The rest of the trilogy follows Lewis’ early life as a civil rights activist, covering his response to the death of Emmett Till in 1955 and his endorsement of the signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As a young boy, in 1951, Lewis took a trip to New York with his Uncle Otis this glimpse into the world outside the South changed him: “After that trip,” he writes, “home never felt the same, and neither did I.” March begins with Lewis’ early life in Pike County, AL-where he took care of his family’s chickens, building them an incubator, preaching to them, even baptizing them. In addition to Lewis’ early civil rights contributions, the trilogy depicts political leaders such as Diane Nash, and, of course, the “Big Six” the illustrations put faces to these important names. It’s one thing to read about the Freedom Riders’ bus going up in flames, but another to see a rendering of it. In a technical sense, their collaboration is lucid and digestible: Lewis’ words are direct, and Powell’s illustrations make the events they describe particularly accessible.
What would underpin the narrative, however, were strategies for action, boldly illustrated. He also persuaded Lewis, who had already published Walking With the Wind: Memoir of the Movement (1998), that comics was a compelling medium for this firsthand account of the Civil Rights Movement. Lewis’ collaborators on March were comics creator Nate Powell and Congressional aide Andrew Aydin Aydin wrote his master’s thesis on the 16-page Montgomery Story. Although ignored by mainstream comics companies, t he Montgomery Story enjoyed grassroots distribution and popularity. March is the illustrated autobiography of Georgia Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis, and it takes inspiration partly from Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a short 1950s comic book that shows how nonviolent resistance by Rosa Parks and participants in the Montgomery bus boycott could function as tools for desegregation. In the year since its appearance, the work has only gained relevance. Book Three of the March graphic memoir trilogy arrived in summer 2016-the season of Orlando, Brexit, Zika, the mediated dawn of the “alt-right,” and the killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling.
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