Gord Hill’s Antifa Comic Bookwas the best-selling title at Camas Books and Infoshop over the past 12 months. Camas Books is an anarchist collective in Victoria, BC..
Gord Hill is an Indigenous (Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, a First Nation on northern Vancouver Island) artist and writer who also wrote The500 Years of Resistance Comic Book. Gord has been active in anarchist and activist circles and actions since the early 1990s.
The revised and expanded edition of the Antifa Comic Book, released in August 2025, includes entirely new, full-colour sections created since its first publication in 2018, during the first Trump presidency, bringing it up to date with chapters on the Jan 6, 2021 insurrection, the anti-vaxxer Freedom Convoy in early 2022, the genocide in Gaza since late 2023, and the return of Trump earlier this year.
For those who are finding themselves increasingly antifa-curious, this is a solid and accessible graphic history of the past century, which traces the rise of fascism, and anti-fascist resistance. The most recent attempts by the Trump regime to classify “antifa” (simply a shorthand for anti-fascist) as a domestic terrorist organization” are intended, of course, to discourage and criminalize those who would confront fascists and racists ideologically and physically. But it seems difficult for those with an autocratic or despotic bent to grasp that there is no centralized command structure to militant anti-fascism, and thus no organization as such that can be effectively dismantled.
THE ANTIFA COMIC BOOK
By Gord Hill August 2025 164 pages Arsenal Pulp Press
Militant anti-fascism arises from ordinary people responding to the presence of fascists and white supremacists by mobilizing and organizing themselves as autonomous and decentralized groups to keep violent xenophobes out of their communities. As the forward by Mark Bray (an antifascist scholar who fled the United States following doxxing and death threats) notes:
“There is no one coming to save us. We can only turn to each other to build a mass anti-fascist movement in the tradition of those before us who fought and died in the struggle against fascism.”
Hill traces the beginnings of both fascism and its militant resistance starting with the end of World War I in Italy and Germany, and the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. The 1920s and 1930s were a time of popular mass mobilizations, both for and against the rising fascist tide. Italian anti-fascists such as Arditi Del Popolo (the People’s Commandos) found themselves regrouping in southern France in the 1930s, and forming the Garibaldi Brigade and the Batallon de Muerte (Battalion of Death) to fight against Franco’s fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War at the end of that decade. In Germany, the Communist Red Front paramilitary organization, which at its height had about 130,000 members, fought Nazis brownshirts in street battles throughout the 1920s until Hitler’s 1933 ascension to power. Throughout WWII, underground partisan resistance to Nazi occupation continued across Europe.
A theme that emerges is the repeated use of terror and intimidation by fascists to create fear in their political opponents – liberals, socialists, communists, and anarchists alike. Beatings, fire bombings and assassinations allowed them to dominate public spaces in towns and cities, and eventually whole regions and countries relatively quickly (in the course of a few months or years).
But equally and consistently what arises each time is militant anti-fascism, popularly organized militias to bravely confront fascist threats and takeovers. There are many defeats, yes – but Gord Hill also takes care to include the victories, the important turning points where the fascists were in fact beaten back, quite physically, in places like Cable Street in London’s East End in 1936.
In the post-war period, violent xenophobic and fascistic movements in the UK, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe emerged, with Islamophobia playing a mobilizing role in recent decades. It can feel numbing to flip through these pages and read the accounts of violent attacks on leftists, firebombings of hostels housing asylum seekers and refugees, and massacres at mosques across Europe and the Anglosphere. Yet again, however, the Asian Youth Movement, Anti-Fascist Action, and the Anti-Nazi League in the UK throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and ARA direct actions against white power skinheads in Toronto and Vancouver in the early 1990s illustrate that determined resistance always emerges to counter.
The portraiture here is not heroic, even when it is of courageous and effective militant anti-fascist fighters. The illustrations are wooden in both senses of the phrase; stiff like woodcuts, reminiscent of both Joe Sacco and Bill Reid, this gives the graphic novel its documentary quality. A very important and clever use of the graphic novel format, especially in the more present day North American-based sections, is to use it to clearly ID fascist and white supremacist symbols iconography, and in this way the graphic novel is serving the popular education purpose or function that zines put out by ARA chapters (Anti-Racist Action) in the 1980s and 1990s did, letting budding antifas know what to look out for. But it is also clear that Gord Hill enjoys a chance to replicate the proudly militant banners and slogans of such groups as AntiFaschistische Acktion, Anti-Racist Action, and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP).
An inclusion of a new section about Zionism for this edition on the Far Right in Israel may seem jarring and even outrageous to some readers. Could the Haganah and Irgun, armed Revisionist Zionists settlers that were the precursors of the Israeli Defence Forces be considered ‘Jewish fascists’, settler-colonial militias terrorizing the Arabic population of 1920s and 1930s Palestine? The Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang, attacked the British when they tried to stop Jewish-only immigration to 1940s Palestine, and for their part proudly proclaimed themselves ‘terrorists’. Hill points out that Menachem Begin (Israeli Prime Minister from 1977 to 1983) led the Irgun. His immediate successor Yitzhak Shamir was a member of the Lehi, along with many prominent Israelis.
This tracing of the lineage of Revisionist Zionism, and the prominence of followers of Meir Kahane (who established the Jewish Defense League and the Israeli Kach Party) in the present day Israeli coalition government makes it clear the extent to which the current state of Israel is a product of the Zionist project. The current ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza is simply its logical endgame, explicitly set out over a century ago by Theodor Herzl and other founders of Zionism.
It is no secret to anyone that the current state of the world is quite grim, with a white supremacist in the White House, ultra-nationalist movements around the globe networking and helping each other to gain strength and prominence in their respective nation-states, while forests burn, floods drown whole regions, and economic inequalities deepen. As Hill notes, “From history, we can see that fascist movements experience growth and decline depending on socio-economic conditions. As these conditions worsen, fascist groups will continue to expand and the violence that accompanies their growth will also increase.”
Yet as the Antifa Comic Book continuously points out, there is no option to sit on the sidelines. History also shows us that building broad-based anti-fascist movements that use a diversity of tactics to militantly confront fascists and xenophobes works. No one really knows what the future holds, or exactly how it is going to play out. That also means ordinary people can be historical actors, and decisively beat back the fascist threat once and for all.
