King a comics biography sample

Review by Ian Keogh

It’s strange there’s been no American graphic distillation of Angela Davis and her achievements, so there’s a welcome for this French project from Sybelle Titeux de la Croix and Améziane, who’s become Amazing since earlier translated work.

Davis has lived a life fighting for better conditions and treatment for people she believes don’t get a fair shake in the USA, and protesting against other iniquities, first coming to prominence voicing opposition to the Vietnam War.

A conflated narrative voice is used alongside quotes from Davis’ own writings after a jump back to her childhood recollections of hatred and injustice. The presentation indicates this isn’t a standard biography, but a collection of flashpoints, almost all of which occurred during the s or further back, so this is no comfort memoir either, showing how everything turned out okay in the end. However, regarding the Davis that became known to the public it’s thorough. As it progresses a parallel social history is introduced, detailing the events and protests that motivate Davis as it tracks her life through college. In places de la Croix uses a pinboard method of conjoining events mixing quotes with news reports and personal recollections for a novel educational brew.

Améziane’s approach is equally startling. He uses a broad palette of imaginative artistic techniques beyond commonplace storytelling from cheery cartoon newspaper strips to explain counter-intelligence procedures to a trial presented in the form of courtroom sketches. There’s an awful lot going on in the complex sample page from the visual allegory of the park fence, not the only time substitute bars are seen, to the scared children in the back of the car, yet the actual drawing is simple and clear. Such stark, yet eye-catching illustration forms a statement maintained throughout, whether the pages read across a spread or down.

Much of Davis’ story beggars belief, and for people who don’t know about the events the

Honoring an American Hero

Two years ago, as Donald Trump was ushered in as president he was also simultaneously responsible for skyrocketing sales of March, the graphic novelization of the life of civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis. Inadvertently responsible, to be sure.

Nevertheless, it gained an incredible bump of more than one hundred thousand percent. And any escalation in literacy is cause for celebration these days. Especially when it encompasses visual literacy. And even more particularly so when the book pays tribute to someone who continues stand up against racism more than 50 years after having been beaten and arrested for peacefully protesting.

So it seems time to revisit a related graphic novel bio, groundbreaking and critically acclaimed when first released, on the life of Lewis’s mentor and marching buddy. I’m referring here to King: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Intense, Energetic Expressiveness

Like March, King began as a three-part serialized comic book. The first issue hit the stands back in , and the last in Four years later it was collected and bound as a volume. But King also differentiates itself in a number of ways. Artist/writer Ho Che Anderson honors Reverend King’s visions, methods, and enormous achievements, but doesn’t overlook the flaws and shortcomings. His book is a complex, critical profile of the public and personal life of a complicated and conflicted man struggling through a tense and turbulent era. It’s often stunning in its bold layouts and experimental compositions and its intense, energetic expressiveness. Much of Anderson’s art evokes the avant-garde brilliance of Bill Sienkiewicz, of Electra Assassin and Stray Toasters fame. And speaking of Sienkiewicz, his “Shadowplay,” a history of CIA’s covert operations authored by Alan Moore and published in Brought to Light, makes an excellent companion piece.

It’s also worth noting that Anderson’s book is educational as well as entertaining. For instanc

Review by Win Wiacek

There are books to read, books you should read, some perhaps, more controversially, that you shouldn’t, and there are important books. The still relatively new field of graphic novels has many of the first but precious few really important books yet.

It’s hard enough to get noticed within the industry as simply excelling at your craft is not enough, but when we do generate something wonderful, valid, powerful, true to our medium yet simultaneously breaking beyond into the wide world and making a mark, the reviews from that appreciative greater market come thick and fast. That was the case for Ho Che Anderson’s superbly comprehensive examination of the man that lived beside – not “behind” or “within” – the modern myth of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Over the course of ten years () Canadian cartoonist Anderson struggled to produce three comics propounding a less hagiographic perspective of a man who was as much sinner as saint. King’s determination, passion, energy and often sheer luck (or divine inspiration?) drove a cleansing wedge into a rotting, repressive, stifled society. He succeeded in opening enough doors for America’s racial underclass, so that forty years later a black American could be elected to govern the World’s greatest superpower. Not that four decades is so brief an interlude, but how many European or white Commonwealth countries can boast that their highest echelons of power have made even that much progress?

In both stark black and white and mesmerising colour, Anderson uses all the strengths and tools of sequential narrative to reveal, relate, question and challenge the oft-recounted facts of the Georgia Pastor’s life. This magnificent volume is available in luxurious hardcover and all-purpose digital editions, and was originally released to celebrate Barack Obama’s – and the American people’s – landmark achievement.

Gathered into one compelling tome is this hard-crafted triptych of issues, including restored extra and dele

A landmark graphic novel about the civil rights leader, complete in one volume.

This groundbreaking body of comics journalism collects Anderson's entire biography of the renowned civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Over a decade in the making, the saga has been praised for its vivid recreation of one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history and for its accuracy in depicting the personal and public lives of King, from his birth to his assassination. King probes the life story of one of America's greatest public figures with an unflinchingly critical eye, casting King as an ambitious, dichotomous figure deserving of his place in history but not above moral sacrifice to get there. Anderson's expressionistic visual style is wrought with dramatic energy; panels evoke a painterly attention to detail but juxtapose with one another in such a way as to propel King's story with cinematic momentum. Anderson's successful use of the graphic novel to tell a major work of nonfiction has drawn favorable comparisons to Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale, Joe Sacco's Palestine, and Osamu Tezuka's Adolph.

King not only recreates the major events in King's public life, but chronicles the daily, rough-and-tumble, behind-the-scenes political maneuverings and strategic compromises that were required to mobilize millions of people toward a common goal. His internal debates with Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson and his hardball negotiations with John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson are dramatized. Anderson's achievement is not merely a political biography filled with names and dates, but a fully rounded portrait of a fallible human engaged in a superhuman effort his fears, his doubts, his relationship with his wife Coretta King, and his children are compassionately and truthfully rendered.

Anderson's visual approach includes the use of photographs, realistic portraiture, and expressionistic imagery alternating between stark black a