Nick Sousanis

Nick Sousanis:
Comics put words in pictures together, that's certainly important, but they also change how we read. And that means sometimes I might make you read in a zigzag and sometimes I might make you read in a circle occasionally or a spiral. Unchaining the hierarchy of reading and allowing it to be something different, I think gets at some other ways our minds work and opens up a lot of new possibilities.
I'm Nick Sousanis. I made my dissertation entirely in comics form. That was a way to bring back this way of working that I loved as a kid and allowed me to think in ways that meant so much to me. And allowed me to bring access to ideas to a wider group of people than I might've without it. And I think ultimately, it really changed how I was able to think and how I was able to ask questions by incorporating images from the start of my process. Was there a supplementary text that explained what you did? And there's not. There's end notes and bibliography, but the entire work is a work of comics. My dissertation was certainly very much about itself. It's certainly an argument for comics and for visual and other modes of learning to be legitimate as scholarship. I don't think I thought it would be that in the start I thought I could just study something in comics, but as I got more into it, I realized I had to make the argument that comics and just visual modes should be legitimate scholarship alongside other kinds of scholarship.
I mean to say that's what it's about. It's an argument against standardized education and an argument for spreading more things, but it's all in metaphor. So I never say any of those things except when people ask me that question. I set out to do the work in comics as a way of making big ideas accessible. I wanted to bring scholarship and things to a broader audience than just academia, but I wanted to do it without dumbing it down. And I thought comics let me do that. So that's why I first did it in comics. That it became an argument for comics was the next, or for visual stuff, was the second part.
But I think one of the biggest things I discovered, and it's a big thing that I do with my students, is that in working visually from the start, that it really changed how I thought. So it's not as simple as I had ideas and I added pictures to them. The introduction of pictures from the start and the introduction of working visually from the start, really changed how I could ask questions, where I went for the answers to questions, how I figured things out. So it's a very different book than or dissertation book than it would've been had I written it and then added pictures to it. That doesn't mean that wouldn't have been an interesting thing, but it would've taken me in very different directions. I teach this stuff now, so I see it in my students who don't come with the experience that I had going into it, and I see that happen with them. Even with rudimentary drawing skills, they're able to discover things about their own thinking that that is quite different than they would without it.
To talk about how it became a comic, maybe it goes back to my life history. I was into comics as a kid. I made them as a kid. And it's really only when I came to college that lapsed a bit because that's not something you could do, just wasn't a thing. It wasn't a thing I would've thought to do. So some years later I came back to it for some political comics and then I made a comic as an essay for an exhibition we did on games. And it's really in making those pieces that I saw that this medium that I love to work in had greater potential than simply, not that stories are simple, but then purely for stories or entertainment. And I saw that my interest in education and spreading ideas about education could collide with what I was doing in comics and actually let me do more than I felt like I could do without it.
So I very much applied to TC with this is what I want to do. I didn't know what it would be about so much, but I knew that I was going to be working in comics. So every semester I was making multiple comics for classes. I did write word things too. I think partly for myself for sure I was making, but also, you have to make that argument to your teachers too, to say this is legitimate and here's what it looks like.
So it came to be that way because that's what I wanted to do, and I was too ignorant about what academia was to know that that was not something that was... I mean, I knew it hadn't been done particularly, but I didn't know it was that big a deal. So it's really in coming there that I ended up studying comics to make the argument for why they worked. And then realizing that it was a political thing that I really embraced that and then made the work in my own. I mean, I spoke about the work all the time, that it really had to champion alternative forms and particularly comics, but other alternative forms as being legitimate. So the final shape that the dissertation took became much more about itself because of the context I was in. I always knew that comics was the way I was going to do it, but I didn't know a lot about how academia worked at that point.
I'd been out for a lot. One has to be careful in saying that comics can do more than you can do in text. I think when I first would talk about this, it sounded like a disparagement of words, which is really not what I mean at all, or at least I don't mean that anymore that there are, because I can use text. So I have all the affordances that words give me. I have the reading ability that words give me, I have what pictures can do that words don't do. I can show things rather than describe things. But I also have all the kinds of weird ways that those both words and pictures interact and pictures and pictures interact and pictures and words interact with the whole space of a page. So there's all these both linear connections like reading would have, but also non-linear juxtapositions that go on across the page that also allow the reader to make their own kinds of connections.
Comics are really hard to read out loud because they're like, I don't know when I'm supposed to say this thing, but you can take advantage of those things to really layer information in. So the title Unflattening, many people assume it came from the fact that I referenced flatland pretty early in there, but that was only because I had this word already in mind and I thought, well, I shouldn't leave flatland out. It worked really well for my purposes, but by Unflattening I initially meant the way that I felt I could put so much density of information on a single sheet of paper that it got bigger, it got somehow bigger than this flat piece of paper, it was unflat. This is very much a comic about education in schooling, and none of those words appear none of the way. It's about interdisciplinarity that doesn't appear. It's about a ton of things and none of those words are in there.
So it's for me figuring out what is that metaphor? How do I want the reader to move through the page? And those two forces, they push me in different directions to figure out, well, what I'm talking about, it often leads me to doing research I didn't expect to do, to digging into obscure Persian mathematics, which was not part of my outline, but it's like, okay, how do I solve the problems of this page that has the Arabian Nights tales in it, how what's going on in science there? Oh, well, what's going on in science is this thing, and that ties into that. So now I've learned a lot. So I think that comes back to what you asked before about what do I learn or what it unexpected is that in working with the visuals from the start, it prompted me to look in directions. I just wouldn't, I had no reason to look in those directions if I was working in words. There's other things I'm sure I would've done working in words that I wouldn't have done. So it's better to say that they're different than that they're better than each other, but they're definitely different.
What advice would I give to someone wanting to work multimodally? Well, first, I guess maybe the biggest thing, well, sorry, I'll try to get this in order here. First of all, make sure it's something you really want to do because it's more work, it's more work. So it can't be a lighthearted idea. It's got to be, yeah, this is what suits me. This feels like the right thing for how I work and how I make sense of it. So that's part one.
Part two is I think really do everything you can to learn the mode, the medium, however you're defining it, to be a master in that. Because in my case, nobody I worked with knew anything about comics at all, and there was not me out in the world that they could call on as an external advisor and say, hey, that didn't exist then. Now there are a few of us out there.
So in my case, one of the great things about having been in New York City was that so many cartoonists were there or came through there. So I made a strong effort right away to get to meet some people that I thought I could learn from and become part of that community. So really as my time at the university went on, I spent as much time dealing with the academic side of things and my advisors and my classmates as I did out in the comics world trying to make sure that I was as good a comics maker as I could be. And I think that's one of the big challenges of academia is, I think if you can draw a little bit, academics would be like, "Oh, that's great," but I didn't want to make a comic that was great for academics. I wanted to make a comic that was equally great to the comics people. And that they would take it seriously because I think if it's just an okay comic by their standards, I think it doesn't quite reach the potential it needed to reach. So yeah, I guess my advice is to really immerse yourself in the craft of the medium to make that as strong. And I think when both sides are equally strong, it really pushes it in exciting places.
Who is on my mind making the dissertation? Obviously you got to make it to your goes through your advisors. That has to happen. So I mean, this is a funny answer, but this woman, Lauren Fox, who was a parent of one of my tennis students who's really curious, pretty well-educated, but that wasn't her. She's not an academic in that way. So just curious to learn stuff and eats up learning. I really had her in mind a lot. So I'm like, I'm going to make something that is exciting for this reader. And I would share pieces with her over time. But I need to make something that definitely the academics know I've got it and the times I hit science or mathematics, those people that happen upon it, they know I've got it right too. But I also want something that's readable by high school students, undergrads. I mean, I was very aware that I was making something for potential teachers, for undergrads and potential teachers, that was definitely high on my list that this would be a helpful thing for teachers, not in a practical way, because it's not practical at all, but maybe in an empowering way that would say, "Oh, we can try these things. We can ask questions that way." It doesn't tell you how to do something.
And one of the things that occasionally has rankled me when I'm talking to teachers is we have this good conversation, they say, "Well, what should I do in my classroom?" And I like, "What do I know? I'm not in your classroom. I'm not you." The goal of my work is to get people to think about their own questions and to think about how much they can do. It's not to say that I'm some expert at, I'm just some guy sitting around drawing comics and thinking for a while. So it doesn't end with answers. It ends with questions. And its aim is to say, how do you ask your own questions? How can you look at yourself in a different way? And if you can look at yourself in a different way, then I think you can generate your own questions and realize that you can come to answers on your own.
Well, I mean other scholars that have done multimodal works that, I mean, there's two that came about the same time maybe shortly after mine, but about the same time as the book. Amanda Visconti's Digital Infinite Ulysses that came out, and then A.D. Carson dissertation as rap album. And he's followed that up with future scholarships. So we were in some conversations together early on in this and both very different than mine, but so interesting to think about how different forms, and I think those things start to open the space to say, it could be this, it could be this, it could be that.
There've been a couple comics, ones that I've either known about as they were happening or gotten to serve on their committees. Megan Parker was a student at Simon Fraser, and this was a master's thesis, which is now published as a book. She did a comic on teaching for her master's thesis. And she, as I understand it, I don't know Megan particularly well, but was not a comics maker. She just got inspired by it, and this was an outlet for her. And it's really delightful book about teaching, much more practical than mine.
And then more recently, Kay Sohini, she just did her dissertation as a comic from Stony Brook, and she was actually sat in on some of my classes via Zoom on pandemic times, and I was on her committee, and she too was not a comics maker, which was just like saw the potential in it and heard about what I'd done.
And then most recently, there's Anna Liz Kozik who just did her dissertation at UW Wisconsin in comics about the Prairies. And she had been a student of Lynda Barry. Yeah, Lynda Barry's a famous cartoonist who became also an educator running some drawing and comics classes at UW-Madison and Anna, or Liz was a student of hers. And I met her, I came through and did a workshop there a long time ago, and she just defended a really beautiful dissertation on Prairies. And I've read part of it, it opens with what looks like the paper that you submit to some journal and it's got all the formatting, see everything, but it's like, I could have done it like this. And then she starts turning to show you why that was not as sufficient as what she's actually doing is really delightful. I have only read the first couple chapters, but I just love that she did that.
But I think the potential, I mean, I've had one student, it was an undergrad, do a dance based on my work, which was cool. But what was really cool about it is that she had been a dance or choreography as a kid, and it sparked her return to it, which then she did her undergraduate honors thesis as a dance and on a pretty serious topic so that she realized the potential for it. And I think that's the exciting thing is what can you do? And once you open that door, where can you go with it? As I think about it, I don't want people to all just go out and make comics dissertations. I think that would be a disaster. But I think people who comics feel good to, and that's a good home for them. It makes sense. And I think people who do dance work, I think the more you can bring other ways you make meaning into your work, the stronger it gets.
How do we like others to cite my non-textual work? Well, my preference and their preference is with pictures. They can write it out too. But to show the paid. Unfortunately, this is an actual problem. And what I've wrestled with. Because citing artwork or poetry often becomes not just a citation, but a rights issue. That's become a challenge. I mean, my press is pretty good about it, but there's often a fee. And occasionally I've weighed in on it and said, "Come on, I want the work cited." But because we're stuck in this old model where citing art, which is crazy, because if you do an interview with me, you can put whatever pages in mine you want. Nobody cares about it for that. But if you're an academic making no money on it, probably paying money to get it done, you have to pay money to get an image. And that just, that's not what the work is. And maybe you can describe it. Well, you can, but you're losing something.
So my preferred thing would be to show it. And I don't need to be paid for that. I don't want to be paid for that. It puts the work out in the world. Other people can benefit from it. And on the bonus side, maybe somebody else picks up the book because they saw it, but that's really immaterial. I think the important thing is people can use it. So that's my preferred thing. I think there needs to be some changes in how academic fair use, and those are bigger issues. I've definitely been involved in that conversation a few times in the past. It's been quiet lately. But I'd love it if he's a publishers just said, just embrace more academic fair use. I think in my case, I got really lucky I hit a time when the digital humanities people, I think, which I was never even super clear what they were. I mean, I am. But I think they were really making some moves and my work fit close enough that people embraced it very early on.
But I think I said in the talk, the firstness of mine was never 100% clear, but less important to me than not being the last. I wanted to work to stand on its own and maybe make spaces for other people. And I think whether that's true or not, there's definitely been other people. So I think before I listed and [inaudible 00:21:20], and just now Anna Liz Kozik, and there's also, there's another Maureen Burdock who's out here whose dissertation was done entirely in comics. So there's three, or I'd have to look, I mean, I try to collect these things. There's three or four that have already done it in that time. There's definitely more publications that are open to doing comics as research. I mean, in my own school, I now have a non-fiction comics-making certificate that I launched. How can we do this stuff?
So I mean, I think it's opened up a lot. I don't if anybody's followed up on A.D. Carson Rap dissertation. I haven't seen word of any since. But I think... Oh, yeah? Oh. Oh, and Brian. I think I owe Brian an email.
So I think academics are ready for it. I mean, they're still going to be resistance and they're still thinking about comics. As much as comics are accepted in schools and libraries and stuff, they're still the person, the teacher or librarian, there are less of them that will say, aren't you going to do real reading? Those attitudes aren't going to be gone. They don't disappear overnight. And there's still going to be people who are dismissive of this stuff.
But I think the more of them that are out there, the more... I mean, definitely when I talk to students, the other undergrads or high school students, one of the most exciting things is what they do with it, not what they do about my work. I mean, that's all nice, but like I said, I mentioned the student who did a dance based on it, but then did more dance. The students who draw things and they feel like they've allowed to. So I think as this body of work builds up, there's just more things to point to say, hey, we can do this, and this is a legitimate form. And there's more people, when I did it, there was nobody to look at, and there was nobody to bring in as an outside expert. It just didn't exist. So now there's more. And yeah, I don't know how to fast these things grow. It could be a long time. And it's a very strange moment for academia in general. So I'm not making any predictions, but I definitely feel encouraged.
Certainly in school. I mean, it's interesting. One of the first classes is our research course, and I had Ruth Vinz for that, and she said, pick a researcher to shadow. And I picked Alan Moore, the famous comics author, which is stretching it a bit. But I made a point of, I was already into his work, but studying how he did all the stuff he did on the page, he's not a drawer. So he's working with artists, very skilled artist. So I really got a sense of how he uses word-picture interactions, how page design, which he has a lot of input on, which is not always the case with. And that definitely shaped a lot. I was already influenced by it in some that he'd done with the artist Melinda Gabby had done a comic called, This Is Information in tribute to 9/11, that was this visual essay told in comics with no narrative.
And that really shaped a lot of what I did. And so I kept pushing from that. In terms of artists I look at and influenced by. I mean certainly in olden times, Frank Miller's work with The Dark Knight, Returns, this lots of panels, lots going on the page. That definitely has always stayed with. I mean, I don't think about it a lot. I don't even look at it a lot anymore. But I know that the comics I made as a kid that were being made when that was coming out, definitely it shaped. Today there's a superhero and other kind of artist, J.H. Williams, who's the density on the page and the range of styles he's able to bring to it. And has worked with more. And Neil Gaiman. That really strikes me. The French artist, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, is a philosopher disguised as a comic artist. Unfortunately, not much of it's translated, so I can't read it all.
One, I'd be remiss not to mention Scott McCloud, whose understanding comics had an enormous impact on me to think that I could do something like that. And Scott has since become a friend, and I teach his work, and my work is almost always mentioned in the same context of it, which is both nice. Mine doesn't look, I very consciously... Scott's work has Scott in it explaining things, and I made a very conscious choice early on to not do that. So it doesn't look anything like it. But I'm wrestling with ideas in comics and about comics frequently. So that. So McCloud's work is a huge influence. Moore's work is a huge influence. J.H. Williams just does things on the page that are like no other. Similarly, with Marc-Antoine Mathieu.
So I'm looking around my lab on my desk. I've been thinking about hexagons and unusual page breaking. So I've got comics that do, I mean, these aren't artists I necessarily spend a lot of time with, but I'm looking at this guy, Jesse Jacobs, who is some weird comics for him. It's not the kind of stuff I make, but these unusual geometric shapes that define some of it. I try to be well-read, so I can find things that help me think through new ideas or help me think through them with my students.
Currently, and currently has been a long moment. I'm working on, I guess, a sequel to Unflattening. I don't know what a sequel to a philosophical non-narrative dissertation graphic novel is. But I'm working on, I mean, I think I'm following up on threads that were started there, and certainly touching on some of the ideas in it. And a lot of things that I talk about when I talk about the work that aren't actually in the work, that are about how it was made. Some of the stuff we've talked about, process, about the body, how much the body is a role in thinking, and now drawing has a role in thinking, which is in there, but it's more in how I talk about the work and more in how I teach.
So a lot of ideas that I explore in my teaching and my conversations about the work are what made the basis for this work. And I've given myself more visual challenges. The opening chapter does a retelling of the Odyssey on a tapestry that winds through a continuous sequence of 22 pages, that is if printed as a tapestry, it's 15 feet long. But it's really about the creative process. I mean, I'm really thrilled with it. It's been done for years, but the other chapters have been harder. So my aim in it is to talk about a return to how we learned as children and a return to where we came from as a species or as organisms, as a way to think about what thinking is. And then again, without answering anything, think about the implications for teaching, for learning, going forward.