Essay origins

So far I've been very pleased at the response to my latest essay, "Navigating Comics", on how people navigate through page layouts (pdf). As several responses have been rolling in via email and elsewhere, I intend to do a post soon addressing concerns in that feedback. However, I think it'd be informative to first talk about the origins of this paper.

Back in 2003 when I was drawing our political book We the People, every now and then my editors would tell me they had trouble knowing exactly where to go in the sequence. Often this happened in consistent situations (like what I call "blockage" in the paper).

Most of the times I'd either simplify the layouts or make some graphic fix (like a trail) to indicate a clearer path. However, it got me thinking... My editors were quite a bit older than I was, and weren't all that experienced comic readers, so I wondered if this lack of experience mattered in their reading habits? (or if I was just needlessly making things difficult)

So, I designed this study to test that. I had a booth at ComicCon 2004 that year to promote the book and my other works, so I designed a simple pamphlet people could make responses in and tested people throughout the convention.

I could tell immediately that the results would be interesting, I just had to wait another three years to learn the statistics necessary to show them (d'oh!). The theory with the tree structures predated the experiment by at least a year, but it didn't really say much without knowing about people's actual preferences. It's exciting to see that my suspicions for creating the experiment were borne out in data.

Every now and then I get a response to my work along the lines of "Why do theory? Why not do something related to praxis?" While theory can be interesting, enlightening, and much of science is simply about discovery without practical applications in mind (ex: penicillin), another reason is that theory can sometimes wrap back around on praxis. I like to believe that this is one of those cases, especially given that it came from those origins.

Hartmann on Air America

I've recently heard the news that Thom Hartmann, author of my illustrated book We the People: A Call to Take Back America, is replacing Al Franken on Air America Radio. This could mean good news for our book (which at three printings since March of '04 is doing pretty well already), but it means even better news for radio listeners.

Thom was already doing well on his decently distributed show (beating Limbaugh in some regions), and he's a delight to listen to, entertaining, rich with knowledge, and open to a good healthy debate with all who have an opinion to voice. Pretty much the same qualities I like to believe our book has.

Plug o' rama

So, a couple weeks ago I finished reading Crashing the Gate by Jerome Armstrong (of MyDD.com) and Markos Moulistas Zúniga (of DailyKos) and I keep meaning to comment on it. I got the prerelease edition, but hadn't been able to get to reading it for a while after I got it. It is a very well written book with great substance to our current era in American history.

In my book with Thom Hartmann, We the People, we pointed out that the only way progressive voices can compete seriously is by taking over the Democratic Party, not by flocking to third parties, which are ultimately useless in the American politcal landscape. Crashing the Gate takes that ethos and dissects the current problems found in the Democratic establishment, while laying out a strategy for making it an effective political machine. The book is clear, concise, and a must read for anyone who want an insight into the broader political establishment and what must be done to return it to the hands of the citizens.

In other items worth plugging, Tim Godek alerts me that he posted a cleaner version of his story "One Night," which I find to be very interesting theory wise. The use of so many panels in a "iconographic" fashion (clocks, moon, sun, etc) creates cool effects to the extant that they are blatantly "concepts" as opposed to "narrative increments." I'll probably find good use for it in some future paper...



Oh, and more of my own "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is up as well.

We the People, third times the charm?

Hey, I just found out We the People: A Call to Take Back America has now entered its third printing in about two years. Not bad I'd say. Unfortunately, the subject matter will stay relevant for a long time to come, even when this administration has gone and left (assuming they do leave... gulp).

For those who have it already, how many comic creator cameos can you spot in it?

We the People 101

One of the projects I’ve been working on slowly over the past several months is a new edition of the book I did with Thom Hartmann, We the People: A Call to Take Back America.

The new version is going to break up the original into three smaller books, to be released as history textbooks for high school and college classes. We’ve had lots of good feedback from people who were using it for this purpose already, so we thought we’d accommodate them by issuing a revised edition.

Most of the changes involve alterations and additions to certain scenes and dialogue, but I’ve also been working on a new cover design for the series. Here’s one of the latest drafts I’ve done for the first book:



We’re shooting for an early 2006 release on the first book, with the rest of the series coming out throughout the year. I'll try to post more stuff on this as it develops.