[tab:Profile: A. David Lewis]
By Valerie McQueen

A. David Lewis has taken on Boston’s evildoers in the shadows and trenches of the Big Dig. He’s overcome Mother Nature and navigated hell and high water to find his way home. In 31 years, he’s encountered madmen, tyrannical dictators, and God himself. So, I should have known when he challenged me to a game of online Scrabble that I wouldn’t stand a chance.

But Lewis, who beat me by nearly 100 points using two- and three-letter words, has practice fitting small words into even smaller places. A man of medium stature with short, brown hair and a scruffy face, illuminated perpetually by a toothy smile, Lewis is Boston’s resident comic book writer and graphic novelist. He’s garnered notice from critics and fans with his thought-provoking and colorful works, which retell myths and religious fables with a sometimes controversial twist.

Having written several comic book series and a critically acclaimed graphic novel, The Lone and Level Sands, Lewis is one of a new breed of writers who employ the interchange of words and images to tell a story. His latest project, Some New Kind Of Slaughter, finds him paired once again with illustrator mpMann, whose artwork helped boost Sands to a Howard E. Day Prize and three Harvey Award nominations.

“That’s just how I think,” he explains as he straightens out the Captain America t-shirt that he is wearing on the last day of classes — a dare from the students in his English Composition course at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Science. “Novels and prose writing are sensational, but when I need to explain something creative, it takes the form of the interplay between words and images.”

Lewis isn’t the first author to breathe life to his writing over a canvas of color and constant motion. In the 1980s, the graphic novel scene exploded and gained respect as an alternative to prose writing. Works like Art Spiegelman’s critically acclaimed Holocaust narrative, Maus, and Alan Moore’s dystopian Watchmen compilation, which traces the superhero’s fall from grace, established the comic medium as a serious, effective, and meaningful way to tell a story.

Lewis, who is Jewish, says he was dismissive of organized religion while growing up in Framingham, Mass. He was best friends with his rabbi’s son, but he still believed the practice of organized faith was a show.

So instead, he found solace in comics and reading became his spiritual diet. Alan Moore’s From Hell became his Torah and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series his Talmud. Instead of the afterlife promised to Jews, Lewis was interested in the immortal life that comic book superheroes were afforded — printed permanently in ink and able to outpace death in every plot twist and miraculous revival.

“I believed that the questions he was asking of literary texts were ultimately religious; they had to do with the biggest questions, the broadest horizons.”

At the urging of his Shakespeare professor at Brandeis, where he studied English, Lewis began his journey into the comic industry by writing papers and giving presentations at comic conventions. He contributed so many articles to the International Journal of Comic Art that they offered him a position on the editorial board.

During the year after his graduation, Lewis spent his days working in advertising and his nights working on his comics and articles. Though he went back to school and got his masters in English literature, his appetite for learning — for words — was still unfulfilled. Then one afternoon, in the middle of a snowstorm, Lewis ambled into the Boston University Religion Department, where he met Professor Peter Hawkins.

“I don’t recall why he came to Religion rather than UNI [University Professors Program] — fate?” Hawkins, now a professor at the Yale Divinity School, laughs. “I believed that the questions he was asking of literary texts were ultimately religious; they had to do with the biggest questions, the broadest horizons.”

Lewis soon began his PhD in religion and literature at BU, and he continues to approach these questions in his work. His stories range from the tale of a young man trying to thwart an American genocide in the Empty Chamber to a retelling of the Book of Exodus through the eyes of the Pharaoh. The Lone and Level Sands, published in 2007, was a controversial account of the Jews’ flight from Egypt that gained him notice as a graphic novelist through the honors it received. However, some Judaica shops refused to carry the book because of his sympathetic treatment of the Egyptians.

“I’m fascinated by myths,” he said. “I like seeing how much I can stretch out a myth and its parameters.”

Like the characters he creates, Lewis refused to be discouraged by this plot twist in his own life. For his first wedding anniversary in October, he gave his wife, Rima, a comic loosely chronicling their first year of marriage. He is now looking forward to working on a new comic set in Boston in the 1940’s baseball scene. Rima, who jokes that she often does the casting for pretend movie versions of her husband’s books and has already chosen Tom Hanks for the upcoming baseball story, describes Lewis as a consummate multi-tasker.

“I’ve never been a very disciplined writer,” he laughed. “I’ll be lying with an idea or some research for a long time and suddenly it’ll reach a critical mass where I have to get it all out.”

The third installment of Lewis’ four-part series Some New Kind of Slaughter will be released this winter. The series continues to explore flood stories drawn from several cultural and religious traditions — an investigation all the more relevant in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and with an environmental disaster looming.

[tab:Images: Some New Kind Of Slaughter]

[tab:Related Links]
» Caption Box – The Comic Book Stories & Scholarship of A. David Lewis
» Some New Kind of Slaughter Production Blog
» Wikipedia: A. David Lewis
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