Top Shelf has released the cover art for March Book Two, the much-anticipated second volume of Civil Rights legend John Lewis’ three-volume graphic memoir. Co-authored by Lewis and Andrew Aydin and drawn by Nate Powell, March Book Two continues the story of Lewis’s life and work in the Civil Rights movement and will be released in early 2015.
The acclaimed first volume, March Book One, has been a literary and commercial success. The book, said Top Shelf’s Leigh Walton, has spent many months on bestseller lists, has been nominated for an Eisner Award and reaped enormous media attention. The book has been adopted as part of the curriculum in about 30 states and is required reading for freshmen at three univerisities.
Walton said the cover of March Book Two was drawn by Powell and depicts two key moments in the Civil Rights Movement: On the top, a white supremacist mob sets fire to the bus of the Freedom Riders in May 1961; the lower half of the cover depicts Lewis delivering his historic speech on the footsteps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in August 1963.
March Book Two, Walton said, covers events between 1961 and 1963 and will be a much longer work than the first volume. The book will touch on such powerful events as the courageous Freedom Riders, multiracial volunteers that rode buses through the south in the face of violent mobs in order to fight desegregation on interstate transport. The book documents the Freedom Riders imprisonment in Mississippi’s Parchman penitentiary and Lewis’s work planning and participating in the 1963 March on Washington.
Top Shelf will release a trade paperback edition of March Book Two in addition to hardcover and a signed and numbered limited edition hardcover.
