Happy Thursday, everyone! The weather is nice here down in Virginia, we had a new patio put in by people who did a real nice job (like seriously, it's lovely in the backyard now) and last night we had the first no-hitter in the World Series in 66 years. (And my prediction of this series being a real battle, going 6 or 7 games, is bearing fruit; it's now 2-2 with one more game in Philadelphia and this is gonna be great.). So on to the thrift stores!
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Only one this week and that's finding the slip-cover edition of all three volumes of the late Congressman John Lewis' fantastic graphic memoir, March, about his years with the SCCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and working for Civil Rights for people of color in the United States in the '60s. I've read this book before but my goodness, I can't not highlight this find. This is one of the best graphic memoirs, a great combination of Lewis' remembrances, Andrew Aydin co-authorship and Nate Powell's fantastic art (his covers for the various volumes are perfection).
Congressman Lewis' work her is really fascinating, talking not just about the fight against institutionalized racism and brutality in the United States (in ways that still seem hauntingly familiar here in 2022), but also in terms of conflicts within the SCCC and its various fellow groups, as well as dealing with seemingly well-meaning politicians (if you've ever seen the perfectly decent movie All The Way, with Anthony Mackie as MLK Jr and Bryan Cranston as LBJ, you know the kind of slow grinding people at the top of leadership of the civil rights groups had to deal with).
This is a lovely set for a book that frankly, contains horrors. There's death and torture and daily indignities and the presentation here is on the level of Art Spiegelman's Maus and Joe Sacco's Palestine and by that I mean they're books about terrible subjects that aren't dismal at a level that makes you want to stop reading.
I love the framing mechanism of this book, which is about Congressman Lewis reminiscing on January 20th, 2009 as he gets ready for the inauguration of President Obama and how his work in his own small part helped lead to that. It's a lovely piece of work, especially as he once in a while checks in on his flip phone and gets voice mails from various people (there's a particularly poignant one from Senator Ted Kennedy, calling because he had been thinking of Jack and Bobby that morning).
I gave this whole set to my father for his last Father's Day in 2021 and I wish I could have had a chance to talk to him about it; he wasn't a particularly liberal Democrat and definitely not a comics reader, and I would have been curious to see what he thought of this, as someone who was born in 1942 and lived through all of this, but from a Northern perspective. I think he would have liked it.\\
But let's have one lighter moment to close out!
Yep, that's John Lewis on the left on the Edmund Pettus Bridge (which a lot of people are fighting to rightly rename the John Lewis Bridge) with his trench coat and backpack in 1965. And there on the right is ALSO John Lewis, at the San Diego ComicCon in 2015, of course cosplaying as himself to promote the first volume of his memoir. Because if you get that chance, you take it.
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