The March Trilogy: Similarities Between Literature And Visual Art

Literature and visual art are very similar; both are creative outlets for self-expression. Both can be very literal in meaning or leave it up to the audience to search for something more. When you combine the two together, you get a comic book or a graphic novel. Illustrator Nate Powell and writer Andrew Aydin teamed up with Congressman John Lewis to tell the story of his fight during the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement in the March trilogy. While these novels are filled with several pages, most are covered with panels of artwork rather than loads of text. Despite the minimal amount of text, the March trilogy is a complex series of books that takes some time to fully understand because of the graphic novel aspect. This is shown through the use

Book two begins with John Lewis and his SNCC colleagues sitting in a restaurant to peacefully protest for desegregation. Because the white owners felt gutsy, they locked in the protesters and began fumigating them with pesticide. Once again, the entire page is black and accompanied by white text. But the text is small; Lewis’ thoughts are written over the black page while speech is inside of text bubbles (see figure 3). Perhaps the lettering size shows that it was hard for Lewis and his friends to speak in the room as they were trying not to breathe in the fumes. While small text provides a sense of an “inside voice” level, large text allows the audience to hear dialogue from across a room. Whenever songs are sung, they either sit in thick banners that swoop across the page or in large speech bubbles. The lettering is at least two times larger than the rest of the text. Songs written in the banners are much larger than those in the speech bubbles. Aretha Franklin singing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” at Obama’s inauguration is one example. When she is singing the song during Obama’s inauguration, the banner begins at the bottom of one page swooping from left to right, and continuing to flow over onto the next few pages in giant, bold letters (see figure 4). The boldness of the song’s text size shows the absolute power Aretha Franklin put into the song. The lyrics

Book one begins with a scene of the march that occurred in Selma, Alabama on Edmund Pettus Bridge. Riot officers are speaking to protesters through a bullhorn; their words are shown in capital letters inside of a sharp bubble (see figure 5). The bubbles display the aggression coming from the officers towards the protesters, despite the peacefulness of their march. It helps readers understand that police brutality is something African American’s have been facing for years now. An iconic text bubble is shown when John Lewis is recalling SNCC’s two-year anniversary. SNCC was a large movement, but people like Stokely Carmichael began to argue that nonviolence was not a great way to protest. Jim Lawson, founder of SNCC, was not invited to the meeting held because most supporters began to believe the idea that nonviolence was ineffective. People began to question the legitimacy of SNCC as a multiracial organization, which was placed inside of a fist hitting John Lewis’ face (see figure 6). The reason for placing these words inside of a fist show that people doubting Lewis’ beliefs hurt him. It was like telling him that everything he and his friends spent the previous two years fighting for were in