HC Anderson's "King"

I guess I'll start by saying how much I appreciate the visual gimmick of only having sharply contrasted blocks of black and white illustrate the scene in jagged, dangerous-looking forms; secondly, I'd like to voice my appreciation also for Anderson's use of breaking this visual motif for moments of significance. Obviously symbolism of the artistic choices aside, it's quite aesthetically pleasing and damn hard to pull off; every time I've tried to do the whole black/white contrast style, it never came out looking like anything close to this.

As a person who, for some reason or another, hasn't really been around much racism for the majority of my life, I've always found it pretty interesting to delve into a story like "King", or watch anything with a story like "King"; the Civil Rights era just contains so much inspiring material, it's hard not to enjoy the media focusing on those times. But even with my love of these kinds of things, and my decently long list of Civil Rights inspired work I've seen/processed, few moments came close (on the bummer-ometer) to when MLK's daughter asked if their family could go to the amusement park.

More often we're faced with the vision of adults dealing with the problems of racism; people who know how to react and know what's really going on and why. But I hadn't really thought of a child's viewpoint on the subject; it couldn't possibly make sense. What could be the reason to someone who already sees herself on the same level as every other human? Someone who doesn't see a difference between anyone in the whole spectrum of her community? When you're a child, especially, you tend to think that the whole world is against you when you're told that you can't have or do something, and it's a bit odd to think about how true that might be in this particular case.

-Will Avery