Red Rosa:A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg

Five stars. The perfect book for [the] socialist-curious … What Rosa Luxemburg wrote about and predicted is scarily relevant today.

Kate Evans deserves our gratitude for telling the tragic tale of this early twentieth-century revolutionary.

[Luxemburg] gets her due in a full-length graphic novel biography … Red Rosa fits comfortably in this fall theme of feminist representation in graphic novels and comics.

Wonderful. I love the way it incorporates complicated historical details into a moving biographical account.

If the bedrock of this biography is its combination of Marxist theory and historical narrative—including but not limited to Luxemburg’s participation in the international socialist movement, German politics, and the Russian Revolution of 1905—the motherlode is its touching portrayal of a woman who sacrificed her life for her beliefs.

It does a fine job of telling [Luxemburg’s] story. The prison scenes are particularly good.

Utterly brilliant. Kate Evans is one of the most original talents in comics I’ve seen in a long time.

We need more political cartoonists like Kate Evans. She is an artist who lives her art and a radical who lives her politics … she can write about revolution, not as a historical object, but as a real, relevant, living thing, because Kate is herself a revolutionary.

Stunningly good.

Red Rosa is a wonderfully composed and lively book. The story it tells is compelling, inspirational and fundamentally human. Instructional in its politics and discussions of economics, Red Rosa is also at turns humorous, romantic, and emotional. The decision to write this work in the graphic novel form was a brilliant one; if there is a biography whose multiple dimensions requires more than words to tell it, Rosa Luxembourg’s is such a biography.

The book has an infectious quality and an embracing enthusiasm for revolutionary ideas. It’s a perfect historic complement to the ongoing radicalisation of the Labour Party. An empowering read for would-be revolutionaries as much as for ‘old hands.’

Evans startles and inspires with her beautiful symbiosis of graphic and text. It is not tragedy that Evans ends with, the tragedy of Rosa’s death at the age of forty-seven and the violence of the next decades it portended, but rather the inspiration she left to her comrades and the inspiration she can still bring to those who long for change.

Kate Evans’ striking pairing of word and image to tell Luxemburg’s story is so perfect that it seems surprising that no one has thought of it before.

If you have ever wanted to learn about Rosa Luxemburg, this book is the perfect entry point … Kate Evans has made the stirring story of Rosa Luxemburg’s legacy accessible to a new generation of readers. No matter how powerful the adversaries or steep the challenge, Luxemburg’s passion for social and economic justice remained.

[Evans’s] storytelling is a clever mix of humor, pathos, politics, and the horrors of war … [a] compelling story of a strong, independent woman who never deviated from her beliefs.

If it were a movie, you might call Red Rosa a tour de force, but that would be short-changing it. Red Rosa is a gripping, wonderfully illustrated account of Rosa Luxemburg the person, but more importantly a straightforward and intellectually honest introduction to her politics and her theoretical contributions. It embodies everything implied by the phrase ‘Marxismus theorie und praxis.’

A stirring and beautiful book … Red Rosa is of more than biographical or aesthetic interest as an introduction to Rosa Luxembourg’s ideas. Its massive appendix, providing lengthy quotations from source material for every citation in the comic, is an education in itself.

Luxemburg’s journey out of Poland to becoming a leader of the German Communist uprising certainly contains enough excitement to fill the pages of a graphic novel. A lively history of Luxemberg’s life and fine blend of Evans’ other areas of thematic interests of feminism, class tensions and womanhood.

A unique format that is as informed and informative as it is absolutely absorbing from beginning to end.

Revolutionary in her intellect, viewpoints, and sociosexual life, Luxemburg more than earns her place among women of the past century whose acts were precedent-shattering.

Offers an intimate view of the woman behind the revolutionary icon.