He Did It All for the Nyuki – Part 3

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.