KING: A COMICS BIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR 349
shadow of his own father, an early Civil Rights activist and the minister of Ebenezer
Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. While the elder Martin King is not a prominent
fi gure in the narrative, King’s sense of himself as his father’s son surfaces in moments of
crisis, such as during the Harlem stabbing that King survived in 1958 and the shoot-
ing that ended his life 10 years later. Following this brief childhood memory, Anderson
introduces King as a self-assured student and minister who, despite his educational
achievements, has grown impatient with the intellectual distance of the academy. Also
prominently featured in this fi rst section is King’s courtship with the incisive young
woman who would later become his wife, Coretta Scott. While their conversations
off er insight into King’s early ambitions, it is clear that his aspirations for social reform
through nonviolence were tested and refi ned once he returned south and was forced to
confront fi rst-hand the realities of racial terrorism. After the 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks
in Alabama, King was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association
and used its city-wide bus boycott campaign to bring national attention to the problems
of racial segregation.
Th e second part of Anderson’s comics biography follows King’s work as president of
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the organization’s eff orts
to end segregation and black disfranchisement through targeted boycotts, marches,
and published writings. Invitations to the Oval Offi ce and increased scrutiny by FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover indicated King’s growing infl uence in national aff airs dur-
ing the early 1960s; at home, however, his relationship with his wife suff ered because
of his sexual infi delity during extended trips away from Atlanta. Indeed, Anderson’s
account is quite candid in its depiction of the Civil Rights leader’s extramarital aff airs
and fl irtations with female staff members. Th e narrative further utilizes King’s guilt-
ridden conversations with his close friend and colleague Ralph David Abernathy (in
addition to the silent surveillance of FBI wiretaps during moments of indiscretion) to
indicate the extent to which the boundaries between King’s private and public life were
becomingly dangerously blurred.
Nevertheless, it is the celebrated “I Have A Dream” sermon that King delivered at the
steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 that emerges as the pivotal and most profound
scene in King , the moment in which the title fi gure is declared “the moral leader of the
nation.” In recounting the event over the course of 10 pages, Anderson demonstrates the
visual power of the comics medium to convey the intensity of the listening crowd and
the profundity of King’s message in an expressionist montage of artwork, photographs,
and newspaper clippings. Th e scene progresses from King’s own insecurities before the
speech, as he wonders how much he can accomplish in his allotted eight minutes at the
podium, to his thundering conclusion of “Free at last!” Th is powerful speech foreshad-
ows political triumphs such as the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting
Rights Act of 1965 that would be attributed to King’s dynamic leadership.
Th e fi nal third of King highlights the last major campaigns of his career in Chicago
and Memphis during the late 1960s. With King’s transition from the terrors of Dixie
to the urban political machines of the North, Anderson moves away from the comic
