This article will employ a multi-level approach to framing, in which frames as cognitive categories will be traced in the textual framings of the work, such as paratexts, frame narratives, and narrative perspective as presented through the visual frame of the comics panels and grids.ĢAs a whole, the March trilogy conforms to a broader frame of thought that John Lewis advertises: “good trouble.” Lewis frequently employs the phrase and popularized the hashtag “#goodtrouble” on his Twitter-account in relation to a 2016 sit-in in the Senate that he led to urge action on gun control. In what follows, the central frames of the March trilogy and how they are inscribed into the graphic narrative text will be discussed.
The story categorizes and evaluates historical events by assigning interpretative schemata, or frames, to them. In Lewis’ story, particular aspects of the movement are selected and made salient, affect and empathy for his position are generated, and through the logic of the story an understanding of how history unfolded is claimed. This article will describe the trilogy as an effort in framing: Not only does a graphic memoir involve situating the elements of the story within panels and grids, but as nonfiction it entails representing actual historical events through a particular perspective on these events-in this case Lewis’-and claiming it as authoritative. Lewis and his team employ the medium of comics to tell the story of the American civil rights movement. Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis is the first major public figure in the United States to co-author a graphic memoir: Together with his Digital Director and Policy Adviser Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell, he created the March trilogy published in 2013, 2015, and 2016. In particular, the graphic memoir has become an outlet that gives voice and visibility to marginalized groups (Hatfield 112). But besides the well-known fictional characters of the comics mainstream, a rich tradition of alternative comics has in recent decades established comics as a vessel to address questions of justice in the actual world.
These fantastic heroes achieve justice for the common people where the state and its institutions fail.
Arguably, the most obvious example would be the popular genre of the superhero narrative, which centers on the struggle of good versus evil and right versus wrong. 1Addressing matters of justice constitutes one of the foundations of the medium of comics.
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