In the spring of 2008, Andrew Aydin, a twentysomething aide and future policy adviser to Representative John Lewis, was driving the congressman to an event. “We got to talking about comic books,” Aydin later wrote in a piece for Creative Loafing, adapted from his master’s thesis. “I remember Lewis sitting in the front passenger seat as he gently teased me about attending Atlanta’s comic convention, Dragon Con. But then he said, ‘You know, there was a comic book during the movement. It was very influential.’”
Aydin was intrigued. The comic book, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, he soon discovered, played an important role in the civil-rights movement by depicting the bus boycott that had brought about the integration of Montgomery’s public-transportation system. Lewis never forgot that comic book.
