I don't know about the rest of you, but I found Ho Che Anderson's King just as difficult, if not more so, to read than Hernandez's Human Diastrophism--and for similar reasons. It seems like Anderson makes the history he is relating in his graphic novel purposefully obscure, to illustrate, perhaps, how difficult it is to re-access those major historical moments that deal with major figures, figures who have been designed in the media as heroes. Though his project seems interested in getting a "real" picture of who Martin Luther King, Jr. was as a man, the man behind the myth, he exposes the layers of mythology and artifice that shape not only King in the press and in history books, but shaped King himself through pressure and public expectation.
As Michael Chaney notes in his article "Drawing on History in Recent African American Graphic Novels," "The first two thirds of King demonstrate a noir style of chiaroscuro and high contrast lighting" (181), a fact that made determining which character was speaking very difficult--because not only are the pictures all in black and white, as well as the words, many of the characters are drawn to look very similar; additionally, Anderson suspends the revelation of what King looks like for nearly twenty pages, so we do not know exactly how he is going to be depicted. On top of these factors, scenes do not clearly open and close--often scenes end abruptly, mid-sentence, and begin before the Time and Place tags mark them. I am very curious to know what the individual issues of King looked like, where they made their narrative breaks, because trying to follow along in the hefty, convoluted, fragmented story line was challenging.
Of course, this changes after King and his compatriots organize and perform their march on Washington, DC, and King makes his dramatic "I Have a Dream" speech--the coloring of the pages and the thought bubbles, colored according to who is speaking, suddenly makes the story legible. Chaney agrees that "This creates a sudden easiness in matching speakers with dialogue, whereas earlier textually-dense sections of the book tended to be more difficult in this respect" (181). This suggests that the "I Have a Dream" speech is meant to be a kind of turning point for King, or for us as readers--perhaps things were more closely recorded historically after that moment, or perhaps making the speech solidifies King as a kind of mythological hero whose individuality is suddenly the most important thing--as opposed to being one man among many who are working to make a difference.
The fragmented nature of the narrative is further complicated pictorially by the inclusion of historical photographs worked in as sequential art , and verbally by the many different voices that interrupt and comment upon the larger historical narrative. At times the photographs show different perspectives, or add a historical, realistic layer to the story, and at other times they become very unsettling and confusing (I am thinking of the image of the two naked women inserted in the the narrative when the group is discussing whether or not they ought to recruit children to march [116]); and the different narrators, the "Witnesses," the newspaper articles, the history books, the news anchors, etc., all help to show a fuller picture of reactions and perspectives on King and his efforts, but because they are not clearly marked, sometimes it is very confusing as to who is speaking, or how they are related to the events (190, 198). Overall, King seems to be purposefully obscuring access to its main character even in its efforts to expose a truer image of a man who has been mythologized for fifty years. The truth may not be accessible, because not only did the mythology shape the way we as students, generations later, learn and think about King and his efforts for Civil Rights, but, Anderson suggests, the mythology shaped the way King thought about himself, and the way he behaved.
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