Ever since the release of the first volume in August 2013, the graphic trilogy March – which tells the story of civil rights icon John Lewis – has been hailed as a groundbreaking achievement. A New York Times number one bestseller and the first graphic novel to win both a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and a National Book Award, March has also been used in classrooms from one end of the country to the other, teaching younger generations of the importance of fighting for their own civil rights.
Given the success of March, it should be no surprise that co-author Andrew Aydin – who worked for then Congressman John Lewis – was inundated with requests to assist with other graphic novels. “If there was anything interesting or just funny, I would take it to the Congressman when it was happening and he would sort of be like, ‘Is that a Good Trouble comic?’” Aydin told Robots From Tomorrow in July 2025, with “Good Trouble” being a catchphrase that Lewis used when discussing March and the Civil Rights Movement.
One of the requests received by Aydin came from the New York City Department of Education, the first school district in the United States to incorporate March into its curriculum. That program was such a success that the NYCDOE decided to launch a series of original comic books that could likewise be used in classrooms and contacted Aydin about creating one of them. Aydin accepted and wondered afterwards what to call it.
“Well, it’s a Good Trouble comic,” John Lewis suggested. The name stuck, and it wasn’t long before Aydin recruited comic book writers Matt Fraction and Kelly Sue DeConnick, illustrator Valentine De Landro, and lifelong friend Vaughn Shinall to form a new independent comic book publisher called Good Trouble Comics, with a mission “to make the kinds of comics that other people wouldn’t.”
Six years later, the company’s staff appeared at San Diego Comic-Con for a “Making Comics the Good Trouble Way” panel on July 26, 2025. Managing editor Lauren Sankovitch told those in attendance that one of their earliest projects wasn’t an actual comic book but an exhibition at the Vermont factory of Ben & Jerry’s. John Lewis and Andrew Aydin spoke at the facility in the fall of 2019 while promoting March, and the ice cream company decided to sponsor an exhibit called The Long March the following September that coincided with National Voter Registration Day.
Aydin and Good Trouble Comics also collaborated with Rock the Vote in 2020 for a “Battle for the Vote” PSA published by DC Comics that featured Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman discussing voting rights in the United States. “In Themyscira, ALL citizens have a voice in choosing our leaders,” Wonder Woman says in the opening panel. “But in America, citizens have had to FIGHT for ALL people to have an EQUAL voice in their democracy. That struggle continues even today.”
Ben & Jerry’s created a video for their The Long March exhibit in which Andrew Aydin remarks, “The idea for March came about in 2008. I said I was going to a comic book convention and everybody laughed at me, except for the Congressman. And he said, ‘Don’t laugh, there was a comic book during the movement. It was called Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story and it was very influential.”
In 2025, Good Trouble Comics republished Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story as part of Comics of the Movement #1, which also features reproductions of comic books created during the 1960s by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that were used to educate African Americans in the South following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
“No one had put together a reproducible complete set,” Andrew Aydin explained to Robots From Tomorrow. “And I searched for years. Archives, libraries, auctions. And we managed to put together a complete set to reprint for the first time. No one else is going to put in that work. You got to be a super nerd into civil rights comics like me to want to do that. But then when you put them all together you realize what this actually is is a comic that is a demonstration of how another generation’s movement grew through comics and a call to action for what our generation needs to be doing.”
In addition to Comics of the Movement #1, Good Trouble Comics successfully funded a Kickstarter campaign in 2025 for Islands in the Sky, a 112+ page graphic anthology. As Lauren Sankovitch explained at San Diego Comic-Con, Islands in the Sky is the first offering in a new initiative called the Appalachia Comics Project that was launched “to help the folks actually living in Appalachia reclaim the narrative of ‘What is the story about Appalachia? Who are the people in Appalachia? What do they do, what do they think?’”
During an earlier panel entitled “Real-Life Superpowers: Teaching Justice, Empathy, and Courage Through Comics” at the same convention, Andrew Aydin also talked about the project.
“I think something that gets left out and left behind in many of the conversations about what kind of discrimination we have in the United States is that there’s a tremendous similarity between the types of discrimination that has been used to subjugate people of color – particularly Black people, particularly in the South – with the ways in which the people of Appalachia are subjugated,” he said. “Controlled, taken advantage of, exploited by large financial interests. And that really became apparent to me living there for the last five years but then also after Hurricane Helene, in which the media coverage was dominated by people not from there, exploiting the tragedy for their own ends, particularly political ends. And there’s this long history of Appalachia not being able to tell its own story, so we started a project to fix that.”
Islands in the Sky pairs actual survivors of Hurricane Helene with an assortment of comic book professionals. “They’re co-creating the stories with the survivors about what happened so that we actually create a historical record,” Aydin explained. “That way the survivors get paid. So the money we raise that would go to a writer goes to the survivors. And then the artist draws the story and we will have a firsthand account of what happened during this disaster and also a way to empower the people of the region.”
During the “Making Comics the Good Trouble Way” panel at San Diego Comic-Con, moderator Jason Johnson asked, “What is it that you think is so unique and compelling about comic books that it’s still such an effective way to get political information and ideas into people’s minds?”
“The oldest things that humans do – other than, you know, reproducing – is we share information by telling stories,” Lauren Sankovitch replied. “And that is every single culture that has ever existed ever, is we tell each other stories. It’s how we encode information, how we pass vital information to the next generation, to each other, to the next tribe, to whomever. It’s how we present ourselves to others. And with comics, there’s just this very special melding of a lot of different factors.”
She then added, “This type of storytelling is everywhere. Our cultures have come up in a way that we are able to read or digest (comics) relatively easily. It doesn’t feel like there’s some sort of barrier to entry in the same way a block of prose might be. And I think that very accessibility is something that we can harness and give people an actually meaty chunk of information without it feeling like a chore. And I think that’s the real power with comics.”
Chris Ross, who worked as a designer on March, concurred. “During the March on Washington, they had a philosophy of always dramatizing the problem, dramatize the solution,” he said. “Show people what the problem is directly. And comics has that unique ability to show an issue and how to solve it. That’s the magic trick of Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story. It tells the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott but the secret sauce to that is the last four pages, where it shows people how to replicate it.”
It’s that “secret sauce” that Good Trouble Comics ultimately hopes to duplicate.
Anthony Letizia