Full Transcript for Episode 2 - Persepolis with Dave Horowitz

again, this is pretty grown-up work. Not going work for kids, not going to work for younger readers. But I remembered what Persepolis was and it showed me what the form could be. So for me, it's really the, you know, it's kind of the yardstick. It showed me what what a graphic novel could be, what a comic could be. Especially with, you know, having the same tools that Marjane had. Those are the tools that I used. So it was really great. I hadn't read it since I read it the first time. So just rereading it to prepare for a speaking with you, it really blew my mind because I mean, it's so relevant today, it's so poignant, but everything that I was inspired by, it's still there, it's still true. It's more amazing to me even now through the lens of time. speaker-0: so if you didn't grow up reading comics, so to speak, you said like funny, I guess funny pages for lack of a better word, Sunday comics kind of thing. and Mad magazine. How did you come across this work? speaker-1: I sh I guess at that time I mean that was two thousand three. Is it what we should speaker-0: That's when it was published in the United States. speaker-1: So 2003, I mean, that's just after nine eleven. We probably just went into Iraq. So I get for me, so now I guess gonna reveal a bit. I didn't even have a T V. I was living in a very different world. I was very analogue. I was into rock climbing, kind of stayed away from all media. I felt it was just toxic. And then the Twin Towers fell down. And we were going to war, and I was thinking, I don't know anything. I better start educating myself. So I kind of, you know, whiplashed the other way, and now I started reading politics and following it like it was my job. So I'm sure it came across my radar going to bookstores and just just trying to learn what I could, just kind of see what's going on in the world. around the same time I was a I was an adjunct professor of graphic design at a school in New York. I don't know that I brought this work to that class. but I was definitely looking at art in terms of protest and propaganda. So this book, you know, fits right into that. speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. speaker-1: I wish I had a better answer, but I I probably just found it at a bookstore and just saw the cover and was flipped through it and was intrigued. speaker-0: I can totally imagine this being like when you walk into the bookstore, you know, and they have whatever topics of the time going on, them having something like this. it is a very different work. It's not a a textualist piece, right? It is it is a graphic novel. how old were you when nine eleven happened? Do you recall? speaker-1: fortunately I was born in nineteen seventy, so doing math was e is easy for me. So I can say eighty, ninety, zero so I was thirty almost thirty-one. speaker-0: Okay. I was in high school. I remember that day very clearly and the world was everything before that and after that. before we get further, I want to say thanks to Tim Guerreri of We

Love Comics in Tampa, Florida. We Love Comics is located at thirty three ten West Cyper Street, Tampa, Florida, three three six zero seven. Be sure if you're in the area, stop by, go see Tim, say hi, and go to him for all your comic needs. yeah, the copy I have is a 20th anniversary copy and it has an introduction from Marjane, who talked about this being published first in the United States in a post 911 world and her being invited. to speak at West Point to talk about Iran and living in Iran. one thing that in reading this and in preparing for this, reading all kinds of interviews with her and listening to interviews she she's an incredible character. Have you ever seen interviews with her? No. speaker-1: I have not. speaker-0: my she she is bouncing off the walls full of energy, very opinionated, but like in a such a pleasant way, it's something to watch. and as I think we've already stated, she recently passed. you made this. recommendation like right before And think it was like the day after. speaker-1: Yeah, if you don't mind my interrupting you. So we I selected this book. I bought my copy. It arrived. I was reading it at work. I worked twenty-four hour shifts on the ambulance. So I was reading it during the day. Things got a little slow at night. I'm scared to say that word. We that's kind of a jinx word for us. but it was kind of a chill night. Got a couple hours, went on a call, came back, and then I looked at my phone, I was doom scrolling, and then I saw her picture and her name. I was like, Are they spying on me so hard? They're trying to sell me the book I'm reading. What's going on? And then I saw that she had died. So it was it was upsetting. it was strange. But also reading the remaining part of the book, knowing that she had just died, it just became even more kind of upsetting. I mean, it's really it's a sad story, it's a sad childhood she had. And I don't I didn't really figure out How she died, I have my suspicions. I know Friends and Family released a statement that she died of sadness. Her partner had died just before her. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. speaker-1: I mean, I think we can infer what that means. but it was it's it was tough reading the rest of the book, knowing that her life stayed pretty hard. speaker-0: the interviews I've read and the interviews that I've watched, I don't think you can ever shake that, but if you want to talk about somebody who seems like she did her best to to try and just move forward with it, which this work was one way of her moving forward with it, I think. she was very lively. and she was very exciting to listen to. She's very funny. literally like a million words a minute. it looked like a beautiful life. I can only say it from an outsider's perspective. so going back to discovering this work and being in your job as a children's book author and illustrator, what made you want to do the graphic novel format? was it something you wanted a new challenge for your skills? Or did you have like do you feel like it was a calling to do it in this format? can you can you elaborate on that one a little more? speaker-1: So I knew the topic I wanted to write on. I wanted to write about my experiences riding an ambulance. it's a unique perspective for sure to have the skills to write and to be in that world. there have been quite a few good books now written on EMS, but I I wanted to take my crack at it because I had my experience in the area that I live. It's it's rural. We have some cities, we have a lot of different. Income levels. we went through COVID. I mean, there was so much material to work with. So I just started writing just prose. And I got about three chapters in, and I was going back and rereading to see where I was, and it was so boring. I was like, if I'm bored reading this, nobody's gonna want to read this. So then I was like, well, how am I gonna tell this story? There's so much here, but I'm just not the guy to do it. Then I thought, well, let me try my hand at graphic novel. And I just picked one scene that I that I wanted to depict. And I did it as a comic. And it's the scene, the chapter titled shit. if you remember that was the well, I don't want to spoiler it for your readers, but it's well, I'm not gonna spoil it, but it was a a pretty visual scene. It wasn't so much relying on the the writing so much as the pictures. But once I did it, I just knew that this was gonna work. And I went back to the beginning and I redid those first three chapters as a comic, and it was just it was just flowing. It was just easy. everything that I learned from children's books, the way sometimes the narration takes over, sometimes the images take over, all those rules still applied. So for me to do a graphic novel, it just seemed the only the only way I was gonna be a writer was to be. An author illustrator. So speaker-0: I I have your book in front of me. shit, this is the one the part of your book where I was like, Man, yeah, this this g this is a nasty job sometimes. And I I don't want to ruin it either, but I I did Google images of what you wrote about and that's even more disturbing. I think in some in some situations For example, I think Persepolis does this well, and I think your book does this well, and I know there are other works where sometimes something can just be too much if it's told realistically or graphically. And it's almost like if you put it in a different format, it's easier to take in, but it doesn't lose the effect that they're going for, right? Like for example, in Persepolis. her life and their and their moments that we can talk about later in a little while. There are moments that are very troubling and disturbing and sad. and she draws them in her style, which is very cartoony. I mean, it's not like a realistic Renaissance style that we've got going on here. it's not superhero, it's not action figure, it's it's very cartoony in I think in kind of the the way that you are describing not Sunday comics, but more like

like a European flair, but it's all blacks and whites. and speaker-1: Well and again, she's also a children she was a children's book artist. I've actually never seen her children's work. But that's something that, you know, when you look at it with with that lens, you can see. Her stuff is very graphic, very simple. I mean, we use a lot of the same techniques really. Like she doesn't jo doesn't draw the joints in people's arms and legs or just kind of a curve which, you know, takes the the horror away, like you were saying, like if you were just gonna draw realistically some of the things that are happening in a work like hers, a work like mine, it would just be, you know, almost pornographic at that point. speaker-0: too much, right? Like she still gets the point across, she still delivers that that impact, but without doing it in a way that makes you feel like, I don't want to read any more of this. You know, like it's just too much. and the story for those who don't know, the first part of it, the most of it, it's it's her youth, right? the first part definitely, it's her being a child as the Islamic revolution happens and just after. but the the way it's drawn I don't say this in like a pejorative way, but it it's almost childlike, and I think that makes it easier. And I think that creates more of that it helps you enter the world that she's showing, which is her perspective as a child. speaker-1: Also makes it more shocking when something that should never happen to a child happens and then happens again and again. And you know, you reminded me a mo of a moment in her book when we were talking about like these horrible things and how is she depicting it in a way that's something we're not offended to to experience, we're more intrigued. There's that moment when her uncle is taken away and we know what's going to happen to him. And he's asked for what he's told he can have one visitor and she's the visitor. So the last person that he sees is her. And she's still young. I mean, she's young. She's you know, a teenager through, you know, is the oldest she gets in this story. But to hear of a kid having to go through that and know this is memoir, this is real, even though we're not seeing necessarily an execution or something like that, emotionally it hits you even harder because it's You know, the narration took over at the right part and just gave you enough. speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. And and before we go further, I did want to address this topic and everything that the book covers. kind of want to make a opening statement to to everybody as we're 17 minutes into the recording. before we get into the book, I want to say something upfront about how we're approaching this episode. Persepolis has been written about. Analyzed and debated from just about every angle you can imagine, whether it be politically, historically, or for a human rights perspective. People who know that history far better than I do have covered it and covered it well. And by that I mean academics, journalists, other artists who are very familiar with this topic. But that being said, I don't want to pretend that this book exists outside of politics because it doesn't. Marjane Satrapi is making a political statement throughout this work, and she does it. against many, many different politics. and that's part of what it is. And pretending otherwise would be a disservice to her, her memory, and the book. So we're not going to avoid it if it comes up. And by that I mean we're not going to avoid the politics if it comes up. And honestly, it probably will. But the lens that we want to bring first and foremost is the love of comics. The show is about the art form, the memoir, the storytelling choices, why she told this story as a graphic novel instead of a prose. That's where we're going to spend most of our time today discussing this. If we go down political rabbit hole for a minute because the book takes us there, that's fine. we're not gonna shy away from it. We just don't want that to be the point of the episode. The point is what the art does, why it works, and that's because here we love comics. Does that sound sound about right, Dave? Sound fair. speaker-1: It does, with a butt. Yeah. I mean, as we discussed before we started recording, all art is political. I mean, even if it's not intending to be, just by its existing, its tone, its being art. I don't know if I mentioned it while we started recording or in our pre-interview. but I was a adjunct professor of graphic design when I discovered this book, early two thousands. And there was a book that I did choose to use in my class. It was it's called The Design of Descent. it's giving Milton Glazer credit on the cover of this book, but I think he just designed the jacket. He's the guy who did the iHeart New York and a lot of famous graphic design. The foreword was written by Tony Kushner. And something that is in that foreword that I shared with that class and has stuck with me with all the art that I do, you know, always now. He talks about, and if you don't mind, I'm just gonna flip to that so I don't get the names and the the times wrong here, the dates. he's retelling a story from the times of the Roman Empire. there was an archduke who lived in Milan, he was a cousin of the Roman Emperor. and basically they were just stealing wheat from the population and just making money off it, you know. so he writes this is him. quoting something that was in a different work. He wrote In May 1796, three days after the entry of the French, a young miniaturist, which I had to look up, that's the artist who makes those fancy ornate characters that starred an illuminated manuscript. this guy named Gross, slightly mad and some subsequently famous, arrived with the army and overheard talk in the Great Cafe of the exploits of the Archduke, who happened to be extremely fat. Snatching up the list of ices stamped on a Sheet of coarse yellow paper, he drew on the back a French

soldier thrusting his bayonet into the obese archduke's belly. Instead of blood, out poured an incredible quantity of grain. The idea of caricature or cartoon was unknown in this nation of wary despotism. The sketch Gross had left on the table of the cafe seemed a miracle from heaven. It was printed overnight and twenty thousand copies were sold the next day. Then Tony Kushner goes on and writes, This image shares with other successful instances of graphic descent at least three characteristics. It is shocking, it is clever, even funny in a grim sort of way, and its meaning is instantly intelligible. and that last bit, that's kind of why I do what I do. You know, it's with what's going on in the world today, whatever side you're on. If you send somebody a magazine article, a you know, a blog post. Something that's just words after words after words, or even a video of you know, some truth being told, at a certain point, people are just gonna tune out. There's just too much information, there's too much noise, there's too much spin, too much angle. But a political cartoon, it just boils things down to the simplest thing that everyone can understand. Again, we don't want to make today's show political, so I won't give examples, but I'm sure people can think of them where you just You just see something and you instantly get the point. speaker-0: I agree. I agree completely. It's I think nowadays it'd probably be something like you stab and oil or cash is pouring out of them, right? Exactly. speaker-1: So but so for me, Persepolis was so educational. You know, I so Marjane and I pretty close in age. She was born in 69, I was born in 70. So when she was experiencing the Iranian Revolution as a 10 year old, I was here in America also as a 10 year old hearing the American version of what was going on. And I very vividly remember those days, you know, there were Things people said in the 70s, 80s, you know, ways of putting down and bullying people, the language that was used. People today, I mean, those of us that remember should, you know, probably horrified by it. You know, people today can't even imagine that the way people talked without getting called out for it. Iran, you know, we used to, you know, people used to chant, fuck Iran, when we were kids. I didn't know what what Iran was, where it was, but we sure hated them. So to hear her version of what was going on there, how it related to Western culture, how we were impacting, what her life was like, you know, and then the hostage situation when Carter was president, then Reagan took over, I was very much aware when that was going on. But hearing another kid's perspective of that from the other side told in that form with pictures, you know, she had. A Michael Jackson poster was an important thing to her. Seeing all those things come together really made it gel in the way that if I was reading a history book, probably wouldn't have the same impact. speaker-0: I absolutely understand. I was in high school when nine eleven happened. At that point, you know, your politics are well, at least I'll say in my case, are are largely based on what your parents say and what you grew up hearing. Right. I mean, it wasn't until I went to college where I started learning things and read doing my own reading. I mean, I had an idea of general humanitarian kind of politics, But when you start talking about nationalism and real conflict, you know, in high school, that's just not at least for me, it wasn't a priority. And that's sort of the the privilege of growing up in a suburb and you know not having to worry about that kind of thing. What I think is interesting is you still see that. And I think that that kind of shows just how universal the scenes that she draws, the stories that she tells in this book, because it is a series of different stories, almost like vignettes. there's one where the kids, after the revolution, they're they're playing as if they're torturing each other. to them, it was funny. You know, because they had no idea about the impact. later on, she goes to learn what exactly it means and then eventually it does hit home, right? She has people that in her family who come home who were tortured for a long time. and they describe the torture to her. And again, the same thing. She delivers this information in a way that Is not too graphic, and like you said, almost pornographic, or where you're just like, this is too much. I don't want to see it. Cause if we did have to see it, we would turn our heads. And I think that's a lot of people do that, right? The reality is, it's just easier if I don't, if I don't look. and then it's just words and ideas and and doesn't affect me personally. But she describes it and in some aspects she portrays it and she realizes, wow, that's stuff that we we're playing we didn't realize, but that's a normal kid, you know, mentality. speaker-1: Well, and she's I mean, by doing that and her whole work really, she's humanizing a culture that and I don't know who she felt she was writing the book for, probably everyone. But for me, reading it, especially being so ignorant of the Middle East, it really humanized the Iranian people. You know, like we talk about going to war with another country and if the country's doing wrong, the country's evil. Well, obviously that's not true. Because, you know, look what's going on in our country today. Does that mean everyone agrees with it? Clearly not. Doesn't mean we're we're evil. Maybe we're a little bit responsible, but certainly kids are innocent. So in her story, we get to see innocence. We get to see a child who is just trying to be a kid and the world around her is just upside down. So I don't know. I my takeaways. When I read this, when it originally published, it was great to see the people of this culture that I didn't know anything about as people. speaker-0: like I said, I've read I've read a lot of articles and interviews with her. And I I believe her primary

goal was to show people that humanity that was Iran and that some people are just living there or at the time we're just living there and still are living there. And while the the government, the regime, whatever you want to call it, is considered at At a time, even after 911, an axis of evil, there are just there are people that are just living there and they're they just happen to be caught up there. She said, there's an interview she did with Vogue magazine in 2016 where she spoke of her approach to writing Persephilis. She said, I didn't have any other way to write my story. I could not suddenly say, this is analysis of what happened in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s in Iran, because I'm not a historian and I'm not a politician. I'm a person who was born in a certain place and a certain time. And I can be unsure about everything, but I am not unsure of what I have lived. I know it. And it was very personal, a very small thing, which was important. She didn't want to write a text about, you know, everything that happened in Iran. She wanted to tell her story. And she has been vocal or she has been honest about things where she says, in some cases, some people might say this is a work of fiction. Maybe it is, but there are instances of it that are real. It's not meant to be as much as we're saying an autobiography. It's meant to be a story that's based off of my experiences. but those are very real experiences as she recalls them, and they're nonetheless powerful, you know, in the same way that you can use humor or fiction to create a metaphor for things that are going on in this world. She used a real historical moment and historical context, but she's saying this doesn't make it any less real, And and she's absolutely right. speaker-1: and and her story here happens to be about the Iranian Revolution happening during her childhood. But she's telling the story of her family. She's telling the story of her childhood. That happens to be the furniture and the, you know, landscape around her at the time. If she was living somewhere else, I feel like we'd get, you know, just as human a story. It just happened to be the backdrop was political violence and a revolution. speaker-0: Yeah, I think that's why the book works, right? It's it's the ordinary life of somebody who is in this extraordinary situation. it's her parents getting on to her about certain things to say the same way any parent would. It's the angst of being a teenager and wanting to rebel, right? And listen to your music loud and dance and and do what your parents tell you. Don't do that. The you know, the one thing that she has in this situation, which is not in every in every scenario, is like her parents are concerned that she could get killed doing it. Right. Right. and that's that's a reality that she faced that a lot of us just don't. We can understand where she's coming from, but when I was a teenager and I was, you know, angry all the time and listening to my punk rock music,

you know, it was like you look at it now and you're like, why was I so angry? It's just a normal childhood you know experience. But she lived it and thankfully she got out of it. She got out of it and her her parents spoiler alert, her parents send her off to Austria to go to school when she's about I think she was like 14 years old, so she said. speaker-1: Yeah. Since you since you brought up the spoiler. Yeah. As I was rereading it to prepare for our conversation, you know, now that I'm working as a graphic novelist, I'm knee deep in another work that I'm working on right now. I'm very concerned about structure, storytelling. So I'm like sometimes it's it almost ruins a work for me because I'm paying so much more attention to how did they do this rather than just absorbing the content. But I was blown away by the ending because I didn't remember how it ended. I remember the gist of the story and I was reading it through and the way she ended it. I don't want to spoil it for your readers, but just those last couple of pages were so brilliant because you think, you know, obviously we know she survived because she wrote this book. But how do you end this story? How do you how do you conclude it in a way that's poignant, intriguing, wants you knowing a little more? And she did it. Do you do you remember the the last pages? speaker-0: so the book has different components? It was published as Persepolis and then Persepolis two. The second are you referring to the second part or the first part? speaker-1: The first part. speaker-0: The first part. Okay. yeah, yeah. I I I remember. speaker-1: So to me that was I don't know, she's I think she must be humble in her interviews because she's a genius. I mean this there's a a blurb on the back of the book. I forget who wrote it. Here. Yeah, Gloria Steinem wrote, You've never seen anything like Persepolis. Marjane may have given us a new genre. I know there were graphic novels before this and comics before this, but I don't think there was ever one done kind of, you know, anywhere near like this. Where it's personal. We talked about how it's almost childlike, but it's not for children. Like I said earlier, it definitely gave me a green light to do work the way I want to do work. But I think she really created something both emotionally, visually, structurally, it's a masterpiece. speaker-0: absolutely. Absolutely. And that's not a bad endorsement to have Gloria Steinem. one thing that I think is really interesting is for such a mature topic and such a sensitive topic, it's also funny. You speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: know, I mean there are parts where you're just you can't help but laugh. the way her parents are, and I think it resonates so well is because she's just a kid having normal kid emotions and she wants to have fun. You know, she wants to listen to her Iron Maiden loud and dance and her parents as much speaker-1: the things that that struck me because like I said, we're the same age. So when she writes that she was listening to Iron Maiden, like, yes, like that's exactly what we were blasting in our rooms, being told to turn it down. So it re it really hits home. speaker-0: And and the parents wanting to do, I mean, being a parent, you know, there there are obviously limits on certain things, but like you want to give your kid the world, right? Like you want to give them everything. They want to do the same thing. They want to give her what she wants, and they do, but the cost, potential cost is their lives in doing it, they find a very creative way to. Bring her home a poster and some and some music, you know? because at the end of the day, that's what parents want. That's the relatability of what they do. again, it's just this ordinary situation that we can all recognize and understand, put in this extraordinary circumstance. and it's so effective to show like, wow, this is very different than what we have. This is very, but but it humanizes. the characters in a way is exactly what she wanted to do. And I think she nails it. She sticks the landing perfectly. speaker-1: Yeah, and there I mean, I don't wanna make comparisons, but you're familiar with Art Spiegelman's Mouse. speaker-0: Yes. speaker-1: Right. So that's it's a great book. It's critically acclaimed. it's a heavy topic. It almost looks child like there you could draw parallels. It's a great work, but I don't think it hits it didn't hit me on as personal a level. I mean it's obviously it's a Holocaust, so well aware of the history of all that. But I feel like that is a story that has been told many times in many ways, certainly equally as effectively, if not more so. I don't know a single other work that has reached me, at least, about the experience of the Iranian Revolution. speaker-0: I've not read one, not on that topic, but the comparison, absolutely. I think in both in both instances, yeah, I wouldn't give it to my four-year-old to look at, but my 11-year-old, he's not quite there yet. but their mouse is one of them. this would be one of them where to me the appeal, the excitement is one that I'm getting them to read. but if I can get them to enjoy a comic book, that's even better. But I keep a lot of things just in my mental Rolodex to say this is something that you can use to learn from, right? Mouse is definitely one of them. And and Mouse goes back to where sometimes it's difficult to recognize situations and it's easier to put them in a cartoonist perspective. Yeah. Creates just as much impact, if not more, because of the way it's portrayed and the simplicity. This is definitely one of them. We mentioned before we were recording John Lewis's March. my son had a he had to do a for Black History Month, a biography on, a black historical figure, excuse me. And he wanna he was gonna do Colin Powell. I don't know where that came from. And I was like, What do you what do you know about Colin Powell? He's like, I don't know. but I was like, No, no, no, no, no, here. And I

gave him March. And I was like, You're gonna read about something that matters, that still matters. and and it's in comic book format. So isn't that better than just reading a textbook? And he's like, Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And he enjoyed it a lot more. And that's what I love about comics. that's what this show is about. It's an art form. It's an art form, and people don't realize it. And every conversation I get into on the topic, I like to stress that because to me a perfect comic is where you have the words and the art come together to create this this bigger thing, this beautiful, this greater than the sum of its parts, right? Right. to tell this very beautiful story, speaker-1: Well, and also as, you know, we evolve or devolve as humans, how many of us read anymore? You know, and even myself, like when I like I said, I follow politics like it's my job these days. And oftentimes all I do is read the headline, which is very dangerous. But you know, I'll see something and I'll tell my wife about it and she'll say, Are you sure about that? Where'd you see that? And I'm like, Well, I don't know. I just read the headline, which is dangerous. But I feel like comics are kind of a safety valve. You know, they're they grab your attention. There's pictures. you know, for my work, it's about EMS. Like I said, there are plenty of books about EMS at this point. There are some really incredible memoirs, but there's none like that one because people that don't like to read books, they're still gonna pick that up and be intrigued and and keep reading it because there are pictures. I don't think just straight text can do that anymore. I think people need either a video or or pictures. speaker-0: We're living in an age where, you can get anything at the click of a button, right? And and don't feel bad about the the headline thing. Like I I think we're all guilty of it where if things aren't happening within ten seconds, then we just move on, right? Like our attention span is just dwindling down to zero thanks to the internet. but yeah, I I have to catch myself as well, where like, I will watch videos of things that I don't don't want to watch. people like politicians, I don't want to watch and their voices just irritate me. But I have to know what was said. I cannot know what somebody told me he said. I have to know from the source And and usually I'm like, it's just as stupid as they described it, or ridiculous. speaker-1: Well, especially in this day and age, you can't even believe. Wait, that was not a hot mic. They intended to say that? speaker-0: Saying saying the quiet part out loud. That's all right. but like I said, I think it's important to go to the source, right? And I try and remember that. comics are my escape, but this isn't really an escape. This is just a different way of digesting information, you know? and it's to me an easier way of digesting the information. You said you were inspired by Persepolis to do this graphic novel format. did you

have any other inspirations for creating this? speaker-1: I did. I they would not necessarily be visual works. there is I don't know if you're too familiar with EMS literature. I would guess probably not. So there's a book called A Thousand Naked Strangers by Kevin Hazard. it's been it was published at least 10 years ago or so. It's amazing. He was a journalist. I mean, his his arc is very similar to mine. He had a career as a writer and then fell into EMS and he was an EMT and then he became a medic. He worked for it sounds like 10 years or more, and then he wrote his book, A Thousand Naked Strangers. It is so well done. just so relatable. It was like, yep, you get it. This is my world. And honestly, it actually almost stopped me from writing my work because I thought, you're not going to top this. But then, like I said, I started mine. I realized as just a writer, it was. But once I added the drawings, I realized I could do something that. better writers couldn't do because I could show the pick you know, I could show visually what what I'm trying to tell. so that work was definitely again, maybe another yardstick to measure my work against was try to try to tell something as honest as that in this world, but in my way. So that book was a huge inspiration. If I was gonna say like who really inspired me again, most of the work that I studied were picture book artists. So James Marshall, Did the George and Martha books, Miss Nelson is missing. Definitely dating myself here. yeah, so children's book artists really inspired me. but for medic, I don't know that I was so much inspired by other works, more than just the experience. It's just, you know, just like the Iranian Revolution. This is quite a segue here, just like the Iranian Revolution is not something most people really know anything about. Most people don't really know what goes on in an ambulance. The amount of times I get called an ambulance driver or, you know, or an EMT. Paramedic's not an EMT. I mean, paramedic is an EMT, but it's a higher level of EMT. But there's so much ignorance about what our world is really like. So I really wanted to just well do two things. I wanted to share it with coworkers who could say, yep, this is what our world is like. But I also wanted something that people who are EMS adjacent, my friends, my family, kind of want them to know what we're going through or what our day is like. because we can't really talk about it. I mean, there in even in this book, there is a chapter that addresses that question of what's the worst thing you've ever seen. I give, if not a cop out of an answer, but something that's being a little snarky. I don't say, it was this twenty-four year old blah blah blah who like I'm not gonna get into stuff like that. And in fact in my book, there are so many runs that I've done that I would never even begin to try to tell in here because they're just it's too much. It's over the top and it might even just be disrespectful to to what had happened. speaker-0: what one thing I know from reading your book is you really do hit the spectrum of I don't want to say bullshit calls, but the calls where you're like, my god, this again, or like, why are we here? You know, versus the very serious calls where you're like, This person's life is in my hands. those are two different extremes. And then you hit everything in between that as well. that's a lot to put on people, you know. That's a lot, that's a lot to deal with. and your book does address that, the the effect that it has on you. So and I don't, I don't know if this is spoiling, but to the point where you you sort of become jaded, sort of like the people that when you first started working and you're like all excited the way they were. I think that that's a normal way of. dealing with it. And my guess is this was probably very cathartic to do this. speaker-1: It yeah, it's funny you say that and I'm glad that that comes across because when I wrote this book, I r really I want it to be I want my work to always be funny. I want there to be humor in it, whether it was my kids' books or even if I'm just emailing somebody, could be a defense mechanism, could just be who I am, but I like to make I like to make people laugh. I like things to be funny, even if it's dark humor. so when I was writing this story, I just wanted to say this is what it's like. But then, you know, people I've talked to, I've been interviewed for reviews of the book and also in conversations with a therapist. People have brought up PTSD and they're like, So, you know, you wrote about PTSD. I don't think I ever used that word in this book at all. But I have discovered since and talking about the book and looking through it again. Think it was my therapist who actually said you can see the PTSD evolve, you know, in your character through the story. And I wasn't trying to focus on that. I was just trying to tell what my experience was. And honestly, you can't ride an ambulance for any length of time and not have PTSD. I mean, there's just it's just a lot. so we all we all get there and there's another work that I'm reading, another book that just came out called Real Emergency. Joanna Sokel, I believe her name is. really outstanding work. And she's kind of hitting those same things too. and it's a very universal story of how we all just kind of everyone in that job, we experience what we experience, we bring our heart to it. And then at a certain point, you just kind of have to put a plexiglass wall between yourself. And what you're experiencing. If you allow yourself to emotionally feel that, you know, tragedy that's unfolding in front of you. Well, for one, you're not going to be able to function on your job, but it's going to destroy you emotionally. So there's, you know, there's stuff in my brain that I'm sure will come back out 15, 20 years from now. I mean, as it is now, I still work, I still feel like I'm able to do my job and do it well. But I think we all we

all carry something. And it's it's really private and it's a club that we're in and we know about it. But I don't think the general public knows, I don't think they should know. It's not it's not a normal world. speaker-0: You also in your book talk about what it was like to be a paramedic through COVID, which wasn't long ago, but you were you and and other paramedics firefighters, you know, first responders were for lack of a better term, first line of defense, right? I mean, you still had to do your job with this uncertainty of what's going on. And what I mean, I know that at some point they're saying, well, this is it's it's not airborne or it only lasts for a second or two when it's you know in the air. so that probably made it easier. But at the same time, you were facing this unknown invisible danger, while also trying to do your job, which involves being close to already sick people at times. can you can you talk to us more about that? Like how do you get through that on a day-to-day basis? You know, it's one thing to look back and be like, yeah, but you know, on a day-to-day basis, on a call to call basis, how are you getting through that? speaker-1: Well, it it's funny because that sits in a you know locked memory vault in my brain somewhere that I don't go into all that often. When I read other people's work about that time, like that book, Real Emergency, I was referencing, she talks about it a little bit. if you've watched The Pit, they talk about it. and you forget, you're almost like, wait, was it really like that? Because again, you hear so much noise and propaganda about like fake news and it wasn't really that bad and people were overblowing it and blah blah blah. And I'm like, were they? I mean, maybe, I don't know. And then I think back. If you just go by cardiac arrests that I worked, I think I say that in the book somewhere, on an on an average week, you know, just prior to COVID, you would work a cardiac arrest every month or two. During COVID, you would probably work one or more per shift. I mean, I definitely have memories where I I'm bringing in a cardiac arrest of a young person and I'm getting my signatures in the hospital and I look behind me and I see in a room a patient on a monitor and I'm watching the cardiac rhythm go into a, you know, a very bad rhythm and then go into an assistile flat line and then I see people looking around and next thing you know, I'm like Gowning up and going in to help do compressions. And it was like that for a very long time. I also, you know, we did a lot of transports. That's a big part of the work I was doing in those days with the company I worked for. So you might be going from a hospital in a small area to a larger hospital that's got more capabilities, and it might be an hour and a half ride. Well, I'm locked in the back with my patient who known COVID on a ventilator. We don't know like Particulate little bits breathing out. Am I in hell? We don't know. But there I am, like wearing what we're told is the appropriate protection for an hour and a half in the back of a truck, sweating, trying to do what I have to do. And I remember I took a lot of selfies, like thinking, this is so ridiculous that this is my life. I so I probably have those pictures somewhere that I'll look back like, yeah, look at the look on, at least in my eyes, I am pretty frightened. But we did it, you know, and I've never been in the military, but I would imagine the camaraderie that I felt in that time of, you know, all of us going through the same thing and the same fears. Like I remembered times where, like I said, if I was transporting somebody, I'm in the back. But I remember when my partner had to do the transport and I was driving, we'd like, you know, inspect each other, duct tape the back of their gown to make sure nothing could get in. It was a little insane looking back. The flip side of that is I really liked being useful and knowing what I was supposed to do with my day. when the Twin Towers fell down, I was a rock climbing guide. and I had high angle rescue experience. I live upstate New York, about an hour and a half from the city. So when that happened, a group of us went down to be potential search and rescue. a search and rescue team. We wound up not doing anything because there was nobody to rescue. but another vivid memory of that were all the people who just wanted to help. You know, driving to the scene, I remember mountains of bottled water and snacks and food. And they were just trying to give us everything we could, you know, to go do what we were going to do. And that's the feeling when something terrible happens, people just want to help. So being in EMS during COVID for me, I don't think there was anything I'd rather be doing, frankly, because I knew I was being as useful as I could be. And honestly, it's the first and only time in EMS where we felt appreciated. I mean, now we're I don't like the the term red-headed stepchild, so I won't use it except that I just did. But that, you know, that's how we were always treated. We're ambulance drivers, we're not essential workers, we're not medical help, we're not, you know, we're just ambulance drivers that people don't know anything about. Except for that little window of time, we were first responders. We were frontline workers. We got all the free pizza. It was a it was it was the best of times. It was the worst of times. But I will I will jump in again though, if I've said this before. If there's another global health crisis with where we've gone in this country and how people responded to the last one, I don't think I would put myself out there again like that. I think I would step away. Yeah. Because it didn't have to be that bad. People people could have behaved themselves and been a little bit less selfish. And I don't think it would have been as horrible. So lost a little bit of faith in my my fellow person through that time as well. speaker-0: Yeah. yeah, there

were definitely some at the time I recall a lot of opinions where, you know, people based on nothing just disagreed with people who spent their whole life studying things, you know. speaker-1: Like, you know, those those times when they're when before the vaccine when people were really just dropping dead. And then you'd go to a call and you'd be like, Why are there like twenty people in here having a big family gathering? Like what are you and you're all sick. can you imagine how that happened? I don't know. I was I was proud to be able to do that job, and I was really grateful that I was an experienced medic when it happened because, you know, amazingly, there were still people going to school and becoming EMTs, becoming paramedics. So we had people doing ride alongs us and still training. And I'm like, man, why would you want to learn to do this job? Now, like, you know, something that seems simple, like starting an IV, it's really not that simple. it's not a natural thing. You only get good at it by doing a lot of it. you know, there's that scene in the book where I was learning, you know, where I was doing my ride times and my preceptor was kind of rough with me, and I asked him to scooch down on the bench seat, and he's like, Nope. He's like, when you're doing this job, you're not gonna have all the room you need. So I'm gonna crowd you. And that in mind, when COVID happened, man, it was hard to do our job. Like it's hard enough in a bouncing truck to do what you gotta do, start an IV, you know, figure out a drip rate on medications that are coming in. But now you're doing it through fogged up safety glasses, you got double masks on, maybe two sets of gloves, and your person is really sick. I couldn't imagine what people who are just learning to do that job in those conditions, like What that must have been like, it took a lot. And a lot of those people are still with us and still working the job and and their memory's very different of it than mine was. speaker-0: Might be I think it's probably an easy way of coping with things too, you know, to trying to change your perspective of of the way it happened. I wanna ask about your your work on medic. So the the work itself is all in pencil, right? speaker-1: Correct. speaker-0: Okay. That's what it looks like to me, but I just wanted to make sure. speaker-1: Well it's so it's actually well actually hold on. No, that's not for so it's a black colored pencil specifically, so it's not like that gray of a number two pencil. speaker-0: Right. speaker-1: And then the shading is done with soft vine charcoal. speaker-0: Okay. speaker-1: So that's a technique I learned. Now, this is actually for if you have listeners who are creators, they might find this instructive. I just mentioned in passing that I used to be a rock climbing guide. Climbing was my whole world for a time. there was a time where I was very broke. I was coming back from being a climbing bum out west and I was trying to land on the east coast again and had to figure things out. I had this idea to make a drawing of the local cliff. It's called the Schwannagunks. It's a I think the cliff is like three miles long, 200 feet tall, and in rock climbing, every established route Has a name and a difficulty grade. So I did a drawing, a line drawing of this entire cliff. I climbed it exhaustively, so I knew it almost without even looking at it. And the poster had every name and every grade of every climb on this three mile long cliff. I'm pretty proud of the work. The original drawing was like five feet wide. Back in the day, it was kind of hard to scan each. piece and put it all together. But anyway, the way I made this poster, I wanted to start with the cheapest production possible. So I said, okay, it's going to be black, black only, no grayscale, no bleed, and whatever size the printer can print on without having to crop the poster at, that's how I'm going to go. So my posters cost me maybe 30 something cents each to make. I could sell them to the store for eight bucks. They could sell them to the public for 14-15 bucks. They're still selling. Had I not found the cheapest way possible to do it, I never would have gotten off the ground. So fast forward a little bit to when I started breaking into children's books. Now I was a climbing guide and I wanted to get out of that world because that seemed a little dangerous and not a solid career move. So I was going back into publishing and I didn't really have a real art studio. So again, I went with What's the most cost effective way that I could make some art to try to pitch myself to a publisher? And it was using cut construction paper and rubber cement. And I needed to figure out a way to make some shading. And I just had some vine charcoal lying around. So if you look up any of my children's picture books, that's the media that I used were construction paper and then this technique of using soft fine charcoal for shading. kind of became my signature and that's the same kind of shading that you see in medic. And even this book, again, why is it black and white? Because it was easy to do, it was cheap. Why did none of the pages bleed or go across the gutter? It was going to be cheaper to do it that way. speaker-0: yeah, so in Persephilis everything is is black and white, like we already talked about. And I was reading an article about Persephilis and Marzanius Sostrappy's legacy. It's from the autobiographics website. the authors are Ameris Ketchum and Nora Hickey. And they make note of The use of black and white only. The hair, the shadows, the veils, entirely black panels. They say that the effect, and I s I think this is true, is that it isolates emotions. it reflects on the selectivity of their memory. And what really what they're saying is it it creates like I'm looking at this right now, a dialogue between her parents and her. In one line of panels, there's a television because the television is doing the speaking. So that's

why it that's why it's important. But then the the following line of panels where it's just her having a conversation with parents, it's all black. it isolates the characters. one commentary has said that it also kind of shows that this is her memory. Right. So there's not all this detail. there's not everything going on in the background. sometimes it's not even up to scale. It's just what it is, is it's her memory and it's a perspective of a child, like what we talked about earlier. And so I was wondering if the use of the black and whites had an impact on your choice to use the pencil and the graphite. Cause one thing I liked about your book, was the way it felt organic, it felt raw. and a lot of that is because of the way you chose to do the art, which the panels aren't done. I mean my guess is that the panels were drawn by hand. because they're not perfect squares. it looks like they're hand drawn. Same with the letters. And what I really liked about it and why why it really hit me was because It felt like this is someone making a comic who you know you you you're professional artists, you you do children's books and and now you you've said you've taught, right? Art, graphic design. but this looks like it could have been just somebody sitting at their desk drawing it because they're like, God, this is what's on my mind. You know, it feels like comics for the love of comics. speaker-1: And thank you for saying all that. Yeah, and that's why I subtitled it A Diary, because it is, you know, it's a memoir, but it's a diary. when I first started this book, I thought that I was gonna create the entire book in one go. There's gonna be no editing. If I spelled something wrong, I was gonna trash the page and do it over. I think I did a couple of chapters like that and I Then I was like, am I dumb? Because I have dyslexia. So I'd spell things wrong all the time. I'm also not as smart as I think I am. Fortunately, had a great copy editor. Because I had, you know, she did a great job of fact checking. This is it's embarrassing, this bit, but it's funny enough that I'll tell it. In the background of one of the pages. there's a fire department using an AED. And I just, you know, wrote in there that the AED was an automatic electronic defibrillator. Well, it turns out that's not what AED stands for. I'm a paramedic. I didn't even know that. It's automated external defibrillator. But anyhow, I thought that I was just just going to draw this fresh, like every page was going to be reproduced the way that I drew. I came to my senses, you know. I allowed Photoshop to be a part of it. So definitely there are edits to the drawing, there's edits to the text. But you're right, I never made a template on a computer. All those boxes for the panels, they're all hand drawn. Part of my process is I start with a pencil drawing, then I do a charcoal outline over it, then I transfer that to another page, and then I do the final art. So it's actually several steps to get that rectangle for the box. But I never use a ruler and I never use a computer. So that's all just keeping a steady hand. So I'm glad that came across that it did feel like it was just somebody's pages off their table. speaker-0: Yeah, and I mean that with the with the utmost respect. And that it like I said, it it feels like someone who's just has a passion to do it and proving that you don't have to have, you know, some fancy computer program to make a good comic. You just need to have the desire and you know, the the talent to to put it all together. speaker-1: You gotta work with what you have. Because for me, this is my style. You know, somebody once commented that it looked like Captain Underpants going dark. And Dave Pilke and I do have a very similar style. I mean, the drawing of that page, it's towards the end of the book where there's just looking down on a guy laying on the ground. We had just worked a cardiac arrest, and you know, you see the Defibrillator pads on the guy, he totally looks like Captain Underpants. I didn't mean that to be the case, but that's how I draw. I look at a lot of comics and graphic novels today, and I feel like a hack. I mean, people, man, people can just draw now. And the use of color, it's incredible. It speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: is. But I feel like if I I just let my hand do the work, I don't use computers to help me, except for a little bit of editing here and there. I'm an old I'm an old guy and that's what we do. So I'm gonna I'm gonna keep on drawing. You know, there was a time where I looked down my nose at people that drew on a tablet and I said, That's not painting if you're not pushing paint around a canvas. But of course it is. It's a new tool, just like anything else. My tool happens to be traditional material and I think that's what I'm gonna stick with. speaker-0: Yeah, I was wondering if I was wondering if going through Persepolis again and the use of the inks or any of the the storytelling methods that she uses. Like there's great example where she is talking to her parents and she kind of has the devil built around the panel. my book it it's on 43, but what she's showing, I think, is like this idea of evil. surrounding them as they're talking about what's going on. there's also a great one where like God is which, you know, a a child a child having God as her best friend and then talking about how she wants to go be a part of the rebellion. where where God suddenly leaves, you know, but they don't she doesn't make a big deal out of it. She just says later on I look for him and I couldn't find him. I was wondering if any of these if these techniques kind of stood out to you as like either one did you sort of subconsciously implement them or if you're if you looked at it and you're kinda like, Man, that's a good idea, not not necessarily ripping her off by by any means, but but recognizing like, that's that's a that's a tool or a technique that I could see myself implementing it on later

on. speaker-1: Yeah, I think back when I originally read the book, and I'm just trying to remember how it impacted me then, I'm sure I got the feeling of I could do this. Not that I was, you know, so cocky that I thought I was as good as she is. but just the simplicity of black and white, I'm mostly I'm trained as actually as a graphic designer. So the graphic design nature of how she works. Like I said earlier, it gave me license to say, yeah, this, this is what a graphic novel can be. It doesn't have to be incredibly perfect, you know, Renaissance quality anatomy. it can be stylized. so yeah, I I can't say I looked back at it while I was working on medic. So anything that I took from her work probably got to me through osmosis and was just living in my toolbox. But certainly in rereading it, I loved seeing those instances where the excuse me, where the design took hold. I'm gonna try this, try to find this one page that here it is. In my book it's on page 95, where all the kids are, you know, striking their chest and wearing the the head covering again. All the figures look almost identical. But it's just such a beautiful, powerful graphic. speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. No, I I know exactly what you're talking about. It doesn't it's doesn't look like Photoshop. I she I think that's hand drawn because you can see slight changes in each one of their faces. speaker-1: I didn't mean that they look duplicated. speaker-0: No, but it's it's it's more of a c I'm complimenting her on it because I think a lot of people would just kind of do Photoshop at this point age and say, I could just you know, the effect is have all be the same, but no, she that looks like she drew those by hand, every one of them. speaker-1: And since you mentioned that component, and since I used to be a design teacher, I wanna say for like creators that are out there, one thing when I taught graphic design, I was teaching students who were raised on computer graphics and computers. me when I was in college, we were still using lineotypes and pressed lettering and Xacconives. but for them, like Cut and paste was a totally legitimate way to duplicate things. So if you were making, I don't know, a graphic about Halloween and you had a couple of jack-o'-lanterns, most people's instinct, and you see this when you see package design or whatever, people just cut and paste the same jack-o'-lantern to have multiple jack-o'-lanterns. I always instructed my classes don't do that. Don't be lazy, draw each one. Like if you're playing a video game, Look at the backgrounds. Are all the clouds the same cloud but smaller and bigger? Sometimes they are. And that's kind of lazy. But when you look at something where they took the time to render each individual element, it's got so much more heart. And yeah, I don't see anything in her book where anything's cut and paste. And same for me. I'm I wouldn't never do something like that just because I'm I'm an old man and I'm not gonna look down my nose at people using new tools, but There's no excuse for being a lazy artist. speaker-0: I also think though it it does depend on what serves the story, right? Like if the idea is to create a monotonous or just contemplative situation where I I see it a lot and where you see nine panels on one page and it's like it'll be the same face over and over and over again, and then like one statement at the end, the idea being that pacing is that They're just sitting there bored or confused I could see it in that situation being a payoff, but otherwise I get what you're saying and saying don't let the tools take over your art, right? even speaker-1: Even that instance, like I that's very important to have those beats. You know, if a person's just sitting and bored, much better to have eight panels of them just staring blankly than say, and John was bored, and then move on. Yeah. But the artist should draw all eight panels. Don't just cut and paste the first drawing you did. You could, you know, you notice that. And there's also room to put nuance. I can't imagine. There was ever a cut and paste Calvin Hobbs, Calvin and Hobbes in any of those strips. Everything was always drawn with purpose. speaker-0: Yeah, you know, I could say they're I mean, especially well, those are like three panel stories generally, right? Three to four panel stories. but yeah, like you know, it's I don't I don't think Jim Davis is cutting Garfield out and then putting him down just to create that same image that he always draws. Or maybe it was. I don't know. I I've looked at old comic books from like the 70s and 60s, and what I like to see is The original art. And there are some great books out there where they show you like the original art, like in the full page format. And you can see the whiteouts, or you can see where they kind of like took something from a copy machine and and pasted it onto the page to create the same exact image, you know. using whatever tools they had to because they're obviously working with tight deadlines. So they wanted to do what they could. but that's to me the fun of comics is that that innovation. What what I do hate to see is when people let the computer take over. You know, like as in like they're losing their style it's one thing to experiment. I think it's another thing to just be like, we're gonna let the computer do everything, you know? speaker-1: And that goes down a a different corridor about AI to speaker-0: Yeah, it does. speaker-1: use. And I will never be okay. I will never be on board with using that as a tool. you know, a lot of people are creating, and I'm making air quotes here, political cartoons using AI. And you see them, you know, it's this that same look for the drawings. And not coincidentally, the the gag they're making. It's usually not that. Groundbreaking. But the the defense of that people will say, well, I can't draw, but I had this idea and I wanted to convey it. Well, find a form you know, find a way that you can draw. I

mean, I'm not, you know, Albrecht Durr. I can't render perfectly. I have my style. It's got limitations, might not be for everybody, but I have my my voice with my hand. Either find your own voice or find a different medium. Do something different, but like a computer doing high tech plagiarism, that's not art. We don't speaker-0: Yeah. did you in going from children's stories where those were those primarily like well, I'm picturing my my kids' books, which are generally like one page, right, with the text on it. Is that how your children's stories typically are? Yeah. speaker-1: They're generally thirty-two page picture books. They're for kids who are just learning to read and having stories read to them. my books usually had maybe two or three sentences per page or per spread. They were very art driven. speaker-0: Did you find from going from that to creating a graphic novel where you do have sequencing? you have different kinds of blocking, you have to look at things from different angles. Sometimes you might have the same situation from different angles. Was that a difficult transition for you? what was your experience with that? speaker-1: It it was not really difficult. It was it felt easy, frankly. Like I said, when I s the first attempt at this book was just writing. That was hard and it went poorly. Once I tried to translate things, you know, I found methods that worked. And now that I'm working on my second book, in many ways it's easier because I found these these tricks that work. a good example is there's that chapter talking about the worst thing I've ever seen. And I'm describing in the narration, just you know, in a couple of words, a couple of really bad calls. But what's being shown in the visual is just me and my partner going into a routine call in a nursing home. So I found that, you know, technique of having two things happening at the same time. Kind, I mean, and I I can't say that came from children's books, but the awareness of letting the words tell one part of the story, let the pictures tell a different part, or in this case, tell a completely different story. That was kind of natural. And also my books are very well, the the kids' books are funny. There's always a punchline. So the way that a narration might lead to a drawing, and the drawing is the punchline to that narration. That was something that comes naturally to me and came naturally when I was working on this this book. speaker-0: was there Any specific lessons you took from Persepolis or other works in making medic that you applied, whether it be the structure, the tone, how you handled the autobiography versus the historical moment, what can you can you explain any connections? speaker-1: I think unintentionally, I was very much trying to do. the same thing. I was telling my very personal difficult story to the world using my tools. And our toolboxes, like I keep saying, were very similar. We came from a Children's book background. Our characters are very,

I hate the word whimsical, but they're kind of whimsical. They're fun. But the story we're telling is very dark. So I think in that way, unintentionally, I was following her lead. If I was gonna say who really influenced me as an artist, I'd have to go back to Mad Magazine. That was my that was my go-to as a kid. Just the way that I draw gestures, hands. I definitely copied that when I was a kid, and that's how I continue to draw hands. People that are fans of Don Martin, they're looking through this book, they'll definitely see some figures, some gestures, some movements that are completely lifted from the pages of Mad magazine. speaker-0: It's funny because I never think about Mad Magazine. and my dad is a big Mad Magazine fan. you don't really think about the impact of the cartoons that they have on cartoonists these days. I grew up, you know, in the nineties, it was all superhero stuff. it took a while before I started getting more a different kind of art form than more than like the steroid Rambo kind of look, I can definitely appreciate it. speaker-1: Yeah, Mad Magazine to me and comics to me, they're kind of punk rock. You know, it's kind of underground. I can't say that I really read much of Crum or, you know, paid attention to him when I was younger, but in looking back, I really appreciate it. Really appreciate the, you know, I mean, some of his stuff is really sexist and misogynistic looking back. But his style and his willingness to just push boundaries of what's out there and what's allowed was inspiring to me. another book that I don't even know if you could find it anymore. It was called Downward Bound. It was about the first ascent of Elk Cap in Yosemite. And unless I'm misremembering it, I think it had some drawings that the author, climber himself, Martin Harding, did. And they're really funny. I mean, they're just like he sets up this surreal interview where like these characters are answering questions about the climb. I'm sure I'm misremembering this, but I just remember having those funny drawings in there to bring a topic that's not gonna be obvious to everybody. Like not everyone climbs, so they don't know the nuance of that. It just it's welcoming and allows people in. So in another way, just that nature of like, do what you want, like tell a story in any way you want. Like it could be words, it could be pictures, it could be a mix of the two. So don't know if that really answers the question you're asking, but I was I just kind of take in influence from everything that I absorb. And I'm sometimes I don't even know where it came from. speaker-0: But yeah, I think that's I think that's normal. I mean, I've read a lot of interviews with people and they'll identify works that they're like, yeah, I never really recognized that until I I realized. And then in some some instances, you know, they will blatantly say, I cribbed this guy's artwork for but there might be reasons. One of my favorites is I don't know if you're familiar with Michael Allred, is one of my favorite Illustrators. he does a comic called Madman and he does a lot of stuff for Marvel and DC, but he has his own character independent kind of situation. and he has this wonderful issue where his character goes through all these. Well, he goes through, this adventure, and each panel is drawn in the style of a different artist that influenced Michael Allred. And and he said it's like it was such an incredible exercise to really stretch my boundaries and try things that I don't really try. But these are the people that influenced me and I wanted to, you know, kind of one, give an homage, give them the credit, but also push like said, push the boundaries and do something different. Cause I imagine after making comics over and over and over again for 30 years, you get bored. And and he's really great about changing panels or seeing like what you can do with the page. I think that's always fun. But at the end of the day, you recognize, this probably slipped into my style and I just never realized it, you know? Yeah. speaker-1: Yeah, I mean I think it was Maurice Sendok, you know, where the wild things are, he said I I again I could be misquoting, it could have been Abraham Lincoln that said this, probably not, but he was saying that when you you know are influenced by people's art, you're not just like taking little bits, you're not just copying this color palette or this line quality. You're just Consuming the entire artist and just absorbing that. You know, that I hate this line. I used to like it a lot. People attribute it to Picasso of good artists borrow, great artists steal. I think the concept. speaker-0: I've heard Quentin Tarantino say that. speaker-1: just he's okay. Yeah. I think that's bullshit. I think I think it's the other way around, maybe. Like his the the way I heard that story was he was talking about Picasso masks, right? African masks. He was intrigued by that. And that led to Cubism, the way that he broke down a face into, you know, abstract graphic shapes. He says he stole from African mask making. I think he borrowed from that. I think stealing is plagiarism. I've been plagiarized. I've seen my work ripped off. And it's it's completely changed how I feel about that statement. So I'm careful to use it, but I do think you have to be inspired by other things. Nobody just draws just naturally with no influence. Yeah, I mean, you can't. That's what cameras are for. speaker-0: I think the I think the that that opens the door to a very dense topic of of what's what's what's an homage versus what's a ripoff, right? I think I think an easy answer a lot of times is it's an homage. but if you're like, but this is the exact same story, it right. It's more like ripoff. speaker-1: And we see that today, like memes on the internet, you know. I'll see one thing, you know, like last week I saw, you know, something, me trying to tie my shoes, and then remembering I'm forty-five years old, and it's

like, now we see like he thought he tied his shoes, but instead he's a ghost and he's, you know, seeing his body laying on the floor. I'm like, okay, that's funny. And then all week I'm seeing the same damn joke. You know, somebody recreated that same bit. And what why do you do that? What inspires you to be unoriginal? I I don't know. Just the the updutes or whatever. speaker-0: Yeah. it's sometimes unfortunately it's just a situation of well, what got discovered first, right? how often do we have a famous work and people are like, Well, that was that was my idea. And then that you know, then it becomes a whole argument or or investigation, I guess, in some aspects. I want to get back to Persepolis, I don't want to really get into a whole lot of spoilers, but We're I feel like we're not doing the the work justice if we don't at least talk about some of the most effective storytelling and the vignettes that she did. do you have any that stand out with you where you where it just had an effect on you, whatever the effects be? Maybe you just thought it was funny or you just kind of had to put it down and think, Jesus, that's that was intense. what what are your favorite Moments for this. speaker-1: made notations. I mean for one, I talk about that very last moment. Can we just spoil the last speaker-0: That's fine. Yeah. it's everywhere. I mean, the whole second half of the book is her in a foreign country. So that's I think we're good. speaker-1: They're they're saying their goodbyes at the airport and she's going through security and she writes I couldn't just go, I turned around to see them one last time, and then there's a drawing that takes up two-thirds of the page of the dad carrying the mom almost like you know the the pieta. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: Would have been better to just go. And speaker-0: It looks like her mom has fainted speaker-1: right, And it's and you see her in the background, you know, hands and face pressed against the glass, and it just says so much, you know, like you know that cliche picture says a thousand words, like you could never have told that moment as dramatically as she does with that drawing. speaker-0: Well, there's also the lead up to it, right? Because her parents are sending her to school in Austria. And the whole time they're saying, Well, we're just sending you ahead. We'll be there. We'll be there. We're going to be there soon. And she's like, I'm not, I don't know if they are. You know, she has this doubt. And then as she's leaving, yeah, she's she turns around and in the background of that image is her hands pressed against the glass, looking at her dad carrying her mom. and then you realize without her having to say it. she realizes they're not coming with. I'm on my own from here on out, you know? speaker-1: not and they're not necessarily gonna be okay being left behind. speaker-0: Right, right. it's great pacing and it's great reveal and it's saying something without stating it, right? Like sometimes you just let the picture do the job and all she says is it would have been better to just go. She doesn't say, I had the worst impact or it's the worst thing I've ever seen. It's you know, it or I've never seen my mom like that. Like it's just her letting the picture do the talking, which I think is the sometimes there are works out there where You only get the impact that you get or the result that you get when it's a writer artist doing the same thing, the same person doing both jobs. and I think that that comes out in many, many moments with this. that comes out clear here where it's like, I don't think if she had written a script, somebody maybe somebody could have drawn it just as effectively, but because it's her, you know. speaker-1: Yeah, and I I think to answer your question also the I'm trying to find it but I can't. I know there was an instance of male nudity in this book, and I I feel like the context was a rape or a sexual assault and the way that she does that just so matter of fact. Like do you remember that? speaker-0: I remember talking about the girl that they arrested and the dowry is what it was, where they arrested her and killed her. And what she explains is that they can't kill a virgin girl. Was it that was it that speaker-1: That might have been same scene. But and that's where I was going with this. Like the way she can, you know, juxtapose these real innocent looking characters and even the emotions when she's mad or sad or scared. They're very, you know, playful, children book like. But then right within that, you have you know somebody that was murdered and dismembered. And she does it in that same kind of graphic. way but the face just looks, you know, gaunt and lifeless. There was look in another page here where one of their friends was murdered and they you know he's laying with his head in a bathtub full of water. And the way she can juxtapose those things in such a you know lighthearted looking world, it's really, you know, jarring. speaker-0: Yeah. The so the dowry doesn't I I didn't I misremembered. The dowry is her they tell what happens to the girl. it's her mother holding her by the shoulders and explaining and shaking her really because she's so afraid of like you don't understand what happens when you get arrested if you get killed, and she explains how they don't just they don't just rape the girl, they they throw the equivalent of five dollars because they have to marry her. Right. And it's all for the purpose of killing her. And it's just that was something that was very trouble. Trouble troubling. Troubling is a great word because she makes a great choice of having her mom, which this probably did happen, having her mom tell her, and being so afraid. And it's where it's like you're so afraid you're screaming at your kid because you don't want the worst thing in the world to happen to them, and that that is it, you know. So to your point, the the story before that, where the bombings are are

going on and she's with her mother, and leading up to this, she's like she knows there's bombings going on, and then she realizes there's bombings going on down in her neighborhood, and then she there's she realizes the bombings are happening right on her street. and then she finds her mom and she's so excited that her mom is safe, and her mom tells her, the other neighbors, the other building. we don't I think she says something to the effect of we don't know what happened to them. Again, I keep going back to this, but the this natural situation where you sometimes you lie to your kids because you don't want them to know the truth. and she's seeing it and she's not mad at her mother for lying to her, but she's understanding and she sees the rubble of the building next to them that had her neighbors, and her mother said, I think they got out of the building and she sees the bracelet that one little girl that lived there that she was friends with, was wearing, and that's all you see. You see the rubble and the bracelet. And that's all you need to know what happened. and then shows her crying, she covers her eyes, and then it's just a black panel, which is so effective for many reasons, but she doesn't state the obvious, she doesn't have to, she doesn't have to show this gratuitous shot of the girl dead. You know, you made the point earlier about like the Holocaust where this isn't the Holocaust, but it's it's a terrible situation nonetheless. It's almost like the girl in in the pink sweater from Schindler's list. Yeah. Where you don't have to see everything, but you see enough to know that something as innocent as like a pink sweater in that case, or just a toy jewelry bracelet, what it symbolizes and what it means and when you see it in the rubble, it's It's this metaphor where you're showing the death of innocence, you're showing the death of the child, you're showing all kinds of symbolism that is heartbreaking and and real. speaker-1: Yeah. So I I did find that instance that I was remembering. It's on page fifty four. No, fifty one. Where they're torturing maybe one of their family members and they'd whipped him and then the guard is urinating on his back. That was like that was very shocking to me. You know, you're you're reading and this is pretty early in the book, so you haven't seen too much yet that's real graphic. And everything's, you know, very family friendly. And then all of a sudden you you got this guy with his dick in his hand peeing on somebody. Yeah. It's just there. She doesn't like call too much attention to it. But that's just the reality of that moment. And I I re like you asked me before, like, was there anything that, you know, I felt I was inspired by from this book? I feel that same kind of mentality or tone of just I'm just gonna tell my story and if I have to go really, you know, dark, if that's what the story needs, then that's where we're gonna go we're gonna go. And so, you know, my work being in emergency medicine, there are definitely moments that are pretty, pretty horrible. But we have to go there. So we're gonna go there. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. speaker-1: Even you know, even when it comes to nudity, like I almost titled my work Death Puke and Nudity. I didn't want it to have a funny title, so I went with medic ultimately. but that is what our world is, is Death Puke and nudity. So there's a lot of nudity in medic, and I didn't I mean, I didn't want to be unnecessarily in your face about it. There's no genitalia, but you know, we're Working on people's chests all the time and cardiac arrest, putting on EKGs on, so it would almost call more attention to it if I was trying to find ways to not show that than to just have it be right out in your face. speaker-0: Yeah, it's definitely the way you draw it is it's it's part of it, right? Like if you're giving if you're applying an AED or you know an oxygen mass to somebody, like a female, you have to open their blouse, right? And that is what it is. And you're not, just just so everyone knows, and no offense, you're not drawing you know, some some goddess on the on the stretcher like these are people that you can tell you've actually helped this this type of person. Like this is somebody who maybe is obese and you draw the anatomy accordingly, you know? Yeah. speaker-1: We see a lot of nudity in our line of work and it's not it's not a great aspect of it. It's not something it's not something you'd want to be seeing when you're seeing it. speaker-0: Do you at some point just kind of it just becomes it's just there and then it's like you're not giving any thought to it or like I would imagine it doesn't matter because you have to do the job, right? But speaker-1: And no, I mean you always have to read your patient. Like who's who's my patient? My patient, an 80-something, who's had cancer breast cancer, you know, has all these comorbidities, they've been in and out of the hospital a bazillion times, everyone's moved their breasts out of the way for an EKG, then yeah, I'm just going in and I'm talking about the weather while I'm doing it. But sometimes there are cultural differences. And I might have a a female partner with me who's got a lesser scope of practice that they're not even supposed to be putting on electrodes, but I would have them do it. If, like I say, there's a cultural difference where a man even touching a woman, forget about her her breasts, would be unacceptable. I would try to find another way. It really, it really depends. but yeah, if it's really critical, if somebody's You know, if it's a question of life or death then forget about it. We're just we're doing what we have to do. You know, one thing I should say on this topic of how much are you showing when especially when you're working in a visual medium, have you watched The Pit? speaker-0: I have not, speaker-1: Well, I I can't recommend it enough. As somebody who works in the medical world, they get it. And not just about the

medicine. I feel like in the first season they tried to really be like, look how much medicine we've researched. And they do that into the second season, but the reason I would recommend it is they really understand the character and personality and the emotions of people that work in that world. But in the In the earlier episodes, and definitely the early episodes of season two, they're trying to be shocking. So they must be prosthetics that they create, but they show in your face like catheter insertion into a urethra. They show childbirth right in your face. And I feel like those moments are so shocking that it almost does the opposite. Like, you don't feel it, you're more just like shocked. Like, are they really showing me this? More than being shocked, like, my god, you're putting what where? Where I feel like if you show less, you can make more of an emotional impact. So when in Persepolis she just goes to a black square and lets your mind fill in the blank, that's so much more telling. there's a scene in my book where the narration is talking about the outcome of a a call. And I just kind of have a panaway showing the lake where the call happened. I feel like that was a choice I I mean, well I know that was a choice I made to let the reader kind of fill in the blanks of the emotion rather than showing a devastated family crying or a person laying there dead. spoiler, that person died. speaker-0: well, I think that that that is an effective storytelling tool. that you really I don't know if you could do it in like a textualist piece, right? Like in a textualist piece you to explain things. You have to explain the scene. Whereas with you and your and your art and in Persepolis, you sh you can show the effect without having to show every detail of the situation. Let the reader use their imagination, or sometimes it doesn't matter what the image specifically is graphically, we don't need to know because what's important is what are you focusing on? You're focusing on the effect, you know, in her world it's the effect on her, her parents, things of that nature. with you, I could see the same thing. Like I look, I know what a child being born looks like. I know. I I don't need to see something on TV to to explain it to me. And I don't know if you're really getting anything out of it by doing it that way. I don't I haven't seen the show, so I don't know. I'm sure the creators had a reason for doing it, but you know, sometimes it's I do think it's just better to let the story have the effect without having to knock somebody in the head of saying, Hey, here's what happened, guys. Just so it's clear, you know. speaker-1: Yeah, and that's the advantage we have as illustrators is I can just draw what I see or what I remember or what I know, and it'll just be true because that's what I saw. things people have mentioned in my book that I wasn't even doing with intention. for example, there's a there's one page in there where I'm with a patient and I have my cardiac monitor sitting on a kitchen chair. And somebody commented, Wow, this is so real, like putting the monitor on a chair rather than the skanky floor or whatever. When I made that page, I wasn't trying to say anything about the condition of the homes we go into. I was just thinking, okay, I want to have myself assessing a patient. What does it look like? Okay. I'm usually kneeling down in front of them because that's how I work. I try to get at their eye level. Okay, where's the cardiac monitor? Okay, where do I put it? Well, I sure don't put it on the floor because that's freaking disgusting. So I scooch a chair over and I put it on there. But another paramedic, presumably, or a reader, saw that and they really were like, Man, this guy is really showing us what the job's like because of a small moment like that. Whereas if I'm a if I'm just writing, am I gonna say, and I put the cardiac monitor on the chair because the floor was gross? Maybe. But Why beat your reader over the head if you don't have to? We can be so much more spare and tell you so much more. And, you know, Marjane is definitely doing that with the world she's showing us, the, you know, the I think they're called hijabs that they wear. Like when they all have to. speaker-0: The Veil is what is what it's called. Yeah, that first that first chapter is incredible. speaker-1: Yeah, so what that is like, you know, what you know, piles of furniture being burned or things like that. She doesn't have to tell you specifically or you mentioned the bracelet. We can infer what that means just by the simplicity of that drawing and the few things she chooses to show us. Shows the realism. speaker-0: Yeah, that's one thing I love about comics is you can let the art do the work without having to state it. and the subtext is there. Maybe especially like with comic books, you know, when when it was all under the comics code, there were things that people would get in their adult ideas without having without being able to say it. Right. So like, you know, if a character suffered some sort of abuse, they couldn't say, she was sexually abused. but there were things that they could do to to get that point across, or let the reader infer that also like as a child, you just sh right over your head, you know? and that again is is why I love this art form You have different ways of of conveying information, of letting the reader do the work. and if they miss it, then they miss it, but the the beauty of it is that you you have a bunch of different avenues to convey this information, to your reader in a way that just reading a textbook doesn't, you know, and it never will. Well Dave, think we've we've about covered all the the points that I wanted to talk about and what makes this work of art so important, so interesting, so effective and such a great work of art. Is there anything else that you want to say about Persepolis before we wrap things up? speaker-1: no, I think we covered everything

we wanted to to talk about. I mean, there are some specific pages I could call out that were really great, but I think it would lead us to areas we've already covered. so I think we're good. I just I guess just want to reiterate like what an important tool, art, comics, specifically a book like Persepolis, how important they are. They're entertainment, sure, but their education, they really, you know, and not in the the boring sense of the word of just getting information to you, but they really they enlighten, they open minds. I'm grateful for one that I have some kind of an understanding of that part of the world through Marjane's eyes, because I never would have had it. And it definitely informs me as a as a person, as an artist, as a citizen. speaker-0: Yeah, as a human being, I think this is just a great work to look at. speaker-1: I'm glad you said that word because it humanizes. You know, art humanizes. And that's what politics attempt to do is dehumanize. So we need artists, we need people willing to tell the truth. speaker-0: Yeah. And this is it's worth noting that this this book has been banned several times in several different ways. Marjane saw that kind of as a badge of honor because real art will be that way. People don't like other people to learn what they don't want them to know, right? And we see that even still to this day. Look, I live in Florida, I see book banning and the question is why why? Do you want to ban this? And it usually it's because they don't want somebody to hear something that makes them uncomfortable, you know? so she saw it as a badge of honor. I can see why people in positions of authority who don't like what she has to say would want to do it, but I would say follow her lead and get this stuff off the black market if you can, because it is important, it's worth preserving for sure. there is one thing I wanted to. do before we got off, which is, as I said in the very beginning, there are a lot of people who have a lot of information, are much more capable of analyzing, discussing, breaking down ideas, and politics arguments or the positions that she has in this. But it's important to remember that there are people who are not like me or not like you who this work reflects something that they've experienced or feelings that they have, feeling like outsiders in a country where they live in, but also living in a different country and and feeling like an outsider there. In this case, she she didn't feel like She belonged in the Iran that she lived in. So she goes to Europe and then she feels like she doesn't belong there. but she still managed to find a place and to create a a wonderful work of art and to provide something to people that you know can sympathize or recognize how she feels because they feel the same way. But this is an article from the website. It's called The Conversation. This is Article by Alessandro Tarantino is prepared after Marjane passed away. I'm not gonna read the entire thing, but there there was one part where I thought it was important to note. It says in Sadrapi's hands, exile was neither heroic nor tragic. It was disorienting, lonely, creative, and politically productive. Her enduring legacy, however, lies not simply in what she told the world about the country she left behind, but in what she revealed about the experience of living between worlds. As a human being. The quote says, I was a Westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West, I had no identity. Our author says, few lines from Persephilis capture the condition of exile more powerfully than this one. Reading Persephilis at different times of one's life offers a language for contradictions that often feel impossible to explain. Loving one's country while criticizing it, belonging to multiple places while feeling fully accepted by none, and carrying memories across borders. That others struggle to understand and telling her own story. Satrapi captured something far larger than herself. In her 56 years of life, she stayed true to herself, never forgot where she came from. There's a lot more about Satrapi, about Persephilis, the movie. If people haven't seen it, should go check it out. in this article on the conversation. But I just wanted to give Alessandra Tarantino her flowers for writing something so beautiful and summarizing feelings that Again, maybe I wouldn't have recognized or experienced, but laying words down that state what this work of art means to other people, which is what real work does, it transcends boundaries. so everybody should go look at that article. speaker-1: That's a great piece, particularly that line you just read about feeling like you're part of something but not belonging at the same time. Boy, couldn't be more poignant, you know, thought these times. Like we just had our 250th anniversary as a c or you know celebration as a country. And I don't know what you felt, but I didn't feel jubilation. I didn't feel Certainly I didn't feel hatred. I didn't feel you know, but it was a somber day. I know some people were excited, I know a lot were just gonna, you know, blow it off completely, remembering what the bicentennial was like, and then going through this anniversary, that's what it felt like. You're part of something, you're I don't want to say proud to be part of it. I don't I don't really take too much suck and pride as being a virtue, but I am an American. I feel connected you know, of course my experience as American, very disappointed with where our country is, but it's my country. And so that's a that's a great way that you put it and very very important. speaker-0: Yeah, it it transcends boundaries. I I understand what you feel. personally, my politics, it's hard to be proud of a situation that I'm not proud about, but still keep the love of of my country and what the ideals are, what the country should represent. I try and keep that hope alive that we will get there. we'll get back there. But you you feel like kind of an outsider

at times shit, especially living in Florida, being a being a liberal guy. Yeah, I feel like an outsider all the time. But there are great things. And I think what I found is if if you just try and connect on a human level, on an on a small scale, you'll realize that like what you're saying about COVID, there are people out there that still want to help and that still want to do good. And I just I love that speaker-1: A hard left turn here and just give a shout out to your listeners who might not be aware, speaking of like the helpers. Heather Cox Richardson, are you familiar? No. So she's she's an historian, I believe she teaches at Boston College, but she's been putting out this thing she calls Letters from an American. She started out, you know, putting the day's news in an into an historical perspective. She's very smart. I think she even once said she used to be a Republican or a conservative. But she's she keeps me sane in these times because she she keeps you informed on the the goings-on in the country. She's not telling you a political perspective. She's just telling you what's going on. so that she's a helper. I she's pretty big. She's, you know, she's blown up, but she stays small. She does her Reports from what looks like her kitchen table in Maine. but she's she's just out there telling her truth and just helping. She's, you know. So I think people that are interested in feeling lost and feeling like they don't belong in this world, they should just go find her. She's on all the platforms. speaker-0: It's very easy to find a lot of vitriol and hate out there. I do believe that there's a lot of love out there too. It's just it doesn't make as much noise. and a lot of times those helpers, they're not looking for, you know, flowers. They're as loud as the people that want to capitalize on that hate. But but they're out there. And I wanted to make sure that we end on such a serious topic, on sad moments, having Marjane losing her, that we recognize the silver linings or what good she has left behind and really what what good we have as people. which I do believe There's a lot of good out there. And you just gotta you just gotta look for it and and appreciate it when we do find it. Well, Dave, thank you for joining us today. if you want to take a moment, you want to tell the listeners where they can follow you on social media, remind them of anything coming up, plug, medic, a diary again. speaker-1: Yeah, so Medic a Diary, you can get it anywhere you find books, and it's available as an ebook as well. If you go to my website, horowitsdave.com, h-o-r-o-w-i-t-z-d-a-v-e.com. There'll be links to where you can buy the paperback or the ebook. also my children's books. There'll be links there, a little bit of more information about me. I do have an Instagram. horowitz.dave on Instagram. Could find me there. still working as a paramedic and trying to produce books at the same time, so it's a little slow going, but I am about five or six chapters into a first draft of My next graphic novel, I'm very excited about. Don't want to give away too much or promise too much because this thing might shift into something else at some other point. But always be working on something, and you can always get a little bit of info on what I'm doing on my Instagram. I'll probably voice some politics there, and if I lose people, I lose. speaker-0: Your Instagram, do what you want. I'd like to thank the listeners for joining us today on this episode of We Love Comics. For more information found on this episode, you can refer to the show notes and I will post links of the articles that I was referring to. You can follow us on Instagram at We Love Comics Podcast. You can also email questions or comments about this episode too. We love comics podcast at yahoo.com. be sure to subscribe to We Love Comics wherever you get your podcast, be on the lookout for upcoming episodes featuring discussions on The Last American with Doug Wagner, the Galactus trilogy with Michael Allred and Sin City with Victor Santos. I've also got some other things in the work. We'll announce those when the time comes. But until next time, thank you for listening and we'll talk to you soon. Dave, thank you. speaker-1: All right, thanks, Coll.