Consultant John Lewis was searching for an orange to hold in his bag. He needed to pack two books, a toothbrush, toothpaste, an apple and an orange
Consultant John Lewis was searching for an orange to hold in his bag. He needed to pack two books, a toothbrush, toothpaste, an apple and an orange inside his backpack, identical to he did in 1965, when he led a vanguard of near 600 folks throughout the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Mr. Lewis had already acquired a jacket and backpack that had been much like those he wore half a century earlier on the march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., although it took him months and journeys to a number of thrift retailers to seek out them. The orange was the one lacking piece to finish his costume of himself on the 2015 Comedian-Con Worldwide in San Diego, an aide, Andrew Aydin, 36, recalled.
“He went full re-creation,” Mr. Aydin, who was Mr. Lewis’s coverage adviser and digital director, mentioned in an interview.
Images of Mr. Lewis strolling throughout the conference heart, cosplaying as his youthful self — with the identical decided expression he sported in Selma when he was 25 — started to flow into on social media after the congressman died on Friday. “John Lewis was a large and an ethical compass,” mentioned Senator Elizabeth Warren, considered one of tens of 1000’s of individuals to share a tweet of the photographs from that day.
Mr. Lewis was at Comedian-Con that day to advertise “March,” a three-part graphic novel memoir he wrote with Mr. Aydin and the artist Nate Powell. The second e-book within the trilogy had been launched a number of months earlier, and Mr. Lewis was in San Diego to put it on the market. He would return once more in 2016 and 2017, and recreated the march each occasions.
His aim that day in 2015 was to assist the kids perceive that you simply don’t want tremendous powers to be a hero, Mr. Aydin mentioned.
“He was making an attempt to point out them how his religion and his perception in America essentially put him able the place they might have a look at him as a hero,” Mr. Aydin mentioned.
The congressman mentioned that it was “one other youngsters’s march, identical to they referred to as it in Alabama in ’63,” Mr. Aydin mentioned.
Mr. Lewis walked the half-mile distance from a panel room to his sales space hand-in-hand with the kids, and others joined in as he walked by. By the point Mr. Lewis took discover, there have been near 1,000 folks following him, Mr. Aydin mentioned.
“‘That is virtually an excessive amount of,’” Mr. Aydin remembered Mr. Lewis saying. “It’s his method of claiming that is one thing actually extraordinary.”
In a 2015 interview with CBS Information, Mr. Lewis referred to as the second “unreal.”
“I walked with little youngsters, fantastic little youngsters. We marched onto the ground of the conference heart. And it was unreal, unbelievable. And this throng of individuals simply walkin’ with us,” he mentioned.
The youngsters had been third-graders from Oak Park Elementary in San Diego, they usually had been studying concerning the civil rights motion from Mr. Lewis’s e-book. Their instructor, Mick Rabin, an avid comedian e-book fan, used it to show his college students about different figures from the motion. However at Comedian-Con, the scholars solely had eyes for the congressman, whilst folks dressed up as Spider-Man and Surprise Girl walked by, Mr. Rabin mentioned.
“The children went bonkers,” Mr. Rabin mentioned. “They knew who he was as a result of that they had learn it within the comedian, and he was carrying the identical factor.”
The concept for the e-book had began practically a decade earlier, in 2008. When Mr. Aydin, a lifelong comedian e-book fan, admitted to the workplace employees that he was going to Comedian-Con after working arduous hours throughout Mr. Lewis’s re-election marketing campaign, his colleagues laughed — however not Mr. Lewis.
“‘Don’t snicker,’” Mr. Aydin recalled him saying to the employees, earlier than reminding them of a 1957 comedian e-book that was widespread within the civil rights motion, “Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story.”
That dialog ultimately led to the “March” trilogy.
“We might keep up and I’d interview him,” Mr. Aydin mentioned about their writing course of. “I’d ask him questions and he’d go to sleep.”
The primary of the collection, “March: Guide One,” revealed in 2013, turned a New York Instances greatest vendor. Mr. Lewis cried when he realized that, Mr. Aydin mentioned. The second, in 2015, gained an Eisner Award at Comedian-Con, and the third, revealed in 2016, gained the Nationwide Guide Award for younger folks’s literature.
In a 2013 look on “The Colbert Report,” Mr. Lewis talked about how impressed he was by Martin Luther King’s comedian e-book.
“I learn it and I reread it, and this e-book impressed me,” Mr. Lewis mentioned. “He turned my hero, my inspiration, my chief. He impressed me to say no to segregation and racial discrimination.”
Mr. Rabin mentioned Mr. Lewis had the same impact on his college students in 2015.
“My college students who walked with him that day had been remodeled ceaselessly,” Mr. Rabin mentioned. “They had been really completely transfixed by that interplay.”