Graphic Novel Review: MORE WEIGHT is a monumental achievement in comic book storytelling

More Weight: A Salem Story

Creator: Ben Wickey
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions – IDW Publishing
Release date: September 2025

The memory of the Salem Witch Trials has secured permanent residence in the collective psyche of the United States, despite them having occurred before the idea of independence even started germinating in the colonies. It explains too much about American attitudes towards truth and paranoia. It’s a wound that never fully heals because it keeps changing shape to remain relevant.

Ben Wickey’s More Weight: A Salem Story is a monumental and exhaustive attempt at capturing the innermost details of this foundational event and how the things it wrought persevered over time to continue being one of the key components of the American experience. Perseverance is not meant be seen as a net positive here. It points to a kind of haunting that refuses to loosen its grasp on the country’s history.

More Weight is set in three different centuries. It focuses on The Witch Trials of 1692, on authors Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as they reflect on their connections with Salem in the 1860s, and on Wickey’s own struggles with the town and its long gestating “Witch City” identity in the present time. While each section is given attention, it’s the Witch Trials that get larger piece of the pie. The reason for that lies in a real-life character called Giles Corey.

Corey is an interesting figure. He was accused of witchcraft along with his wife, suffering through the terrible consequences of being accused of such a thing. What makes him remarkable, though, is how the last part of his story unfolded. He was pressed to death over the course of three days for not taking a plea of either guilty or not guilty when he faced judgment. Whenever someone from the judges’ side tried to get him to plead his guilt or his innocence during the torture process, Giles would respond “more weight.” The judges obliged.

It’s hard not to think of Alan Moore’s From Hell when reading Wickey’s book. There’s a sense of ‘big picture’ anxiety coursing through its characters as they worry over how the Witch Trials will mark their moment in time and how badly it’ll all fester in the grand scheme of things.

Whereas From Hell (a story that looks at the demise of perceived notions of order and decency in Victorian England during the Jack the Ripper killings) is concerned with the architecture of history and how the past creates sacred altars to itself, More Weight approaches history as a series of injuries and badly healed scars that seem destined to infect future generations with the same darkness they lay the foundations for.

Wickey illustrates this with a cartoony sensibility that makes the cruelties of the trials hit with more force because of the ease of access the character designs afford readers with. It’s like a cartoon gone wrong, but with enough of the style to carry it through. It’s not unlike how illustrator Edward Gorey blended cartooning with disturbing subject matter. The effect is ultimately one of unsettlement.

The visuals change for the Hawthorn and Wadsworth Longfellow sections, where characters and location are portrayed with a stronger sense of realism. The approach marks a distinctive shift between time periods that allows readers to interrogate Salem and its history on different registers. The same applies to the present time, where the town is presented at its most tourist-friendly to frame legacy as an unstable construct that knows how to hide in plain sight when it needs to.

Wickey also showcases great use of colors. They’re deliberately used to signal the arrival of more complex and abstract ideas that require a different thought process to engage with. More importantly, they serve to comment on the philosophical distances between the historical time periods. The further away from the trials, the brighter the colors. This isn’t used as an indicator of things changing for the better, though. Instead, it communicates history’s ability to blend in and survive as new national distractions arise. It shows just how much story one can pack in colors.

More Weight is a triumph. It earns its place as one of the best studies of the Salem Witch Trials in recent times, notably for its ability to bring the past right to our very doorsteps. It deserves to be spoken in the same breath as Alan Moore’s From Hell, both in terms of scope and narrative complexity. More Weight has earned the right to be included in any talk of a new comics cannon. It’s not often the medium gets a fresh classic of this magnitude, one that immediately becomes a fundamental read. Ben Wickey has succeeded in producing just that with this commanding book.

More Weight is available now

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