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[00:00:01] Pretty weird. In 2019, I was teaching in Minneapolis and River at Night came out and I traveled around with that book. And then in early 2020, my mom was battling cancer and I had come to Chicago to visit her in the hospital and around that time is when lockdown happened.
[00:00:48] And what I ended up doing is just moving in with my parents to help take care of my mom through lockdown. And that was a crazy time. And my mom passed away during that time and with me and my dad and my sister
[00:01:10] basically taking care of her through lockdown, which was, you know, what terrible timing. And then, you know, and then my partner also got cancer shortly after that and we transitioned into taking care of her.
[00:01:30] And she's all clear since then. But since then I moved to Chicago and live in Chicago now. And I don't know the rest is a blur, a beautiful blur. First of all, my condolences. It's been very interesting talking to people about people who make things
[00:01:56] about the last four years and some people have been able to flourish and be productive. Other ones myself, you know, I probably like a lot of people was going through some depression
[00:02:07] and found it really difficult to be productive at all. Were you, especially during that time when you were caring for your mother, were you thinking about art at all?
[00:02:20] I mean, yeah, of course every day. I mean, I try to draw and make something every day if I can. I really get depressed if I'm not working on something. I really get depressed if I go a few days without drawing or writing, start to feel crazy.
[00:02:50] I don't know. You know, that's in some ways my life was radically different. In other ways it was the same old thing, which it was like, you know, writing and drawing. And, you know, this is after my mom had passed and I moved back out of their house.
[00:03:12] You know, it was back to work. And then all the pandemic stuff that we all went through, you know, with masks and with, you know, going to the grocery store, seeming like a major event, you know. What was your mom's relationship with your work?
[00:03:30] My mom is where I got my love of reading. When I was young, my mom would take us to the library and she would get a pile of books and I would get a pile of books.
[00:03:45] And, you know, after a while I started like digging in her pile of books and reading what she got out of the library. Yeah, she's where I got my love of reading. She loved, I don't know, she loved all kinds of novels.
[00:04:03] I remember her talking to me about Ursula K. Le Guin. But then at the same time, you know, we would read Stephen King or we would read Tom... At one point I think my mom read a Tom Clancy book even, you know,
[00:04:22] because it was like in the news or something and I read the Tom Clancy book and then I started reading Tom Clancy books. I mean, you know, when I was a little kid. But yeah, yeah, I owe that to my mom.
[00:04:37] We talked about comics later and she admitted to me at one point that she said, she said, I admit that I don't even really look at the pictures. I just read the words. She's talking about your stuff or just comics in general?
[00:04:50] Comics in general. And it made me realize, I think, the way, the different ways people read comics that some people, I don't think even read the words, they just look at the pictures. But my mom admitted to me that she doesn't even really look at the pictures.
[00:05:06] And so she's like, sometimes I have to go back and look at the pictures and try to figure out what's going on. She wasn't a big comics reader though. I assume she must have read your work. Sure. In more ways than one it is very, very literary.
[00:05:22] We're ostensibly talking about the re-release of Curses. It had been a few years since I read it and there are... There are a lot of straight adaptations in that book. Yes. Yes. I mean, you're talking like the first book,
[00:05:42] the first story in the book is Green Tea, which is an adaptation of a Victorian ghost story that was kind of done for an anthology. That was kind of an assignment that really wasn't my choice.
[00:05:53] But it was for an anthology put out by Ben Catmull and Dylan Williams about Victorian ghost stories. And I think part of their idea was smart, which was that this stuff is all public domain and so why not make comics of it? And so that's what we did.
[00:06:16] That's always been in the back of my mind too, that there's all this public domain writing that could be adapted. I guess that's what... There's people that are doing that for sure with... I don't know. You see those anthologies or you see those adaptations, but...
[00:06:38] Graphics. What was it called? Graphics, classics. Yeah, something like that. And then I think I've always thought too about how movies are often made out of books and I've often thought, why aren't more comics adapting books? I haven't really done it very much, but I'm often thinking
[00:07:04] maybe I'll turn my attention more to adapting certain short stories or working with writers. Was that a first for you then? Yeah. I think when you're a young cartoonist, you do... A classic thing is to do a comic of adapting a song,
[00:07:24] doing song lyrics and making a comic out of it. I feel like that's one of those classic gates you have to go through where it's kind of a bad idea and it doesn't really ever turn out good,
[00:07:38] but everybody does it and you kind of have to do it at some point. And I definitely did that. I think I adapted... Adapted is like a big... I basically drew a comic of The Doors, the song The End when I was in college.
[00:08:00] I thought that was a good idea, but of course it's totally embarrassing and should be forgotten. I think I adapted some stuff like that in college too. I did something from the Book of Tea, this book about Japanese tea ceremonies. It's a good opportunity to...
[00:08:25] With that example or the Victorian example, less so with the Italo Cavino example of almost finding an excuse to draw an entirely different era that you might not otherwise. Yeah, I like coming across something and thinking, I could never write this, but I would love to visualize it
[00:08:52] and tell it in comics form. But I love to put words in comics that I never have seen before and you're going to find that in someone else's story. It's more exciting than the things I could come up with out of my head.
[00:09:10] The Cavino story that you're talking about was itself an adaptation of Italian folktale or it was a collection of Italian folktales. I think the idea there was to draw on folktales, the feathered ogre. The idea wasn't even really to use that particular folktale and be faithful to it.
[00:09:38] It was really just to kind of play with the folktale form. I read all these folktales and I really liked how they reminded me in a way of John Stanley's Little Lulu, which I was reading at the time too because there was this sort of force of
[00:09:55] storytelling where it was like... It was like this primal force of storytelling where it felt like John Stanley could just write a story about anything. He could write a story about a robo in an umbrella or an ice cream cone or whatever.
[00:10:14] And the folktales felt the same way in that they they just felt like endless variations on these forms where they would often start out with a parent dying and the child dying. They would start out with a parent dying and the child being set loose in the world
[00:10:39] to find their way. It would be sort of a quest story where the character would have to find some object to make something happen or something like that. So when I was working on the feathered ogre story,
[00:11:00] it really was a situation where I got this assignment to do a story for Drone and Quarterly and I was like, what am I going to do? And I thought, well, I'll do what these folktale writers do, which is just like start with one of the basic
[00:11:18] setups, which is like, you know, the king needs to have an heir or the king wants to have a child but is unable to... King and Queen are unable to have children. And so they turn to, you know, a witch or some kind of magical object,
[00:11:35] you know, which then turns into some kind of monkey's paw situation where like the witch curses the king because the king doesn't hold up his end of the bargain or whatever. You know, these kind of classic setups.
[00:11:51] And by that point I had come up with Glenn Ganges as sort of my like default character. And so I just thought, well, I'll try to mix those things together. Something that it does really well that's stuck with me is the
[00:12:09] mixing of... and something that I don't recall seeing very often. It's the mixing of the fantastic with the mundane. And it almost seems like you leaned into this, you know, suburban Midwestern mini mall as almost as a clear juxtaposition for this feathered ogre. Yeah, for sure. I mean,
[00:12:34] I think at the time too I was like... I was kind of becoming aware of the suburbs as my like where I lived. Like it was always just sort of the default neutral background of my life, but I started realizing it was sort of a strange
[00:12:56] kind of artificial environment. And I wanted to write about that and sort of call attention to that a little bit. You know, while at the same time like, you know, I guess I just didn't really want to write about like your stereotypical like folktale type
[00:13:17] world, you know, with like kings and queens and horse drawn carts and cauldrons or whatever, you know, it's like not interested in that at all. But what's nice about like, you know, ogres and magical enchanted objects and so forth is the freedom as a storyteller.
[00:13:38] You can kind of get yourself in and out of jams pretty easily with the story. You can kind of do whatever you want, you know, if you need something to happen easily and quickly, you can just come up with some magical reason that it can happen.
[00:13:58] Yeah, I mean, something that only occurs to me now that we're talking about it is presumably in the time that these were written, they were written or they're set in fairly mundane settings. These are things that, you know, that we consider to be like foreign or fantastical now.
[00:14:13] But you have to assume that to a certain extent, these kinds of folktales were set in whatever the equivalent of a gas station or a mini mall was at the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:14:28] Just like, you know, the farm and then like the ogre lived in the mountains nearby and you had to get on a horse and go go to the mountains and find the cave. It's normal stuff. A big part of the genesis of these were these
[00:14:46] not constraints, but these guidelines that you were given by Dylan or by Dron and Quarterly. Dron and Quarterly really was just like, you know, keep it under 40 pages, you know, or whatever. That was it. In the case of the first story though,
[00:15:02] I'm thinking that almost as an exercise, you know, in much the same way that adapting a song was that do you find that that is helpful for actually kind of getting your bearings? Yeah, for sure, for sure.
[00:15:17] I mean, that's like the that's like the one of the main lessons of being an artist is that you got to come up with some kind of constraint or you got to come up with some kind of
[00:15:29] boundary or some kind of rules that you're going to follow so that you can kind of like have structure but then you can play within the structure for sure, for sure.
[00:15:39] I didn't actually realize this at the time, but going back and reading some of the contemporary interviews that you did around the time we last spoke, you were talking about the god, I'm going to kill this, but the Zettelkasten, am I close at all?
[00:15:51] Oh yeah, Zettelkasten. Yeah, that came much that came a lot later. But yeah, yeah, yeah. That was sort of in that 2019 time period. Right. Yeah. When we last spoke. Yeah. Is that still part of your process? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's evolved. I mean, it's evolved.
[00:16:17] I was just telling some younger cartoonists the other day about a kind of a variation of this meaning. I was telling them like we were talking about how we do a lot of work in our sketchbooks and I was saying that
[00:16:31] I was saying I've really learned how important it is to put page numbers in your sketchbooks and also name each sketchbook so that you can then later go back and refer to what is on what page in what book.
[00:16:54] That connects to Zettelkasten and the idea that when you're taking notes, every note should sort of have it a unique number or some kind of like identification code.
[00:17:06] And that's part of some larger system so that you don't just like drown in your notes and your notebooks and your sketches, but that there's a way in which you can you can refer back to things.
[00:17:21] And that way you can weave through your work, your writing and your work. You can link things together by, for instance, you can take a step back then and make an index of like every time I wrote about this thing,
[00:17:38] you know, this subject and here's where you can find that material. It's in this notebook page, this note, you know, pages 15 to 30, etc, etc. So anyways, I was just talking about that the other day for sure.
[00:17:51] What drew you to that? And again, going back and reading the interviews you did around the last time we spoke, it sounded like you were kind of really testing the waters at that point. I mean, you know, I'm a I'm an insane scribbler.
[00:18:07] Like I mean, I'm doodling right now as we're talking, but like I'm surrounded by just like paper and notebooks and note cards like I also my partner and I have these old library card catalogs that we've got.
[00:18:26] We got them from the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Chicago. They were getting rid of their library card catalogs. So we got one of them. So we have all these drawers of library card catalogs that we can use the flip side as note cards.
[00:18:40] And I've just been using those note cards for years and years now. And I have a zillion of them. And I don't know, I'm constantly just like writing things down and trying to keep track of everything going on around me on paper.
[00:18:57] And the Zettelkasten thing was exciting to me in 2019 and still is because it helps you understand how to stay organized. Not even just to stay organized, but to like
[00:19:17] Like if part of your brain as a writer, as part of your brain is just generating stuff all the time and you want to note it. You want to write it down somewhere.
[00:19:29] But then another part of you needs to go back as an editor and start assembling it into a structure where it's like this part comes at the beginning of the story or the essay. This thing comes next. This thing comes next.
[00:19:47] Or even you can say like, you know, I wrote about this here and I can refer to it in this thing or I can refer to it in this thing.
[00:19:57] So it was exciting to not feel lost in one's own archives, but to have a somewhat of a system so that you can go back and thread through all the notes and all the notebooks
[00:20:12] and have a sense for that you can build something out of all that raw material. First, it's important in the actual crafting of a story.
[00:20:20] But then when it comes time to put some of these seemingly, you know, disparate pieces together into a book, then that must come incredibly in handy. Yeah.
[00:20:34] Yeah. And, you know, it's still chaos and it's still like, you know, when I put, you know, coming back to curses, when I put curses together this new edition, I put notes in the back, which forced me to, you know, I dug through my files and my old sketchbooks and stuff looking for stuff to put in the book.
[00:20:53] And, you know, it was still chaos. And even after I was finished with the book, I found a lot more stuff that I hadn't even found yet when I was putting the book together and I thought, oh, I could have put this in the book too.
[00:21:09] But sort of as a sidestep to this, what we're talking about is this idea in the formation of the Internet. In the early days of the when I think Tim Berners-Lee and stuff was coming up with the ideas for how the Internet would work.
[00:21:32] One of his ideas was that documents on the Internet, the computer network would have a firm address that would never change. And so then that address would be stuck forever in a certain code.
[00:21:50] And then you could always add to it or link to it or refer back to it. And so you can build out outward from these stable documents or these stable notes or stable pages.
[00:22:04] And then you could you could see how that would be a totally different kind of Internet where there would be sort of like everything would have a stable address that wouldn't change. And you could always link to things and build upon it.
[00:22:19] But instead of what we have now is it's just chaos of links and chaos of addresses. And so things disappear and then links go dead.
[00:22:34] And so the Internet is just this kind of like thing where there's like there's so much amnesia where like all these all these websites and blogs that existed, you know, 10, 15 years ago are all gone now. And so it's almost like they never existed.
[00:22:57] And you can't even refer back to them unless you have some, you know, unless you can find them in like the Internet way back. Do you know what I mean?
[00:23:06] And so Zettelkasten is kind of like almost like a physical version of that where it's like you write a note and then that note has a number and then that that note then like exists forever. And you can always build upon it.
[00:23:20] I was going back and reading some of the blogs posts on your site and it seemed like you almost harbored.
[00:23:27] I can't remember exactly what it was, but there's a reference to blogger and you almost harbor this like nostalgia for that form of the Internet that is now completely gone. Yeah, I noticed. I noticed that a lot of blogs that I used to read all went dead around 2016.
[00:23:48] It's a weird thing that I kept noticing that 2016 or 2017 is around the time that a lot of people stopped updating blogs. If even if they're still there, that's when they stopped being updated. But a lot of them are just physically gone altogether.
[00:24:06] And I guess I guess that was partly the way that social media had totally taken over by that point. And I think also maybe the 2016 election probably felt like a turning point. It may be like a like a cultural shift and like people just stopped blogging or something.
[00:24:27] My job job is working at a technology site and I've been I have I have one of the new Apple headsets to review and I've been writing about it. And one of the I want to hear about that.
[00:24:41] Yeah, when Apple was introducing it, unveiled it over the summer, they kept dropping the phrase infinite canvas like over and over again. And I'll send when we get off, I'll send you the link.
[00:24:55] I wrote like six thousand words about this thing and talked a little bit about Scott McCloud and reinventing comics. And as you're describing this, I'm really just thinking about all of the unfulfilled promise of of of the Internet and of technology.
[00:25:14] And if things had worked out better, all of these sorts of things that you could do in terms of note taking and tying things together that just for whatever reason is impossible with the current tools. Yeah, I mean, software design is such a big deal.
[00:25:33] You know, like the choices that are made by these software designers really like have all these downstream effects on what happens in culture now. What's possible? What's not possible? I think about that kind of thing all the time. Yeah, I mean, even something like Wikipedia.
[00:25:54] I was thinking about how Wikipedia, the fact that it's so stable has been so stable for so long is in a way like it's like one of the things that still carries. It's like like you can still refer to it. The links still work after all these years.
[00:26:14] You know, like there's something and it would be such a tragedy if Wikipedia were to be like taken down or to be or like, you know, all the links were shifted to some different addresses or something like that. What a mess that would be.
[00:26:31] But also just, you know, if you were able to do any of this electronically, it would be a lot easier. But to a certain extent, it sounds like you're also tied to the especially in the case of the card catalog, the physical object.
[00:26:45] Well, what we're talking about was Zettelkasten. Like there's a ton of guys who are companies, people who are working on digital versions of that. That's like a it's like a very hot area of software development.
[00:27:01] They're basically called note taking apps and there's a ton of them and they're evolving very quickly.
[00:27:10] And, you know, like a lot of things you kind of like those different camps, you know, who you kind of have to throw in your lot with one program and then commit to it for a while and then watch while everybody gets excited about a different one.
[00:27:27] I use a program called Rome, which is like a note taking app that allows for back linking. And I've dumped a lot of my writing into that.
[00:27:42] It's it's it's cool to be able to dump a lot of your writing over the years into something and then you click on a word and you create you turn that word into a link.
[00:27:53] And then every instance that that word appears in your own writing, you can link, you can see it all linked together, you know. And it makes possible all kinds of new things with weaving together your writing over the years.
[00:28:14] And, you know, there's all kinds of different versions of that software where you can visualize it as like a big graph, you know, and you can play around with the data and move things around. It's it's cool.
[00:28:28] It's it's and then you can, you know, and you can hack it to do all kinds of things. You know, it's like software. It's exciting. The thing I was going to say coming back to infinite canvas.
[00:28:39] I've been thinking lately about this idea of comics that connects to the infinite canvas idea of like if you could. Here's my idea. And in my mind, I call it a quilt.
[00:28:58] If you could take all the comics ever done by a certain cartoonist and put them side by side, like on this giant infinite canvas.
[00:29:09] So, like, say all the comics ever done by Jack Kirby, and you would you would put them all side by side on this giant scrolling canvas. And then you could zoom like way you could zoom in and out.
[00:29:23] Maybe you could like select whole chunks of it at a time and move it around or you could tag, you know, different areas in different ways and then like physically move all that around.
[00:29:35] I understand visually and I understand that it's a database, but it's a visual database on one place. Obviously, you would have to have a very good navigation system in order for you to have your bearings at all.
[00:29:49] You know, if you're just there was a point with software where it seemed like it seemed like there was a lot of excitement about like putting a ton of photos all into one giant canvas.
[00:30:01] And then and then people were excited by how quickly you could zoom in and out. Well, there was a trend in like the yeah, the 90s and odds where they did that thing where they just they like drew a picture on a bunch of smaller images.
[00:30:14] Do you remember that? Right. That was a hot thing for sure. Photo mosaics or whatever. Is that what they were called?
[00:30:22] It would be kind of like that, but it would be like every comics page drawn by a certain cartoonist or even like, you know, you could do a year, you know, or something like every comics page published in 1970 or something like that or 1963.
[00:30:38] It just seems like it seems like an insane thing to do, but it seems like I can imagine it being doable. But also like as a as a sort of like thought experiment and myself being a cartoonist, like it's sort of a it's what I imagine.
[00:30:57] Like when I'm dead, that will be what I leave behind is the all the pages that I've ever done. And then there will be like a boundary around it. And, you know, you could conceivably take that body of work, zoom out and see it.
[00:31:16] And then that would take take its place on the giant quilt of the, you know, the infinity of all the other comics that were drawn. I totally understand conceptually and I think I understand it as an art object.
[00:31:30] But is there like a pragmatic use for this or is it just fun zooming in and out on somebody's art? I don't know. It's just a way to arrange data, I suppose.
[00:31:43] You know, like I have all these, you know, I'm sure a lot of people do have all these digital copies now of comics on my hard drive. There's all these, you know, electronic versions of books that you can buy or pirate.
[00:32:00] And there's all these comics, you know, are available on the Internet. And you just throw I, you know, I save them and throw them in a folder. And over the years, it's like these folders have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.
[00:32:15] And so they're they're sort of arranged like that already. They're just arranged in files and in folders, you know. One of the things that I've been doing as I'm testing this new piece of hardware out, I downloaded the the Marvel app the other day.
[00:32:30] And I don't know if you've used that or if you use comics ology when it was a thing. But it essentially it's that Netflix subscription style thing where you basically have access to probably not all but most of Marvel's entire catalog.
[00:32:48] Yeah, it's it is like going through Netflix in the sense of here's all of this movie history and here are all these great works of art.
[00:32:58] And it's incredibly useful, but there's something almost demoralizing just seeing them all presented together in an app in that way where they're all kind of the same.
[00:33:11] Right. And the people who have designed the app have made, you know, they've made the decisions about how that stuff is going to be presented and accessed and and interacted with.
[00:33:25] You know, if if all that stuff was just raw data that you could open up and let people build on top of, you know, then it would be it'd be interesting to see what people come up with.
[00:33:40] You know, I guess the other thing that's in my mind is there's all these comics sites that are like, you know, Grand Comics database or, you know, in music, there's all these different sites where it's kind of like collector obsessives, like find different ways to
[00:33:57] categorize the archives and link it all together, either by like reviews or like rankings or like they tag it or they they arrange it by artists, you know, or in discographies and so on and so forth.
[00:34:24] So much of the Internet, so much of Spotify is is about discovery, which is useful at the end of the day. And obviously comic shops still exist. But you know, certainly record stores don't exist in the same meaningful way that they used to.
[00:34:40] So you've got to find some kind of proxy for the discovery process online.
[00:34:46] Yeah, and you know, a lot of it comes down to ownership and so on and so forth. Like to tie it back to curses like it's like what we're talking about with folk tales. You know, folk tales are stories that belong to to everyone.
[00:35:01] And so the tradition sort of like repeats them and evolves them over time. And part of what I play with in the book is in the is quoting the story with the starlings gestures at this idea that the starlings are mimics and that they can quote this unit they they pick up the sounds of traffic or the sounds of car doors.
[00:35:31] Or the sounds of air conditioners or whatever. And in the same way, like in the comic, I'm, I'm kind of quoting from a lot of different sources and you know, and you even walk a line sometimes where you're like, I'm, you know, I quote from Robert Crumb's brief history of America or I'm not sure what the exact title is, but.
[00:35:58] It's the same sort of thing where it's like I, I like the I like the idea of these these these files and this work being available to play around with. You know, with the software rather than just you know.
[00:36:17] You sign up and then you you can use their app.
[00:36:21] It's also connects up to the idea of note taking in the same way where like you have all this, you have all this writing in your notes and then you have to figure out some way to arrange it so that you can keep it alive.
[00:36:36] You can use it in a new form. You can tie it together in an essay or in a story or something like that. I suppose what we're talking about is the kind of thing that happens with texts all the time.
[00:36:51] You know, that texts all end up in a library and you can quote from them and write a new book and quote from old books and make something new out of it. There's the very obvious visual metaphor too.
[00:37:06] I mean, I imagine you get this all the time, but you know there's air gay or there's easy Seeger or there's you know stylistically. There are things that you're referencing in the process of making the book. Yes, yes, yes.
[00:37:20] And I think as a cartoonist and when I was a younger cartoonist too, especially like you look to the past for. You know, what am I doing? How should I do this? And you look for models and you look for styles.
[00:37:35] And when I went, yeah, the story with 28th Street and the Feathered Ogre, the other big inspiration for that was reading EC Cigar and you know he would just draw people sort of from the crotch up.
[00:37:47] And he would draw like two of them in sort of a horizontal in a panel and they would just be talking and that was it. And it was funny and it was compelling and the story moved forward.
[00:38:00] So that's what I tried to do on some of those pages too. I was like, I'll frame this panel the way that's set up. I'll frame it in a way that's not too much of a problem.
[00:38:13] So that's what I tried to do on some of those pages too. I was like, I'll frame this panel the way that Cigar frames his panels.
[00:38:22] That's exactly the story that I was thinking of but I was thinking specifically of the doctor who just feels like he could be a Popeye character. Yeah, yeah, that's yeah. Those pages are definitely the pages where I was thinking of Cigar.
[00:38:36] One thing I think that we're kind of talking around but we haven't quite touched on, I know it's something you wrote a little bit about on your blog and obviously interests you is this world of LLMs and generative AI.
[00:38:51] Do you have a morbid curiosity? Is it something that you are actually interested in exploring at all? I don't know. I don't know. I don't have a take on it really yet.
[00:39:06] I feel like it feels new in a way that something hasn't felt new in a while, if that makes sense. In the sense that the way that the Internet felt new in the mid to late 90s and you were like, well this is going to be something.
[00:39:33] I think and then you get a lot of people who are trying to make money. To me that's the part that I kind of for better, for worse, definitely for richer, for poorer, I've tuned out of.
[00:39:50] I remember in the 2000s and the late 90s it was like everybody was talking about, when we talk about the Internet and then it was like everybody was talking about focused ads. And I was like really? That's what's exciting about the Internet?
[00:40:10] And I thought it was so stupid and I laughed at it at the time.
[00:40:13] And of course, it's like in a way it took over our world and our economy that focused ads ended up being the thing that somehow everything was built on top of or built around or built in the service of.
[00:40:28] I don't know. So in the same way it's like there's a lot that's fun to think about with the LLMs and with AI. But in the same way I feel like the interesting stuff is going to be art projects or eccentric software design.
[00:40:50] And that a lot of it's just going to be stupid capitalists, money grubbing and it's just going to be disappointing. And that's what our children's lives will be characterized by is whatever makes it to the top of that scramble for money.
[00:41:18] You know, that'll be what happens. But at least for now there's a lot of fun things to think about doing or playing with. But I'm kind of pessimistic and cynical, I guess.
[00:41:38] I'm with you and this is something I think about a lot because I actually end up writing a lot about robotics for my job. And I always have to have this conversation with people who make it build robots about the job loss to automation.
[00:41:53] And they always have this, you know, obviously really rosy picture because they kind of have to.
[00:41:58] And the thing that I inevitably say to them is as we're projecting out these utopias, you know, whether it was Tim Berners-Lee or Timothy Leary got really into this idea of the internet as utopia,
[00:42:15] that we forget to factor capitalism and with the job loss thing, we forget to factor in that like, you know, you don't think that if Amazon could save pennies on the dollar by automating every single job out of sixes that they would?
[00:42:32] Yeah. I mean, the decisions are not going to be made according to real values. They're going to be made according to money expediencies. And, you know, that's just the way it is, I guess.
[00:42:50] You know, and I guess the best thing you can do is sort of try to carve out some spaces that are shielded.
[00:43:02] You know, in the same, you know, like I'm, you know, I think about libraries all the time and I think that libraries are secretly the best thing about civilization and that, you know, and then, and then, and then I think of schools as schools are built on top of libraries.
[00:43:23] In my mind, that's how I think about it. I don't know if that's, but in my mind, there's a library and then people start reading the books and then they want to have a book club and then the book club becomes a class.
[00:43:33] And then before you know it, you have a school. And I still am idealistic about that world. And to me, that feels like a good space to protect and hold on to.
[00:43:51] And I don't remember where I'm going with this, but like, yeah, you know, responding to what you're saying about like the idealists or the the futurists and so on and so forth.
[00:44:10] Like I said, I keep thinking about that. Like they're really excited about the ads that they're going to get to, you know, they're going to focus an ad on me because I said something in my phone heard me, you know, or whatever.
[00:44:27] Instagram is like the ultimate version of that because so much of it is art for people. But it's also telling, I had Jillian Tamaki on recently and we were talking a little bit about, you know, because she has been directly affected by the library bands in Florida and here in New York.
[00:44:50] When the mayor was making cuts that, you know, the library hours were the first things to go and I think that there's probably something very telling in why these like seemingly benign institutions are the first things that people target. Yeah.
[00:45:09] Yeah, it's a it's a whole thing for sure. I mean, you know, I also have a real like I think about university libraries all the time and those are some of my favorite places in the world. And I don't know, I'm always concerned.
[00:45:28] I'm always concerned when I hear something about technology and libraries and I get suspicious. You have been teaching for a while. You know, as you're talking to these young budding cartoonists, is there anything that is really exciting you about comics?
[00:45:57] I mean, the way I think about it is that I think there's a particular kind of person who latches on to comics. You know, they could latch on to anything else, you know, sports or, you know, taking care of horses or whatever. But there's something about comics that
[00:46:23] that resonates with the part of you that loves to focus and concentrate and write and build something and create a structure for something. And so when I see these students, I often feel like we're part of the same.
[00:46:43] We got the same quirks, you know, the same personality quirks. And so I just am trying to like do my best to like help them with the path that is ahead of them if they continue to, you know, try to find the pleasures of
[00:47:04] concentrating on comics and making comics. The inevitable hurdles and the inevitable things that they're going to run into. And that's how I see my place.