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The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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Editor's Note: King was originally serialized in three seperate graphic novels and is now available from the publisher as one, collected edition. This review reflects the original, serialized presentation.
There’s no doubt that Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was a passionate
leader and a great orator or that he inspired a movement whose effects are
still felt today, 37 years after his assassination. However, Ho Che
Anderson’s graphic biography takes a decidedly humanistic approach to
contrast this legendary view most people have of “ML,” as his friends called
him. He is presented here as a man with inner demons - plagued by his own
ego, prone to excessive drinking, repeatedly unfaithful to his wife, never
completely at ease in the spotlight and burdened with an increasing number
of death threats as his popularity rose. I don’t know how much is true, but
the portrayal is both unsettling and fascinating.
King walks the line between biography and historical fiction. Though
the author appears to have done extensive research, much of the dialogue,
settings and detail were invented. No records exist of the private
conversations that are presented here, and many read like a narrative
summary of events rather than natural conversation. Anderson, aware of this
tension, even writes in the afterward to the third volume “Maybe it’s best
you think of this book as fiction. Think of it as one man’s riff on the life
of another, part truth, part ephemera, a doorway into which I hope you will
trip so that you might look around on your own.” Yet King is much
more than simply “a riff” on another man’s life, it is part homage to a
great man’s achievements, part deconstruction of an icon (a theme
ever-present in the world of comic books) and part artistic exploration.
In many ways, King’s speeches are his greatest legacy and Anderson presents
many of these in their entirety. Re-reading them in little word balloons, the
power of his words to conjure visual images have lost none of their potency.
One of Anderson’s other narrative techniques, referred to as “the
Attestors,” gives voices to the fictional eyewitnesses of the civil rights
movement, brilliantly offering accounts of each of the major events from
varying perspectives (the white supremacist, compassionate Southerner,
etc.).
In the first two volumes, Anderson’s McKean-style artwork makes incredible use
of shadows and mood. The use of color, however, is sporadic, without any
particular pattern. For example, ten pages of black and white story are
followed by a 9 panel page with panel 7 in color. It’s an interesting
experiment, but I found it confusing, wondering why the author chose a
particular panel to color. Wilfred Santiago, Anderson’s co-author on the
short-lived Pop Life series, illustrates 9 pages of volume 2. This
artistic shift further breaks the pace, but if his help was pivotal in
getting the author to finish this book, then he should be thanked rather
than criticized.
The third book, perhaps due to the lengthy gap between volumes, is a drastic
artistic departure from the first two. The beautifully detailed black and
white pencil work is replaced with painted panels and distorted photo
collages. Anderson’s use of photo imagery in this book is a powerful
technique, though it’s diminished slightly by more experimental coloring.
Where in the first two volumes, perhaps 5-10% of the panels were in color,
90% of the third volume is in color. Yet these photographs lend a sense of
realism to the narrative, giving the story historical context and visual
power. When Anderson does pencil a panel, the art is in a much more
simplified style. Although it’s undoubtedly beautiful, reminiscent of Teddy
Kristiansen’s House of Secrets work, when compared to the first two
volumes, it feels rushed, which may have been the case as after 10 years,
the artist must have felt an urgency to finish.
There have been numerous other biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr.
written, and most are more detailed, more adherent to the facts and better
researched. In the historical record, I suspect Anderson’s graphic novel
will have little place beyond a self-indulgent curiosity. However
King is an ambitious personal work, one that regardless of its
historical relevance, stands as a crowning artistic achievement by one of
alternative comics' most talented creators.
As a complete work, the feeling of
inconsistency is an unfortunate distraction from what is otherwise an
excellent graphic novel. The art, though vacillating between multiple styles
and artists, remains always dynamic and visually powerful. If the
inconsistency is a distraction, it can never be faulted for lack of
craftsmanship or inventiveness. Never once does Anderson lose his passion
for the subject matter. Along with Maus by Art Spiegelman,
King is perhaps the greatest graphic biography ever published, and
stands among the best graphic novels, whose scope reaches beyond established
borders and never fears bold experimentation in its storytelling.
Grade: 4.5/5
-- Marc Sobel
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King