More Weight: A Salem Story by Ben Wickey

In More Weight, artist and writer Ben Wickey tells a story of the terrible year of 1692, where neighbors suddenly turned on each other and innocent people were killed by the state simply because they were convicted of witchcraft. Shifting through time, we follow the Salem Witch Trials through the eyes of Giles Corey, and, to a lesser extent, his wife Martha. In spring of 1692, Giles attends one of the first trials and is taken in by the claims of the young women, swayed by their actions, and basically gets swept up into the whole thing. When Martha dismisses the whole thing as lies and superstition, Giles begins to wonder if she could be a witch, and ultimately brings an accusation of witchcraft against her to those leading the trials, who then arrest her. But Giles himself isn't exempt from the hysteria, and is eventually accused and arrested himself. Interwoven into the story of the Coreys are interludes set not quite 200 years later, as Nathanial Hawthorne escorts Henry Wadsworth Longfellow through Salem. Hawthorne, a native of Salem, had his own connections to the trials through an ancestor, John Hathorne, who was one of the judges. The two writers discuss Salem, the state of post-Civil War America, their writing, and their own losses as they wander the city under the guise of Hawthorne helping Longfellow in researching the trials for a play in verse on Giles Corey that Longfellow is writing. Bracketing the whole thing is Wickey's musings about modern-day Salem as the city gradually fills with tourists ready to celebrate Halloween in a place synonymous with witches and all things spooky, before diving deep through the post-witch trial history of Salem, Massachusetts, and the United States as a whole.

This is the kind of graphic novel that really showcases the versatility of the comics format, and the pure artistry that goes into telling stories in this way. Wickey gives each time period of the story its own art style and set of colors, making it easy to distinguish which part of the story you're getting next. The trials are done in black and white, with the figures more simply drawn, reminiscent of linocut printing. Hawthorne and Longfellow's story includes color, though everything is a little muddy, like an old postcard, and the characters look more like the engravings that would have been done for newspapers and magazines of that time period. The modern day parts are clearly more in line with Wickey's personal style of drawing, and feature saturated, almost jewel-toned colors.

What really drew me in was the story and the depth of research that went into it. Many of us have probably learned something about the Salem Witch Trials in history class, but how many of us can actually say that we understand the full history of the Salem Witch Trials? I know I didn't know much beyond the basics: young girls began acting strangely, accusing others, mainly women, of witchcraft, and many of those accused were convicted and killed. The fuller story is, of course, much more nuanced than that, and Wickey goes to great lengths to include all of that historical detail, using primary sources, information from experts, and much more to craft this story. This is very evident in the portion of the book near the end where he moves the story away from 1692 and lays out everything that happened afterwards. Instead of just focusing on certain details as they relate to the trials, or only giving a partial timeline, he crafts a comprehensive history that moves through 300+ years to bring us to the present day. There is some editorializing - part of that comprehensive history does critique how not much effort was made to stop people from linking witches to Salem and using it for tourism, and he also dismisses some of the theories that have been proposed to explain why the accusers acted the way they did. But I think what really struck me is the subtle argument he makes as he lays out this post-witch trial history, which is that when we don't fully examine our actions, when we don't take steps to understand what happened and why it happened, it leaves space for people to paper over things, forget who was harmed, and allow misinformation in. Wickey makes it clear that once the trials were over and everyone involved began to realize what they had just done, limited efforts were made to apologize and correct the injustice that was done. In fact, it wasn't until 2022 that the last victim was formally exonerated.

This was one of my favorite books that I read in 2025, and I highly recommend it. If you're looking for books to read that tie into America 250, or are into history in general, definitely pick this one up.

Take a Breath, Big Red Monster! By Ed Emberley

A fun companion book to the bestselling classic Go Away, Big Green Monster shows kids how to calm down with more than ten interactive peek-a-boo pages.  Strategies include taking deep breaths, closing your eyes and imagining a cooling rain.  With very colorful pages, kids preschool through school age will love this book and may ask you to read it over and over again.

-Julie B.