Posted in: Comics, DC Comics | Tagged: Bill Sienkiewicz, dc comics, Denys Cowan, election, john lewis

DC Rocks The Vote In This Week's Comics With Representative John Lewis

In today's DC Comics titles, DC is running a promotional campaign alongside Rock The Vote, dubbed Battle For The Vote. Written by co-writer of the late Representative John Lewis' March series, Andrew Aydin and drawn by Milestone founder Denys Cowan, New Mutants artist Bill Sienkiewicz and Chris Sotomayor with letters from Josh Reed.

The comic looks at the history of democracy in the USA – as opposed to Wonder Woman's Paradise Island which has a more Athenian model of direct democracy. How the US model was based on class distinction of land-owning, gender distinction of being male and race-distinction of being white. How that changed in policy, but how practice took a long time to catch up. And all while Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, Cyborg and Beast Boy stand around at a voting rally chatting, with a young man wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt, while Batgirl thanks the mail officer. It ends with Superman quoting Representative John Lewis as he flies off.

Representative  John Lewis was an American statesman and civil rights leader who served in the United States House of Representatives for Georgia's 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death in 2020. He was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1963 to 1966. Lewis was one of the "Big Six" leaders of groups who organized the 1963 March on Washington. He fulfilled many key roles in the civil rights movement and its actions to end legalized racial segregation in the United States. In 1965, Lewis led the first of three Selma to Montgomery marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In an incident which became known as Bloody Sunday, state troopers and police attacked the marchers, including John Lewis. A member of the Democratic Party, Lewis was first elected to Congress in 1986 and served 17 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In 2013, Lewis became the first member of Congress to write a graphic novel, with the launch of a trilogy titled March, a black and white comics trilogy about the Civil Rights Movement, told through the perspective of civil rights leader and U.S. Congressman John Lewis, written by Lewis and Andrew Aydin, illustrated and lettered by Nate Powell. Lewis cited the influence of a 1958 comic book, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, on his decision to adapt his experience to the graphic novel format.

In 2018, Lewis and Andrew Aydin co-wrote another graphic novel as a sequel to the March series entitled Run. The graphic novel picks up the events in Lewis's life after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The authors teamed with award-winning comic book illustrator Afua Richardson for the book, which was originally scheduled to be released in August 2018 (but has since been rescheduled).

I bought my DC Comics this week from Piranha Comics in Kingston-Upon-Thames. Piranha Comics is a small south London comic store chain with a small south-east store in Kingston-Upon Thames's market centre, which runs Magic The Gathering nights on Fridays, and a larger south-west store in Bromley, which also runs Magic nights and has an extensive back issue collection and online store. If you are in the neighbourhood, check them out.

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