>> Donald Brinkman: Alright. Thanks everyone for coming out, and I’m really excited today to be able
to introduce Nick Sousanis. I’ve known Nick for quite some time, watched him as he’s gone through
many adventures. Nick is a, he’s a mathematician, entrepreneur, artist and recently a graduate student
at Teachers College at Columbia University, where he is writing his dissertation entirely as a graphic
novel. And then this is a really interesting work because it’s all about visual and verbal discourse. And
the difference is the strengths and the weaknesses, the tradeoffs between them. It’s the first of its kind.
So he’s been getting a little bit of attention lately. He’s been, you know, he’s been in the Chronicle of
Higher Education. He gave a talk at Stanford lately. And we have a show here that’s opening right after
this where we’re going to show some of his work. And he’s here today to talk to you about unflattening.
So, and this is an interactive for those of you on-line, this is an interactive presentation. So if you have
some paper and a pen and some kind of surface, make them handy because you will need them later on.
And without further ado I guess I’ll just hand it over to you. So, welcome Nick. [applause]
>> Nick Sousanis: Well thank you all for coming and thank Microsoft Research and Studio 99 and
Donald. And I don’t know how many of you work with Donald, but the opportunity to work with him
and see just such enthusiasm to make things happen, it’s really a treat. So all of you who do work with
you, you’re really lucky and if you don’t you should find a way to.
So, there will be an interactive part but that will be a little later. So, I’m doing this doctorate in comic
book form and as you may guess, there aren’t a lot of other, this is a little bit unusual in the academic
setting. So a big question people say is how do you get away with this? You know, that’s the, that’s
almost always the first question. So, the truth of the matter is, this is not something I didn’t come to
Columbia and say, I’m going to now make comic books. I came as a comics maker with a lot of
background in that. So I thought I’d give you a tiny bit of history of my background with comics before
we get into some of the specifics.
I’m one of those kids, well my older brother was a comics reader. So I’m one of those kids whose first
word is Batman, which there’s a lot of us now I think. And I think part of that, I work, I work with
students in them teaching comics in their classrooms and I think the literacy elements of comics is a big
thing and I can certainly attest to that anecdotally because you know my experience with reading came
really fast because I was reading comics when I was very small.
So later in junior high and high school I produced my own comic. I had a superhero series for quite
awhile. But then, then I went to college and in college it seemed like you’re supposed to do serious
things and I really liked mathematics and things like that and so I always, I kept doing comics but they
were always on the side, always this thing that I did if I had time to get to it, but never the main focus of
what I did. So that continued for a number of years and I spent, I was in Detroit for a long time and I
worked, I worked around the arts. I wrote about art shows and that sort of stuff. And at the last minute
was asked to be in a political art show with about four days to go. And so the only thing I could come up
with was, I can make a comic. So I made, I made, it was right before the 2004 election and right after.
Yeah I heard that. So this piece is the second of those two pieces. It’s called The Show of Hands. It’s
about voting. The sort of visual verbal metaphors that came out of that really resonated with how I
would work in the future and sort of triggered me getting back into comics.
So there was this piece and then about a year later we organized an exhibition around games and art
and education. And that piece I did the essay in comic book form. So, it’s about a 16 page comic that
deals with the history of games, how games work, and then sort of applies it to the philosophy of life
through games. And so when I was coming to Columbia I said, I had this document I had made and I said
this is the kind of thing I can do. So they bought it and said alright, we can, you know, this is the kind of
thing you can do. We’re going to let you do it.
So I continued to make comics for a lot of my assignments. This is about Professor Maxine Green. She’s
a professor of aesthetic education who’s in her late 90’s or mid 90’s. I had her class in her living room.
She’s really amazing if you know [inaudible] Maxine Green.
But, so to me, making, you know, I just said why not? Why not make comics as academic work? But
when you’re actually in academia, and those of you who’ve come through it, you know that that’s a little
bit more of a challenge than you might otherwise think. So, I’ve, part of my argument has been to, to
argue for the legitimization of this work. I had to argue for its self. I didn’t set out to argue for its self. I
set out just to do it, because why not? But now I had to both argue for its self and do this larger thing.
So, what I’m going to take you through is the larger argument, which is about education. And then the
tighter thing which is very specific about how comics work in visual thinking.
So to start, I call this work Unflattening. So I should let you know what flatness means. So by flatness I
mean sort of a flatness of sight, a flatness of possibilities. I don’t mean literal flatness at all. And I liken
it to, if you’re familiar with the sociologist Hebert Marcuse, his expression, a pattern of one dimensional
thought and behavior, the kind of thing where like all the possibilities are already chosen for you. So
this really is just one way of thinking. So the other thing I connect this to, and I would guess people here
are familiar with Edwin Abbott’s book, Flatland from the 1880’s,and in Flatland it’s about these
geometrical inhabitants of a two dimensional plane, and they’re capable of moving east and west and
south and northwards, but they have no concept of upwards. They have no idea how to move off that
plane. They can’t even imagine the idea that there is something off of the plane. And so I feel like what
flatness is, is this lacking of the critical dimension to step out of what we know in the same way that
Flatlanders only can know the plane.
And I think, or I fear really, that despite a lot of well meaning things that are going into education and
the institutions around school, that they are complicit in creating flatness and perpetuating flatness. So,
I think this starts out really early. We’re put on tracks at the beginning of school and sort of divided out.
And learning becomes something that you’re, it’s more a recipe. These are things done to us at certain
steps along the way, rather than experiences that we have.
And these things happen in boxes. They happen in boxes of space, like this room. And they happen in
boxes of time. Like you have one period to do this subject and they happen in varies of subjects as well.
So everything is organized into these different boxes. And I think in being sort of indoctrinated by
boxes, that we tend to take those boxes inside ourselves. We internalize that. So the idea of somebody
who studied mathematics and studied art is weird in this culture because we’re in multiple boxes.
Maybe not in this building, this might be a building where that’s more embraced than other places. But
I can say from experience that folks that are in multiple boxes, that is not always welcomed or
understood.
And I think that the tools we’re using to assess the human, which is this very complex capable amazing
creature, we try to compare that to other kinds of boxes that don’t look anything like this. And so
converting the human into data, I think it limits us and I think it flattens us. And so maybe, you know
when da Vinci made this drawing and said that you know in humanity we could see the whole universe, I
think maybe that was in our hubris to make statements like that. But the flip side of that is, is to stick us
in the bubbles that testing puts us through, is starting to limit us and sort of align us in one dimension.
And the effect of this I think, again despite well meaning, is that things get standardized. They get put
in line, in row upon row and we end up being flattened.
So, I want to come back to how early this starts. This is something that really struck me and it’s been a
guiding force throughout this whole project. The New York Times reported getting close to three years
ago now, the decline in the sale of picture books. There’s a big decline in the sale of picture books and
the publishers said that the reasons that they stated was that kids, that parents wanted to get their kids
into chapter books at earlier and earlier ages. And this is four, three, four and five year olds. And the
reasons that they want to do that is because kids had to take standardized testing. And standardized
testing required that they be able to do all these verbal things and so parents want their kids to do well,
well meaning again, and so they throw out picture books because that’s not important. But chapter
books, word books are the way to go. And this is for four and five year olds.
So, obviously a big focus of what I’m doing is to challenge text. And so this is a page from my
dissertation. It’s the only page that looks like this. But if you look at every other dissertation ever done,
in the last few hundred years, maybe not, I don’t know how long the typesetting has been like this but
for awhile, they look a lot like this except for the burn marks and some of the other parts. And I think
we’ve had this bias for the verbal linguistic being the way we think for a long time. And I’m here tracing
it back to Plato, who looked at the reed bent by water and I think you’d be familiar with that. You put a
straw or something in water and it looks like it’s bent.
And so you’d say well you can’t trust your eyes because your eyes are deceiving you. And so you know it
all became well it’s pure thought, and pure thought was more like inner speech. Descartes picks this
kind of thing up and, well let me back up, sorry. I think the other, so that’s about what we see, but the
other aspect of that is images themselves. So if you can’t trust what we can see when you’re making an
image, that’s a shadow of a shadow already. So you really can’t trust images. So Descartes takes that
and sort of double downs, doubles down on it, and his experiment with the wax candles. So the wax
melts and then when it cools off the wax hardens again. He says well I saw it being fluid and I saw it
being solid, so obviously my senses are wrong because it’s still the same thing. So he throws out sense
experience altogether, saying I distrust that. And I think continues with that sort of dissect, dissect
what makes us human and reduce us to thinking machines. And obviously that came with some great
advances but also some really difficult things for us.
So consider this. Consider that language is, is like a sea that we swim in, the thing that we breathe in.
And so it’s a powerful tool. It enables lots of possibilities. But at the same time, in sort of defining what
we’re able to see, what we’re able to know, it can also confine what we’re able to know. It can limit
what we can see. So it’s a tool and a trap all at once.
And just to give you an example. If we think about, think about maps as a kind of language, you’re
familiar of course with the standard Mercator projection of the earth. You take, you take the world,
which is this very complex thing and you think about that as experience. Experience is all over and the
globe is all over. And you flatten it out and you know that distortions happen when you flatten things
out like that. And you know that the information is lost, and it has to be. It has to be any language has
to flatten things out. And so then you look at Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion map and he flattened it
out in a different way and it shows connections. It shows other things. But it’s also losing tons of
information. So any language that we think through in the way that a thermometer can only tell us one
thing about the weather, you look at a thermometer, you say, I know the weather, you’re missing a lot
of pieces.
And so let’s think specifically about text and image. Text unfolds the linear like a chain. The things are
words are connected to each other in this sequence. Image on the other hand is all over. It’s all
connected to each other and you take it in all at once. So you’re familiar with this, sort of the treelike
structure of how we break down language. I’m sure you still spend a lot of time diagramming sentences.
And the flip side, if you’re familiar with the term risome [phonetic], something that’s root, it’s all
interconnected, all the roots are, there’s no center structure like a tree would have. And the image is
much more like that. So it’s all over all at once. So there are different ways of perceiving reality. And
so the question and maybe the guiding question for my work is what have we been missing when we
see through only, when we rely on only one way of looking? It’s not to say that one way is bad or one
way is better. It’s to say, what do we miss out on when we rely on just a single way of thinking?
And so comics, for me I think of comics as amphibious, something where I can breathe in both mediums.
They can be visual and verbal. And I can exist and see from both sides of those borders, and maybe get
a little sense of the things that I have been missing. And maybe that’s a way that you can start to step
out and gain perspective on the situations you find yourself trapped in.
So, it’s a way of sort of pivoting away from one center, sort of the pre Copernican models of the earth.
We pivot away from that single center and we start coming at things from two eyes, from two points.
And this is really common in, I mean we live with this every second of our lives, when we see through
two eyes. And those two eyes are always giving us two different views. You take this for granted but
the fact that you are able to see, do that, is what makes you able to catch a ball. It’s what makes you
able to navigate this face. Those two different views work together to give you perspective.
So, a big idea of what I’m doing is saying, look let’s see not only from, let’s get past one perspective and
let’s get two or maybe even many. Let’s look for many points. And it’s not to denigrate the disciplines,
the single disciplines or any particular language. It’s just to say that when we start to bring them
together, when we start to look from the multiple ways that people make sense of the world, then we
can see a bigger picture. We can explore new possibilities.
And I think some of those distances are necessary. Sort of being apart from each other gives you greater
perspective. And holding those two things in relationship, not say not at odds, but how do you make
sense? How do your eyes, you know if your eyes don’t talk to each other correctly, you have problems.
If your significant other and you don’t learn to talk to each other properly, there’s problems. So, you
know, it doesn’t mean there aren’t differences, but those differences need to speak together and from
that we really, we gain possibilities.
So my definition of unflattening, which I may read to you, but it kind of came out of, who’s familiar with
Eratosthenes’ finding the circumference of the earth? A couple of you are. Okay. So what he did on the
solstice, he knew that down south in Syene that the sun at noon was directly overhead and there was no
shadow in the well. So it went, the sun went straight down to the bottom of the well. But up in
Alexandria where he was at the very same time, there was a slight shadow. So he, doing some pretty
simple geometry and knowing that the sun’s rays were all hitting the earth straight, calculated the
circumference of the earth from that. And this page, it’s a pretty simple explanation but, and you could
do this thing yourself with somebody far away from you.
So for me, my definition of unflattening, unflattening is a simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage
points from which to engender new ways of seeing. So it’s all about how do we see from more than one
point at a time? And if you’re thinking of you know, I think a big part of I wandered a little bit in the labs
last night, there’s people looking from different places and as those intersections happen, what more
expansive possibilities come out of that?
And I want to make a side note here to stress that I talk about ways of seeing and I am very specifically
focused on visual and verbal. But by ways of seeing I really mean something more metaphorical about
ways of seeing as sort of ways of perceiving the world. So I use the example of my dog to say his sense
of smell, which the dog’s sense of smell is not just more powerful, but it’s more nuance. So a dog might
walk into this room and smell the speaker that was here seven days ago and one that was here six days
ago and have all those sort of layers of experience that we don’t even have concepts of.
So, I use the example here to say, look I say, I talk about ways of seeing, but your ways of seeing maybe
have nothing to do with making visuals and they have some other, other thing. But since I am talking
about ways of seeing, for me comics let me not only talk about seeing and talk about the importance of
visual thinking, but I can actually walk that talk. I mean in the academia there’s been lots of talk about
visual thinking and its importance, but a lot of it looks like text. More like all of it looks like text. So
comics let me get at these things from the place that they’re actually trying to address. And I think, I
mean comics have been around a long time, but they’ve gotten a bad name and they have a bad name.
This is changing now, but I think that our connotations with the word comics are unfortunate. It’s a
children’s medium. It’s whatever, and then they gave it the name graphic novel, which is an excellent
marketing term, but it’s also, it has some odd connotations as well. So we call it lots of different things,
but the truth is, I don’t think of comics as a new medium or even a newish medium. I think of them as
part of a long lineage that goes back to ways we made sense of the world before we could use words.
So, I’m not saying this is comics, but I’m saying making images to make sense of things, that’s been with
us since we could be us.
So a little bit about, specifically about how comics work. This will, this first part will jump off Scott
McCloud and if you’re interested in comics at all, you know who Scott McCloud is. But if you’re getting
interested in comics at all, you should know who Scott McCloud is. He wrote a book called
Understanding Comics in 1993 and it’s a comic about comics. It’s really a phenomenal read. If you’re
interested in comics it’s a phenomenal read. If you’re interested in design it’s a phenomenal read. If
you’re interested in being human it’s really worth it. So we’re going to, we’ll start with him and then
diverge as we go on our definitions here.
So for McCloud, comics are juxtapose, pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence. Essentially
saying they’re sequential art. So that, the simple version of that, if I put my fist like this and I draw a box
around it and then I put my fist like this and draw a box around it, you guys make the connection and
you know that a punch was thrown, even though nothing actually moved. Those static images, you
linked them together in your head. You made a gestalt of it and you made meaning out of those
separate images. So that sort of, that’s his groundwork for what comics are. You string images together
that becomes a comic. It separates it from visual art and it separates it from text in other ways. This is
my page sort of taking all of his thinking and putting it into my own work. But one aspect of that is that
time, he’s saying time equals space and I wrote here time is written in space. And so that idea of the
passage of time, like I drew the two boxes, is, I mean no time unfolded, but the passage of time
happened from this space to this space.
So for instance, in this sort of winding sequence here, and it’s still a little too hard to see, but there’s a
larger one out there. I took the idea of sequence and the idea of seasons and put them together. So
our experience of the seasons is something that happens in sequence. Things move along. And I think
this is my redrawing of a lunar calendar from about 30,000 years ago. That people were recording time
in space a long time ago. They did it in things like that. They did it in things like Stonehenge. They made
sense of sequence by marking it in space. So I think we can think about the way this aspect of how
comics work is also something very old. And the other part which we already alluded to before is that
the reader is really, really involved in this. The reader is involved in making the connections between
here and here. And so unlike animation where the thing unfolds, you’re doing the animating. You’re
bringing it to life.
So, yes, comics are sequential in the ways that text is sequential. But the other aspect to that is that
they are also a visual media. They are images. And we have talked about images earlier. Images is
something you take in all at once. So yes, I do read the sequence step by step by step by step by step.
But at the same time, I am making connections up and back and down and across because I can’t help
but see the whole. I can’t help but make those connections. So some people call this more like a
network. You know, to see that whole thing all at once. And there is my, you know my little joke here is
that this whole page is really one with everything. There are no separate elements. They hold together
because you see the whole at once.
And so this is an example from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, which is a very well known
book and well worth reading. But in this center panel this character, he’s sort of displaced in time, I
think is making meta commentary about how comics work. So in the center panel he says there is no
future. There is no past you see. And what he is really saying is, this isn’t the future panel. And in fact
that’s said in the past. This isn’t the future panel either. And that’s not a past panel. Those panels are
all taking place at the same time. So there is no separation between future and past in the comics
except how it’s marked off in space. So, for me this makes me think about how we think. And I want to
sort of go to cognitive science for just a tiny second. This is based on the work of Iain McGilchrist who
wrote a book called The Master and His Emissary. And he’s talking about the split between left and right
brain, which is traditionally thought of as left being verbal and right being visual. And he is sort of
drawing most of that out, but saying that yes, there is significant difference and the difference is in how
we pay attention to the world. And he is saying that the left is very much about paying attention, linear,
very focused and very narrow kind of way of sequences. And that the right is sort of this global, all over
broad awareness, which you can relate to visual and verbal, but they’re not that neatly mapped.
So if you think about this evolutionary, evolutionarily, it’s important to be able to pay very close
attention to something to do work, to make something, to make a tool. But at the same time if you
don’t have broad awareness, you’re about to get eaten. So you need to have, you know, to have these
two brains talking to each other and working together to survive in the world. So for me, I see comics as
sort of holding two different ways of paying attention to the world in one sense, the sequential and the
simultaneous. And I think that makes comics really cool because it makes them stand apart from other
ways of communicating.
So maybe if you, I’ll give you a few of what I think are neat implications of this. This is from Art
Spiegelman’s Maus, which is familiar to people. But I think, so this simple example, this is sort of a time
line within what they’re talking about. In text, I would put this as a footnote or I would put it at the end
of the book or I would have to do some, or a sidebar. Sidebars are horrible. Because, and here’s why I
say sidebars are horrible, because you don’t know when you’re supposed to read it. You don’t, and it
matters when you’re supposed to read it and you get lost. And I go down to my footnote and I’ve got to
find my way back up to text if that’s how it is. So comics, because they hold together visually, but they
also can be kept apart visually, because you know that this is separate, but you also see the whole.
Comics can hold things together even as they allow things to be separate.
This is an example from Watchmen again. It’s a pretty simple sequence. There’s a story taking place in
this room in California. And at the same time there’s something they’re talking about that’s happening
in New York. And the scenes are kept separate. They’re sort of interlaced, but they’re kept separate by
the fact that they’re colored and you can see the ex panels are different than the darker panels. So they
can both hold together and you can have two different things happening at once. And this is a reason
for those of you that happened to see the film which I have not heard that much good about, that the
film can’t handle that. Film is going to do things. It has to go on and on and on. And comics can spread
things out in this spatial way. This is a pretty simple example, but the fact that there are these separate
little moments, but if you pull back and notice, there’s a larger shape going on that’s actually speaking to
what he’s investigating.
This is a French author. This is Gasoline Alley from a long time ago. But this is just a pretty neat example
where there’s a sequential thing. There’s guys fumbling through the beach, but there’s a simultaneous
scene that he’s moving through. So you’ve got those two ways of thinking stuck together, similarly from
Gasoline Alley, same kind of thing, where sort of it’s one scene but you’re supposed to read it
sequentially. Two modes of reading stuck together.
And this one, this is just funny, but I really like it. This is something you can really only do in comics.
This poor little guy can’t get the apple out of the tree. He can’t get it. He gets an idea and so he walks
up the hill. Because these are in the same space, he’s able to get the apple. Similarly his game of keep
away backfires because people can reach through panels because they can intersect in space.
Okay, so some, this sort of ecosystem that this simultaneous sequential ecosystem allows some other
things. It allows us to directly integrate visual and verbal. I mean I’ve been talking about two modes of
how we pay attention, but visual and verbal more specifically. So, words can become visual elements.
So they not only, they not only help us sort of move through the page in how they are oriented, but they
can become visual elements and integrated in that way. And there are interactions. Interaction which I
talk about as refraction here and that’s the part that I didn’t show slides of, the way that they, you know
they sort of bend meaning. When you’re reading in one, when you’re reading text and then you see the
picture and then that sort of contributes back and forth and there’s a resonance between the two. And
it really, you know in ways like if you think about magazines which also have pictures and words, there’s
text and then there’s image. And so there is some resonance but in the case of here, we’re constantly
going back and forth between the two modes of reading.
And I just grabbed a couple of examples here, which I just, this is from an Alan Moore comic about 911.
But I just think it’s a wonderful one with the upper left, his images of course also carry information every
bit as powerfully. They express symbolically feelings beyond the reach of language. And I think that’s
sort of speaking to what’s going on in, I mean speaking to what’s going on in the panels. But it’s sort of
speaking to what comics can do. They can give you images that do things that text doesn’t do and they
can give you text that does things that the images can’t do.
And this is a simple example from The Flash. But just the flow of word balloons tells you where to move.
This is from a Batman and Robin comic where the text becomes a graphic. These are fun. This is, seems
to be, you know, I mean, it’s a really, it’s clever but it’s how do you deal with, how do you deal with the
silence of this medium and then sort of make it, you make it visual. And that goes into I’m sure at
conferences as things you guys have seen visual facilitation or sketch noting. And I think that comics
have some over, I mean they’re not very much about stories or sequentialness, but they’re very much
about how words and pictures interact.
And the other aspect that comics facilitate is the multimodal. A multimodal very simply is saying that it’s
not just text but things like gesture, image, action, all contribute ensemble to the meaning. And they’re
not add-ons. They’re all part of it. So my page here is sort of talking about you know, unlike Descartes’
thing, communication isn’t just these dots that go across. It’s expressed in how we gesture or how
angry, how loud, whatever those things are. And you can make them visual. And we have all this sort of
signs and symbols that we can utilize and make part of the visual page.
So one example, this is Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli. And it’s really, if you’re interested in
multimodality or comics or both, it’s awesome. And in this panel so there’s the two actors and they’re
doing whatever they’re doing. And then there’s the text which is sort of telling you what’s happening.
But then the way, the colors that they’re rendered in is giving you information. The way that they’re
rendered, and hers is this sort of rendered, sort of soft lines, and his is obviously very geometric stylized
form, on top of that the fonts that they’re speaking in and the shape of their word balloons. So there’s
all these layers of visual information, this multimodal stuff coming at you. But whether you’re aware of
it or not, you’re taking it in all at once. And it’s making something that looks as simple as a Peanuts
cartoon incredibly dense and powerful in what it can communicate in, in seemingly simple form.
And this kind of stuff I threw in. This is a slide from Edward Tufte’s book. I mean the information
design, I think comics start to have overlaps with that as well. I won’t speak to that. So this brings me to
sort of, what do our thoughts look like? Like you know, what is the shape, what is the shape that our
thoughts are before we get them out? You know we get them out in things like words. We get them
out in pictures. But what are they, what do they look like? And for me, I know I tend to talk in
parentheticals a lot. There are all of these sort of side tracks and I always bring up my grandmother,
whose stories, as many grandmothers probably do, all had, you know I was going and then, oh and that
neighbor, and then all of a sudden we’re hearing about, so they, it’s something that’s not always great in
conversation, but I think in comics this sort of tangential in the sidetracks can be utilized really well.
And this is Chris Ware, a really wonderful contemporary cartoonist if you don’t know, I highly
recommend. But Ware is really a master of slow moments of recreating memory in space and having
the sort of sequential moments but also these side simultaneous things happen that really gets at how
you tell a story or how you’d think about what happened that day. And it’s using the space in very
different ways than you may have thought of comics in the past. It’s not, it’s not dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.
It’s all over. And so every element here, every side turn you make to move back, to come back, it all had
meaning. That whole shape of the page is telling you something.
And in that way it’s very much like architecture. And for me I think comics are so much about how you
arrange the space. And my pages take forever to make. And they take forever to make not because I’m
slow at drawing. Even when the drawing is incredibly dense and intense, which I tend to go for, but
that’s not what takes, I mean that takes awhile, but that’s not what takes so long. What takes so long is
figuring out how to have this space convey the meaning.
And so, we’re going to pause from the me talk a lot part and we’re going to turn this to you. So I’m
going to explain the exercise. Are you guys ready? Okay. So, it’s a little bit more comics theory than the
exercise begins. So, this is Little Nemo from 1908 or something like that. And comics, so comics are
often compared to storyboarding. And you’re familiar with storyboarding from movies. Storyboarding,
but what storyboarding does is you decide what goes in the panel and you draw it. And you decide what
goes in the next panel and you draw it. And they’re all the same size and they’re all, you know, so you
get to choose what happens within. But after that the choices are kind of done. In comics you not only
choose what goes inside these containers, but you choose what’s the shape of that container, what’s
the size of that container, what’s its relationship to the things next to it and what spot on the page is it
on. So in this thing, if we whited out the content of this, you’d see you know this sort of same size thing
and then all of a sudden the panels would grow. And then they would grow some more and then at the
end they would shrink back down. So, the panels I think are starting to tell you the story. You’re not
convinced.
These panels are telling a different story. I mean they’re sort of establishing a rhythm in that kind of
grid. And this is a Chris Ware one that’s mostly just crazy, but maybe it’ll give you an idea. This is a
Frank Miller piece from The Dark Night Returns. Again, this sort of beep, beep, beep, I mean that’s a
very different meaning being conveyed than what happens here. He’s slowing you down in or speeding
you up in ways that here again it’s very rhythmic. This is a modern, few years old We3 by Frank Quitely,
sort of using the kind of bullet time from the matrix and video games stuff you know. What happens
when all these layers are sort of interacting? And the page itself is a frenzy, not let alone the action.
The page is giving you that frenzy.
So, as I think about structuring pages, as I’m walking in New York or in a room or in a place in this room, I
start noticing how much the architecture around us, the landscape around us, is, has potential for
thinking about how to make comic books. So if you look at the ceiling, it’s a wonderful ceiling. Thank
you Don. If I, let’s just pretend we put this ceiling to music. And so if I start in this ceiling panel I might
go and I sort of have a dah, and then I hit the light and the light goes dot. And then I hit the thing and
then I hit that, the fan, whatever, the vent, and it goes drrrrrr, and then I keep going and there’s sort of
a solid thing and it continues. So you might imagine putting this to music.
So I’m kind of intrigued by this. What are all these different shapes? What are they telling us? What
kind of information is being told to us when you see those little dots near the edge of the subway or
how that’s divided up or why has this building got these things? What kind of information is being
conveyed by that? So, just a few other examples.
So, the assignment, lots of people in these talks will say I really like what you’re up to and I don’t, you
haven’t said that yet. [laughter] But, what is the problem they all, they say I get it. Comics can do lots
of stuff. But what is the problem? This is the problem everyone will tell me after that for themselves
personally. They say I really liked it but, but I can’t draw. So the idea of the exercise is to make
something that reconsiders what drawing is and does it through making an abstract comic. So it’s in, it’s
two parts that you’ll do at once. But I have to explain them separately because I don’t know how to talk
non- linearly. But I’d like to.
So, the first half of this is you take the entire sheet of the paper you have. And how would you take it
and carve it up in sort of ways that comics carve up space, divided into boxes, whatever? I don’t want
to tell you too much because I don’t want to influence how you carve your block, your page up. But
think about the whole surface as your day. That whole thing on your, that whole sheet of paper is your
day. And how would you arrange the space in whatever the kinds of things I’ve shown or whatever you
come up with that says this is what my day looked like or a day. You know you can pick a day that is,
you know whatever, I don’t care which day it is. It doesn’t have to be today.
So how would you compose that space to speak to the shape of your day, how it unfolded? Does that
make sense? Oh, alright, that look was like, but really the look was I don’t know what I’m going to do.
But that’s okay.
So the second part of it. So as I’m about to, I had this thought right before the class I was going to teach,
and I was on a run on the boardwalk and I was running over this gridded thing and there was spilled
paint splashed across the thing. And that reminded me of my wife’s work, who’s here, who is an
abstract gestural artist. And so much of her work is about expressing a motion or emotion through the
thrown paint, through how this line cuts through space. So this is two little examples from her work.
This is an example of oil or something spilled on a sidewalk. So the idea is so you’ve got this grid, or it
doesn’t have to be a grid, but you’ve cut up your space to convey the shape of your day. And then I
want you to think about in this sort of gestural line, any kind of line you want to make, that runs through
it or animates it in some way that speaks to your motion or emotion in those moments. And I give you
another example. This was paint, not the same one that I saw that day. Or even this, if you can see it,
this river running through somewhere in Ohio. You know, what does that, what does that line mean? Is
this clear? In five minutes can you carve up the shape of your day? And it’s, so drawing skills are not
required. You need to be able to carve up one, and I say use the whole page, I really mean it. That
doesn’t mean you can’t leave giant spots blank, but they mean just as much as the spaces you fill. So,
what I don’t want, the only sort of requirement is that you don’t like use half of it and say well I just was
done. With text you can scroll and you can be done wherever you want to be done. But comics you
have to think of every inch. So if you leave a giant blank space, it’s because there’s a giant blank space
in your day and that’s fine. But it should mean something. Is this clear? Any more I tell you, then you’ll
do what I would do and I try not to do this because I don’t want to know. So like five, maybe six
minutes, and then a few brave volunteers will share.
Do you need a surface? You sure?
>>: Yeah.
>> Nick Sousanis: We can, I can get you one.
[minutes of silence]
Everyone following on-line, you can do it as well and send us, send us what you’re doing. Yeah.
[minutes of silence]
That’s fine.
[minutes of silence]
[inaudible]
[minutes of silence]
You guys are brave. I got them. Hmm plenty. Time?
>>: [inaudible]
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah with the text.
>>: [inaudible]
>> Nick Sousanis: Oh, don’t know?
>>: [inaudible]
>> Nick Sousanis: Oh, do I have to say that?
>>: [inaudible]
>> Nick Sousanis: Where are these people?
>>: [inaudible]
>> Nick Sousanis: Well the text will be fine.
>>: [inaudible]
>> Nick Sousanis: Okay. So we’re going to do 30 more seconds? You don’t, you know if I finished a
page as quickly as you all do, I’d have finished my dissertation a year ago. [laughter] Good? So, a
suggestion from the audience is that we put these up. We were going to share them but this is even
better. So there’s tacks. All on one side? All on one side just real quick. Tacks are here and we’ll just
have a couple of you talk about them, only because of other things to do today, but, come on up. And if
the video happens to catch the people putting tacks in the wall, awesome. [inaudible] I get all these
out. It’s no contest, no prizes. No prizes. [laughter]
>>: May I have one [inaudible]?
>> Nick Sousanis: You may. Alright. Oh, more? You’re very serious in your tack use. [inaudible] Oh,
tacks, as many as you need. 30. Make that part of the piece. Do you have tacks in the back? Alright, we
will look for a second and then we’ll, funny, no matter what, no matter how many times I say it’s about
making an abstract thing, just about the grid and the line, some of you will always draw things. And
that’s okay. So who’d like to say a word about theirs?
>>: James would.
>> James: Yeah.
>> Nick Sousanis: James.
>> James: Alright.
>> Nick Sousanis: Where is yours James? Oh yes.
>> James: Okay. This should be like Dieter on Saturday Night Live, right?
>>: Here’s my art right here. Okay, so let me explain to you all the concept, so …
>> James: Ah, yeah basically what I was trying to capture is that you know each day sort of has
[inaudible] upon like a start point and end point?
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah.
>> James: And there’s like a bunch of different ways you can sort of get there, right? And it’s all, and
these are sort of like my ridiculous daydreams or excursions? So it’s like this is sort of what the man
wants me to do? [laughter] I wake up. I eat breakfast. I take a shower. I go to work. I come home,
whatever. But then sort of connected all this as you know I’m a [inaudible] you know stuff like that.
And so there’s [inaudible] an interconnection between that. So there’s sort of like a flow to, you know I
get down here, I go to sleep, whatever, but then you know, dreaming or whatever. The dreams
somehow turn to birds. That part I don’t quite understand. [laughter] Then I started getting …
>> Nick Sousanis: Nice. So, immediately, I mean are you a drawer?
>> James: Ah, I draw a little bit.
>> Nick Sousanis: There’s a slight ringer in here. [laughter] But, the point is …
>> James: I sort of like comics too.
>> Nick Sousanis: I knew that, really. [laughter] But immediately whether you can or not, we know
right away that this means something. I mean all of us knew without his explanation that some sort of
dream time happened and happened here. And we knew that there was more rigid structured time
here and we knew the flow. So I mean these are comics that kind of need some explanation, but we’re
already making choices on how to organize space because of things that we implicitly know. And so let’s
take another one that, thanks.
[inaudible]
>> Nick Sousanis: [inaudible] I don’t know if I’ve had one that has that many choices in it for reading.
Cool. Who else needs to volunteer? Good heavens.
>>: I’ll go.
>> Nick Sousanis: Oh?
>>: I’m always afraid. So I was seeing mine sequentially. I did. I drew things.
>> Nick Sousanis: You drew things?
>>: I drew a little. Then I started filling things in. It’s, I had time left over, so, yeah. [inaudible] So I think
I have like you know my sleep time up here, you know, like waking up in the middle of the night. I’m
getting some sleep and then getting up and thinking about the floor plan of my house and just, I started
thinking about everything in boxes. I started realizing that I am , I live entirely in boxes.
>> Nick Sousanis: Uh huh.
>>: Then there’s boxes in my rooms and the path I take, which is generally the same and constrained
and there is you know, like here’s where I pick up my phone. That’s where I pick up my coffee. And
again my phone, my phone, it’s a Windows phone. It’s full of boxes.
>> Nick Sousanis: Uh huh.
[laughter]
>>: Seeing the little boxes on my phone, and I realize like that my Outlook is like a little box and I’m
playing a chess game which is like, you know on a grid of boxes and then I put them on parts of my body
and then I give to either the individual person box or the multi-person box, depending on my day. That’s
my big choice there, is the box. And go to the big box which has four series of boxes that I walk up the
stairs and kind of go around into my little box here where I sit and I look at three different boxes with
boxes inside of them. And that’s my day.
>> Nick Sousanis: Fantastic. So I mean right there, you’ve made all, you haven’t made comics before
have you?
>>: Not really, I guess, I don’t know, I’ve drawn things.
>> Nick Sousanis: Oh, well alright. I don’t [inaudible]
>>: [inaudible] I like to draw my friends as various animals.
>> Nick Sousanis: Oh?
>>: My own devising, so.
[laughter] [inaudible]
>> Nick Sousanis: Later exhibitions. [laughter] But I mean you’ve made choices like all of a sudden
there’s all these little tiny, tiny boxes in there. Then there’s the big boxes when you move here, and
maybe you made them just because that’s how you filled the space if you were doing stuff and then you
had more left over or maybe…
>>: You told me I had to fill the space.
>> Nick Sousanis: I did. But I mean, you know I mean all those choices were, for instance, this is a very
short amount of time, right? You getting ready. So there’s all these little, you know there’s all these
little moments that are happening as you’re getting ready, and then there’s the expanse of travel and
then the longness of your day. So I mean those kinds of things are written into there instantly as you
know, you make those choices as of [inaudible].
>>: Do you read palms?
>> Nick Sousanis: Palms?
>>: Yeah, like I feel like giving you my palm.
>> Nick Sousanis: No. So I need somebody who made one very abstractly to speak up.
>>: What about that one? The red squiggle.
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah the red squiggle.
>>: The red squiggle?
>> Nick Sousanis: Is that you?
>>: That one?
>> Nick Sousanis: The red in the center.
>>: Oh yeah that’s me. Alright, well I don’t know if you guys can see it, but I do a lot of work with heart
rate and galvanic skin response. And I’ve been seeing a lot of these lines and these jaggy things and so
what I did was I thought about my heart rate and my skin response throughout the day. And I thought,
well when I get up in the morning I’m really calm and I have my coffee and I’m hanging out with my cat,
and then the yard, it’s like birds and my heart rate is really you know soft and really nice. And then
there’s the 5:20 commute. You know you’re like ahhhh, and you get into work and there’s like a million
e-mails and you’re like whaaat, right, and so I have little people on the blitz.
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah.
>>: And that’s when it becomes usually by mid-day, super crazy, like interns running around, projects
blowing up or you know, we have wins and losses, and then it kind of starts to subside again as I get
home and then I get back into the swing of life outside of work. I kind of used sort of the Richter scales
sort of …
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah.
>>: Heart rate to do it.
>> Nick Sousanis: But we know, I mean the thing is that we know sort of a smooth line, you know
whether a drawer or not, that means something. A smooth line means something different than a
jagged line. And it may mean slightly different things depending on the context, but we know sharp
lines because we live in a world where sharp things hurt or where steep things are hard to climb. And
we know soft curves mean something different. So whether you’re a drawer or not a drawer, you can
do these things. So, I mean a big part of this, and you know we’d spend a lot more time on it, is to say,
well drawing doesn’t have to look like render, you know, things that look like things. It has to look like
things that we feel. And we feel that line. I mean you can look at, and I think all of these, you can pretty
much start to look and you say, and there’s a lot of coff, every time I do this there’s coffee, and usually
drawn. It’s the most persistent theme. And driving is a toss- up, but you know that sort of softness and
the energy, I mean those things come out and we, and you recognize it immediately. And everyone or I
mean there’s, there’s portrait style, there’s landscape style. You guys have, some are circular. I think
there’s one, I think Nathan yours starts to go in a circle or maybe it’s not done. I don’t know which.
>> Nathan: [inaudible] the different structures of thought that happened in my day? And you could
just…
>> Nick Sousanis: So you could go in any, yours is sort of all over.
>> Nathan: Yeah.
>> Nick Sousanis: Alright. Do we want one last word from one audience member? And then I’ll close up
the talk. Somebody else need …
>>: I’ll say something.
>> Nick Sousanis: You can always count on your wife to have a [laughter] to know exactly what you
need them to say.
>>: Well I realize at the second part [inaudible]
>> Nick Sousanis: So wait. Yours is the, is that the …
>>: The red one next to the first [inaudible]
>> Nick Sousanis: Jennifer. It’s right, Jennifer right next to you.
>>: Yeah, that one.
>> Nick Sousanis: Yes. Thank you for modeling it.
>>: Um, I realized after I had kind of divided up my space that drawing a line within the divided up space
was probably extraneous, like I was just repeating what I had already made through cutting up the
space.
>> Nick Sousanis: Ah.
>>: So, it was just repeating myself, and …
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah. That’s interesting. So you’re, so you’ve conveyed so much through this space
already that you didn’t need anything.
>>: Right. Like I felt like I had already done that.
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah, interesting. Fair enough. And I think that’s, I mean there’s a lot of educational
comics coming now and a lot of, and then it’s really exciting, but I think it sort of, I think with our
fallback on making comics and things like that is to lean towards illustration. To have the text do most
of the work and the images sort of hold the text. But I think what you guys are doing which is more
advanced than a lot of things I see sometimes, drawing skill is separate from that, is that you’re thinking
about how the space, and if you’ve already organized the space in ways that said what you needed to
say, it’s possible you don’t, you know you don’t need any other information. And, as I’ve said, the
composition is the slowest thing for me. How do I fit all these pieces that move the reader the way I
want them to move or let them choose, depending on, and how does that, how does that space, and the
same way that you go to a museum and it’s sort of, you have a guide, you have like the audio guide, and
it’s sort of, you have choices, but you have a guide and, that experience of the space is what you’re
trying to orchestrate with the comics. It’s less about what do I, how do I draw a really nice picture of
Batman, which has its appeal as well, but, anyhow. So let me wrap this, let me wrap this up and then
we’ll take any questions and go to the other space.
So what I said before the exercise is that comics really let us represent our thinking in ways that you
guys have all demonstrated. But I think the flip side of that, and I think it’s also demonstrated here, in
the ways that you’ve started, a few of you at least, and if we had time we could talk to all of you, started
to discover things you didn’t know about what you were thinking or about. So, for me, this sort of play,
this spatial play of image and text in the space of the page, it starts to open possibilities for me that I
don’t expect. Because, you know I make scribbles and this is, there’s a bunch, there’s a whole table now
of my scribbles out there, that my interaction between my eyes and the thing I scribbled on the paper, I
start to see new possibilities because now my eyes are interacting with that drawing. Okay? And so
that play, so I see all these parts working, oh wow, that’s kind of interesting how that fits with that. So,
new possibilities open. And I say this a lot. I think that my interaction with my sketches is smarter than I
am. So I think the things that I create in conversation with my drawings become smarter than what I
know because now I’ve got this tool, a very simple tool. It’s a pencil or pen or whatever and a sheet of
paper that I organize my thinking on. But it opens possibilities and we sort of see the unexpected
because we make combinations that we don’t anticipate. This next to that suddenly produces a new
thing.
So sort of to wrap this all back to education as we started, I really want to say that, you know, we’re not
flat. We’re so far from being flat. And so when we think about comics and visual thinking, when we
think about having art in schools and things like that and the importance of it. The importance of our, I
think, yeah, it’s great that we produce artists and it’s great that we think about aesthetics and culture.
But I don’t think that’s all of it. What all of it is, is that we’re introducing a way of seeing the world. And
I think when we’re armed not just with one way of seeing the world, but when we’re able to come from
two, we can see something that from head on was very flat. But now we can see that you know what it
has sides because I can see around it and I can turn it over and I can flip it open and all these possibilities
open.
So education instead of becoming that sort of conveyor belt that I drew at the beginning becomes more
like a journey that we’re experiencing and the possibilities open. And you know again, this is very much
like the kinds of drawings that you guys did. Like that abstract thing conveys a lot of things, a lot of
meaning in how all the forks and how all the words speak to them. And this is a different thing than
those straight lines I drew at the beginning. So I think, thinking about comics, thinking about visual,
thinking along side our verbal, putting multiple modes together. I think it opens possibilities for how we
teach and how we think and how we learn and make meaning in this world.
So, thank you for your time and now we’ll do some questions. Thank you.
[applause]
>>: Sure, so one of the things I’m very interested in coming from a background of literature …
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah.
>>: And thinking about like say some of Plato’s arguments about the theatre as well.
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah. No, yeah yeah.
>>: He didn’t like theatre.
>> Nick Sousanis: And he didn’t like writing that much either. So it’s, I know that I sort of simplified it
but.
>>: And one of the things that I’m curious about is the degree to which you feel like, like comics and this
kind of expression can participate in conversation. Because we have a lot of strategies, like
summarization, that allow us to have really efficient and long term in depth conversations and dialectic
around each others’ works. And I’m wondering if you know the examples, if you’ve explored this world
of like people talking to each other through, through these visual forms?
>>: Instagram?
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah. So if I understand, I’m not sure I totally do. This might be a long conversation.
Are you saying where people have actually exchanged comics as their way of communicating?
>>: Yeah.
>> Nick Sousanis: Is that, I don’t know? I like it. I mean, I can’t answer that because I don’t know. And I
think that sounds like a neat project that we could talk about.
>>: Awesome.
>> Nick Sousanis: But I think what comics can do really well is let you see more than one way of thinking
at once. In a way that’s what James very very much did that. But all of them, because, when you
introduce a sort of multimodal and multidirectional elements into it, that you open possibilities for what
the meaning is. So you might read, you know you might read this page one time, and you, and this is
fairly linear despite its forkingness, but, and see on set of things but you might, you might see it slightly
differently the second time around. And I can say something like Watchmen, each time you read it
there’s other things that happen. And that’s certainly true of text as well. I don’t think it’s not. But I
think comics in that way that you look and then read and read and look, and you know that’s a question
I get a lot. You know, which do you do first? Do you read the text first and say yes? I mean do you look
first or you read the text and say yes? And you do what you do and everybody does it differently. And
every, you know, each page demands different things. So, there’s no answer to your question except we
should try it. Joe or James?
>> Joe: Joe. What’s your [inaudible]? What’s your methodology? How do you start? How do you end?
Do you, you know it’s so, for example some artists do a whole bunch of sketches.
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah.
>> Joe: They do a whole bunch of stunts.
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah.
>> Joe: Are you, do you, like do you have a vision of where you’re going and where you’ve come from
and then alter the project? Or do you open to different things and then see how they fit together? How
do you fit it all together?
>> Nick Sousanis: Well, I mean a lot of it’s out there on that table. You’ll see a lot of the preparatory
things. What I do, I mean there’s a master layout. Like I know where I’m headed. So there’s like,
there’s some drawings and there’s some words and there’s like this thing that sort of breaks down
where I’m headed. So there’s that. And then from that I tend to type up like, so the typing is sort of a
scaffold for me like, here’s all the things I might use and in some order that I might use them. And then
so I make, I have it with me and I have like this massive document with references, stuff that’s sort of in
the order that I might use. I mean, I’m not, if I, so I don’t write stories in this. And these are really
philosophical excursions. So you know, if I was writing a story, I would have to break things down like
the dialogue, etc. But I don’t do that. So from that, as I get to the pages that I’m actually working on, I
mean, this is my thinking. This is like, alright this page is about how comics let you find unexpected
connection. So hmm, the shape of it should have something to do with this sort of lateral thinking. It
should have something to do with nonlinear. So immediately, I mean I, there’s more sketches probably.
So this one was particularly difficult to think about because I was trying to convey something that was
not linear and have it be readable still. So there was a ton of things. Like alright, well so it’s going to
need to be lots of little pieces. And the little pieces almost could kind of move around. So I had this idea
of the shape. I had some words but mostly not. So I keep playing and like oh well alright, what if this
line runs through it like, but that’s kind of linear. And at some point that line was like this and I don’t
know if these are in order. Some point, this line like oh well that line and that line, oh that is sort of,
that’s not the final, but it’s one of the ones. At some point, like, there it is. So now that’s sort of some
scaffold. So now where do these words fit? And so now here’s some, alright, there’s a word and I don’t,
these are shorthand for whatever longer words I might write. So then that says something to what the
image is. So now the image in the words that I have sort of roughly down, are talking to each other.
And then say well, that image suggests a totally different bit of text there. So now I’m going to have to,
you know so there’s this constant just insane feedback system that’s going and going and going, and
that’s, I mean that’s why I’m so slow. I mean it’s really not, it’s not so slow because I can draw an eye in
a few minutes or something. It’s because how those pieces start, they have this conversation and I
often feel like I’m just kind of there. Like I have to pay, I have to bear witness to this thing that I have
laid out. And it has to tell me what to do. And I feel like as I’ve gone, in the first chapter which is mostly
what’s up there, it’s the very dark figures. That’s a little more straightforward narrative and it’s a little
more intentional because in these ways that you, I mean, this is the first of these things. I wanted to
make sure people knew that I could draw things that look like things and I wanted to sort of hit them in
the face with a tour de force of drawing. Like, this is drawing. This is what you know as drawing. So
that when I get to things where it’s much more abstract, that they already know that alright, he knows
what an arm looks like. So now we trust him when he goes here. I felt like if I started in this point, it
would have been, you know it would have a little trickier. I’m not sure that’s true but, does that sort of?
>>: Yeah.
>> Nick Sousanis: Okay. James?
>> James: So just from the [inaudible] perspective, do you do your own inking and your own lettering?
You know when you read a comic from you [inaudible]
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah, I do it.
>> James: There’s like half of like thousands.
>> Nick Sousanis: No, but if you’d like to be on staff, if you’re looking for a …
[laughter]
>> James: Unpaid internship, awesome.
[laughter]
>> Nick Sousanis: From Microsoft to unpaid internship, all in one day.
>> James: Yeah. I’m digging it, hopefully with healthcare. Then my second question was…
>> Nick Sousanis: No I do it all. There’s no, and I’ll tell you, I give that away here. This is, this is not
drawn on a computer, but my final everything is, and mostly because I cannot letter. Physically I have
some sort of issue with letters. So I use fonts and it allows me to keep playing with things after. I mean
it’s still drawn by my hand but it’s drawn on my hand on a computer. Anyways, sorry, so I think …
>> James: Yeah, so who are you reading right now? Like what comics do you read? What one do you
think is [inaudible]?
>> Nick Sousanis: What do I read right regularly or what do I think is good? Those are two very different
questions.
>> James: [inaudible] whatever you feel comfortable revealing.
>> Nick Sousanis: I mean things I recomm … said the guy in the Green Lantern shirt. Yeah.
>>: [inaudible]
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah. Things I think are really good and worth reading, I mean I think Chris Ware,
which I showed is worth reading. They’re hard. I mean they’re sort of sad things. But they’re worth
thinking about how he organizes. Alan Moore’s work, which there are less new of all the time, are really
worth reading. Stitches, by David Small, it’s a graphic novel about, sort of memoir about growing up in
Detroit and having pretty traumatic childhood. It’s a really, it’s very cinematic in how it’s, this is sort of
an interesting parallel. There’s Stitches which is about his childhood and then there’s a book called Fun
Home, which won a ton of awards by Alison Bechdel, which is a very literary thing. There are tons of
text, but they’re both about childhood, about their childhoods, both about sort of similar issues going on
in their homes. But one is a lot like film in how it moves and the other one is a ton like, like Joyce in how
it’s got lots of words.
So those are kind of, I’ve had my students do both at the same time to kind of see the range of what
comics can do. I think there’s a ton on that note, there’s a ton in sort of memoir narratives. There’s this
upswelling of stories around, you know, traumas that happen in people’s lives and I think comics speak
particularly well to that because they can get at some things that words don’t handle very well. And just
one more side note and then I’ll take another. There is a group at Columbia in narrative medicine sort of
looking at how stories deal with health and ideas of health. And professors from that came to my class
because they were using comics. But they didn’t know a lot about how comics work so they’ve then,
you know they’ve just been eating up comics. And there is so much around health issues. I think that’s
one of the more interesting things. I mean, it doesn’t mean it’s all good, but we can talk about
superheroes later. Yes?
>>: You already started answering my question because I wanted a bibliography of people you quote or
give examples of, or that you think are really you know, interesting to read up on. And I started trying to
keep notes and I couldn’t get everybody.
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah.
>>: So I was wondering how you spell Chris Ware’s last name or is there a title I can search?
>> Nick Sousanis: Chris W-a-r-e. It’s Jimmy Corrigan, boy, Smartest Kid on Earth, Smartest Kid. Yeah but
Building Stories, he just put out. Yeah, Smartest Kid on, Jimmy Corrigan. It’s in a, it comes in a box like a,
like a game. You guys should have one in the lobby at Microsoft Research, come on. And it’s apparently
all these separate stories. I have it but I’m not opening it until I have time to look at it. But there are all
these separate stories in different formats and he’s really, you know as things have become digital and
you can kind of stick everything on a screen, there is a big push by comic makers to also make things
that are objects and take advantage of the different ways you read. So Chris Ware is really wonderful
for that. You can ask, you know, you’re welcome to e-mail me and I’ll give you a recommended reading,
but.
>>: Are we going to be able to look at your slides or?
>> Nick Sousanis: Well you can look at the work itself.
>>: Okay.
>> Nick Sousanis: And this is also recorded so you can…
>>: Oh, okay.
>> Nick Sousanis: Yeah.
>>: This is all recorded and…
>> Nick Sousanis: And I post, oh, sorry I got excited but it’s on the booklet if you got it and I have cards
too. But I post my dissertation as I go. That was another one of those things I thought why not? I was
posting my comics as I go. Why not post my dissertation? Apparently that’s not done. I don’t know
why people don’t want to read chapters from dissertations on blogs. But yeah, as I go, as I finish a new
page or sequence, I put it up so you can, yeah. And I can answer any of those individually as well. I
mean, do we want to take one more or should we cut it?
>> Donald Brinkman: We should cut it, because…
>> Nick Sousanis: We should cut it.
>> Donald Brinkman: We’re not really cutting it. We’re just moving to a new space.
>> Nick Sousanis: We’re transforming.
>> Donald Brinkman: Yeah, so I just wanted to say that yeah we have this exhibition right now that
we’re going to open in like eight minutes. So I’m hoping to get everyone out there. There is, we have a
tradition here at MSR for the last ten years or so to have an end of month drink and eat sort of thing.
Today they kind of did a switch on us at the last minute and they moved out to the back patio and they
changed the beer and wine to Guinness ice cream floats, which according to the prenatal postnatal
expert in the room are excellent for producing breast milk. So it’s good for all of us I think. And but
what I’d like to do is I’d like to move us out there. We have some prints of Nick’s there. We have some
prints of Nick’s there and we have on the columns we have a lot more stuff. We’ve got a book for you to
page through. Nick actually, he did a drawing earlier today of this talk in comic form that’s up on a dry
erase board. And he also has the draft of the next page in the third chapter that he’s working on. It’s
out there in rough form. I’d also like to take these. I think I’m going to try to pen these and put a little
shrine and say these were produced you know from [inaudible] so if you, if you don’t want that to
happen…
>>: Well this is a portrait of him right there.
>> Donald Brinkman: Oh excellent. Perfect. So, come out. [inaudible] So here’s my master plan. This
is how we’re going to take over the world. We’re going to go out. We’re going to go out to the patio
and get yourself some Guinness and root beer and try to grab some stranger and say, come in we’re
going to open up the show. And bring people in for us in the next eight minutes. Okay? So, we’re going
to see a lot more of Nick because we’ve got some plans to build educational tools with him for little kids
and [inaudible] Microsoft technology in all kinds of weird ways which I can’t talk about now because it’s
totally secret.
>>: [inaudible]
>>Donald Brinkman: Yeah, but that’s for later. For now let’s just give him one round of thank you.
[applause]