Let's talk the impact of March. How much has it affected your career? The National Book Award must have been huge.
There are several different facets to this. In so many ways, there had never quite been a comic like March—and that includes the specific creative relationships, the storytelling process, and the space it occupies in the world at large. On the one hand, it has been profoundly encouraging to make something that has significantly contributed to an urgent national conversation about justice, equality, representation, activism, change, and revolution. On the other hand—and this is the part comics-loving people don’t really want to hear—the success of March led to an absolute-zero quantifiable increase in sales of my other books. That surprised and frustrated me at first, but it’s ultimately intertwined with March occupying uncharted territory; its inclusion in so many schools and community reading lists often means that it’s folks’ first and only graphic novel they’ve ever read. Being a part of that gateway-exposure for comics is wonderful, but it requires accepting the realities of a segmented, limited comics readership.

Since the completion of March, my professional realities have largely been unchanged. I’m actually backed up with years of work I started before and during my work on the trilogy, which had to be shelved in order to meet the rising challenges and demands of March. I’m just now starting to dig out of that work-hole. I also had to turn down a lot of collaborations and for-hire comics jobs—even some really promising Big Two projects—to complete the trilogy. Doing the job right required choosing a single path over the course of 4 years, and reckoning with that path after the fact. Exposure-wise, it’s true that I wound up getting on TV cameras a bit more than my peers, but ultimately I discovered that such exposure does very little to bring new readership towards comics itself. The work is always there on the drawing table, and it’s the work that shall survive.

How much did it impact you personally?
It allowed me to reckon more fully with any leftover social-political baggage or anxieties as a white Southerner raised by Mississippian Baby Boomers, and carved out a new set of tools by which to better speak about the legacy of those conditions and experiences. The same is true for my parents, specifically after they read Book Two. That reckoning with their own complicity and participation in the daily structures of the Jim Crow South has since brought us together more fully as a family and has better equipped them with the perspective needed to take a stand in 2018 and onward. The work also allowed me to confront some long-standing rhetorical and political assumptions I’ve carried since teenage political awakenings in the 1990’s underground punk community. It’s been unnerving to see how some of the hair-splitting and posturing of the era was a product of living in an underground subculture amidst the relative cushiness of the second Clinton administration. Most importantly, as a parent, the process of making March has allowed me to equip my kids and their generation with a set of tools to help deal with the ongoing struggle for justice and equality, and the necessity of taking to the streets to push change into being.

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Society of Illustrators displays the art and process behind these critically acclaimed graphic novels