A. David Lewis


Aaron David Lewis is an American comic book and graphic novel writer. He is also a comics scholar focusing on literary theory, religious studies, and graphic medicine.
He is the founder of the Caption Box comic book imprint. He has also served as an instructor at Georgetown University, Northeastern University, MCPHS, Bentley University, and Boston University. Additionally, he has given lectures at conferences such as WizardWorld, the San Diego Comic-Con, and the New York Comic-Con, among others. He is an Editorial Board member for the International Journal of Comic Art under editor John Lent. He is an Executive Board Member for the Comics Studies Society. He has also been involved in several podcasts.

Early life

Lewis was raised in Framingham, Massachusetts. He graduated from Brandeis University with a B.A. in English and Psychology in 1999. He earned his M.A. in English Literature from Georgetown University. He earned his PhD in Religion and Literature from Boston University.

Career

Lewis's 2005 work, The Lone and Level Sands, won a Howard E. Day Prize and has been nominated for three Harvey Awards in 2007. His 2002 creation, Mortal Coils, was named one of the winners of the 2003 Cinescape Literary Genre Competition, and in 2004 it was given the Paper Screen Gem Award for Mystery/Suspense. It was republished as a hardcover, color edition by Archaia Comics; Mann and Lewis collaborated again through Archaia with Some New Kind of Slaughter, or Lost in the Flood : Diluvian Myths from around the World in 2009.
In the late 2006, Lewis started a PhD program studying religion and literature at Boston University. There he also helped organize the "Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels Conference" and co-edit its later text Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels published in 2010. He completed his PhD in 2012 and revamped his dissertation work into the book American Comics, Literary Theory, and Religion: The Superhero Afterlife published in 2014 by Palgrave Macmillan.
In 2011, Lewis became co-editor of Muktatafaht: A Middle East Comics Anthology initially through the Harvard University Center of Middle East Studies' Outreach Center but, due to administrative circumstances, shopped elsewhere. He is also the organizer of the Chain World Freeform Comics Experiment and its customized book The Tome, and, in 2014, a founding member of Sacred and Sequential, an organization of religion & comics scholars.
In 2015, Lewis's co-edited volume with Christopher Moreman, entitled Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age, was a winner of the Ray at Pat Browne Award for "Best Edited Collection", and his American Comics, Literary Theory, and Religion: The Superhero Afterlife was nominated for "Best Scholarly/Academic Work" in the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards.
In 2017, Lewis edited and contributed to Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam, and Representation as co-editor with Martin Lund.
In a 2018 interview with Nicholas Yanes of Sequart Organization, Lewis stated that his next work would focus on an academic manuscript of the depictions of cancer battles in comics, to tentatively be called: Cancer in Comic Books.

Nonprofit work

Lewis was the founder and president of Comics for Youth Refugees Incorporated Collective, a 501 nonprofit organization in Massachusetts dedicated to producing free comic books based in Syrian folklore for refugee children. By 2019, the organization had sent over 1000 copies of their Haawiyat anthologies overseas to camps and schools along the Turkish border in partnership with NuDay Syria.

Comics bibliography