This Is Not News

KO: Was Columbus a good town to work in?

JH: I don’t think anything would have happened the way it did if I hadn’t been in Columbus. I really attribute it not only the owners of The Laughing Ogre, but the environment, and the fact that there was this place with friendly people who were interested in the work and what I was doing, and who were plugged into all this independent alternative stuff, and all of this mainstream stuff, to the point that they offered a legitimate perspective. Those guys were all so very helpful. They’re not comics pros, but these are the guys that I would actually show the stuff to, other than my wife and my best friend Jeff. Their encouragement helped quite a bit too. I sold 600 issues maximally. I peaked at about 640 on the third, fourth and fifth issues of Clan Apis, and I think 100 of those were sold at The Laughing Ogre. It’s astonishing the effects a store can have just by saying, “You should look at this.” The Ogre is a kind of place that will recommend a DC book that they like, and they’ll recommend a no-name alternative book that’s on its first issue. If it’s good, they will point it out. I think that’s the strength of the store. I think that’s why they make a lot of money for a comic store. At some level, I have to believe that Clan Apis is good. Once it gets into people’s hands, and they give it a chance, I think the majority of people say, “You know what? I like this.”

KO: In some way the industry supports that as well, in that since it’s still kind of struggling, people just starting out might be given more of a chance than they would in TV or film or publishing.

JH: One of the things I used to do was I used to point out when a book was coming out. I would hype it on the usenet groups. What you have there, and I think in comic shops across the nation, and in magazines like Comics Journal, you have not only an acceptance, but a yearning to find something new and different that’s good. I mean, there’s a difference between new and different that sucks, and new and different which is good. I think that people are looking, and people want to be entertained, and readers are much more open to giving people a chance. It’s still not that big a chance, but I think that Clan Apis really took off and started to do well. My numbers went up from my first issue. I’ve always been told that that’s unusual. I’ve always been told: Big first issue, and then drop-off. And I had dreaded that through word-of-mouth in the industry. And then people like Neil Gaiman were saying in interviews that they really liked Clan Apis. Alex Robinson mentioned Clan Apis. People who don’t know me being kind enough to say things like that — that has, at some level, a really significant impact in this industry, because it is so small, and it is so tight-knit.

KO: What do you read now?

JH: I’ve really cut back on my pull. I read Bone, I read — I’m trying to think of what I just got. Castle Waiting. Dork. I love Evan Dorkin, dystopic and depressed as he can be sometimes.

KO: Milk and Cheese is definitely something that’s not for all ages.

JH: No. It is not. There’s a book called The Wiggly Reader, by John Kerschbaum, that I really like. Usually anything by Jim Ottaviani, which is great. Rachel Hartman’s Amy Unbounded. I just read Box Office Poison, which I loved. And From Hell. And I’m a huge Stan Sakai fan. I love Usagi Yojimbo. That’s one of my favorite books, and I’ve said this to him. There’s a story in there that was really one of the major inspirations for Clan Apis. The story opens with a sequence demonstrating how the samurai swords are made. The constant folding of the metal. And I thought, “Wow. Here’s sequential art, it’s a fundamental element of the plot — it’s also taught me something.” I enjoy Akiko. The Wiggly Reader is adult fare, it’s pretty sick humor. I’m trying to think what else. I like Murder Me Dead. Stray Bullets. I’ve been reading some Spider-Man lately, mostly because of J. Michael Straczynski. I’m a huge Babylon 5 fan. I love Hellboy. It’s just fun.

Not a lot of ongoing books, but graphic novels, like Stuck Rubber Baby. I just handed a big pile to another faculty member here. She grew up reading ElfQuest, so I wanted to hand over a few things that she might be into. I love Rich Geary’s Treasury of Victorian Murders. Hate. I loved Hate, which is not kiddie fare by any stretch of the imagination. There was The Replacement God by Zander Cannon, who’s doing a lot of work with Alan Moore these days. One of the things I find interesting is that there’s a fair bit of fantasy in there, and I’m not much of a fantasy buff. So it’s not so much genre.

KO: There seems to be kind of an overarching philosophy in what you write that says “You’re special, but you’re still a cog in the machine.”

JH: The philosophy I always keep in mind is this: Reality is so much more interesting, and at times more painful, as recent events have taught us, than most of the made-up stuff. I’ve already admitted to liking Babylon 5, so the whole concept of aliens is fun. But we live in a world obsessed with concepts like that, like pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. We drape ourselves in it, we wrap ourselves in it, we call it philosophy. And these are the same kinds of people sometimes that really don’t have any fundamental idea of how the world works. And as a biologist, you can’t help but be just blown away by how the world works. The way in which individual organisms have adapted to environment. The enormous history that this planet has. And when you accept as I have the concept of evolution — and when I say “accept,” it makes it sound like a religious thing, and it’s not; obviously firm scientific evidence is the best explanation for what we see — you have to recognize that you are this point in this continuum that has existed for four and a half billion years on this planet. Each of us is very special in that we are unique. We have this big brain that confers upon us this consciousness, and that consciousness is shaped by our invariably different experiences. So we are unique.

But we have a habit sometimes of equating uniqueness with deification. Each chimpanzee is unique, but it’s not a god, it’s not divine. We spend our time being awed by the quote-unquote miraculous — which oftentimes is just coincidental — and we ignore the marvelous, which is all the awe-inspiring things in nature. I’ve got this story I want to do in which we trace a photon of light which leaves a star four billion light-years away, at the same time the Earth is forming. And it’s flying in a trajectory toward the Earth. And it’s heading in, it’s heading in. And you sort of draw the story in parallel, above and below. And below is this sequence of Earth changing and yada yada yada, and evolution, blah blah blah. And you get to the point where the photon of light reaches its destination, which is the fortuitous turning of someone looking toward the sky, and it popping onto their retina, and turning on a photoreceptor, and having that register. The payoff here is that the person actually appreciates it. The person says, “Whoa. That star, that light that I’m looking at, is older than I. It could be older than the Earth.” It’s amazing little marvelous elements like that in nature that we don’t spend any time, or we spend very little time, marveling at. It’s not cool, it’s geeky. Whereas it’s really cool if we imagine dinosaurs coming back to life today, and eating people. That is cool, K-E-W-L cool. A lot of my work is the recognition that we are unique, but that we are part of this ongoing drama that really is writing itself as it goes. And there’s all this amazing stuff around us, and we’ve got all these other players in this drama who have eked out very unusual existences. There are all these different strategies that life has taken to survive. The point is that we’re all unique but we’re also connected.

KO: And we’ll see that coming back in The Sandwalk Adventures?

JH: I hope so. For me, the concepts of coming to terms with different ideas and facing your position in the scheme of things, and being content with that — maybe content’s the wrong word — having appreciation for the role you play, that’s going to be playing out with the follicle mite. And Darwin is going to be in a position where he’s the grand master, the storyteller.

KO: When you look at Cow-Boy these days, how do you think of it?

JH: I still like it. It still makes me laugh.

KO: You don’t look at Cow-Boy now the same way you look at your older strips?

JH. No. Uh-uh. There are things I look at and say, “I’d change that. I could have stood to re-draw this, or paste that better,” but you invariably look at things and find things that you would fix or do differently. But so far, it’s one of those things that I’m really proud of.

KO: What kind of choice was self-publishing for you? Have you ever considered trying to go to a bigger publishing company? Would you do it full-time?

JH: There’s a part of me that would love to write books, and with comic books, I’m releasing a book in installments. So a collection isn’t an endpoint, it’s the goal. But I’d love to write books for the rest of my life, but I also love being in the classroom. So as far as full-time — No, I haven’t really entertained that seriously. And in self-publishing — and this is not a disparaging comment on those that do — I never wanted to write somebody else’s characters. I’ve been always very proprietary about the things I write and draw. And the other thing is, if I were at a big publisher, I’d have to make a decision, probably. I wouldn’t be famous enough to write and draw. The bottom line is, too, that I’m not a good enough artist to be at a place like that. I have to do my own thing and do my own style and not worry about the specifics of house style or whatever. So that never was a goal of mine. Self-publishing feels like the only avenue. And I feel compelled to place the caveat here that the money hasn’t been mine, the money has been Daryn’s. I’ve sort of just done the creative thing. And it’s been tremendously valuable for me because I’m not a businessman, nor do I have any interest in that. So we share the revenues from the work.

But I have a real problem being told what to do. It’s a good thing that I’m an academic, because the course is mine to make exactly the way I want to do it. I don’t take direction very well, except from Lisa and Max. And mom and dad, I can handle that as well. But I don’t, and I tend to feel like, when it comes to writing a story, I know what’s best for my story. And I’ve taken one piece of advice on structuring a story. It was from Lisa. And I only admit this because it was really good advice. It was the fourth issue of Clan Apis. And you know how that opening sequence ends with Nyuki saying “Isn’t this great?” and that sort of segues into her working on the comb? I was going to have that be the first page, and have the whole (foreign bees invading the hive) conflict thing happen later on. The way it works is that I would write out the stories and I would read them to Lisa. This is when we were living in Columbus. She would come in, and I’d say “I need you to listen to this, it doesn’t feel like it’s got the right oomph.” And she said I should put the whole fight thing at the beginning. And I sort of looked down, angry that I hadn’t thought of it myself. I was unwilling to admit that that was exactly what I was going to do, since I’ve developed a pretty firm reputation with her for not listening to what she tells me. And that made it a really good story, but for the most part I chafe a little bit at being told what to do. So self-publishing is the only option for someone who’s as fussy as me.

KO: As you went through this, did you feel you were sort of going it alone in terms of breaking into the industry?

JH: I know a lot of people in the industry now, and email and talk to a lot of people who I really like and look forward to seeing at shows. But before Clan Apis finished, it wasn’t until it finished did I consider myself a participant in the industry. When people read it, and thought it was good, that was sort of my ticket into the dance. Before that, people were really nice. But in all fairness, I was some unproven person. And it’s tough for me to ask for help. What that left us with was me trying to figure it out on my own. Daryn and I didn’t really become partners until we did the Clan Apis trade. I got the Xeric Award for the first issue, and I published all the other issues myself, although he did step in once when I didn’t get the invoice and covered my costs on the second issue. But it wasn’t until we were done with it that I started talking to people. I didn’t make too many horrible blunders. But not really, I didn’t really have guidance on the way. And that’s not me saying “oh, boo-hoo me,” because I really didn’t ask for it, and I really didn’t know anybody.

KO: Would you do it the same way if you could do it over again?

JH: Yeah. I applied for the Xeric Award, and it’s nice to have that award. A lot of great books have gotten a start, or have gotten attention, with the Xeric Award. Jim Ottavianit’s Two-Fisted Science, which I love — great book — is a Xeric work. There’s a whole long list of them, and of course I can’t remember anybody’s names right now. So that was nice. It was nice to have that recognition, because ultimately, that was a group of people who didn’t know me, a funding organization that was reviewing my first issue. I hadn’t really shown it to anybody, and I was pretty unsure. And to have someone like Peter Laird and his group say, “Hey, this is good. We’re gonna give this money.” I’d have to say that was the one sort of industry pat on the back that gave me the boost to have the confidence to do it. I’m at heart not a very confident person, and some would say borderline neurotic. I don’t know that that makes me much different from many other cartoonists. But I approach things with trepidation, and the assumption that it’s not all that great. So that was nice. That was the one big pat on the back. I met Jeff Smith for the first time at the Chicago Comicon, and shamelessly dropped my name as doing the Cow-Boy strip, which he apparently liked. And he was impressed, or acted impressed. So that was a nice boost too. It’s just little things like that, little nudges like that, that keep you going.

KO: Your first book, Cow-Boy, was published by The Laughing Ogre, a comic shop in Columbus, Ohio. Did you get your start in Columbus?

JH: I was a cartoonist as a little kid. I drew as a little kid. I think I remember my first gig being the Crestview seventh grade yearbook, where I did some spot illustrations. I did them in pencil, and I though it was insulting — I don’t know what my problem was — I thought it was insulting for someone to say I had to trace them in ink. Pencil wasn’t good enough. I still had the same stupid mentality my freshman year in college, when I submitted some cartoons to the newspaper there and they said “Well, they’re okay, and we’ll accept them if you go over them in ink,” and I was like, “I don’t think so,” which just demonstrated that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. But my sophomore year is really when I got my start, and that was when I wrote a cartoon in the first newspaper of the year, and it was just the most awful thing in the world. And it was really poorly drawn, and there was no indication at that point to me that I could be funny, but I knew that I could draw better than that, and so I submitted my cartoons, and they were accepted, and that ran twice a week.

KO: A regular strip?

JH: It was an editorial cartoon called Under the Bubble. Most colleges talk about being in a bubble or cut off from the world, and there was this thing called the DePaul Bubble, so that was what it was called. I took it as an opportunity to make puns when I wanted to, to make political comments when I wanted to, and it was very open, very free form, and in the end, not that good.

KO: Why do you say that?

JH: My wife and I were actually talking about this last night. When I went to graduate school I had a weekly strip for five years called Spelunker. Looking back on those strips, you kind of go ooooh, aw. God. We were talking about the fact that when you are developing as a cartoonist or an illustrator or a storyteller or whatever, you have to have just the right balance between two things: Self-criticism, so you actually get better, and self-delusion, so that you think that what you’re doing at the time is actually pretty good. I look at strips that I did when I was in graduate school, and I remember finishing the strip, saying “Man, that is good. I can get better, but that is good. I’m really happy with that.” There would be strips I would leave sitting out on the drawing board for a few days so that I could admire them. “Mmm, that is good.” And you look at them now, and you’re like “Ho-lee smokes, that is bad.” And so it’s that balance between the two that keeps you going, and keeps you muddling through, and hopefully, you haven’t been discouraged. I had the great fortune of being surrounded by people who liked me enough to lie to me. Well, not all the time, but were very supportive. I wasn’t getting dinged and dissed, and on top of that I had a publishing outlet — in this case, two college newspapers. You have that learning that goes back and forth balancing between those two things. I was a graduate student until ’95 at Notre Dame and then I stayed for a year and a half, just to get some teaching experience.

It was at that time, and just a little bit before, that I started doing Cow-Boy, which was a strip that ran in Comics Buyers’ Guide weekly. I was getting to the point there at the end when I was teaching after I had gotten my degree that the whole three-panels-punchline shtick was just, number one, I didn’t feel I was very good at it, and number two, it was just tedious. And I wanted to do something longer and I wrote and drew a story called “Escape from Womb World,” which was the first Cow-Boy story. I did it because it was a biology thing. I did it because it was a superhero spoof. You don’t get any more origin than that — that’s the very first thing that can happen. And then I did “The Pernicious Peril of the Plummeting Plane.” Those whole sell-your-soul kind of stories have always been kind of — well, since I don’t believe in the devil, it’s always been kind of silly.

KO: And for something as lighthearted as Cow-Boy, it’s a pretty intense philosophical situation.

JH: Yeah, the thing is that — I don’t know if this distinction exists, but it exists in my mind — Cow-Boy was never a parody, it was a satire. Which, to me, I don’t know if Webster’s defines them as different things, but to me they’ve always been different things. X-Farce, that’s a parody. Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” that’s a satire. And so I always thought you could make a serious comment about something and still laugh. That was what a lot of those things were. “The Mighty Morphin Mutton Monster” — that was a comment on mob mentality, and how easy and seductive it can be. And of course there were things in there that were utter fluff. And you could argue that it’s all fluff. But once I started doing those long-form things, I could start playing with ideas that you really can’t address in a strip. I could start being serious every once in a while. The humor in my work, where it exists, seems to me on my own analysis to be not punchlines and zingers, but stems from a character saying something in character that’s funny. So I’m not spending a whole lot of time setting up the joke. I’m just having someone be themselves, and that itself is funny.

Which is the type of funny we encounter every day. We don’t go through life setting up jokes strategically to get our friends, we crack wise, and we make fun of the people we know best, because we know them best. That’s the type of humor that I like to write, and you can’t really do that in a four-panel strip. Unless you’ve been around like Charles Schultz was, for decades, and you have firmly-established characters. But anyway, I went to Columbus with a couple of those stories, and I got to know the guys at the Ogre, and they were very encouraging, and said, “Why don’t you do a book?” and it was one of the owners who footed the bill, and has actually become my business partner as far as Clan Apis and The Sandwalk Adventures and Active Synapse in general. But it was when they said, “Hey, we should do this book,” that I thought about putting more stories together. And then once I had the comic book out there, there’s just no way I’m gonna go back to that short form stuff.

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.