For this week's talk on representation in comics I read March, a graphic novel by Andrew Aydin and Roy Lewis in which Congressman and Civil Rights activist John Lewis tells the story of his life.
When reading March, I found myself constantly comparing it to Art Spiegelman's Maus. Both comics deal with a man narrating his experiences navigating a time of great turmoil in human rights, but they are executed in very different ways.
Where Spiegelman tends to transcribe everything about his father in Maus regardless of whether or not those details are directly relevant, March is more streamlined. Even when it deals with issues in Lewis's life that aren't directly related to the Civil Rights movement, those details are a vital part of understanding Lewis himself and how he came to be the activist and Congressman--like when we see him preaching to his chickens and protesting their deaths. I think March can have this tighter focus (which I found to be very preferable, and more readable) because it is following Lewis's life very closely, while Maus was often covering the much larger scope of both the father's story and the Holocaust as a whole.
I thought the art in March did a great job contributing to the story as well. Through visuals like future protestors spitting on each other to test themselves, a judge silently turning away from a black lawyer, to a phone ringing with dark news taking up an entire, black page, I found that the art in March made me empathize much more than I usually do in comics. The frank visuals made me start to feel some of the discomfort and oppressiveness that is felt by the characters throughout the comic. In this way March definitely helped me understand the greater scope of what comics can accomplish--if I was reading a biography of Lewis's life instead of March, I don't think I would be nearly as invested.
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