King

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 A Survivor’s Tale and Joe Sacco’s Safe Area The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995.