The Intersection of Comics and History: An Interview with Jason Rodriguez

Writer and editor Jason Rodriguez’s work includes District Comics: An Unconventional History of Washington, DC, Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened, and The Little Particle That Could. His books have been nominated for eight Harvey Awards honoring excellence in the comics industry and a Will Eisner Comic Industry Award. Rodriguez’s current project editing graphic novels about colonial New England brought him to the Massachusetts Historical Society last week. He took the time to answer a few Beehive questions about comics, history, and what to expect from the coming historical graphic novels.

                                                                                ^{*Image of Jason Rodriguez drawn by Scott White}

1. Tell us about your current project with Fulcrum Publishing editing graphic novels on colonial New England.

Colonial Comics is a series of graphic novel anthologies about colonial life up to and a little bit beyond the American Revolution. The first book, scheduled to be released in the spring/summer of 2014, will focus on the early settlement of New England. The book will feature stories of pilgrims and Puritans, Pequots and pirates, midwives and printing presses, whales and livestock, slavery and frontiers, and many other aspects of colonial life. The second book, scheduled to be released in the fall/winter of 2014, will focus on the pre-Revolutionary period. It will depict the unconventional stories of Revolutionary men and women, the early ideas and seemingly insignificant moves that brought about revolution, and a shot that was heard around the world. We're still in the planning phases for additional books, but editing two large anthologies at a time is a lot of work as it is, so I'm not in a huge rush to get started on a third or fourth.

The books feature an eclectic mix of comic book writers and artists, fiction and nonfiction authors, university professors, and renowned historians. I also have two assistant editors: A. David Lewis, a comic writer with a Ph.D. in religious studies, and John L. Bell, who writes the Boston 1775 blog.

2. How will the Massachusetts Historical Society support this work?

While we're still working out the details, the MHS aims to help us in our mission to produce a historically accurate piece. With comics you need to get all the visuals right. Architecture, clothing, weapons – you need to make sure that the images you're putting on the page are backed by the historical record. There's also the fact that we're crafting narratives and extrapolating between recorded points in history by making up dialog and inserting representative characters. MHS is going to help us by making sure we have access to the primary sources and artifacts so that we can include them in the stories and make a book that's accessible and fun for readers but also educational and accurate.

3. What is your background and how did you come to write comics?

I've read comics my entire life, tried to write comics for a little bit, and then took a job editing a small anthology that turned into a bit of a cult hit called Western Tales of Terror. After that I took on a job editing a book called Elk's Run, which was a critical success but not much of a commercial success. Nevertheless it got nominated for seven Harvey Awards and was picked up by Random House/Villard, who also picked up the anthology I was working on at the time, Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened. From there I worked on a lot of small- and mid-sized books, writing for anthologies and editing some projects here and there. Colonial Comics is definitely my most ambitious project to date – between the first two books we're looking at around 50 stories, which translates to over 100 writers, artists, and designers.

4. Why do you think comics are a good medium for exploring history?

Comics tend to immerse the reader in the time period. Every panel is a moment in time, and each moment allows the reader to pause and take note of the buildings and the dress and the people. Since the words are printed on the page in little balloons, the reader can note the dialog and the pacing. There's also a layer of subtext you get with comics that you don't necessarily get with books and film. When someone is in panel for an entire story and hardly says a line of dialog it says a lot about that character and how he or she fits into the context of the story. And of course there's the narrative aspect. These historic figures become interesting characters within the stories. Readers are inspired to learn more about them, either on their own or in their courses.

Because of all this, the individual stories could stand alone as fun and informative narratives or act as segues into larger discussions on the period. For example, one story in the first book is about Elizabeth Glover, the owner of the first New England print shop. The story could be used as a lead-in to a discussion on the difficulties of female business owners in society at that time. The small pieces capture your interest and encourage you to seek out the larger context.

5. What are some of your favorite comics? Can you recommend a good entry point for someone who is interested in history but fairly new to comics?

My taste in comics is pretty mixed. I love a lot of Japanese comics, especially anything by Naoki Urasawa. But more to the tastes of the people on this blog, I recently finished Osamu Tezuka's massive eight-volume graphic novel about the life of Buddha. It's a bit of a pop-culture twist on the source material but it is beautiful and heartbreaking.

Forgive me if I give a little plug for Fulcrum's District Comics: An Unconventional History of Washington DC. I even wrote a story for that one about the 1867 Washington Nationals. As far as other histories, I like the ones that have a personal narrative attached to them, like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (which is about her childhood in Iran) and Joe Sacco's Palestine (which is about his experiences in the Gaza Strip during the early '90s). A bit more of a hidden gem is Ryan Dunlavey and Fred Van Lente's wonderful Action Philosophers! That book is the greatest way to learn about philosophy and philosophers. It should be required reading in every college philosophy class. And if you just want straight history, Hill & Wang has published a bunch of graphic histories including books about Reagan, Ché Guevara, Trotsky, the Vietnam War, the 9/11 Commission Report, and even an adaptation of the U.S. Constitution.

Brown-Bag Lunch Talk: “Some Are Weatherwise, Some Are Otherwise”

On Wednesday, 3 October, research fellow Lauri Coleman from The College of William and Mary, gave her brown-bag lunch talk, “ ‘Some are Weatherwise, Some are Otherwise’: Popular Almanacs and Weather Cosmology in Mid-eighteenth Century America.” Coleman’s dissertation research explores how mid eighteenth-century New Englanders, from the 1740s to the 1780s,  experienced and made sense of the weather generally and natural disasters such as draughts and earthquakes in particular. New Englanders during this period experienced the weather in two distinct yet interconnected ways: “providentially” (as a sign of God intervening in human affairs) and through the discourse of natural philosophy, scientific observation through which divine laws might be discerned. Coleman argues that these two frameworks for understanding weather – one through which God is understood to act disruptively and violently, the other through which God is seen to act benevolently and in an orderly fashion – exist together in collective consciousness throughout the period.  In the face of natural disasters, these two interpretations were often pitted against one another in public discussion (in newspapers and sermons, for example) as citizens attempted to make sense of the event.

The Cushing Academy Fellowship in Environmental History -- one of the 20 short-term research fellowships offered by the MHS -- is supporting Coleman’s work at the MHS this fall, where she is reading through our extensive collection of interleaved (annotated) almanacs and diaries. Almanacs, Coleman explained, are particularly useful as a window into understanding how eighteenth-century New Englanders understood “usual” weather, what type of records they kept about everyday weather, and what use they made of that documentation (if any) over the course of their lives or across generations. They are also unusual for surviving eighteenth-century records in that, while still relatively elite, the authors of annotated almanacs represent a broader cross-section of society than the typical manuscript or print materials that have been preserved from the period.  Coleman has found two collections of particular interest during her residency thus far: the Experience Wight Richardson diaries (1728-1782) and the Samuel P. Savage interleaved almanacs (1770-1795). Richardson’s diaries, which record her spiritual struggles and relate her faith experiences to weather events, are unusual in being kept by a woman. Few eighteenth-century New England women’s diaries have survived, and fewer still deal so directly with the cosmology of weather. A farmer, Samuel P. Savage used the almanacs, particularly the information they provided on the phases of the moon, to plan his management of crops and animals.

During the discussion that followed Coleman’s presentation, attendees raised questions about the motives of those documenting the weather – were they hoping to forecast the future? Did they change their behaviors in relation to the weather based on their records of the past? They also explored what is historically particular about weather cosmology in the eighteenth century, and whether Coleman’s project might benefit from comparison to earlier and later periods (possibly beyond the scope of a single dissertation!).

We wish Lauri Coleman the best as she continues her research at the MHS and then returns to The College of William and Mary to complete her dissertation.

A Massive Machine for a Massive Job: Digitizing 55,000 Pages of China Trade Material

The Library Collections Services department is always a busy place, but this fall is an especially active time on the third floor.  As the behind-the-scenes arm of the library, our department is responsible for the acquisition, cataloging, processing, preservation, conservation, and digitization of our collections, but in addition to our regular ongoing digitization projects, we are playing host to a large-scale scanning project for the next four to five months. The MHS has contracted with Adam Matthew Digital, Ltd., a British publisher of digital collections sold to libraries, to supply somewhere in the neighborhood of 55,000 manuscript pages to a forthcoming multi-archive digital publication, China, America and the Pacific: Trade and Cultural Exchange.  Adam Matthew has contracted, in turn, with Luna Imaging in Los Angeles to do the scanning.  In late August, Luna shipped all of the equipment shown here and sent a representative to install and test it and train a scanning technician.  The technician, shown here, is now hard at work scanning correspondence, account books, ships’ logs, and letterbooks from multiple collections, including the extensive Forbes Family Papers.  Other highlights of the final product, scheduled for release in late 2013, will include the manuscript of Richard Henry Dana’s seminal work, Two Years Before the Mast, and Robert Haswell’s log of the Columbia-Rediviva, the first vessel to circumnavigate the globe

Happy Birthday, Lafayette!

Today marks the 255th birthday of Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, who was a Revolutionary War hero and one of the first celebrities in the United States. To celebrate, the Society joins with 23 other host institutions tomorrow for a lecture at Hamilton Hall in Salem, Mass. Prof. François Furstenberg, associate professor of history at the University of Montréal, will give the keynote lecture "When the United States Spoke French: Trans-Atlantic Politics, Land, and Diplomacy in the Age of the Revolution." A festive reception will follow to honor the marquis. For more information about the event please contact Becky Putnam of the Bowditch Institute at beckyput@yahoo.com or 978-744-6343.

A French citizen, Lafayette began his career as a musketeer in the king's regiment and married into a wealthy, well-connected French family. The reports of Americans fighting for liberty moved him, and in 1777 he bought a ship and sailed for America. Upon arrival, Lafayette earned an honorary commission as major general in the Continental Army. Gen. George Washington became his mentor, and Lafayette was devoted to him. Lafayette earned fame for his courage on the battlefield, and he used his family connections to obtain crucial material aid from France for the American cause. His support for the Revolution, especially as a foreigner, captured the imagination and admiration of Americans. He was beloved in the United States for the rest of his life.

Lafayette’s legacy is apparent in the Society's collections, which include correspondence, artifacts, and memorabilia from the time of the American Revolution and his celebrated return trip to the States in 1824-1825. The portrait gallery also features Jospeh Boze’s well-known portrait of Lafayette. Thomas Jefferson commissioned this work for his gallery of American heroes in honor of Lafayette's contributions to the American Revolution. The portrait depicts Lafayette at the pinnacle of his career. He wears the uniform of the French National Guard and a confident expression as he gazes off into the distance. Even at 255, he still looks good. A happy birthday to him.