In the Shadow of Stalin: The Story of Mr. Jones

The crusading journalist who inspired George Orwell’s Animal Farm searches for a story and finds hell in this propulsive if uneven nonfiction graphic narrative scripted by Gaslit Nation podcaster Chalupa (Dictatorship). In 1933, bright-eyed Welsh journalist Gareth Jones goes on a fact-finding mission to the Soviet Union. Once in Moscow, Jones finds that nobody is willing to go on the record about the Communists’ mysteriously funded “spending spree” on “new tanks and planes [during a] global economic collapse” or why New York Times correspondent William Duranty—depicted as a monstrously craven Soviet dictation machine—was murdered when he started asking the same questions. After sneaking away from his minder to Ukraine, Jones uncovers grim evidence of the Holodomor famine. Chalupa’s script delivers the horrors of what Jones found (including roving bands of cannibals) in a short but pulverizing sequence. The thicket of obfuscation Jones battles to bring this story to the world is nearly as damning as the inhumanity he witnessed. Unfortunately, Rodriguez’s art can feel staid in some sections. Still, this is a rousing yet haunting portrait of journalistic idealism. (Sept.)