Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and eighty-sixth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false.

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COMIC LEGEND:

A discussion at a panel at a 2014 comic book convention inspired John Lewis to cosplay at the 2015 Comic-Con as his younger self from "Bloody Sunday."

STATUS:

True

As you may or may not know, the late, great Congressman, John Lewis, who passed away earlier this month (we just did a Line it is Drawn in tribute to Lewis), co-wrote a series of three graphic novels, March, based on his life as a civil rights icon.

march-book3

The books were drawn by Nate Powell and were co-written with Andrew Aydin, Lewis' Digital Director & Policy Advisor. The idea originated when Aydin, a comic book fan, mentioned he had attended a recent comic book convention and the other members of Lewis' staff began teasing him about it. Lewis stepped in and noted that a comic book about Martin Luther King Jr. had been a big inspiration on him and so the others shouldn't tease Aydin about comic books.

In a great interview with Joseph Hughes at ComicsAlliance, Lewis discussed the importance of that comic book:

Well, growing up in rural Alabama, 50 miles south of Montgomery, I’d heard of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the bus boycott when I was 15 years old, in 1955. And I went away to school, to Nashville, and after being away in Nashville for about two and a half years, I came in contact with Jim Lawson. Lawson was working for the Fellowship Of Reconciliation, or the F.O.R. He was the one who introduced me to the comic. I read it, and I saw it as a piece of moving history at the time. It just made it very plain, it made it very clear, the power of the philosophy and the discipline of non-violence. And Jim Lawson became my teacher, my trainer. And every Tuesday night for that entire school year, a group of 20 or more school children from Fisk University, Tennessee State, Vanderbilt, and American Baptist College would meet, and we would study the way of peace, the way of love, the way of non-violence. And The Montgomery Story, this comic book that sold for 10 cents, became like our Bible. It was our guide. And I think it helped compliment what Jim Lawson was teaching. It made it simple, it made it plain and it made it very clear. What happened in Montgomery, for more than 380 days, that a people came together, with the purpose of ending segregation and racial discrimination on the bus system in Montgomery. They did it in a peaceful, orderly, non-violent way. There were people who bombed homes and churches, harassed people, but the participants didn’t engage in any acts of violence.

Hughes then asked Aydin, "Andrew, you were introduced to the comic by Congressman Lewis, and then you sought it out. First of all, how difficult was it to find a copy, and second of all, when you read it, was your immediate reaction “I have to convince the Congressman to write his own comic?”

Aydin replied:

Well, when he first mentioned it to me, I went and read the section in his memoir Walking With The Wind, where he talks about how the Greensboro Four read it. And then I did what most of us would do: I Googled it. There were some digital versions of it, so you could get pieces of it and see it firsthand. It actually took me several years to track down an original copy, and like most things I found it on Ebay [laughs]. But once he told me about it, and I connected those dots that a comic book had a meaningful impact on the early days of the Civil Rights movement, and in particular on young people, it just seemed self-evident. If it had happened before, why couldn’t it happen again? I think part of that impulse was born out of a frustration with the way things are in our politics and our culture. The election of Barack Obama seemed like it was opening a huge door, and I think perhaps we put all of our dreams and aspirations on him, and failed to recognize that we too have to rise up, and we too have to make our voices heard. He’s one man and can’t do it alone, and we did not make Congress, we did not make our state legislators do what we needed them to do to make the society we all imagined in that campaign. And when I look back on it, the Civil Rights movement was so successful at using non-violence in so many different ways: Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma in particular, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, all held different aspects, and when you look back at the comic book it was one tactic. It was the way they did it in Montgomery. But what if we took the broader story and showed all of the different tactics. Because what worked in Birmingham and what worked in Montgomery didn’t necessarily work in Albany, and there were different reasons. The Sheriffs started adapting. They were moving prisoners out of city jails and putting them in county jails, and things like that, so you couldn’t fill them up as fast. And we need to adapt. The tactics, the principles, they still work, but we need to adapt our use of them. And so showing how others had done that and how it had progressed seemed like such a natural way to sort of pursue those ends.

At Comic-Con International in San Diego in 2015, on the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis' famous walk to Selma, where he and other protesters were brutally attacked while crossing Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge on "Bloody Sunday," Lewis dressed in the same outfit that he wore on that day in 1965 and even led a march of children (he would repeat the event in the next two years).

(The above image is courtesy of Top Shelf, the company that published March).

Not only did Lewis dress in the same outfit as he did that day, he even packed his backpack the same as he did that day in 1965, bringing two books and an apple (he had an orange in 1965, but somehow, they couldn't find an orange for him to use in San Diego).

It was an awesome moment and it has been shared a lot since Lewis' death. However, I think it is fascinating to learn the origin, of sorts, of the idea to do this. Michael Cavna shared the information in his Washington Post column, about a convention appearance that Lewis had made in D.C. in 2014:

Last year, on a warm April day, Rep. John Lewis sat on stage at D.C.’s Walter E. Washington Convention Center and shared the story of what new worlds he had encountered since becoming Congress’s first-ever graphic novelist. “I went to Comic-Con and I’ve been to Small Press [Expo] … and Dragon Con,” the congressman recounted about attending his first nerd-culture festivals. “It sort of changed my life.”

Just then, this living legend hopped for a half-second and pivoted toward me, to reveal just how much he’d observed at these events. I was moderating the congressman’s panel at Awesome Con, to celebrate “March: Book One” — the launch of Lewis’s acclaimed civil-rights trilogy as illustrated memoir — and had introduced him as the truest hero at an event packed with people “cosplaying” (or costume-playing) as fictional caped crusaders and superpowered crimefighters.

“The mistake I made, when I went out to Comic-Con, I didn’t wear my official outfit,” said the ever-dapper Georgia congressman, in coat and tie, nodding to the popularity of cosplay at Comic-Con International in San Diego, the American granddaddy of such pop-culture circuses. I decided to bite.

“–And what is that outfit?” I interjected, following the congressman’s lead as if we’d scripted it. His eyes twinkled.

“Well, I thought I should have a backpack on,” said Lewis, then 73, as the crowd laughed at his spirit of sartorial playfulness.

“I should have had my trench coat on. And maybe a cap — just maybe,” continued Lewis, glancing left toward Andrew Aydin, his young staffer and “March” co-author, who, as a lifelong comics geek, had introduced his boss into this very world.

What an amazing story.

Thanks so much to Michael Cavna, Joseph Hughes, Andrew Aydin and, of course, the legendary John Lewis, for the information!

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