Announced just before the weekend by Publishers Weekly, Fantagraphics have secured the rights to R. E. Burke’s graphic memoir Visiting America: 19 Days in an I.C.E. Facility. As long-term Broken Frontier readers will be aware Rebecca was a much-valued member of the BF team between 2020 and 2023 so her unjust incarceration at the hands of ICE early last year, which was extensively reported by the national press including the BBC, hit particularly hard in these parts.
R. E. Burke at the Battle of Wonk Fair in 2024 – Photo by Lydia Turner
The circumstances of her ordeal will be familiar to most already but if you are unaware Rebecca ended up wrongly imprisoned in a detention centre, after being refused entry into Canada while on a backpacking holiday. Last year at BF we reviewed a sampler excerpt of her work-in-progress book, self-published as Diary of a Detainee, which you can read here on the site. I said of it then: “This is clearly the beginning of a project that is not just vitally important as another record of the ongoing collapse of society and democracy in the United States but also a fiercely articulate piece of comics practice.”
Visiting America will tell not just Rebecca’s story but also the stories of some of those she was incarcerated with. The book will be published in 2027 and, given current events in the US, seems ever more relevant with each passing day. Undoubtedly this is going to be one of the key releases of next year.
