Red Rosa

It is Luxemburg’s ethical response to the world in which she found herself – and her commitment to (in her own words) ‘burden the conscience of the affluent with all the suffering and all the hidden bitter tears’ of the oppressed – that remains her most inspiring legacy for today’s activists, and which Evans’ book captures so vividly. Peace News

Fanciful stylistic touches echoing Chagall’s paintings serve to narrate events too huge and complex to be drawn with journalistic realism. The 1905 Russian Revolution and WWI appear here as spirals and waves, as film footage, or in miniature as Luxemburg’s unruly hair, as seen in the cover image, literally “on her mind.” These huge events that defy realism call for a different… Eyedrum Periodically

Evans deals with theory in graphic form. She doesn’t shy away from giving theory the spotlight, and she is quite adept at unfolding, panel by panel, some extremely important, sometimes dense Marxian principles… Evans’s drawings give abstractions a living quality that makes them intelligible: an unattended tea kettle represents capitalism’s tendency for booms and busts, a lit candle the dialectical opposite of darkness…  L A Review of Books

Kate Evans has produced a graphic biography Red Rosa to bring the life, times and ideas of Rosa Luxemburg alive in a vivid and striking manner text alone will never match for impact and engagement. Philosophy Football

Luxemburg’s discussion of credit under monopoly capitalism is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the capitalist economy crashed in 2007-2008 and why it will crash again.  Her unrelenting opposition to imperial war and disgust with those who call themselves socialist yet support such wars is an inspiration… Counterpunch

Red Rosa by Kate Evans is a work of flat out brilliance; a fuller story of a great life than I’d thought to see. Rosa’s mighty spirit and towering intellect – both much in evidence as she took on Lenin, no less, over the nationalist question – shine through every page… Steel City scribblings.

Evans’ account pays close attention to the social milieu within which Luxemburg operated, along with the political debates that she took part in. I was especially impressed by her presentation of her (and Marx’s) ideas about commodities, class relations, and the contradictions of capitalism.  Her book also does a fine job… New Politics.

Red Rosa is extensively researched and presents the public and private Luxemburg in her own words, taken from her works and letters. It highlights how her thinking on economics was far ahead of its time. Long before the terms “military industrial complex” and “globalisation” were coined, Luxemburg talked about a… Jewish Chronicle.

This superb graphic novel not only succeeds in telling the life story of the Marxist theorist and revolutionary socialist, Rosa Luxemburg, but also manages to advance many of the central tenants behind her beliefs in a clear and concise manner.  She was born to a Jewish family in Poland… The Crack Magazine

Luxemburg sought to “affect people like a clap of thunder” in a political landscape where revolution competed with reform. An obvious question when approaching a new book on Luxemburg is whether her activism still speaks to us today.  After reading Kate Evans’ new graphic novel, Red Rosa, the answer is clearly yes… Beyond Chron.

“There’s only one tiny, limping, Jewish girl spreading the socialist word,” Rosa Luxemburg’s Polish comrades tell her in Kate Evans’s graphic biography, Red Rosa. Rosa Luxemburg’s Jewishness, her gender, her astounding intellect and independence, even her limp, all served to make her notorious among her political enemies; they also made… Bookslut.com

The People’s Shortlist of must-read inspiring books 1) The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell. 2) Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg – Kate Evans. 3) The Moth Snowstorm – Michael McCarthy. 4) Orison for a Curlew – Horatio Clare. 5) 23 Things they Don’t Tell you About Capitalism – Ha Joon Chang… Caroline Lucas

Red Rosa has 23 pages of doubled-columned scholarly notes at the back of the book explaining the basis of virtually every dialogue balloon and every panel of narrative. When you read Red Rosa, flipping between the notes and the narrative, it feels like a hologram of ideas because you see… artsjournal.com

Who was Rosa Luxemburg? In Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg, the artist and writer Kate Evans and editor Paul Buhle have produced a magnificent answer. It provides, with great originality and flair, distinctive dimensions that help us to see Rosa Luxemburg in new ways – a remarkable accomplishment. Paul le Blanc, Socialist Worker

In a recent Morning Star interview with Kate Evans about Red Rosa, her sense of revelation at the richness and topicality of Luxemburg’s political thought and discourse was crystal clear. That sense of sisterhood grew with the design of each page and Evans’s no-holds-barred approach has resulted in a gripping narrative… Morning Star

Red Rosa, a biography of the revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg by Kate Evans (Verso), comes with praise from the cartoonist Steve Bell, Channel 4’s Paul Mason and the writer Barbara Ehrenreich. A touch wordy at times – extensive notes bulk out the text – but… it does a fine job of telling her story. The prison scenes are particularly good…  Observer.

At a time when vilification of the Left is pervasive, and corporate-led capitalism seems to have triumphed resoundingly, squeezing out any space to think about better alternatives, it is good, and necessary, to have Kate Evans’s Red Rosa (Verso, £9.99), a graphic biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Polish-German socialist and Marxist ideologue and founder of the ‘Spartacus League’, which was to…  Independent.

The perfect book for socialist-curious: RED ROSA: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg by Kate Evans, in the spirit of the For Beginners and Introducing graphic novel series. But this book is better! Longer, and with more detail about Luxemberg’s really fascinating life: a supersmart polish immigrant in France/Germany who got her PhD in Economics when most women couldn’t even… Comics Bulletin

She was born Rozalia Luksenburg in Poland in 1871. Against the triple historical whammy of being “a girl, a Jew, a cripple,” as Vivian Gornick put it, she opposed an overpowering intellect and a turbulent commitment to social justice. She became one of the vital thinkers of the 20th century, a Marxist theoretician without peer, a revolutionary passionately opposed to…  Chicago Tribune

The most powerful idea conveyed through the contrasting aesthetics of the novel is that of the dynamic nature of social life in an era of struggle. The very ‘cramped’ and regulated manner by which we are introduced to Rosa’s world is periodically overthrown by rich artistic convulsions that spill across the page and sometimes between them, symbolic renderings of epic events, war and revolution. These shifts in style feel spontaneous, even ecstatic, and they convey the ingenious, unexpected nature of these moments when the masses are making history and not simply being made by it. Red Wedge Magazine