King by Ho Che Anderson
I remember this coming out as a three part series, those issues were being called 'graphic novels' but I called bullshit on that. They were slightly thicker comic books with a card-stock cover and they were marketing them as graphic novels in an attempt to get somebody to buy them. I skipped on them because I knew full well that they'd be collected into one thick book.
It was and that's the book I'm reviewing now.
King is a string of stories about the man put together. Things he accomplished, conversations in hotel rooms. Quite often Anderson puts these little faces telling their POV of the man, sometimes it's a black woman praising him, sometimes it's a racist white guy. While the dialog is believable they don't appear to be from anybody real. They do a good job of breaking up the stories. Without them, the stories tend to run together with no real breaking point. One panel they'll be in mid conversation and the next they'll be talking about something different. You get taken back a bit and have to look again to realize what's going on. This broke up my reading experience a number of times which made for bad flow for reading.
I've heard Anderson say in an interview that he didn't consider himself to be a great artist. He's right, he's not. The characters are all drawn with sharp angular lines with little to no facial features to distinguish the characters. Occasionally a picture is put in and I wished I had seen more of them.. this could have been a decently done fumetti.
The book starts with stark black and white, to give you a feel for the times and the views. As it progresses splashes of colors are used then finally it's all color with different folks having dedicated word balloons colors. This happens particularly when the civil rights movement begins the fragment off from violent and non-violent factions. MLJ was a very strong proponent of non-violence but towards the later half of the 60's there was a strong belief in that violent protests & riots would get them the results they wanted and fast. King fought against this but towards the end he was having his doubts and there was one instance where violence appeared to have worked.
After reading this I do come away with a better appreciation of King and the book is very good on that account. Even when violence was growing in favor, he stuck to his ground and tried hard to prove to the world non-violent protests would win out over violence. It was at this time Martin becomes a victim of violence and is assassinated.
One major problem I had with this book was the pages becoming unglued and it fell apart at me at the end. There is also a giant weird out of place word balloon saying "please keep this color scheme when you change the font." in page 180. It looks like something an editor stuck in there but forgot to remove. Typically Fantagraphics (the publisher) has much better production values but whomever handled this book dropped the ball.
I give this book a 3 out of 5.