Rep. John Lewis's Civil Rights Memoir Concludes in March Book Three

By Vince Brusio and Mark Banaszak

John Lewis, the Democratic Congressman from Georgia, has been at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement since his days as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s, and in his graphic novel trilogy March he has powerfully recreated the turbulent struggle to secure equal rights for African Americans in the South and nationwide.

The March trilogy concludes in March Book Three (JUN160408) from IDW Publishing/Top Shelf Productions. This volume takes the story of the Civil Rights Movement from the summer and autumn of 1963, including the famous March on Washington, through the Mississippi Freedom Summer and the important March on Selma that culminated in "Bloody Sunday" when Alabama state troopers brutally attacked the peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

The graphic images of the violence would shock the nation and give renewed strength to the Civil Rights movement, and Lewis, along with cowriter Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell, capture this powerful moment in March Book Three. The work of the Civil Rights Movement is still incomplete, a half-century since Bloody Sunday, and with March Lewis reflects on how the actions of a few became a movement that continues to work tirelessly to fulfill the promise of America, where all are created equal.

PREVIEWSworld talked with March artist Nate Powell about the concluding volume, and his experience in bringing Rep. Lewis's struggles to life in what may be defining imagery for many readers.

Get March Book Three (JUN160408) now at your local comic shop!

PREVIEWSworld: What did you learn during this experience? Has your art changed (in style or approach) and if so, how so?

Nate Powell: This collaboration was life-changing in many ways. On a basic level it was like getting paid to study the Movement. Along the way I’ve constantly reevaluated and reflected on my Southern, Generation X assumptions about growing up with some working knowledge of civil rights history, and as a dad I spend a lot of time processing what that means for my own kids, born in the 2010’s, how they will grow into and through the world, what sense of continuity with history they will develop, and how to integrate that sense of history into their Midwestern kids' world.

Stylistically, I think I remained pretty consistent throughout the trilogy, but my craft and discipline became shockingly efficient as deadlines became tighter and tighter, and as the narrative demands of the books grew and changed, particularly in Books Two and Three. By the end of it, I doubled the rate at which I drew pages, finding wiggle room wherever possible to explore new ways of inking, lettering, or layout. Now that it’s wrapped, it's been so liberating to work on my own book and other projects with whatever formal and stylistic changes I've been waiting to apply.

PREVIEWSworld: In Book Three, there are incidents of beatings and murders of activists, but also the ultimate victory of the Civil Rights movement. What was your experience detailing these events, and did it have an effect on you?

Nate Powell: Book Three covered so much ground as the Movement expanded in scope and scale that we were all pretty anxious about our ability to shape that into a compelling single volume. Andrew did such a fantastic job wading through an endless lake of interviews and research, pushing along the narrative threads and finding connections without cutting content—in fact, I have no idea how, but he totally pulled it off. The third book is somehow even darker than the second, and the sense of danger, loss, and paranoia is almost overwhelming at times—but again, these were the times in which my thoughts were aimed towards the fact that this all unfolded in our world, with, amongst, and despite our neighbors, our families, our friends. During the darkness, the confusion, the hopelessness I was ultimately connecting 1964 with 2016, connecting my parents' world in Mississippi to that of my daughters today. March will forever impact me in that way, and has already indelibly shaped how my 4-year-old navigates the world.

PREVIEWSworld: Your work on March has created a concrete visual reference for a period of time that occurred before many of the people reading the book were born. How does it feel knowing that your work will form many readers' ideas of these events?

Nate Powell: Wow, it's only by reading this question that I've consciously processed that. Work on Book Three was so intensive, such an all-consuming collaboration amongst the entire team, that there’s been virtually no room for reflection. At the drawing table I've always tried to be mindful of using my skillset to tell Congressman Lewis' story-- itself the story of hundreds of thousands of active, involved people like him—and balancing the intimate, highly subjective personal elements of the story with accurate, responsible accounts of history. But in a sense, the execution of that balance determines hundreds of thousands of readers' ability to both imagine and identify with its contents. It's pretty daunting, really— I'm glad I was usually too busy to reflect on it.

PREVIEWSworld: Now that you've finished this trilogy, would you want to work on another non-fiction/historical work, or are you looking forward to creating some fiction books?

Nate Powell: I'm always open to it, though fiction comics are typically what I like to read, create, and consume. One of my next projects, a book called Two Dead with writer Van Jensen, has fictional components within the script, but is based on real-life events. It explores the unfolding of a bizarre, mind-shredding, dangerous partnership between two detectives in my hometown of Little Rock in 1947, and heavily incorporates the dynamics of fully segregated police departments in the Jim Crow South, organized crime in Arkansas at the end of the mobster era, and the unspoken and underreported plagues of PTSD amongst World War II veterans who faced massive challenges as they tried to reintegrate into society.

My next solo book is called Cover and is fiction, but my work on March, particularly learning how to research, and how to jump down rabbit holes of interest, definitely changed how I've approached writing and world-building. It’s been really satisfying to carve the environment out of a number of personal interests and connections with late-1970's Arkansas.