As comics literature goes, only a handful of books can top Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby, a fictionalized memoir of growing up gay in Alabama in the era of Freedom Riders and bus boycotts. But Cruse had the luxury of writing about himself. For the graphic novel King, cartoonist Ho Che Anderson covers some of the same ground as Cruse, but Anderson is shackled by the inherent problems of tackling the preeminent civil-rights icon. In some ways, Martin Luther King is almost too easy a subject, because even some bigots see him as the "good" crusader. He naturally appeals to those nostalgic for the cut-and-dried righteousness of non-violent marches and sit-ins. He's a hard man to humanize.
King biographers tend to rough him up by delving into his extramarital affairs, but though Anderson doesn't shy away from that aspect of King's life, King offers a more subtle and expansive critique. The book depicts the thousands of petty details that pepper a natural-born leader, as King negotiates with parishioners and presidents, each with their own idea about the right time to take action. King captures the heady rush of political change as the '50s slip into the '60s, colonialism collapses abroad, and America's oppressed minorities start to pay heed to the revolution. The story peaks with the March On Washington and King's "I Have A Dream" speech. Then Anderson spends the last third of King's 240 pages showing how the political capital of that day gets drained away. When the civil-rights movement tries to transform the urban north—where drugs, slums, and economic despair prove to be a bigger problem than voting rights—the unwieldiness of an expanding grassroots bureaucracy and an increasing loss of faith in the principles of non-violence render King a prophet without honor.
King is structured like a vérité documentary, with the intimate details of bull sessions and strategizing set against the voices and faces of people who witnessed the public events. Anderson employs a smeary, impressionistic style that combines photographs, detailed line drawings, blocky silhouettes, and pure abstraction, and he uses color-coded word balloons to keep the story clear and compelling. He makes the minutiae of a social movement gripping, echoing a line he ascribes to his hero: "I think sometimes we orchestrate these things as though they were no more than elements in a story. It's easy to forget that these events will have real meaning in people's lives." Anderson also has the sense of drama to end the story abruptly when King's life ends, leaving the unfinished business to hover like a rain cloud. The rest, after all, is history.