Most students graduate from high school knowing nine words about the civil rights movement: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and "I Have a Dream." And that's it!

If voting wasn't important, why would they be spending so much time and so much energy trying to stop you from doing it?

You have such a sacred responsibility when you touch John Lewis's story, when you touch the story of the movement. You don't want to leave anything out, but you want to tell a good story so the people will read it and they're engaged and they don't fall apart with extraneous details.

"March" was inspired by "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story." I actually first heard about that comic from John Lewis, who told me that it played an important role in the movement. And so once he told me about that, it made me start thinking, "Well, why doesn't John Lewis write his own comic book?".

I spent almost two years working on this book ['March'] before we ever had a publisher, before we ever had a title. And when you're reading it, and you're writing it, and you're ingesting it, sometimes a single word just comes up over and over and over again. And if you're trying to capture the essence of what it is you're trying to tell, you don't have a whole lot of space.

The parts of the [Civil Right] Movement we recognize so well now were not born from a single decision, but were a complicated and messy evolution of ideas and spirits, coming together after a long, hard struggle to triumph in moments when the odds seemed the longest.

I have been a comic book fan nearly all my life. My fascination began as a refuge after my father left because it was within the stories told in comics that I could find heroes who fought for justice and where outcasts or misfits could find purpose and commonality. But over time I have come to love comics as a medium for its ability to tell stories with tremendous depth and emotion that in some ways go beyond what is possible solely with the written word.