edition credits their translator and letterer (said letterer is the underground comics artist Spain Rodriguez!) but there are no credits offered for the original creators... for that matter, no indication of what the comic's original Portuguese title was or when the MPLA first published it.
From Slavery to Freedom is a political comic - a work of propaganda. It seems it was designed primarily to help the MPLA explain what their cause was doing through a visual narrative to assist the illiterate or semi-literate. The plot concerns a young man named Paulo who is victimized by PIDE (the Portuguese secret police), joins the MPLA and becomes one of their fighters. The story took time to demonstrate that women were part of their movement and that there were white men fighting alongside them against PIDE. It didn't actually put that much time into extolling the virtues of Marxism - the MPLA were presented simply as a pro-Angola force battling the Portuguese, that seemed to be a more important message than any idealogy.
However, the Peoples Press were themselves a lot more explicit in their messaging. They wrote an introduction and epilogue for their version in which they celebrated Angola's independence, extolled the virtues of the MPLA and denounced the MPLA's enemies (FNLA and UNITA) as puppets of the CIA. The Peoples Press had a smug tone that is really off-putting to a non-communist such as myself. Frankly, they could have learned some lessons in propaganda!
I should also mention Spain's lettering. Spain had a problem you see in many translated works - trying to retain the original text within speech balloons that can't quite accommodate it. Portuguese can be a very succinct language compared to English and can convey in a few words what takes several words to get across in English. Consequently, you can see Spain struggling in panels (such as above) where he realized he'd run out of space and had to reduce his font to fit the entire dialogue.
This comic got a bit of write-up in North America thanks to a feature that the Comics Journal ran early on in its history called "Alternating Currents" in which Bill Mantlo examined unusual propaganda comics that weren't normally reviewed by the comics fan press (this was back in the days when someone as mainstream as Bill Mantlo could contribute to TCJ). In TCJ #45 (1979), Mantlo spent 2 pages reviewing From Slavery to Freedom. He primarily recapped the comic's plot but he ultimately spoke approvingly of the comic: "Such propaganda is the only way to counter the CIA-fostered lies spread by capitalist media in this country."
Mantlo hit a nerve; in TCJ #48, reader Gerard F. Einhaus wrote in and complained of Mantlo's "political naivete" and denounced the country's liberation as "being preserved at the point of a gun barrel, made in the Soviet Union and usually held by a Cuban soldier. Maybe you call it liberation, Bill. Looks like tyranny to me." As late as TCJ #95 (1985), Mantlo was still being denounced as Dwight R. Decker wrote in an article:
"The Journal's reviewer of Nazi comics wrote as if he were fighting desperately to keep from vomiting all over his typewriter, but when his attention turned to the Marxist revolutionary comic from Angola, his tone changed to the point that he sounded as if he were writing a hymn for an angelic choir."
Decker's complaint was that Mantlo was too emotionally involved in judging propaganda (I guess we're supposed to be dispassionate in talking about Nazi propaganda?). Decker though, got to be as emotional as he liked; do as I say, not as I do.
Anyway, since the Marxists Internet Archive have put the entire comic online it's available for anyone to see; it's very much a historical artifact as the conflict with Portugal was already in the past at the time the 1976 English translation was made and now even the civil war is 22 years in the past.
More Angola in the Comics next week!
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