As people keep putting up walls, we have to remember to keep jumping them.

I meant to post this earlier but it seems even more appropriate as our President continues to try cram a wall down our throats. This is me, my daughter, wife, sister, nieces and bro-in-law, walking along the wall at the burial site of Andrew Johnson, the the first president to be impeached- and hopefully he won’t be the last!

My sister, brother, and I used to hike up Monument Hill since it was conveniently across the street from our childhood home. We even used the National Monument for sledding until the Park Rangers ran us off (yes, much like Yogi Bear.)

This jaunt after a Christmas lunch was particularly special, despite the mud. We weren’t being political in the moment, just living our lives and having fun, but afterwards it did make me think about wall-hopping and wall-walking.

We don’t need more walls. We don’t need more barriers, but as people keep putting them up we have to remember to keep jumping them. We didn’t have any fear of crossing the wall because of our societal status (class, race, economics, social cache in a small town, etc), but for those who don’t have such privilege, we have to use our position to bring others up and tear down walls, whether physical or ideological.

 

Pocket Con 2018!!!

Don’t miss Pocket Con this year, this Saturday, Dec. 15 fro. 12pm-6pm. Me, Dragon, and Goat’ll be there all day.

It’s a free comic book convention at the beautiful Chicago Cultural Center that emphasizes creators, fans, and characters of color as well as small press comics.

It happens to fall on the One Year Anniversary of our first ever Kickstarter for The Thyme Bandit, the newest Dragon and Goat book, so if you want to pick up a copy or two to check off some people from your holiday shopping list stop by our table.

The ChromoGnomes: a Genomix Comix

The past year I’ve the pleasure of working with the Aiden Lab Center for Genome Architecture, developing the web-comic The ChromoGnomes. It’s been pretty hush-hush, since we didn’t want to let the cat (or cheetah) out of the bag that we were creating the world’s first comic to be paired with ground-breaking science. (I don’t know that this is technically true, but I’d really like to know what other lab comix are out there if it’s not!)

I’m really excited that we’re finally launching the comic and while you’re checking out the comics be sure to check in with the sciences- since after all the comic is there to just pull people into this amazing database of all sorts of animals with their genomes ready for all to see!

Check out the comic at: https://www.dnazoo.org/chromognomes/

 

Response to Bill Maher, a Comic who apparently hates Comics

Over on his blog, Bill Maher has made some incendiary comments about comics after the death of Stan Lee. (http://www.real-time-with-bill-maher-blog.com/index/2018/11/16/adulting )

Clearly Maher is trying to undermine Lee’s legacy to get under everyone’s skin (that’s his schtick), and drive traffic to his site and generate buzz for himself. So I unfortunately have to take the bait because he does call out professors who deal with comics…and I’m a professor who deals with comics- as he states one of “the dumb people.”

In his post Maher makes a very common error in talking about comics and confusing the genre for medium. It just so happens that I’ve been talking to my students about this this week in our Intro to the Humanities class. When we throw out the medium because of how it’s employed by a particular genre, it’s like throwing out our television because we don’t like Jersey Shore.

The medium is the vehicle for transmitting the content. Reducing the medium and people who work hard in the field (as creators and scholars and publishers) is incredibly naïve, and making it fairly obvious that Maher is as narrow-minded as the bigots he projects himself as being against. Because he’s clearly never seen a comic outside of the mainstream comics that he’s criticizing. He’s just working on his assumptions.

Other commenters have suggested he read Maus and Spiegelman’s books are a good entry point into comics outside of what people stereotypically regard as “comics.” I more immediately thought of Alison Bechdel’s work, but there are literally thousands of comics that do fit better the category of literature than the “kid stuff” to which he is referring.  Comics, as a system of communication- as a language- can say anything that someone wielding pen and paper (or digital tablet) wants it to- just like comedy (that Bill Maher never grew out of).

Maher is simply over-simplifying. He’s doing it for his own ends- to generate controversy by attempting to undermine a figure like Stan Lee who is much admired by many mainstream comics fans, but who does not form the nucleus around which comics as a field as a whole is centered.  He really doesn’t care about comics or about this conversation.

As an educator in academia who is invested in comics, though, the debate is tiresome. Maher said, “…adults decided they didn’t have to give up kid stuff. And so they pretended comic books were actually sophisticated literature. And because America has over 4,500 colleges – which means we need more professors than we have smart people – some dumb people got to be professors by writing theses with titles like Otherness and Heterodoxy in the Silver Surfer.”

I can’t find this article so I can only guess that he made it up, but what I find interesting is that Maher who seems to project himself as a champion of thinking and knowledge is making an anti-intellectual claim here that has been made against all fields of academia for the history of American academia.  So he makes a call for us being smarter yet undermines those of us working in Higher Ed.

While academia has somewhat opened its doors to researching the relevance of popular culture, scholars who choose to focus on this continue to be assailed as “less-than” when compared to experts in other fields of knowledge. This stance is near-sighted and often has classist roots- as to say that which is of the common people must be inferior to our “high class” art. It seems to be a fairly conservative view of the world and ignores how much people are in fact influenced by popular culture like comics, video games, and television- which now occupy the space in which literary books and the works of Shakespeare also existed. As human culture changes, so to must academia.

And to be clear, academia does not “accept” comics, as Maher claims. If you are a comics scholar or creator you are generally accepting the role of step-child if you are ever welcomed into an academic institution. A guest speaker I had speak at my History of Comics seminar at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC told me that while she was doing art historical research on the comics artist Winsor McCay, her advisor insisted she pursue more “fine art” research so that she doesn’t get pigeon-holed. Academia looks down on comics still just like Maher.

Yet when he accuses comics as the entertainment medium as being responsible for Trump being president, if he wants to throw a whole medium on the fire, maybe he should look at his own field. Polarizing news outlets and comedians posing as political and/or intellectual gurus are driving our national zeitgeist into the gaping maw of Trumpism far more than a bunch of superheroes who help people take off the edge of what’s left of the American dream.

 

An Early Harvest! The Thyme Bandits Are Here!

At long last all of the The Thyme Bandits have made it to the United States and, apparently, avoided any of the horrible tariffs. They have been packaged and sent off to pretty much all of our Kickstarter supporters (except for those of you who got the 3D prints… I promise, they’re coming soon to a mail box near you…). Thanks a million to everyone who helped make this this project a reality!

If you didn’t manage to get in your pledge to the Kickstarter campaign that made this happen be sure to order a shiny new one from the D&G shop: http://www.dragonandgoat.com/?product=dragon-and-goat-thyme-bandit

And if during the Kickstarter you were unsure, and said, “Hey, ok, I’ll get a book, but I can’t afford an enamel pin even though they’re going to be very sparkly and  the Dragon one glows in the dark…” Now you can buy your very own! Or both! Just head to our Etsy store at: https://www.etsy.com/shop/DragonAndGoat?ref=seller-platform-mcnav

Thanks again for the support!

New Children’s Book about East Tennessee’s Pigeon River Illustrated by former student at Arrowmont

In other Dragon and Goat community news, we’re excited to hear that artist Shanon Kelley of East Tennessee has been busy making work and is illustrating the first children’s book about the Pigeon River. The river runs through  Newport, TN where Shanon has worked with local people to collect stories from local elders about the Pigeon River and put image to them.

Though Shanon and I first met back in middle school when she lived in my hometown, I was fortunate to have her in my Storytelling with Mixed Media drawing class at Arrowmont in Gatlinburg last October. Her work in the workshop was fantastic, and we definitely look forward to seeing how she brings pictures to local history in this book!

To find out more check out the article.