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.

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.

You cannot understand the politics of today without understanding the Civil Rights Movement and the role it played in our society.

We were trying to show that you should be hopeful, you should be optimistic, but you have to be consistent and persistent, because it's not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year. It's the struggle of a lifetime. And so you're going to have to put in 40 or 50 years to reach that high-water mark.

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.

"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 went on to write my graduate thesis on the ["Montgomery Story"] comic book itself. It was the first long-form history that was ever written about it. And it's how I found out Martin Luther King actually helped edit "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story."