This Is Not News

KO: Are you hoping to achieve that with The Sandwalk Adventures as well?

JH: Well, Sandwalk has potential to be much higher profile, because it deals with Darwin and it deals with evolution. And because those two things are so contentious. Part of the desire to produce The Sandwalk Adventures is because I’m a Darwinophile, and the other part is that this argument, to me, doesn’t need to be as contentious as it is. In fact, in the United States, we’re notorious for it being so, well, awful. I deal with Preemie Print and Litho in Canada, and Kevin Johnson works there and handles my covers. We were talking about my covers one day, and he had seen the interiors and read it. And he asked me, “Is this going to be a problem down in the States?” And it occurred to me, that here is someone from another country, who speaks English, that’s European, essentially. They don’t have this problem. They don’t view Darwin as a threat to anything. And yet we have entire school systems in our country — states, you know, Kansas as well — where it’s not required. My wife’s a teacher, and we know that when you say something’s not required, then you have tests that are testing children’s knowledge, the required things don’t really get addressed. Ninety percent of all biologists will tell you that evolution is the key framing element of biology. And so I guess in some ways, aside from my Darwinophilia, the other goal in The Sandwalk Adventures is to contribute an explanation of evolution that’s relatively straightforward, that’s simple without being simplistic, and that can at least educate those that may not believe that evolution occurs. Because so much of the argument on either side springs from either an inadvertent or willful misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the other side. And so I just want to contribute: “Here is what I know. I’m a biologist.” Of course there’s another part of me that wants to find a place to have it banned someplace, because when something gets banned, the sales go through the roof.

KO: Well, here’s hoping. Let’s talk about you having two jobs. How do you compare and contrast your roles as writer and artist with your roles as teacher and scientist?

JH: I find them to be very similar. During the day, I spend the day researching. When you talk about being a lecturer at a small college, your primary responsibilities, at least during the year, are teaching. In the summer we get to do research, and I’ll get to do a little more research during the year once I get more established. But during the year, it’s primarily teaching, and in order to teach, you have to prepare a lecture, and in order to prepare a lecture, you have to read reference material, you have to distill certain elements, and you have to write the lecture. Usually it’s an outline. For me, at least. Oftentimes, you have to illustrate it in some way. You have to pull up images to illustrate your point, to use in your PowerPoint slides, to show to your students. And so in reality, writing a lecture is writing a story that’s illustrated and has a plot that fits within the allotted 50 minutes.

Doing The Sandwalk Adventures is very similar. I have a story that has to fit within 22 pages. I have to illustrate it. It has to have a plot. Just like in a classroom lecture, you have objective points that you have to cover in that 50 minutes, I have objective points that I want to cover in those 22 pages. And so one informs the other in helping me construct lectures and to write stories. I think the big difference is that I get paid to teach, and that’s what most of my time is spent doing. And with my son, and we actually have another one on the way, the amount of time to do cartooning dwindles. And so I’ve actually changed the way in which I did it. With Clan Apis, each issue I’d probably write about eight pages, then I’d draw those pages, then I’d write the next eight pages and I’d draw those pages. Now what I do is I write the entire story, and then once I’ve got the story I draw piecemeal through the day and then sometimes in the evening when I get a half hour or 45 minutes here or there to finish things off.

But being an academic has really helped me with this Darwin story. And the Darwin story has actually helped me to be a better academic, because what I’m doing is history, and history’s hard. I mean, biology’s hard, but history’s hard. You have all these resources, and you’ll never have enough. I’ll never do it in the depth that a true historian does, so I have twelve references where they have twelve hundred. And so you’re confronted with situations of determining which references are reliable, which is something you do when you prepare a lecture or write a paper. You’re faced with the question of “Do I have enough information on this to go ahead?” So they really complement each other.

KO: Do you use Clan Apis in the classroom?

JH: I have.

KO: When I first read the book, the two parts that struck me specifically were Nyuki’s death in the end, and the part at the beginning of the fourth chapter where a bee from the neighboring hive tries to invade Nyuki’s hive, and is then killed by the rest of the bees.

JH: Tha’s probably the best example. The thought is, these are our heroes. These are our characters that we care about. And it’s really easy for us, it’s potentially easy when we write a story, to slap a human moral structure on this and say the bees will find a way not to kill, when in reality, this is what bees do. And I think that softening it up detracts from the truth. And ultimately I wanted to portray something that could be — and is — used in classrooms, in science classrooms. And if you have the bees negotiating with another bee — well, admittedly the bees talk, and that’s silly, but negotiating, that’s even worse. I mean, please, it’s not what happens. They come in, try to get in, and if it doesn’t escalate into a bee war, the person trying to get in is killed. And so it’s just one of those reality checks. And it demonstrates the fact that the bees aren’t bad because they do that. Not that I want to send the message to kids that it’s okay to kill people that want to hurt you, but we’re talking about insects.

KO: You mentioned the notion of using Clan Apis as a teaching tool, and in the end of the book, you even give your email address and come right out and suggest it. Was that something that was pretty strong in your mind when you were writing it?

JH: Probably not until halfway through it, to be quite honest with you. Ultimately I was motivated by wanting to tell a story, and wanting to contribute something to comics in general that was unique and good. It wasn’t until halfway through when I saw that I could really — if you work hard on building the plot points on the information, because every story has bouts of exposition. You go along, you have exposition, and that moves the plot forward. If you place those plot points, those exposition points, if you build them upon critical elements in the organism’s biology, you can actually pack in a lot of information within the context of the animal’s natural history. So that you have this great layering of information, and then you have the context, and all of that helps you to remember things. The best professors I’ve ever had were the ones that really told a story every lecture. And what they told us about, all the information that they dispensed was within a context. And that really helps you to remember things much more specifically than a laundry list of facts that are not really connected to each other.

KO: Have you gotten any calls from anyone saying they want to use the book in the classroom?

JH: No, not specifically. I’ve gotten a couple of emails from comic readers who are also educators who say, “Oh yeah, I’m using this.” But no, never anybody directly. But that said, there have been some really cool things that happened. Recently, one of the library associations reviewed Clan Apis, and I can’t recall, because my partner was taking care of this, I can’t recall if we were in the top twenty children’s books recommended for libraries across the nation or the top twenty graphic novels recommended for libraries across the nation. But at any rate, we got this really nice review written by a woman from the American Library Association, and so we’re being carried now by a couple of library book distributors. And so that’s one big step into libraries.

KO: Well, you’ve got something here that will teach children about science and about bees. And in Cow-Boy, you called attention to people who still think comics are juvenile literature that rot the mind. Since Clan Apis is such a good teaching tool, do you think it will teach people to be more open to comics in general?

JH: I’d love it if it did. The bias against comics is one that reflects a lack of, well, reflection. The most popular page in the newspaper is the comics page. People read sequential art every day. People cut it out and put it on their cubicles. This is something we admire if it’s four panels long, and something we gladly buy giant collections of at B. Dalton. And the minute you string more than four panels together, and the minute there’s a coherent plot, then it’s silly, or it’s too much to look at, or it’s children’s stuff, or it’s for kids. Yeah, it would be great to get a book into schools and have kids talk about it with their parents, and to have parents see it, and to challenge the parental notion or the teachers’ notion about what is a useful teaching tool. It remains to be seen whether that’ll happen.

KO: Well, it seems the more libraries and bookstores Apis makes it into, the more likely that is to happen.

JH: Well, I hope so, although you never put it all on one thing. Ultimately, for that to succeed — and this is why I say I hope we start seeing many more books that are attempting to take an all-ages approach in the sense I think that I have — is that one little drop in the bucket, which is ultimately what Clan Apis will be, is not enough. There have to be people out there willing to write stories that they wish they’d had to read when they were kids, to sit down and really put together something that they can be really proud of that can appeal to broad groups of people. Because if then you have not just one book, but twenty, which you can say “look at this,” then you have a situation in which you can change people’s opinions. But it’s like Sandman — this brilliant piece of work sort of stood by itself. It wasn’t enough. We didn’t change the public’s opinion of comics. Articles were still written in newspapers that started with “bam, pow, biff.” Probably even articles about Sandman were written that way. So one isn’t enough. And one 165-page book is definitely not enough. But if it can be one voice in a growing chorus — well, that sounds really corny.

KO: How old is your son?

JH: My son is two right now. But I wrote Clan Apis when I was just married and planning to have kids, so I guess I always thought in those terms. I guess — this is going to sound screwy — but as far as things like that are concerned, I’ve had my son in mind, and I’ve had my mother in mind. My mother and my father. I want to write stories that they can read.

KO: What kind of readers are your mother and father?

JH: Well, I guess it’s not in terms of necessarily the content. But I come from northern Indiana, a small midwestern town, but a lot of cursing, and sexual situations, and a lot of gratuitous, drippy, bloody violence — not that that’s my voice anyway — that’s not something I’m gonna hand to my mother, or that I want my son to read. And I can’t say for certain whether or not that’s the voice inherent in me, or whether it’s a voice that’s a reaction to a dearth of that type of material. In any event, that’s just the way I write. Because a Warner Brothers cartoon was the same way. As nasty as it got was Bugs Bunny wearing a bra.

KO: And I can enjoy them just as much now as I did when I was six.

JH: And that’s, to me, the key. It’s writing a story that I can enjoy and be proud of now, and in twenty years. That can sit on a library shelf and not be dated. The word my wife constantly accuses me of using is “classic.” There’s something that isn’t rooted in a particular time, and is accessible to anybody who wants to read it at any time. Because the minute you start doing those other things, I think you start cutting yourself off from people. It’s my desire not to cut people out. And the reason that’s important is that it comes from a second perspective from which I write, and that is as an educator. I want to teach people something. So much of the stuff that I pick up — and this is true of comics, it’s true of books, it’s true of magazines — I find myself growing very frustrated, because I read these things, and I don’t walk away with anything. My life hasn’t been enriched in any way. Now that’s not true of everything, but I think a lot of stuff out there just sort of, you know, exists, kind of goes through the motions of telling a story. It doesn’t really do anything to improve me. You know? I don’t want to cut myself off from an audience. The minute you do that, the minute you turn off potential students is the minute you fail to educate somebody, and that’s no good.

KO: You mentioned gratuitous blood and gore — do you think there’s an excess of that in comics specifically? It sounds like maybe you do.

JH: Well, to say there’s an excess is to suggest that I’ve studied the situation, and I have not. So all I can go on is anecdotal stuff. Comics are like movies, so it’s not as if it’s something that’s unique to comics. Comics are like movies — you see more now, there’s a lot less left to your imagination. And growing up, I was never a kid who liked gory movies. I liked scary movies. To this day, I still enjoy watching The Creature from the Black Lagoon, those classic Universal monster pictures. They still scare me a little bit. But I never enjoyed the Halloween, the Friday the 13ths, the hacking and chopping, that just wasn’t my style. So when I see it creeping in, and you can see people holding decapitated heads dripping on the covers of comic books. And it’s not that I think, “oh my goodness, we should censor that,” And I can’t even say that it shouldn’t be done, but invariably it’s going to affect public opinion. And people can make the argument that movies are the same way, people don’t castigate movies because of violence, but the bottom line is, movies are doing fine. There’s no fear that the movie industry is going to collapse. And so that may be true, and people are free to make whatever comics they want, because as long as there’s a market for them — and that’s the other thing. They’ll only be produced if there are people buying them. And you don’t publish books like that at a loss. And so there’s clearly a market for them, so I’m not making any sort of judgment call on them, but it would be nice to see, and I think there are — okay, so now I’ve just sort of spiraled right into mishmash, but — my gut is, when I look at the stands, that it’s a more violent place than it used to be. It’s a less noble place than it used to be, in all genres. I prefer to contribute to something that attempts to be much less violent and more hopeful.

KO: And Clan Apis is nothing if not hopeful.

JH: I hope so.

KO: Staying on that track, you’re very frank about death in Clan Apis, and its place in the cycle of life and in the universe as a whole. When you were thinking that you were going to be writing for all ages, was there ever a contrast as far as writing something for all ages yet not pulling any punches?

JH: It kind of goes back to kids being smart, and kids being able to handle things. My dad, when he was growing up, he was orphaned when he was very young. And it’s a corny story told by my father who grew up in the 40s, but he went to see “Bambi” with his aunt, within the year. And he still talks about how Bambit’s dad says, “You gotta go on. You’ve got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and that’s just the way it is.” And now people criticize that because, you know, we can’t show kids death, and blah blah blah, and it’s a violent image, but the bottom line is that kids have to potentially deal with death in some respect all through their life. I think they’re capable of dealing with a lot more than we give them credit for. We’re not talking about the death of their aunt or uncle here, or a relative. We’re talking about the death of an animal. And I think the understanding that that’s an element of an animal’s life is an important thing for them not to ignore. Because you can Disneyfy nature too much, you can make it a little too warm, a little too cuddly, and that goes back to the dangerous spiral of anthropomorphizing. These bees are my characters. These bees are my heroes. The queen I liked, Queen Hatchi. But you find out she had to kill the previous queen, and so these elements are not things — as long as you don’t have eviscerated bees lying around and stuff, then these are things that kids can deal with. The real motivation for dealing with that properly on a more important level was my own — if this came through as a fundamental part of the story, it’s because I’ve always dealt with an awful fear of death. And so Nyuki was my surrogate for a lot of things in the story. Like my fear of change, and fear of death as the biggest change there is. And this was sort of my way of dealing with that issue, and in some respects I view that as one of the more grown-up elements, and one of the things that a kid will probably just gloss over. I’m not sure I dealt with the metaphysics of that very well.

Quick. Name an Eisner-award nominated comic artist and writer who also has a Ph.D in biology and teaches college-level science classes. The answer is easy, mostly because there aren’t many people in the industry that fit anything even remotely resembling that description (It’s hard to imagine Garth Ennis giving a lecture on mitochondria).

Somehow, Jay Hosler has found the time to devote his life to both the study of life sciences and the production of great sequential art. His current big seller, Clan Apis, tells the story of Nyuki, a honeybee who takes herself — and us — on a journey through life in the hive and as part of the swarm. The six-chapter collection was nominated for two Eisners this year.

Widely discussed as a work accessible to — but not written specifically for — children, Apis is lighthearted but pulls no punches in its description of life as a bee. Its frank description of death and conflict in a world populated by wisecracking insects provides a welcome sense of balance in a medium where stories for all ages aren’t easy to come by.

Meanwhile, the first issue of The Sandwalk Adventures, Hosler’s newest work, hits shelves in December. The series chronicles conversations between Charles Darwin and a microscopic mite living in the follicles of his eyebrows.

Again, not something you’re likely to see from Garth Ennis.

Hosler lives in central Pennsylvania with his wife Lisa and son Max, who enjoys playing with mechanical pencils. Jay and Lisa are expecting a second child soon.

KO: Le’s talk about Clan Apis, since that’s kind of your opus right now. I think it’s fair to say that it’s written for younger audiences, or at least written to be fairly accessible to younger audiences.

JH: I think the latter is more what I had in mind. It sort of goes to the real concept of “all ages,” which means that it should appeal to, well, all ages. Unfortunately, it’s sort of in a market right now where “all ages” is translated as “just for kids.” And so, and I’ve said this before, I think, to people, that I sort of write these things like I imagine the old Warner Brothers cartoons, which was, you know, there’s slapstick and silly stuff for kids, but there’s another level, that kids will just skip over things they don’t get, as long as you give them enough material to keep going. And then there’s political commentary and broader thoughts that should appeal to older readers.

KO: How did you feel, then, when the Eisner nominations came through, and they addressed your work in terms of its youth orientation?

JH: Oh yeah, I have no problem with that, because ultimately, if I had to pick a market that is completely, in my opinion, unaddressed in the comics medium today, it’s kids. I mean, what book are there out there for kids? You go into comic shops now and you’ve got Akiko, and you’ve got Bone, and you’ve got Castle Waiting, which are all great books — Amy Unbounded, which is a mini-comic, is a great book — but in reality, compared to the vast content of Previews — this is not a slamming of Previews, this is a comment on the type of material they receive — is almost exclusively adult-oriented. And so to be nominated in a category for kids books, I have no problem with that. I’m excited about it.

KO: I’s interesting you’re saying this, since people outside the medium generally stick to the belief that comics themselves are pretty much just for kids.

JH: Yeah, it’s an interesting dichotomy. It is considered sort of childish literature. And I think there’s been a real concerted effort by a lot of people to make it adult, and when I say adult here, I mean what the real world means — not, like, pornographic. Something that a grown-up could read and not feel embarrassed about. And of course there are tons of books out there like that. One of my favorite books of all time is Minimum Wage. It’s not a kids’ book, but it’s not standard everyday fare either. The problem is that it almost seems like this desire to legitimize ourselves as okay for adults to read has left this dearth of material for kids to read. Companies make attempts at kids’ books, but usually that fails, because most people have no respect for kids’ intelligence.

KO: What are you thinking of specifically when you say that?

JH: I’m loath to single things out, but I’ve seen books come out from various publishers within the last two years that, in my opinion, missed the mark on what kids want, because what you’re doing is you’re thinking of it in terms of what kids want instead of just writing a book that could be read by a kid. I know that’s sort of a fuzzy distinction. I think that when you sit down and think, “I’m going to write something that a kid would like,” you’ve already started from the wrong standpoint. For example, I don’t think Linda Medley sits down with a Castle Waiting story and says, “I think a kid will like this.” I think she sits down and writes a story and does certain things, like — this is going to make me sound like an old fuddy-duddy — but you don’t have cursing in it. You don’t have gratuitous sexual content. You don’t have gratuitous violence. She tells a story without those trappings, so in that respect it’s accessible to a child, a child can pick it up and read it. Now, there are also elements to it that a seven-year-old kid won’t get. But at least there aren’t those really strange barriers to a kid reading it. I guess I’m not in Linda Medley’s mind, so I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I suspect it’s not “kids could read this,” I think it’s more along the lines of “I want to tell a good story.”

KO: So when you wrote Clan Apis, did you think that there was a void to be filled, or were you just writing it because it was a good story to write?

JH: I got the idea for Clan Apis reading a book called The Biology of the Honey Bee. I was doing that reading for my research, and so many of the elements of it seemed like the parts of a story — things you would anthropomorphize. And it struck me as very unusual, because I was anthropomorphizing something that was very alien, a very alien world. And so the starting point was that it was just a different story. And everything I write, I write with the mind that my son will read it someday.