“The set-up [in The American Way] is that there are Southern heroes and Northern heroes — and the easy thing to do would have been to say, ‘OK, the Southern heroes are all bigots and the Northern heroes are all very heroic and liberal.’ But the reality is that race relations are far more complicated than that. And the nice thing is, coming into this book — aside from the superheroics and those kind of things that make graphic novels and comic books so much fun — the idea was figuratively and literally to have heroes that are different aspects of America.”

John Ridley