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!

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.

So March: Book One was the first book I ever wrote. And it was the most terrifying process I've ever been through.

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!

I think ['March'] is not just for the Black Lives Matter movement. It's for everyone. We all have to understand what happened then, so we can understand what's happening now.

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.

I hope March is a guide for today's activists. It took raw courage for young people to volunteer to go to Mississippi in the summer of 1964, and unrelenting faith in the power of democracy to organize such a massive campaign.