King (Vol. II) - Softcover

Anderson, Ho Che

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560974966 ISBN 13: 9781560974963

Publisher: Fantagraphics, 2002

Synopsis

Ho Che Anderson's controversial second graphic novel based on the life of the revered civil rights leader. The long-awaited sequel to the graphic novel biography of the life and career of civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., which will ultimately trace the life of the late civil rights leader from his birth to assassination. Winner of a 1995 Parents' Choice Award, yet decidedly controversial, speculative and intended for adults, King Volume I garnered extensive press coverage and was Fantagraphics' best-selling book in the company's history when published in 1992. King Volume II picks up where King Volume I left off, probing King's life story with an unflinchingly critical eye, casting King as an ambitious, dichotomous figure deserving of his place in history but not above moral sacrifice to get there. Anderson's expressionistic visual style is wrought with dramatic energy; panels evoke a painterly attention to detail but juxtapose with one another in such a way as to propel King's story with cinematic momentum. Anderson's successful use of the graphic novel 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.

About this title

About the Author

Ho Che Anderson lives in Toronto, Canada. His books include King, Scream Queen, and Sand and Fury.

From Publishers Weekly

It's been nearly 10 years since the enormously talented Anderson published the first of a projected three-volume interpretive (and often speculative) comics biography of Martin Luther King Jr., but the second volume is well worth the wait. Anderson picks up where he left off. It's 1958, and King awakes in Harlem Hospital after being stabbed by a deranged black woman. Anderson quickly delves into the contentious debates between the elder SCLC organizers and the impatient young SNCC activists. In graphically expressionistic b&w vignettes, Anderson offers a powerful recreation of the Civil Rights movement's seminal events and King's role in them. From 1961's interracial bus rides to the 1963 march on Birmingham and King's now-legendary speech at the Lincoln Memorial, each historic moment is captured through Anderson's terse, confrontational dialogue constructed to both identify the incident and capture its emotional toll and his brittle graphic virtuosity. He's dramatized the Civil Rights movement though its failings and factional disputes as much as through its mythlike social triumphs. He presents JFK's as well as ordinary black people's reservations about King and uses King's personal failings his womanizing and domestic conflicts with Coretta to provide a study of a magnificent social movement through a candid portrait of its greatest symbolic figure. As in volume one, Anderson combines illustrations and photocopy collage in a rugged chiaroscuro comics style. Without quite achieving the visual brilliance of the first volume, in which every panel seemed designed to graphic and narrative perfection, Anderson's illustrational powers remain eye-poppingly formidable in this new work.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fantagraphics
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1560974966
• ISBN 13: 9781560974963
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 69