He Did It All for the Nyuki – Part 4

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.