All three pieces in Health Care Comics deal with issues of health equity. I explore and explain an array of recent public health research, drawing on peer-reviewed articles, my interviews with their authors, and additional sources. The authors, activists, and teachers themselves appear as characters in the stories.
All three stories appeared online on The Journalist’s Resource (JR), but in Health Care Comics this is the first time they’ll be collected in print. As ever, I’m grateful to my amazing editor at JR, Carmen Nobel, for making this project happen.
I’ll have copies of Health Care Comics at the excellent one-day festival at the Brooklyn Independent Comics Showcase (BICS), taking place on April 13 in Industry City, Brooklyn (natch).
Being that H.C.C. is a Harvard U./Creative Commons project, I’m not allowed to sell the comic, BUT I can offer it as a giveaway with any other purchase of my work. And I’ll have plenty of other items for sale at BICS, including recent issues of The Vagabonds, Keyhole 25, and of course my books A.D., The Influencing Machine, and A Few Perfect Hours.
So come to BICS and say hi: further enticements to attend are the planned presences of my old pals Dean Haspiel, Whitney Matheson, and Nick Bertozzi, who will be debuting new work as well! Remember: April 13, 2023, at St. Mark’s Comics in Industry City. Here’s a link.
Thinking about Victor S. Navasky (July 5, 1932–January 23, 2023), the longtime editor and even longer-time public face of The Nation magazine, who passed away last week. He was a towering figure in journalism, and his life and career have been documented by people much more qualified than me. But I have some personal memories to share.
It was 1990. I was a year out of college, searching for direction, and I wrote a desperate plea to The Nation, a sort of moral compass for me back then. I begged for a job — any job — and even though the magazine didn’t have any openings, Victor agreed to meet with me. Despite his vital obligations in putting out a weekly magazine, he was so kind and patient during the interview, crinkling his eyes in a sympathetic smile as I expressed my existential crisis.
And somehow he created a job for me! At first, I was the magazine’s jack-of-all-trades — my duties included everything from helping with the magazine’s classified ads section and selling back issues and T-shirts to putting fresh toilet paper in the bathroom — but I couldn’t believe my good fortune to be in the door and apparently steering my life in the “right” direction.
Victor was never a director mentor to me, but he embodied the spirit of the place. I learned so many things from him just by observing his manner and the way he dealt with his people. I thrived at The Nation, where I made a bunch of great friends and contacts, and eventually became director of reprints and syndication. I also learned how journalism and fact-checking work, and I credit that formative experience with setting me on the path to my eventual (current) role as a journalist.
And no doubt the best thing that happened at The Nation was that I met Sari Wilson, who began her own post-college career as an intern there. The rest, as they say, is history!
I left The Nation in 1992, setting out with Sari on our round-the-world backpacking adventure (which led to us living in Prague, then Chicago, then San Francisco, then Provincetown, and finally, nearly a decade later, back to New York City). At the farewell party for me, Victor gently ribbed me about how far I had come in my two years there, and even jokingly took credit for connecting me with Sari. But it wasn’t a joke: if he hadn’t taken “pity” on me and given me a job that didn’t exist, Sari and I would never have met.
I ran into Victor here and there in later years — when Sari and I were back in NYC for a visit, and a couple of times upstate in the Berkshires. And he was always the same: avuncular, sharp-eyed, and happy to see how my life was progressing. I’m happy he had a good long life, and I’m grateful our lives intersected at such a key juncture in mine. He will be missed.
The interview is fun to look back on and read—it’s a real conversation, with some good back & forth, and I felt Jon’s questions really pushed me to go deep in my answers. Topics we discussed include whether comics journalism is “real” journalism, what subjects call out to be treated in comics form, collaborating with Brooke Gladstone, how comics are treated in the U.S. as compared to France, the media and Donald Trump, and the insertion of myself into my stories. Shout-outs to Joe Sacco, Scott McCloud, Harvey Pekar, Dean Haspiel, Martha Rosler, and Sari Wilson.
I can say for a fact that Jon’s intro and the interview itself is the most serious treatment of my stuff that I’ve yet seen. I’m blushing here!
Anyway, there’s a short excerpt from the piece here, but I think you have to have an academic journal subscription, or pay a one-time fee, to read the whole thing online.
I’ve been working the last three months on a 10-page comic about COVID-19, “Black immunity,” and historical health inequities. Titled, “A Tale of Two Pandemics: Historical Insights on Persistent Racial Disparities,” it was published yesterday by Journalist’s Resource (out of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center).
The piece springs from the work of three doctors— Lakshmi Krishnan, S. Michelle Ogunwole, and Lisa A. Cooper — and a recent paper they wrote for the Annals of Internal Medicine. In their paper, they discuss the similarities between the COVID crisis and the 1918 “Spanish Flu” pandemic, particularly racial health disparities and the spread of misinformation.
With their piece and my interviews with them as the frame, I take readers through some of the misinformation about coronavirus circulating on social media, and the impact of that on communities of color, particularly given that African Americans have been dying at a much higher rate than white Americans during this crisis.
I learned a lot while working on this piece — particularly the insidious myth of “Black immunity” to disease that was used in our country as rationale for all sorts of horrible things, from Benjamin Rush urging Philadelphia’s Black citizens to act as nurses for white people during the 1793 Yellow Fever outbreak, to J. Marion Sims’ 19th-century experiments on enslaved Black women, to the infamous 20th-century Tuskegee syphilis study.
No wonder polls show that many African Americans are distrustful of any potential COVID vaccines in the offing!
But I also learned about the work of Black newspapers and columnists from the World War I era, who worked to combat misinformation about the Spanish flu as it related to their readers. So one thing I really appreciate about the doctors’ paper and my conversations with them is their commitment to finding paths forward — like working with “trusted voices” and with modern organizations devoted to protecting the lives of BIPOC. As we enter a new, deadlier third wave of the virus, that’s something to look forward to.
Apparently, the woman I captured on video the other night (from the George Floyd murder protest), throwing what I thought was a glass bottle at a stationary police van, actually threw a Molotov cocktail. (If you watch the video you can see that the bottle as it flies through the air is faintly glowing.) At the time, I had no idea that’s what happened, even though I was standing very close nearby! (Although you can see from the reaction of those even closer than me, that many people did see what the object was.)
As you can see in the video — which I shot at approximately 10:40 pm on the corner of Eastern Parkway and Washington Avenue — the bottle shatters harmlessly on the side of the van. Immediately afterward, the van then reverses on the street and four officers jump out and pursue the woman. They eventually corral her on the steps of the nearby Brooklyn Museum. Subsequent reports have listed her name as Samantha Shader, of Catskill, New York.
Shader was initially charged with four counts of attempted murder of a police officer, attempted arson, assault on an officer, criminal possession of a weapon, and reckless endangerment.
From my perspective, it appears the case against her has been exaggerated by the police. And much of the news reporting on the incident has been shoddy — because much of the information in the reports came from police rather than reporters or eyewitnesses. For instance, multiple outlets initially blamed Shader for a totally separate incident of an unoccupied police van being set on fire in Fort Green, a different neighborhood in Brooklyn. (I live in Prospect Heights.) The oh-so-reliable Washington Times, for instance, writes, “The officers were able to quickly exit the vehicle before it became engulfed in flames.”
From my video, you can clearly see the bottle did not break any of the van’s windows, and the van certainly never caught on fire. (My wife Sari also filmed the incident, from our apartment window, and you can also see from her video that the van is unharmed.)
Other reports on the story I found last night on the web made similar claims, and errors. For instance, The Mount Pleasant Daily Voice wrote that “the four officers inside the van were able to escape as the fire broke out.”
It looks like much the misinformation can be attributed to an NYPD spokesman, Det. Brian Magoolaghan, who told Hudson Valley 360 that “the bottle shattered a window but did not explode on impact, Magoolaghan said. The four officers, who were not injured, were able to get out of the van before the firebomb exploded and van burst into flames, Magoolaghan said.”
In another example of poor reporting, the New York Daily News wrote that “An upstate woman admitted using a Molotov cocktail to set ablaze an NYPD vehicle with four officers inside. . . . At about 1:12 a.m. Saturday, Shader approached a police vehicle near the corner of Eastern Parkway and Washington Ave. and lit up a bottle containing ‘an incendiary chemical.”
So the Daily News apparently got their facts from the police affidavit, which has the time wrong by almost two-and-a-half hours. More importantly, they state that the vehicle was “set ablaze,” which it definitely was not.
To its credit, the Daily News reports that “Two other protesters are suspected of setting fire to a second police vehicle at about 12:57 a.m. Saturday near the 88th Precinct in Clinton Hill.” (Clinton Hill is adjacent to Fort Green, so sometimes the two neighborhoods are confused for each other.)
The New York Post initially wrote that Shader had set the van set ablaze and the four cops had barely escaped with their lives — but they have now changed the story to get closer to the facts (though with no record of their correction).
The N.Y. Post and Gothamist both write that the NYPD announced they were charging Shader with four counts of attempted murder, but apparently now the federal government is taking over the case, charging her with the much less serious crime of “Causing Damage by Fire and Explosives to a Police Vehicle.” I’m not sure if both cases will still proceed, (The Gothamistpiece also gets the time wrong, saying it was at 1:12 AM — I’m assuming they got that from the police affidavit.)
The New York Times reported that “A Molotov cocktail was thrown at an occupied police van at around 1 a.m., Mr. Shea said. . . . While the firebomb Ms. Shader threw shattered a rear window of the van, the officers inside managed to jump out.” The time is wrong, and I still contend that the van’s window was not broken.
I’m not in any way trying to excuse what Shader did, but it appears — big surprise — that the case against her has been exaggerated by the police, and has been amplified by some weak reporting.
My homage to Captain America Comics #1 (with apologies to Jack Kirby and Joe Simon)
I’ll be tabling at MoCCAFest this weekend (table I 270 A) with the latest issue of THE VAGABONDS. 24 thrilling pages of COMICS JOURNALISM and other great features!
A lot has changed in this country—and the world—since the last issue of The Vagabonds, so it’s only fitting that this issue features a Donald Trump story. My explainer on the former British spy Christopher Steel’s “dossier,” originally published by Columbia Journalism Review in the fall of 2017, remains surprisingly relevant, as the special counsel seems to be using the memos as a “road map” for his investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. This issue’s longest story—originally published by The Nib in the fall of 2016—looks into the influx of costumed characters into New York’s Times Square. In the piece I explore the phenomenon — who are these unlicensed Elmos, Spider-Men, and Minnie Mice, and why are they there? This issue also features a fun story I did for Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge. Do you often find yourself losing or breaking your old phone just when a new model reaches stores? Well, you’re not alone… The story shows how researchers — using the game of Jenga and a precious coffee mug—were able to get test subjects to replicate this risky, self-destructive behavior. THE VAGABONDS #6 closes out with a couple of shorter pieces, including a collaboration with my mother, the artist Martha Rosler.
I look forward to seeing you at MoCCA Fest this weekend and handing you an autographed copy of THE VAGABONDS #6. (And of course I’ll have copies of previous issues of The Vagabonds, as well as A.D., The Influencing Machine, Terms of Service, Flashed, and much more!)
MoCCA Fest 2018—April 7-8, 2018
11:00AM – 7:00PM on Saturday; 11:00AM – 6:00PM on Sunday
Metropolitan West
West 46th Street between 11th and 12th Avenues, NYC
Remember the Donald Trump-Russia “dossier”? Released by BuzzFeed in January (shortly before Trump was sworn in as U.S. President), the 17 short memos (compiled over seven months) featured some pretty wild claims—sex parties, etc. But the main takeaway was that Trump and his cronies were in the pockets of the Russians.
Amidst the furor over the memos’ contents was an equally strong uproar in the journalistic community. Was it ethical of BuzzFeed to publish the so-called dossier, which was unverified and contained some specific errors? The backstory, of course, is that during the previous months, the memos—and their author, former British spy Christopher Steele—had passed like a hot potato through every major news organization before BuzzFeed finally pulled the trigger. So was the outrage honest, or really just a case of sour grapes at being scooped? A new piece I just did for Columbia Journalism Review—“The Trump-Russia memos”—tracks that long strange journey.
The events described in the five-page comics story are based on reporting and research, including interviews I did with journalists who sought to verify the memos and wrote about them—or chose not to…
As far as the actual contents of the memos, none of the more outlandish claims have been verified—although the FBI and Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller apparently are using the memos as a “road map” for their ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia…
So check out the piece and see what you think. (Thanks to Vanessa Gezari for commissioning the piece and shepherding me through the whole process.)
As a native New Yorker, I don’t visit Times Square very often—too noisy, too bright, too many tourists. Of course I was aware how much the area has changed over the years, with the banishment of the porn palaces and prostitution, and the Disneyfication that began during the late 1990s. Back in the day, if you walked around the area, you’d get “asked for a date” ten times per block. Now, improbably, the area had returned to its early 20th-century roots as a tourist Mecca.
But when I did walk through the area a few years back I couldn’t help but notice a whole new group of inhabitants: Elmos, Minnie Mouses, Spider-Mans, and packs of others in Sesame Street and superhero costumes, posing for photos with tourists for tips. It was like they had come out of nowhere and had taken over the Square. (By the way: did you know that the area is actually not a square at all, but really more of a bow-tie shape?)
When I first began noticing the costumed characters it was really freaky and random to me, totally out of left field. And now, a few years later, it’s just another fact of life in NYC. Despite the shiny electronic billboards and chain restaurants, you still can’t walk through Times Square without being accosted. Maybe times hadn’t changed that much after all.
All this got a ton of local recent coverage, particularly in 2014. And believe it or not, the City Council held hearings on the matter—including the idea of requiring you to undergo a background check before you can put on a Spongebob costume—and instituted some new restrictions.
I was intrigued, so I spent a little time hanging around the area, and I couldn’t help put notice that most of the people underneath the costume were Latino. I wondered about them. Where do they come from? How much money do they make? What’s it like to do that job all day long? I decided I would find out–and show what I learned in a comics piece.
I spent two months doing research and interviews, and another couple of months writing the script and drawing the piece, which includes more than 50 panels of comics. (Much credit goes to The Nib editor Matt Bors for helping me winnow down the more than 70 panels I originally envisioned!)
The pull of the story, of course, is its sheer wackiness—plus, for those not from New York, this whole scenario is new information. And that’s how I suck you in. But then, halfway through the story, I go “behind the mask” to get the other perspective—that of the people in the costumes. And with all the new regulations spurred by the hyperbolic press coverage and local business associations like the Times Square Alliance, the real story comes into focus.
This story in particular is perfect for the comics treatment because of the costumed character aspect. It’s all be very meta, with the reader not being sure if he or she is looking at someone in a costume or just a drawing of the actual character from the cartoons or comics… (In that vein, I had fun with the color concept of the piece—let me know if it works for you.)
There’s an old saying that journalism is the first draft of history. I was thinking of that recently when I presented A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge to students & teachers at Ben Davis High School in Indianapolis. Pretty much the entire 10th-grade there had read A.D. in their English classes, so I spent a full day at the school, bringing the story behind A.D. to the more than 1,000 kids from that grade (and a selection of 11th-graders who had read the book last year). It’s crazy to think that those students were around four years old back in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and nearly destroyed New Orleans. So to them my book is not a journalistic perspective on the disaster, but rather (ancient) history.
(One positive about that is in regards to the section of A.D. that deals with Denise’s experiences at the New Orleans convention center—without the burden of the false rumors about gang violence, rapes, dead bodies in freezers, etc. that flew around the media at the time, the kids will have a fresher understanding of at what actually went down at the convention center…)
I write at the end of A.D. that
… there are many, many stories about Katrina and its aftermath. Those of the seven people in A.D. are quite particular and highly personal, but my hope is that they provide a window into a larger world, one that few of us understand and that we’ll be trying to make sense of for a long time.
And I always paraphrase that sentiment when I discuss A.D.—that my book is merely one document of many about the storm and its aftermath. And I make sure to mention some of the other great narratives about Katrina/New Orleans (a few of which are much more expansive in scope). Documentaries like Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke or Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water. Books like Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge, or Chris Rose’s 1 Dead in Attic, or Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, or Dan Baum’s Nine Lives. Or more recent works like Roberta Brandes Gratz’s We’re Still Here Ya Bastards, and Please Forward, edited by Cynthia Joyce. And even fictional works like HBO’s solid series Treme.
Well, now there’s another “graphic narrative” to add to that list: Don Brown’s Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina & New Orleans (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Published last summer on the 10th anniversary of the storm, it’s the only other comic book format history of Katrina that I know of. (And I only just found out about it, though apparently it’s been very well received…)
Definitely for a younger audience than A.D., Drowned City takes the reader through the breadth of the Katrina story, from the storm’s formation as “a swirl of unremarkable wind” in Africa to its building in the Gulf of Mexico and finally sweeping into Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. The book shows New Orleans preparing for the storm and the city’s belated & haphazard attempts to evacuate. It shows the breaching of the levees, the people trapped in their attics, and the drowned bodies. The book details how helpless/useless the authorities in New Orleans were to deal with the flooding and the aftermath, and how thousands of people were abandoned at the so-called “shelters of last resort,” the Superdome and the Convention Center. Drowned City shows the chaos that settled over the city, how people were forced to help themselves to much-need supplies—and the instances of looting—and how some brave groups and individuals performed heroic rescues. The book spares no blows in its depiction of the ineptitude and infighting of officials like FEMA head Michael Brown, Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, and President George W. Bush. The book ends in October 2005 with the city finally dry, but totally devastated. It talks about New Orleans’ subsequent depopulation, particularly the decline of the city’s poorest (mostly African-American) populations. Nevertheless, the book ends on a tentative note of hopefulness.
Drowned City is gorgeously illustrated, mostly in large panels of pen & ink and watercolor. And it is meticulously researched & documented, with a full source list/bibliography at the back.
I often speak of A.D. as a “people’s history” of Hurricane Katrina. Don Brown‘s Drowned City takes more of a holistic perspective, and in that way is a perfect complement to A.D. I highly recommend you check it out.
There’s a new book out, by three college professors, called CREATING COMICS as Journalism, Memoir & Nonfiction (Routledge), and I wrote the foreword. I’ve known authors Randy Duncan, Michael Ray Taylor, and David Stoddard for some years now; I’ve even made guest appearances at their annual workshops for the College Media Association; but I was still extremely surprised and flattered when they asked me to write the foreword to their forthcoming book.
The book is chock-full of useful info: the history of the genre, approaches to finding stories, tips on tools & techniques, getting published, and a discussion of legal and ethical considerations. As far as I know, this is the first “instructional manual” on comics journalism, so I am very excited for it to come out, for my own use as well as others. After all, I’m no expert on the field—I’m just a practitioner.
When it came to the intro, I wasn’t sure what I had to offer to the discussion. In the end, I decided maybe the best thing would be to recap how I got here: the signposts along the way that led me to this very moment—not only in my own career, but to this extremely vibrant period of comics journalism. So, without further ado, here’s what I wrote. (And look for the book in all the usual outlets…)
Well, now there’s another “graphic narrative” to add to that list: Don Brown’s 
There’s a new book out, by three college professors, called