Music Credit: “NY” written and performed by Kosta, from the album Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

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Nate Powell: … it was sort of a—a real baptism by fire. It was from the page in—in March: Book One in which a teenage John Lewis meets Dr. King for the first time. And it really wasn't until the moment I was penciling Dr. King for the first time that I realized exactly what the stakes were at the drawing table. It, sort of, forced me to reckon with the fact that this is one of the most recognizable human beings on Earth. Dr. King's face is so iconic. So few lines are required to make his likeness, but even one stray line can shatter that likeness.

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Jo Reed: That’s cartoonist Nate Powell talking about his work on the trilogy, March, written by Congressman John Lewis and Andrew Aydin. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.

In 2016, Nate Powell became the first, and, so far, the only cartoonist to win the National Book Award. He shared the prize with Congressman John Lewis and Andrew Aydin for the trilogy March. March is a graphic book, a memoir and history of the Civil Rights movement told through the eyes of John Lewis who was at the center of many pivotal events as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC. When he came into the project, Nate Powell was an award-winning cartoonist and although he had inked a book that dealt with racism called Silence of Our Friends, his work tended toward the weird and fantastical. So, his teaming up with Representative Lewis and Andrew Aydin to draw March was not necessarily a no-brainer, even to Nate.

Nate Powell: I remember I was just, kind of, on a lunch break one day. I was drawing two books simultaneously and I checked my publisher's website, and I saw this press release about this new project, March. So, I read about it. I was like, "Oh, cool. John Lewis, the story of the Civil Rights Movement—that sounds like an awesome book. Well, back to work." And at the time, there was no artist assigned but in looking through the press release, it never occurred to me that perhaps they needed an artist. A couple weeks later, my publisher gave me a call. I've been working with my publisher, Top Shelf, for about 15 years and we were even pen pals before that, so we have a very close, kind of, family relationship. And, he personally suggested that I try out for the role of artist for a number of reasons. Some of them were stylistic and aesthetic. I am a Southerner from Arkansas, but I also grew up in Alabama and have enough first-person experience with the topography, the culture, as well as a familiarity with the history and with the physical sites of that history, that it was going to make the project a lot easier and perhaps, you know, more emotionally riveting in terms of—of having enough of a physical connection to the location and the context of the story. So, I got in touch with Andrew and the Congressman and I did a few try-out pages based on pages of their script. But within a couple of weeks, we just clicked really well together and decided to move ahead.

Jo Reed: Why did John Lewis decide to write a graphic novel about the movement and his part in it? He's already written the extremely powerful Walking with the Wind.

Nate Powell: Without a doubt. Well, this is one of these, kind of, unicorn projects, <laughs> a perfect storm. Its genesis goes back to about two years before I came on board. Andrew has always been a comic book nerd. Basically, <laughs> some folks in the office were gently ribbing him for heading to—heading off to a comic book convention. Congressman Lewis kind of jumped in and like, “Oh, don't make fun of him. There was a comic book during the movement when I was a teenager and it was very influential.” And he starts telling this story about this 1957 comic, Martin Luther King, Jr. and The Montgomery Story, which is a 16-page account of the Montgomery bus boycotts that was published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Dr. King and Jim Lawson specifically used it as a part of their Nonviolence Workshops and trainings, and it was sold or given away, you know, out of the trunks of cars, in activist training sessions, schools, churches, et cetera. It wound up being massively influential, translated into other languages, even used by Cesar Chavez in his labor movement in California. The book had sort of fallen into obscurity at the time. Anyway, all of this blew Andrew’s mind and so he looked it up online that night, came back, and for every question that his office had had about “How do we revitalize and reintroduce the history of the movement? How do we increase civic engagement, voter turn-out?” Andrew kept coming back with a solution. “Congressman, you need to make a comic about all of this.” And it took a few months to—to work it out and kind of wear down Congressman Lewis. And he was like, “All right, I'll do it, but only if you do it with me.” So, they spent a few years working up a script together. Then I came on board.

Jo Reed: Well, how did you work together with Congressman Lewis and Andrew Aydin? Did you get panels and captions? How was this broken down?

Nate Powell: Yes, well, in the medium of comics, what's really refreshing is that 80 percent of the work is invisible and really, all people get to see is the finished printed product. So, because of this, there's sort of been an easing of some of the—the constraints of writing a comic script. So, Andrew did write a really tight page by page, panel by panel script based on the working up of the story and the interviews that the two of them had done together, as well as Congressman Lewis's decades as a very masterful oral storyteller. I however, have my—have my own sort of storytelling sensibilities, so I went in there with the approach that, you know, I'm—I’m going to move some things around to develop a pace and a flow that I'm comfortable with and then we're going to work up the final look of this book together. So, originally the script for the entire trilogy was just as a single 270-page book and within a couple of days of reading the script, I was like, “You guys, this is great. I'm really excited. But it's going to be about twice as long. I hope that's okay with you. I think it needs some breathing room to sort of pull out some of these subjective, personal experiences and emotional—emotional moments.” And at the time—this is back in 2011, 2012, we really didn't have a full sense, or at least I didn't have a very clear sense of the potential scope or scale of the project. So, a lot of it was just, sort of, let's take the pressure off. Let's all work at our pace. Let’s—let's see the way collaboratively we're going to have this—this book turn out. And so, basically, I broke down the entire book and I worked through some rough pencils and sent them back to Andrew and Congressman Lewis, got some notes, and then we would sort of work through the pages, at first week by week, and then over the course of the project, we were in contact literally around the clock.

Jo Reed: This project had you drawing people who actually had lived, some of whom are still alive. And I could imagine that being challenging and I'm curious how you approach that.

Nate Powell: Certainly. That's a very good question or observation. And I'd say over the course of the four and a half years of doing March, that became more and more of a primary daily consideration. That was probably the most daunting challenge from the get go—dealing with the likeness and the legacies of hundreds of recognizable, real human beings, some of them globally recognizable. One of my two try-out pages, actually, was sort of a—a real baptism by fire, it was from the page in—in March: Book One in which a teenage John Lewis meets Dr. King for the first time. And it really wasn't until the moment I was penciling Dr. King for the first time that I realized exactly what the stakes were at the drawing table. It, sort of, forced me to reckon with the fact that this is one of the most recognizable human beings on Earth, but strictly from a—from an artistic perspective, Dr. King's face is so iconic. I guess I—I mean that almost in a—in a literal sense. In terms of line work, so few lines are required to make his likeness, but even one stray line can shatter that likeness. So, there's a lot of pressure at the tryout stage, but I'm really glad that I—it was up to that level early on. But, yes, there was a much higher degree of accountability. I guess the—the best example is on the cover of March: Book Three itself, which is the initial section of the 600 protesters on Bloody Sunday. And looking at the documentation of the march--

Jo Reed: And that's at the Pettus Bridge.

Nate Powell: Yes. Yes, ma'am. Asking Congressman Lewis about the identities of each of the people towards the head of the March, it was important to—for me to recognize that, you know, the first 40 or 50 people had to be distinct individuals all the way down to their socks, their scarves, their bags, their shoes.

Jo Reed: Building on that, you also had to depict violent, heinous incidents. And again, this isn't a superhero thing. I mean, this is based on events that actually happened. And I wonder what went into your thinking about how to depict those?

Nate Powell: That was a really important kind of reckoning within myself. And I'm glad that you brought up violence and these not being a tale of superheroes in conflict with supervillains. Because the—the physical violence is fairly limited in March: Book One, but by the end of that first volume, it sort of made me have to take a hard look at the visual language I had grown up with and through, in terms of depicting physical violence visually on a comic book page. And I think even across a lot of mass media, specifically through movies and TV, I'd say that most of our visual language for depicting violence in storytelling really does come from American comics. So, specifically, once we got to the Freedom Rides, I had to recognize that I couldn't pull back. I had to sort of unflinchingly depict violence while not only being mindful and respectful of the—the people who had faced the violence, but also to be able to do so without exploiting the nature of violence as the way that I'm used to reading it in comics. So, I sort of had to, kind of, deprogram the way I—I control body language and poses and movement. It may not be entirely visible, but it definitely re-sensitized me to physical violence and that sort of dovetailed with becoming a—a new dad at that period. And so, I sort of became re-sensitized on many fronts in terms of what's going into our brains every hour of every day.

Jo Reed: I would think that would be the case. This book has had a marvelous afterlife. It is taught in schools, in history classes around the country. So, I assume that as you were creating it, everybody was very concerned about getting the facts right.

Nate Powell: Without a doubt. And frankly, because these are comics and because of the general legitimacy crisis that comics have always had in America--

Jo Reed: Absolutely.

Nate Powell: We knew that this would always be an uphill battle. So, I'd say that this sort of goes back to that increasing level of accountability in documentation in media as the Movement goes on. Between March: Book One and March: Book Two, that was sort of our raising the alarm for ourselves. We had to really step up our mindfulness recognizing, “Okay, this is being used as history in history classes. What are the guidelines that govern keeping history books in history class?” We sort of had to give ourselves a crash course in a lot of those guidelines and it even affected the ways in which we approach things like incidental dialogue, background dialogue. In March: Book One, I think I had a little bit heavier of a—heavier of a hand, sort of, throwing in incidental background dialogue as a means of visually depicting some auditory noise. I thought that that noise component was—was really important and it was important for maintaining tension, but also for—for assessing the general tone within any environment. However, as the March Trilogy increased, we recognized we had to tighten up a lot of our own guidelines. So, in March: Book Three, basically, we had to carry the internal policy that if an actual person couldn't be quoted as saying something we could not include it, even as background incidental dialogue. That was frustrating at times, but it was what absolutely had to be done in order to make sure that this book would have the most secure footing as possible, specifically in institutional settings.

Jo Reed: What materials did you use to draw and color?

Nate Powell: I—I do all of my work physically on the paper, except for scanning the final pages in and sort of cleaning them up in Photoshop. A lot of that is just a product of being in my early forties and I graduated from high school and art school <laughs> being the last class before any sort of computer education was required. <laughs> So it's not that I'm intentionally a Luddite. It's just the way the cards have played out and I don't have the time to really teach myself the skills. I've got to keep moving and keep working. So, I use—I just use Bristol board, which is kind of standard for cartoonists. I use a mechanical pencil to lightly and loosely do my pencils. All my ink is with India ink. About half of it is with a number two sable watercolor brush; the other half is with a crow quill nib. And then to use my grays, I take that same India ink and I just dilute three different gradients and it works like watercolor and is completely permanent once it does dry. It's a very quick, fun, you know, organic process and I love doing washes, so I just kind of fell in love with it.

Jo Reed: Oh yeah. It sounds like it would be a lot of fun to do. When did you first begin cartooning?

Nate Powell: Well, I started drawing when I was three. That was in 1981. And I—I started reading comics at that time, too. But for some reason it never occurred to me to actually draw comics. So, in the summer of 1990 my friend, Mike Lyerly, had been drawing for a couple of years and it really just took him saying the words. He was like, "Nate, we need to make comics together." It was like an incantation, just by saying the words.

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Nate Powell: I was like, "Oh, that is so obvious. I can't believe I've never drawn a comic before." So, that was the summer I turned 12 and I just never looked back. We both got really serious about it. And, you know, there was someone with whom to commiserate about this very strange, nerdy, deeply satisfying endeavor. And within about two years, we had started self-publishing by photocopying our own comics and selling and distributing them ourselves.

Jo Reed: Well, that was my question, what was your first publication? So, it was—you were self-pubbing very early.

Nate Powell: Yes. This is pre-internet Arkansas. This is during the comics boom of the early 1990s and we had one comic bookshop in town called Collector's Edition and the owner came from a self-publishing background and he was gracious enough to grant us a little bit of shelf space at a time when that shelf space was really at a premium. This is sort of interconnected with discovering the underground punk rock community, which is very DIY-oriented, at around the same time, and so getting exposed to other young people, not only starting bands but printing up fanzines, making their own tapes and records. And we just brought it back over to the—the kind of dystopian superhero comics we were making at the time.

Jo Reed: Well, you were in a punk band for years called, is it Soophie or Sufi?

Nate Powell: It's Soophie Nun Squad.

Jo Reed: Okay, yes.

Nate Powell: It's yet another casualty of being too young to correctly spell certain things. And then the—the name of the band is meaningless anyway, so. <laughs>

Jo Reed: But you guys, you know, I—I had read you were in a punk band, and then I, you know, looked up the punk band and I thought, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait. You toured for years. You went to Europe. You played around the country."

Nate Powell: Oh, yes.

Jo Reed: This really isn't like my housemate's band which is, you know, in somebody's basement every week.

Nate Powell: Oh, sure. But that's the thing is—my band probably was like your housemate's band <laughs> except that--

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Nate Powell: Over time, as you get more interwoven with the other bands like your band, then all of a sudden, you're like, "Oh, I'm on tour now. Oh, I'm in Europe now. Oh, I just put out a record. How about that?" But that's—that’s the joy of punk is that, there are no rock stars. Every band really is just a basement band, even if you do sell 50,000 copies of a record. <laughs>

Jo Reed: That's pretty good, though. Were you cartooning while you were in the band?

Nate Powell: I sure was. And so, I'd say we were most active between the mid-90s and the mid-2000s, and during that time I went to the School of Visual Arts for cartooning. I started offset printing a self-published series and started pitching work to other publishers. However, most of my life was still structured around my band's touring schedule or recording schedule. So, once—once my band became defunct, all of a sudden, I realized that it was a lot easier to focus for a few years at a time on a book. So, after my band sort of fizzled out in 2006, that's when I really sat down to do my first full-length graphic novel, which was Swallow Me Whole.

Jo Reed: And you were also a caregiver, for a decade, for adults who had developmental challenges.

Nate Powell: That's right.

Jo Reed: What drew you to that for that long a period of time?

Nate Powell: Well, it was—it was very natural and pretty personal. My—my older brother has—he's on the—on the autism spectrum. He was born in the early '70s, so the autism spectrum notably didn't exist at the time when I was a kid, growing up with my brother. The spectrum wasn't defined until 1995. So, I don't know, for me, it was just the way my family was and that was growing up with my brother. When I was about 19 or 20, one of his high school friends came over to visit and mentioned that he had been working with a—a company that was doing performing arts and visual arts stuff for people with disabilities in my hometown. And he was like, "I think that'd be a really great job for you. You should try it." And I was like, "Oh, I kind of didn't know that was a job. Okay." So, I started being an art teacher for folks with developmental disabilities and all of a sudden, I was like, "Oh, <laughs> because of my life experience, this is a strength for me and I love it. It's satisfying. You know, who knew I could work at a job that wasn't just, you know, making food and serving it?" I’ve always had that thought in the back of my head where I'm like, "Well, you know, my former career is important and it's satisfying. And if I ever need to go back to that, I will have no qualms about it whatsoever."

Jo Reed: Well, I'm always curious how experiences bleed into each other because we don't live in, you know, “Okay, this is my caretaking box. This is my cartooning box. This is my band box." You know, these things always mush together, and I mean that in a positive way.

Nate Powell: Certainly.

Jo Reed: So, I'm curious if you've thought about, perhaps, how those—those experiences that that decade of—of doing that care and that time in—in your punk band, how you can see that reflected in the work that you do now.

Nate Powell: Oh, yes. They're deeply intertwined. I mean, even in the book Swallow Me Whole, which is a work of fiction, it centers around teenage step-siblings with emerging symptoms of different mental disorders and not only the stigma which followed them, but the changing dynamics within their—their family, their culture, their school, their friends. And so, without being directly influenced by experiences I had throughout my career, it was unavoidable that the, I guess the lens through which I had always viewed life, being adjacent to folks who experienced the world differently, was really at the core of that book.

Jo Reed: And the other thing, you know, sort of stepping off that cliff and having a career cartooning, nobody gets rich by cartooning, or very few people do.

Nate Powell: Oh, yeah. Very few.

Jo Reed: That had to be a consideration.

Nate Powell: Oh, certainly. And you know, I was very fortunate that I had a chance a few years before I became a dad to be able to take a chance. And the time when I did decide to go full-time as a cartoonist, there was a way I could scrape by on maybe $15,000 dollars a year. And comics is a pretty small pond. And in terms of being inside the larger world of publishing, at times it can feel really insular. So, a lot of it is you keep doing the work. You keep your books in print. You're always moving forward. And after five or 10 years, you'll have enough books which remain in print, which might sell a few 100 or a few 1000 copies each year and that does add up to help you make a living. And that's precisely what happened with me. I'd say that I was a full-time cartoonist for five years before I stopped worrying every couple of months, like doing the math, running through the numbers and seeing if I needed to look for a—a day job just in case. And that's even a whole year after March: Book One came out. It's a real relief to have persevered, <laughs> but that worry never goes away. And that's sort of what keeps you hustling and keeps you looking for new work and thinking a year or two ahead of time.

Jo Reed: Well, after March, you did a solo work called Come Again. Can you give us just a very quick synopsis of that plot?

Nate Powell: Oh, sure. Okay, so Come Again is kind of a horror suspense relationship story. It takes place in the late '70s in the Ozarks, in a sort of half-abandoned hippie village that's always thrived on openness. But it, sort of, explores the basic human need to—to carve out a space for privacy, a space for secrecy. However, there is an actual demon which lives inside the hill underneath this village, which feeds off of secrecy. So, there are—there are missing children. There are curses. There are terrible reckonings. There's infidelity. A lot of it just simply has to do with changing ideals.

Jo Reed: And your most recent book is Two Dead, and that is a collaboration with Van Jensen.

Nate Powell: That's right.

Jo Reed: And that's set in Little Rock in 1946.

Nate Powell: That's right.

Jo Reed: And it focuses on race. What's the story of that book?

Nate Powell: Well, oddly, both Come Again and Two Dead predate my work on March from their earliest inceptions. So, Van used to be the crime reporter for my hometown newspaper in Little Rock. And he stumbled across a bizarre chapter in Little Rock law enforcement history involving what appeared to be some kind of a murder-suicide, some kind of undiagnosed PTSD involving possible delusions of an actual demon invasion causing crime in Little Rock. So, I guess in 2011, right before I became a dad, Van got in touch with me and let me know, "Hey, I've got this really weird, compelling story from Little Rock and I'm wondering if you'd like to draw it." So, I did a few just sample illustrations so that he could pitch the story. And then I became a dad, he became a dad and we kind of forgot about things for a bit. And then we circled back around to it. And I started drawing it back then while I was doing March: Book Two and March: Book Three, but very quickly I really needed to put it on the back burner. So as soon as March was done, I was more freed up to spend all of my time reckoning with—with Come Again and Two Dead. And I'm—I’m glad that I waited so long with Two Dead because one of the weird things about graphic novels is that it takes two or three years to make a book. So, we had to sort of reckon with the contemporary climate of 2018 and 2019 and sort of change our story, our art, our lettering to meet those challenges. When you spend so long making a story, it has to be a living thing. It has to be able to reckon with what's happening outside your window.

Jo Reed: Do you prefer collaborating or do you like working on your own? Or do you like doing both?

Nate Powell: I like doing both. And they are such different processes for me that I'm pretty easily able to do them both simultaneously, though that's a very practical need. I generally do get paid more money from publishers when I am just acting as an artist working with a writer. I've been very lucky that everyone I've worked with as a writer has been a friend and has been someone whose writing I've—I’ve really respected. But my own stories are pretty weird and intuitive at times and they're just not the kind—They're not necessarily the kinds of books you're going to be getting a huge paycheck from, but those are the most satisfying to me. At the same time, the—the process by which I draw those two types of books really served to inform and enrich each other. For example, Come Again is—I started penciling it while I was drawing March and it, you know, it's a really weird horror book. It seems to bear no similarity to March whatsoever, but by working with a finished script and such meticulous concrete considerations for storytelling throughout the March Trilogy, that need for clarity and concreteness was something I was able to take back to the drawing table for doing Come Again, and I was able to tell a much stranger, more open-ended story with more clarity and more concreteness than I had ever been able to achieve before. And then I'd go back to do Two Dead with a writer with a finished script, someone else who is meticulous and well-researched and I was able to bring a lot of that weirdness back on board. So, they sort of bounce off each other.

Jo Reed: Well, Nate, thank you. It was such a pleasure to talk to you. Your work is wonderful.

Nate Powell: Well, thank you so much.

Jo Reed: And it was—it was great to talk to you about it. It was very enlightening for me.

Nate Powell: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

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Jo Reed: That’s cartoonist Nate Powell. He’s the author, with Representative John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, of the National Book Award winner, the trilogy March. Nate’s most recent books are Come Again and Two Dead which is written with Van Jensen.

You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. You can subscribe to Art Works wherever you get your podcasts, so please do, and then leave us a rating on Apple because it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

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