Visualizing the roots of violence

TAKING a life story and translating it into a visual form allows readers to emotionally connect in a way that simply reading about it may not.

In his memoir, "Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence," Geoffrey Canada - the founder of Harlem's Children's Zone who was featured in the recent documentary "Waiting for Superman" - wrote about his early life. I took the events and emotions, and visually represented them in a new, more accessible way.

The stories of a young Geoff Canada may be shockingly commonplace if you grew up in an urban environment like Philadelphia, as I did. In many ways, I shared the same childhood - of fear, mistrust, danger and violence. My intent in adapting this book was to shed light on a subject that people may only see one side of - which has its own sets of rules, codes, and procedures.

But as "Fist Stick Knife Gun" shows, the world of youth violence is not as black and white as it seems.

Jamar Nicholas was previously editorial cartoonist at the Philadelphia Tribune, the nation's oldest African-American newspaper, and teaches at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia.