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Today, we look at the excellent first book of the follow-up to March, Run, by the late John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, L. Fury and Nate Powell.
In “Reason to Get Excited,” I spotlight things from modern comics that I think are worth getting excited about. I mean stuff more specific than “this comic is good,” ya know? More like a specific bit from a writer or artist that impressed me.
March by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell is one of the greatest graphic novels of the past few decades. It told the story of the late Representative John Lewis and his time in the Civil Rights movement leading up to the March on Selma and the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1965. I’ve written about it a number of times over the years, but here’s a snippet of one of my pieces to give you an idea of how good March was:
Outside of the fascinating life story of Lewis himself, the greatest strength of the book is the work of Nate Powell, who uses the black and white nature of the book beautifully as he embraces the power of negative space to make some striking visuals….It really grabs you in the gut….Such is the case for much of the story, as Lewis, Aydin and Powell really know how to make the story seem so visceral that you cannot help but become affected by the story, to feel the anguish and the dread that comes from, say, a drive through the south in the early 1950s (when Lewis goes on a trip with his Uncle to Buffalo) or the hopes of Lewis when Brown versus the Board of Education came down or the disappointment when Lewis realizes that he cannot put his family through the trauma of an attempt by him to integrate Troy State University (something Martin Luther King was willing to back, but only if Lewis and his family understood the sacrifice they and their neighbors would have to make – a sacrifice Lewis’ family was not yet prepared to make) or the severe determination it must have taken to not react when the Nasvhille police allowed angry white students come into the Woolworths to attack and degrade the protesters.
After an introductory section of the first book of Run, Powell gives the book over to the new artist on the series, L. Fury (Powell also did lettering on Run with Chris Ross).
Run is a worthy successor to March, and in a way, it is almost a more vital work, because as excellent as March was (and it was excellent), the story of the Civil Rights Act has thankfully seen an increase of coverage in popular culture, while the work done AFTER the Civil Rights Act often seems to almost get a “and they all lived happily ever” postscript, which we all know is obviously not the case and so Run goes into detail on the next steps and it is striking in how frank the late representative was in this work (Lewis passed away last year, but he had already approved the scripts and finished pages for nearly the entire series by that point). Lewis truly gets down to the nitty gritty of what it is like in organizations that deliberate in committees, but he accurately explains how DRAMATIC these moments can be.
The main gist of this first book is to show how out of place Lewis was starting to feel at the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, where he was the chairman but he was starting to feel like it was a struggle against the newer voices. He goes to visit Selma on the one-year anniversary of the March on Selma, and it is striking how much it feels like nothing really has changed since their major victory in the Civil Rights Act (the Watts protests, for instance, broke out just DAYS after the Voting Rights Act passed).
Lewis gives us so much insight into his feeling at the time, and since he was SO involved in the movement, you get viewpoints that you really can’t get from anyone else. For instance, how many people would be able to tell the story of the tragic shooting of James Meredith and add in that he felt that Meredith was a strange guy….
The protests after the Meredith shooting, though, shows how many differences there are between Lewis and Martin Luther King and the non-violent movement and the younger, more aggressive voices in the crowd, like Stokely Carmichael, who replaced Lewis as the head of SNCC after a dramatic sequence where Lewis was initially re-elected but Worth Long, an Alabama staff member, made a speech demanding a new vote and Carmichael won the re-vote.
Lewis doesn’t blanche from showing the passion of the people who think that he was the wrong choice for leadership while, of course, not saying that he thinks that he is wrong. He supports his own positions, naturally, he just isn’t afraid of showing the positions of the people who were against him (while at the same time, there is a fascinating riff where Lewis tries to guess if one of his enemies put Long up to his speech).
L. Fury really excels at the big dramatic scenes, like Carmichael sort of kind of introducing the concept of “Black Power”…
She really captures that Powell visceral nature of the art well.
By the end of the book, Lewis is at a low point in his life, but he has the passion to know what his next step will be (there is a lot in the volume about Julian Bond’s early political career, which is fascinating knowing what will happen in the “future” between him and Lewis).
Run continues to meet the high standards of March with its standards of history (the attention to detail is STUNNING. There’s even a whole section on how they came up with the various pieces of dialogue so people don’t think they’re being unfair at all) but also its powerful narrative that speaks to us all. Highly recommended.
Okay, this feature is a bit less of a reader-interactive one, as I’m just spotlight stuff in modern comics that specifically impressed ME, but heck, if you’d like to send in some suggestions anyways, maybe you and I have the same taste! It’s certainly not improbable that something you found cool would be something that I would find cool, too, so feel free to send ideas to me at brianc@cbr.com!
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