On being persistent with your vision

You worked with John Lewis and created the graphic novel series March with him after learning he was inspired by a comic about Martin Luther King. I want to talk about your own comic inspirations because you’ve worked in a lot of different parts of the business. What’s your earliest comic memory? What comics inspired you to want to work in the medium?

I think my earliest memory of comics is my grandmother letting me read my uncle’s old comics at her house when she didn’t quite know what else to do with me. It was kind of an absurd experience, when you think back on it, to read these vintage comics from the early to mid ’60s as your first experience. But if you know anything about my family, it’s that we save everything. Then she bought me my first comic book here in Western North Carolina at the old Piggly Wiggly off Hendersonville Highway. It was Uncanny X-Men 317, the “Phalanx Covenant” with the lenticular cover. That was really my earliest memory.

The idea of working in comics never really seemed like something I would get to do because I needed health insurance. You grow up poor and you’re like, “I need a regular paycheck.” There’s no savings for those years where you really struggle to break in. But I remember going to Dragon Con when I was maybe 13, and meeting creators for the first time, and that was a tremendously formative experience for me. One of the people I always think about is Mike Wieringo, who was illustrating The Flash run that I had started reading on the newsstand. This would’ve been about issue 94 is where I started. And then, getting issue 92 with the first Impulse appearance was like a grail for me.

He was so kind. He did this beautiful head sketch of The Flash on the back of a backer board for me when I brought him my comics to get signed. I remember being so impressed with the idea that these people were able to make a living with things that they could dream up. The power of their ideas and their creativity allowed them to earn a living. And that really stayed with me.

I think comics were something my mother at first tolerated and then later embraced as at least I was reading. Also, it was better than a lot of the other trouble that some of her friends’ children were getting into. I think she appreciated that I really did enjoy the art and the storytelling and that, as I showed her things that I was reading later on, that they were not just literary, but also meaty.

I talked to her about some of the plots and things that were happening in X-Men and it dispelled the impression she had that these were lightweight stories. She saw the power of me seeing people trying to do the right thing, because it was the right thing to do. She saw it was having an impact on my outlook on life. Over time, she really warmed to it.

And then I went into government because, one, I felt very strongly about what I could do in that space. But two, it was a steady paycheck and a slightly more reliable job with insurance and some benefits and things like that. That was just the decision I had to make as I was looking at careers.

I was the guy in the office who was always talking about comics. When we had to give gifts at the end of the year for Christmas or the holidays, I would give everybody a graphic novel or a comic that I thought spoke to who they were. My first job out of college was working for Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut and I gave him Pride of Baghdad. The initial reaction as everybody got their present was like, “Comic book, that’s cute.” But then, Kevin went and read it and he was like, “This is really good.” It was the height of the Iraq war, and what Brian K. Vaughan did with that was so innovative and particularly uniquely successful in the comics medium. That’s a story that works because it’s a comic. I think it changed his mind a little bit about what comics were at that time.

And so, that’s how it carried into my life over time.

What is it about comics that makes it such a powerful medium?

Fundamentally, comics are sequential narrative as a language. It is the most universal human way to communicate. From cave paintings to cuneiform and hieroglyphics to the Twelve Labors of Hercules to what we think of as the modern comics. Pictures telling a story in order has been how we’ve always communicated. As we develop the written language, words and pictures together are the way to reach the most people with the most information the most quickly. And it allows, essentially, information to transfer from one brain to another, or from one medium into a brain more quickly and more efficiently than anything else. think we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what it can be used for.

There’s this idea that it’s just superheroes and that’s what they’re for, but that’s just one piece. I think about Will Eisner making manuals for repairing planes and other machines during World War II. The military saw very clearly in those moments, where preconceptions or prejudgments were dangerous, that to survive they had to move quickly, move fast, and be right. In those moments, that’s when they throw all that aside and embrace it and it works and it keeps planes in the air. It keeps people alive because people are able to learn more quickly using the medium.

In my own work, the research on Martin Luther King and the Montgomery story and how it was used to inspire some of the earliest acts of civil disobedience of the movement is another example where the medium grew and served yet another purpose within that framework of teaching people more efficiently. But it also added this other element that, in my graduate thesis, I called “manufacturing lightning.” The idea being, How do you manufacture a lightning bolt moment? Would you change someone’s mind?

These are not just tools for information dissemination, they’re tools for inspiration. And comics—because of how wholly they engage the senses, stimulating both the art brain and the analytical brain—can help people unlock greater understandings, which then influence their actions and their decision making.

I wonder what moments are happening right now, where comics are lighting people up, especially with all the protests that are happening globally.

I think the most immediate example we have is March. When John Lewis and I first published March, following the procedure or the rules of nonviolent civil disobedience, we wrote out our objectives, which we said were twofold. One was to educate the young people on the history of what happened during the movement. And two was to give them a roadmap to inspire a new nonviolent revolution. We wrote this out in 2013. By 2019, March became one of the most widely taught graphic novels in America. You had the first generation of students growing up with civil rights education pervasively taught in their schools because of March.

So, it came as no surprise that, by 2020, you saw the uprisings happening. You saw Black Lives Matter written down the streets of Washington, just like the cover of March Book 3 emulating it. You saw places like the March For Our Lives come out of this tragedy with the Marjory Stoneman shooting. We had, just weeks before that tragic incident, been in Miami-Dade County doing a reading program where the Knight Foundation gave out thousands of copies of March to the students.

There’s no coincidence that these things happened as they did. It shows the power of the medium. Like we were just saying, it shows the power to inspire. I think the unique thing about comics is that it is an inherently positive medium. It is very difficult to teach hate through comics, but it is very easy to teach love through comics.

What is your advice to young writers and comics creators today?

I think the first rule, if you want to make comics, is to make comics. My small publishing company is releasing a comic in a few weeks called Comics of the Movement. It pairs Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story with comics made by SNCC in 1966. And they were used to educate and inspire people to participate in the first election after the Voting Rights Act was passed, which was particularly challenging for these Black voters who’ve never been allowed to vote, who were scared to vote, who didn’t know what that process was like. And so, they wanted to reach as many people as they could, and it was the most cost-effective way they could come up with.

But the reason we wanted to bring them back into print for the first time is that we wanted to show how simple they were, that they were just drawings and very simple layouts. But the information, the sequential narrative of it, made them incredibly informative and incredibly useful. I think sometimes we get a little wrapped up in what a comic should look like. And I think a comic looks like whatever you want it to look like, whether it’s six and a half inches by 10 and a half inches, or whether it’s three inches by six inches, it is a piece of paper with drawings and words, and you can make that canvas into anything you want it to be. And the best way to start is just to start.

If we really want to get into it, don’t be afraid to pitch. I think the story of my career is rejection. Every time I come up with an idea, I spend I don’t know how long having everyone tell me, “No, it’s a terrible idea.” But then, you find that one person or you start it on your own and then it becomes March. And if you listen to those people who don’t have the vision or the understanding that you do, you’re allowing them to determine your future. And you can’t do that because everyone sees the world differently. And we all have something that gives our perspective a unique element.

It’s like Appalachia Comics, which was inspired by a graduate thesis that I read by a woman named Elon Justice, who published it in 2021 through the MIT Media Lab. In it, she made some critical observations about the depiction of Appalachia and popular media, and that it is being used to perpetuate stereotypes that take away the power of the people of this region.

What we’re trying to do through the Appalachia Comics Project is to change that, to give the power back to the people of this region, to control their own depiction so that they are able to find their voice, but also to reemerge as an important culture within the United States that is more diverse than people understand, that has a rich and complicated history that people don’t understand, and that has tremendous value that has influenced this country for generations.

With that, when I went around to a lot of the foundations at first, they all looked at me like I had three heads. I’m pointing at March saying, “Trust me.” And they didn’t necessarily see it. But you keep pitching, you keep pitching. And I hope what we can do is be a vehicle for that sort of change so that people can find as many creators as we can who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to tell their stories, to be creators, so that they can show the unique and special things that they see in Appalachia, in their history, in their community and in their culture.

That’s how I came to Kickstarter and y’all got it, y’all understood the importance of what we were doing and the potential for what it could become. And you get those people, the people who see the future, the people who understand the world a little bit differently—find them and work with them and be grateful for their help.

And then, the sky’s the limit, as long as you’re willing to be persistent, to have resilience, to not be frustrated just because someone else doesn’t understand your vision. You just have to be dogged. Then, one day you look up and people are like, “It was an overnight success.” And you’re like, “Yeah. That was like a 10-year night in that case.” It’s just the way it is. And it’s very rare that anyone’s going to hand you a golden opportunity. You have to make that opportunity for yourself.

I’ve talked to a number of creators who have a specific vision, where they want to explore a particular piece of media or have a specific thing to say that, from a larger perspective, probably doesn’t gel with the majority. But like I always tell them, just fuck them. Just make what you want to make and you’ll find the people who get it. The peole who are interested in it will come find you and be adamant about it and supportive of it and excited about it.

I have a writing or mentor friend who’s older, who’s been around a long time and done a lot of things that I looked up to as a kid. He has this unbelievable attitude where he’s just always happy to be there, it all rolls off his back like water off of a duck’s back. And I asked him, after watching him for a little while and being like, “How do you stay like that?” And he’s like, “fuck ‘em, man.” And now, over the years now, whenever I’m having one of those moments or he’s having one of those moments or something works, we’ll text back and forth, “fuck ‘em.” And then, the other one will be like, “Hell, yeah.”

And that’s it, right? Just because they don’t see it doesn’t mean you’re wrong. If everybody could see reality or see the future or see the potential, our world would be a better place because there would be more understanding. But if anything is evident in this world, it is that there’s a tremendous amount of misunderstanding. And so, You can’t rely on other people’s opinion to set your course. You have to be your own navigator, and you have to do what you believe in. And if they don’t believe in it too, fuck ‘em.

I make role-playing games. Most of mine are Power Rangers focused, but it’s more about the character development and relationships rather than the action. And a lot of people don’t like that because they want the action. They want to punch and kick. I’m like, “Great, go make your own game. If you want that, go do it. I made this thing that I’m interested in and my thing is valid. Your thing can be valid, too.”

I’m trying to take the attitude with criticism of saying, “I took the time to make the game, and you can, too.” Everything we make is valid and we can have a better society if we’re all making stuff that we’re interested in.

You’re making a key point here, which is that just because you don’t like something or you don’t see the potential in something, maybe keep that to yourself. We don’t need to go around policing everybody else’s actions or what they make or what their art is. Art is a personal expression. Storytelling is a personal expression. Making comics or anything else, it’s a personal expression. And I think there’s too many people out there who get too much of their self-worth off of criticizing other people, and these people doing the criticizing aren’t making any works themselves. If we get past that, if we can get to a place where we’re just, “Great, I’m really proud of you. You finished something. You tried…” That’s where we have great discoveries. That’s where new ideas come about. We’ve got to get to a place where we appreciate people creating and not denigrating people because it’s not what we would’ve created.

That’s something I try really hard to do because people ask me for advice and what I think they should do, and I tell them what I think, but that’s my opinion. That’s how I would do it. You have to do it your way and it will be different. It will inevitably be something else because it is through your prism, your experiences, your ideas, your loves, your hates, all these sorts of things. But it goes back to what we said earlier where comics are so good at teaching love, and not very good at teaching hate. I think if we all approach the medium and the industry with a perspective, which is that love everyone who is doing the work, that is the hard part.

And be grateful that they are participating in this medium as well. Because you never know, it may be that person who inspires the first reader that then becomes the reader for your work and the advocate for it that helps get it out into the world. We’re an ecosystem. We’re dependent on each other. It’s a very fragile ecosystem. And so, we should be lifting all of each other up and trying to find a way to help everyone make a living and being honest with each other and just try and make more cool things.