King: A Comics Biography, Special Edition

By Ho Che Anderson

Book Overview

Ho Che Anderson has spent over 10 years researching, writing, and drawing King , a monumental graphic biography that liberates Martin Luther King Jr. from the saintly, one-dimensional, hagiographic image so prevalent in pop culture. Here is King--father, husband, politician, deal broker, idealist, pragmatist, inspiration to millions--brought to vivid, flesh-and-blood life. Out of print since 2006, King is Fantagraphics' most-requested reprint. In recognition of the advances made in American social equality that has made it possible to elect America's first black President, Fantagraphics Books is publishing King: The Special Edition , a newly designed volume that includes the original 240-page graphic biography, as well as nearly a hundred additional pages of "extras," including: "Black Dogs" is a 14-page prelude to King , a dialogue between a young black couple expecting a child, living in LA in the aftermath of the Rodney King upheaval, a raw and inflected conversation between husband and wife and their racial attitudes in a post-King world; Excerpts from the diary and notebook the author kept when researching and writing King , with interstitial notes written specifically for this volume commenting on the method he used to conceived and execute the book; Preparatory sketches, discarded images and pages, an interview conducted at the time of the third volume's publication, and excerpts from the draft of the script; An epilogue titled "Assassin," written and drawn for this new edition, in which Anderson explores the question of whether James Earl Ray actually shot King. Caroline Longstreet, one of the observers who comments on King's life throughout the book, is obsessed with the assassination, won't let it rest, and pursues her own private investigation and ultimately confronts the reasons why it's held her in its grip so long. Anderson's biography traces King's life from his childhood in Atlanta and his education at Booker T. Washington High School, and his subsequent centrality to the civil rights movement when, in 1955, he organized the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott; his founding of the Southern Christian leadership Conference in 1957; his Nobel Prize in 1964; his help in organizing the 1966 March on Washington and his "I Have a Dream" speech; and the tragic moment on April 4, 1968 when he was shot dead on the balcony of the Loraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. Anderson's expressionistic visual style is wrought with dramatic energy; panels evoke a painterly attention to detail but whose juxtapositions propel King's story with cinematic momentum. Anderson's successful use of the comics form to tell a major work of nonfiction has drawn favorable comparisons to Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale and Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995 . King won a 1995 Parents' Choice Award.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1606993100
• ISBN13: 9781606993101
• Release Date: February 2010
• Publisher: Fantagraphics
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 2.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.3" x 1.1" x 7.7"
• Age Range: 16 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 11 and higher

Customer Reviews

Not a plaster saint

Anderson's style is so impressionistic that you would have to know the basic facts of King's life and career to get much out of it. That being said, this book is not another hagiography of King as a non-threatening figure whose message was that we should all be polite to each other. Anderson's King gets angry, gets hungry, gets horny, has periods of crippling despair; in other words, he was a human being. But he also stubbornly held onto what he felt was right, often in the face of powerful opposition. And make no mistake about it: charlatans and dolts like Bush II may invoke his name now, but Anderson makes clear that when he was alive, not everyone was standing around applauding. The King we see here is almost as polarizing a figure as, well, Jesus. After reading it, I understand anew why M.L. King was a great, if not a perfect, man.

Powerful and gripping

The starkness of Ho Che Andersen's artwork is fitting in that it serves to heighten the mythological feel of King's life, which contrasts with the intimate portrait we get of the man and his daily struggles. The mixture of photography montage, black and white sketch work and the occassional, startling splash of color is mezmerizing. I don't know enough to comment on the historical accuracy of Andersen's work; the first volume of King was released in 1993 and it took the author a decade more to finish. This is a labor of love foremost, and the author's passion manages to leap off the page at you. That Andersen has avoided the pettiness of humanizing King is no small miracle - the biography genre routinely suffers from trivializing those it portrays in an effort to make them seem more familiar. My only complaint is the paraphrasing of much of King's "mountaintop speech" given the night before his death in Memphis. The speech is too long to be included in its entirety, but having listened to the audio clips of that speech too many times to recall I found Andersen's version lacking. I suppose this is only to be expected, but nonetheless I would have loved to have seen a few more pages devoted to what I consider a rhetorical masterpiece, and easily one of the greatest speeches ever given in America. If you've never heard it before, do your best to download it or otherwise listen to King at the height of his power; it is a speech much informed by the gift of sight and of prescience, and is all the more moving and remarkable for the last stanzas. If you are as fascinated with Martin Luther King as I am, I cannot recommend this work enough. Go out and buy it, and marvel, and remember one of the most pivotal figures of the twentieth century whose message should be heeded no matter the era.