In this episode of Creative Guts, co-hosts Becky Barsi and Joe Acone sit down with cartoonist, historian, and award-winning author Joel Christian Gill. Joel is celebrated for his powerful graphic novels that illuminate overlooked narratives from Black history, including Tales of The Talented Tenth, his graphic novelization of Stamped from the Beginning, and his autobiographical work Fights. His storytelling blends rigorous historical research with deeply personal narratives, fostering empathy and a more human understanding of the past and present. In addition to his published works, Joel chairs the Visual Narrative graduate program at Boston University, where he mentors the next generation of storytellers and artists. Visit Joel's website at www.joelchristiangill.com. Listen to this episode wherever you listen to podcasts or on our website www.CreativeGutsPodcast.com. Connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Discord. Creative Guts recently moved our newsletter to Substack, and you can find us at creativegutspod.substack.com. If you love listening, consider making a donation to Creative Guts! Our budget is tiny, so donations of any size make a big difference. Learn more about us and make a tax deductible donation at www.CreativeGutsPodcast.com. Thank you to our friends at Art Up Front Street Studios and Gallery in Exeter, NH and the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts in Rochester, NH for their support of the show!
In this episode of Creative Guts, co-hosts Becky Barsi and Joe Acone sit down with cartoonist, historian, and award-winning author Joel Christian Gill.
Joel is celebrated for his powerful graphic novels that illuminate overlooked narratives from Black history, including Tales of The Talented Tenth, his graphic novelization of Stamped from the Beginning, and his autobiographical work Fights. His storytelling blends rigorous historical research with deeply personal narratives, fostering empathy and a more human understanding of the past and present. In addition to his published works, Joel chairs the Visual Narrative graduate program at Boston University, where he mentors the next generation of storytellers and artists.
Visit Joel's website at www.joelchristiangill.com.
Stamped from the Beginning, by Ibram X. Kendi (graphic novel adaptation by Joel Gill)
Fights: One Boy’s Triumph Over Violence
Tales of The Talented Tenth series
Listen to this episode wherever you listen to podcasts or on our website www.CreativeGutsPodcast.com. Connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Discord. Creative Guts recently moved our newsletter to Substack, and you can find us at creativegutspod.substack.com.
If you love listening, consider making a donation to Creative Guts! Our budget is tiny, so donations of any size make a big difference. Learn more about us and make a tax deductible donation at www.CreativeGutsPodcast.com.
Thank you to our friends at Art Up Front Street Studios and Gallery in Exeter, NH and the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts in Rochester, NH for their support of the show!
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:00] BB: I'm Becky Barsi.
[0:00:01] JA: And I'm Joe Acone.
[0:00:03] BB & JA: And you're listening to Creative Guts.
[0:00:18] BB: Hey, friends. It's Becky.
[0:00:19] JA: And Joe.
[0:00:19] BB: And thanks for tuning in to Creative Guts.
[0:00:21] JA: Today, we are sitting down with Joel Christian Gill. Joel is a cartoonist, historian, and award-winning author known for creating powerful graphic novels about uncelebrated narratives from Black history. His acclaimed works include Tales of the Talented Tenth, the graphic novelization of Stamped from the Beginning, as well as his autobiographical novel Fights. His work showcases his dedication to fostering empathy and humanity through storytelling. He also chairs the Visual Narrative graduate program at Boston University.
[0:00:49] BB: So, let's jump right into this episode of Creative Guts with Joel Christian Gill.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:00:57] JA: We're here with Joel Christian Gill. Joel Christian Gill is a cartoonist, historian, educator, and he also runs the graduate program Visual Narrative at Boston University. Did I sum that up right?
[0:01:09] JCG: That's right. Yeah.
[0:01:11] BB: No small program here.
[0:01:13] JA: Yeah. No kidding.
[0:01:14] BB: Well, welcome to the podcast, Joel.
[0:01:15] JCG: Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
[0:01:17] JA: I mean, we have a whole bank of questions and things to cover. I mean, I guess if you wanted to give people a sense of what your work is about, could you try to maybe frame that for them, for people who might not know you?
[0:01:29] JCG: Framing my work. I draw comics that are the combination of history and, I don't know, social commentary? Comics about social commentary. My book Fights was about my life, and Stamped was about the history of racism in America. And then my other series are all been about Black history. And my upcoming book is an alternative history of the South that deals with the same kind of social commentary, but it's fiction. So, we'll see how that works out. My first fiction book.
[0:01:59] BB: That's great. Yeah, that's quite a shift.
[0:02:02] JCG: Yeah. Well, I mean, it's in the same vein. It's an alternative history of the South. So, I had to do a lot of research in order to write it and draw it. And so, it takes place in an alternative history where black people, because of a series of successful slave rebellions, now control the South, and they're fighting a supernatural force. And the supernatural force is sort of a combination of capitalism and white supremacy.
[0:02:26] BB: Wow. Yeah. I mean, that's the best way to describe it. The main antagonist, but you don't find out until later in the book, is basically a zombie in a suit.
[0:02:37] BB: This is fantastic.
[0:02:39] JA: No spoilers.
[0:02:40] JCG: No spoilers, yeah.
[0:02:40] BB: What's the timeline on this?
[0:02:42] JCG: I should be done with this some 2027, I think. Should be coming out, yeah.
[0:02:46] BB: All right, excellent. You grow up knowing that you wanted to be an illustrator and a writer.
[0:02:52] JCG: Oh, yeah. I want to be a cartoonist. Before anything else, I wanted to be a cartoonist. I wanted to draw comics. I spent a lot of time drawing out of Mad and Cracked in the newspaper. And back in the old days, there was a show, I can't remember what it's called. It was an anime show that came on. And I used to hate it because it rose my anxiety. Because the thing had – at the end of the day, when the Earth was going to be destroyed, and I didn't like seeing it. It's like 7,454 days before the Earth is destroyed. And so these people are on this giant ship. I'm going to have to go look this up.
[0:03:22] BB: Yeah.
[0:03:23] JA: Was it SilverHawks?
[0:03:24] JCG: No, it wasn't SilverHawks. But that was one of the ones I liked.
[0:03:27] JCG: Shout out to SilverHawks.
[0:03:27] JCG: Yeah, SilverHawks, which was basically – what is ThunderCats in space? Yeah, so I would sit in front of it sometimes, that show, because I was trying to figure out how to draw a nose. And this was before you could stop or anything. And I would just draw every single nose in there. And I kind I got sidetracked by painting and law at one point. I wanted to be a lawyer when I was in high school. I was really looking at history, and I'm like, "I'm going to be a lawyer." And then I decided I was gonna be a painter. And I got sidetracked with painting for a long time.
The way I usually tell people the story is kind of comics was my high school girlfriend, and we were together forever. We were going to be married. We were going to do everything together. And then we both went off to college, and we did other things, and we found other people, and I found painting, and we got married, and we had a couple of kids, but we didn't work out. And then one day in a coffee shop, I saw comics again.
[0:04:21] BB: It's a wonderful romance.
[0:04:23] JCG: It's a romance, yeah.
[0:04:23] BB: It's a meet-cute.
[0:04:25] JA: Yeah, absolutely a romcom.
[0:04:26] BB: And you guys have a connection.
[0:04:29] JA: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Joel was my instructor in college back in the day when you taught at the New Hampshire Institute of Art. I was an illustration major, but I only had one class with you, I think.
[0:04:38] JCG: In my comics class. Yeah.
[0:04:39] JA: Yeah, your comics class. That was back in the day.
[0:04:42] JCG: Back in the day, when Joe had long hair.
[0:04:44] JA: Yeah. We're not going to talk about that. Yeah.
[0:04:48] BB: I think I need some proof of this. We got to see this.
[0:04:50] JA: Yeah. Well, maybe. Yeah, that's a point.
[0:04:52] BB: We'll drop that on the Instagram, everybody.
[0:04:54] JA: No, we absolutely will not. But yeah, we stayed in contact ever since. We played some D&D together. I worked for you when you were chair of foundations. And then at some point, you officiated my wedding. So, all kinds of stuff go on there.
[0:05:09] BB: Important life interactions here.
[0:05:11] JA: Yeah, yeah. And you've been an awesome influence in my life and a real creative force. And I know a lot of this podcast is about staying inspired, making sure that you're fighting the imposter syndrome and everything like that. And I've gotten a lot of inspiration from watching you work, continuing to push yourself, and just seeing like, "Yes, you can do it." If you're a creative person, you can do it out there in the world.
[0:05:33] JCG: - Absolutely. If you ever feel like you have that sense where you're like, "I feel like an imposter," Art and Fear is a really good book.
[0:05:40] BB: Yes.
[0:05:40] JCG: I think for lots of – I don't know if anybody else has said that. But I make my grad students read it, and I read it every year. As we talk about it, we spend a lot of time in it. It's a really great book.
[0:05:49] BB: Yeah, I read it in grad school as well, and it's time to bring it back out again. I think that's a good one to revisit.
[0:05:54] JCG: I read it every year. I read it once a year.
[0:05:56] BB: What brought you to become an educator?
[0:06:00] JCG: In college, I think being a professor was plan A. Being a famous artist was plan B. And what was funny about this – and I was talking to my son because he's like, "I'm going to be a famous podcaster." I'm like – not a podcaster. A YouTuber.
[0:06:14] JA: A live streamer.
[0:06:15] BB: I think everybody's children do that.
[0:06:17] JCG: And I say, you always have to have a plan A. You have to have like a couple of plans. I said, "For me, plan A was to be a professor and plan B was to be a famous artist." And he goes, "So, you decided to do both?" And I'm like, "That's not the point of this conversation."
[0:06:29] JA: Yeah, right, yeah.
[0:06:32] JCG: Yeah, it was my plan. Because I had a professor in undergrad tell me that colleges and universities were the modern-day Medici families. That they were the ones that propped up artists. And I was like, "Okay, then I'll just go do that." And I had kids, young. My daughters were born my freshman year in college. And so my goal was like I need to make sure I have a job and like a stable – I will lob stuff at New York. Do you know what I mean? I would lob it. All of my friends in grad school, all of my people, my peers, went to – like, "We're going to New York. We're going to make it big." And I'm like, "I'm going back to Virginia. I'm not doing that. I got kids." And so I just sort of chipped away at it, just working in summers, and trying new things, and sort of expanding.
I mean, I think one of the things you have to do as an artist is I feel like if you ever stop learning or thinking like, "I don't need to learn from that person because they're 20 years younger than me, or I don't need to learn from that," I think that's when you die, right? I think that's the place where your creativity and your innovation will die. And so I just kept pushing and trying to do things along the way.
[0:07:33] JA: Right on. I feel like the natural next question would be like, "What's a piece of good advice you received?" But I'm actually really curious about, "What's a piece of bad advice you received relating to art and art?"
[0:07:44] JCG: This is really funny. And my undergrad was in art school, was liberal arts school. Just like everybody, we have a thesis, and we had to go and do a thesis defense in front of all of the art faculty. And I had been painting very naturalistic realism and that kind of stuff. And I just like, "I'm going to be Basquiat. That's what I'm going to do."
I started, I was doing these weird paintings with spray paint. And I was taking Maxim because I couldn't have like Playboy around my house because I had little kids. I was taking Maxim, and I was cutting out the girls and stuff, and I was drawing this random stuff. And I was like spray-painting on them, and I was just doing all this other stuff. And I took it to the thesis. And one of my professors, who's passed away now, but he was a very sweet man, John Brust, he started yelling at me. He's like, "Why are you doing this? You should be painting." He was so angry, right? And I was just like, "All right, man."
And then the printmaking professor at the time, whose name I won't say, she came to me outside of the thesis. She goes, "Joel, just do what you've been doing, right? Grad school is when you start experimenting. You're so good at this other stuff, you should just keep doing this." And my favorite professor, who was a ceramicist, I told him that, and he said in this most diplomatic way ever, he was like, "That's bad advice."
And we had another professor who came, who was a visiting professor, and he didn't say anything about my work the whole time. And then he gave me this scathing sort of two-page letter at the end of it. And I was the art star at my college, right? And he gave me this scathing two-page letter. I actually have it somewhere. I need to hang it. I'm going to frame it. But it was like, "People aren't working like you, and you should consider why." Right? That was like one of the things. It was a negative thing, right?
One of the things is – he was like, "Most of my characters were looking to the left. When I drew figures, they were looking to the left." And in Portuguese, left is sort of sinister, and that means sinister. And he was just – it was wild, right? The bad advice that I got is like just coast. You know what I mean?
[0:09:41] JA: Right. Sure.
[0:09:42] JCG: Rest on the things that you've done that's just really well, and I never did that.
[0:09:45] BB: Good. Yeah.
[0:09:46] JA: Wow. Yeah. Just stop pushing yourself.
[0:09:48] JCG: Yeah, stop pushing yourself.
[0:09:50] BB: Because that doesn't do anything.
[0:09:51] JCG: Wait until you get to the next stage to start innovating, right? In the snow, you innovate all the time. You're always trying new things, and trying to push yourself, and trying to discover and create. I want my work to have a stylistic quality that's my own, but I don't think about style. Because just like in Art and Fear, style is the result of consistent practice. And so you get to a place where you can do things. And if you look at my first books and what I'm drawing right now, you can see the connection, but you can see the progression. I'm just like, "Just draw this." I'm trying to draw better and better every time.
[0:10:25] BB: Because you've been drawing for such a long time and you were using references from just the media and material around you, but did you have any other influences growing up, and how that helps shape your particular style?
[0:10:39] JCG: I mean, I don't know if anything shaped my style other than just I think that one of the ways we think about how we work is like I think what I make is dope. And so I just hope everybody else does too. And so I'm attracted to the things that are interesting to me. And I don't know if there's anything specific. I mean, I was really into comics when I was a kid, and manga, and chess, and hip hop. All of these things all come together.
And what's weird is that as I've gotten older and I've met people that are not specifically in my circle, people who didn't grow up in the same place that I did, or they weren't my close friends, but they become my close friends now, it's like they have the same interests, hip hop, and chess, and like all these other – I wasn't alone. I was just alone in Southwest Virginia. There were all these kids that were all over the place who were doing the exact same thing that I was, just in Mississippi, and in New York, and in California, and I'm in Southwest Virginia. It was one of those things. It was like I used to think I was just a weird kid. But, no. I'm like, "There's a whole bunch of me out there." That's the kind of stuff that I think has influenced.
And I think Joe probably remembers me saying this before, but when I read Blink years ago, when it came out. Maybe it was Blink or The Tipping Point. I can't remember which one. I think it's Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. And in that book, he talks about you build your unconscious way of thinking about things, whether it's the colors you wear, the clothes you like, the music, whatever else, it all becomes part of who you are. And it's kind of like if you have a memory palace, it's like a room in your memory palace that you can't have access to. You don't have access. You can't go in there and go through filing cabinets or anything else.
But, occasionally, something will slip under the door, and it'll say something like, "Add yellow." Right? And you just add yellow, but you don't know where it's coming from. And you have to learn how to listen to that, and you have to feed that room. And the best example of this, one of my favorite example, is the painter Pierre Bonnard, who would sell all these paintings. He was a later impressionist. And so he would do all these paintings, and he sold them, and they would be in people's houses. And he wasn't ready – he wasn't finished with them. He would go back to the house, and he would draw a friend distract them while he would go in and add yellow to it.
[0:12:48] BB: Really?
[0:12:49] JCG: A little thing, and add yellow to his paintings.
[0:12:50] BB: I love that. And I'm not familiar with his work.
[0:12:53] JCG: Pierre Bonnard.
[0:12:53] BB: Bonnard?
[0:12:54] JCG: Yeah.
[0:12:56] BB: That's so important, I think, to – I mean, with our students as well, trying to remind them. It's like, "It's okay. Take a moment. Step back from it. Give it some space. And then maybe go back to it and change it." Just because you've created something now, doesn't mean you can't go back and change it, unless it means break into people's houses.
[0:13:13] JCG: Yeah. Also, I think there is a thing about applying the thing that you learn from this thing to the next thing so that you don't get stuck on that. It's hard for me to open up my books and look at them because I always see things that I want to fix. When you go back and you're looking at it after you've already done it, when you're no longer in the thick of it, you just kind of see like, "Oh, I should have changed this or I should have done that." And it makes me just not want to look at them and just work on the next thing. I think it's a little bit of both, right? Not being afraid of making changes, but also being okay with letting go.
[0:13:43] JA: Yeah. Yeah. Recognizing it. This is a point on the timeline, and we're not going to go back.
[0:13:48] JCG: Yeah. And I think, specifically, when you're dealing with students who are creating comics like my grad students, I've got people who plan, meticulously plan, and I'm like, "You got to stop. At some point, you sort of make." I had a professor in undergrad who was one of my favorite professors, and he said one time, "There are two types of people in this world when it comes to art. There are people who talk about art and people who make it. Which one are you going to be?" Right? And that stuck in my head whenever I'm like planning or doing them, like, "Do you want to talk about this or do you want to make it?" Right? Always in my head, it's like, "Just make it. Just be that person that makes art."
[0:14:17] BB: Yeah.
[0:14:18] JA: Yeah, it's like the difference between preparation and action. Yeah, I think I was reading Atomic Habits, and they were talking about that differentiation. And I was like, "That rings so true in so many aspects of my life as a creative." And you see it play out a lot in the classroom, right? With students, you introduce a prompt or something, and you can see the wheels start turning. And then, okay, you come back to the next session, and they haven't made anything. I mean, it's the fear thing, too, right?
[0:14:43] JCG: Yeah, and it's funny because in comics, you have to spend a lot of time, there's a lot of planning that takes place, right? We were talking the other day, my daughter's cookout. And I was talking about the process of stories and how you have to spend all this time with understanding how story structures work. Because by the time I get my students, they already know how to draw. And it's just more about tweaking the things that they understand. But the thing that I can do at my program that a lot of other programs can't do is like really spend a lot of time on storytelling.
And so we deep dive into storytelling. And it's like it's super complicated. You've got the hero's journey. You've got the fictive medicine. You got the pyramid. You've got Joseph Campbell's heroes journey. You've got Dan Harmon's story circle. You've got the Japanese one, which I can't ever say, which basically is M. Night Shyamalan movies. It's like all of these different ways of thinking about the story. I was actually thinking about this this morning. I can see my students right now, me going through this and talking to them about this, and just going on deep dives, really deep. Spending all their time figuring out the story. I'm like, "No, no, no. You got to stop and just actually sort of apply something. Just try it. See what happens." And I think that's part of the creative process.
I mean, one of my favorite examples of just like how important creativity is, is that this was like 15 or 20 years ago, they had designed – they had used ants as a model for information system routing. And so they had used the way ants moved. And I want to say it was telecoms. And I have to go and look this up at some point. And so one of the ways is if there was a line in that system that wasn't working, they would actually program in an algorithm that would actually have it try a bunch of different random lines, right? And then whatever worked in that system, they would add it back. And that's what creativity is. It's trying the random stuff. It's just putting it down and just seeing what happens.
And so here we have this information system where we're looking at how something as simple as like making this line connect to this line across the country, they're adding creativity in that process just to make sure that those things can work effectively. And I think that's what happens when you try things, when you stop planning and just do it.
[0:16:47] JA: Yeah. So, do you have any theories as to why – I feel like I see the choice paralysis spinning wheels, student, or artist, or friend, or myself a lot of the time. I see that play out a lot. I don't see enough of just throwing stuff at a wall. Do you have like a reason why –
[0:17:07] JCG: Yeah, it's the American education system that trains us to answer – it's like a test, right? It's like the path to hell was paved with good intentions. You know, in the 80s, it was like we need to start training people to be able to do this, this, and this, and not so – not so open. And we need to make sure everybody goes to college, or everybody does this. In the process, you have to teach people how to think, not what to do, not what to think about, right? It's how to think. And I think that that process is driven out of kids coming through K through 12.
And I used to see this in freshmen when they came in, when I was teaching at foundations all the time. It was almost like, "Is this right? Is this right? Is this right?" I'm like, "I don't know. You tell me if it's right." Right? You tell me if this works. Ask me what I think about it. Let's have a conversation about it. Because they're looking for a right answer. And there's just no right answers.
I mean, even in things like math and science, there are no right answers. You always have to push the boundaries of those things. And we have developed a system that's really based around testing and making sure you hit this specific level. We're not teaching people how to think anymore. We're actually trying to teach them what to think.
[0:18:11] BB: Yeah, it's scary. And trying to break that of kids and trying to get that civil discourse, or to be able to think outside the box and have that independence and have those conversations that can push people to question their process and their understanding, and just question the world around them, "Why?"
[0:18:28] JCG: I had a kid send me once, from our books. He wrote me a letter, and my publisher sent it to me. His name was Dexter Youngman, or something that was this great name. And he wrote it. He's like, "JOEL CHRISTIAN GILL," all caps, "JOEL CHRISTIAN GILL, I'm just asking you, did you write these books to make money?" This is what he writes. He goes, "Because I've looked up all of these things, and I've tried to do – I went to the library and everywhere, and I can't find any of these people in the books that I've been looking for." He goes, "So, I just want to know, did you just make them up just to make money?"
And at first I was thinking, I was like, "This kid doesn't understand. This is like deep research into black history. This is the reason that I do is because you can't find these people." And then I thought to myself, like, "He's questioning what he's reading." Right? That's what you should do, right? Don't take it for face value, right?
And so my first response to him was just to be like, "No." And then the second response was like, "Good question. This is the way you're supposed to engage with text, right? You're supposed to ask it questions, not look at it." And I think we miss that. And so when you have kids who are afraid to be creative and to think, and they have that choice paralysis, is because they're afraid to be wrong. And people need to understand it's okay to be wrong as long as you learn from it. Failure is part of the process. And most people just don't understand that. They just don't accept failure. You need to accept it and move on. Like, "Well, that didn't work. Try another thing."
[0:19:47] JA: Mm-hmm. I get so anxious because Becky and I are both teachers, and I don't want to steer the podcast too far into education, but I feel like we think a lot about assessment, right? And that kind of dominates the conversation. And within the structure of schooling, that's the framework really. We're constantly trying to push against that, right?
[0:20:04] JCG: But even then, I think assessment can function when you're looking at creativity. You can assess that, right? Because when you put people in positions to evaluate what a creative has done, right? Whether it's a panel, whether it's teachers, whether it's you in that situation, if you set the parameters to, "I want you to have exhibited the formal elements and principles of organization in four works. And then I want you to give me a written document that explains how you've done that." Then you can assess that, and you can say I assessed that they were able to meet these things through looking at their portfolio and their response to that. Absolutely. It's a very easy and specific thing that I think lots of people get in their heads. It's like, "Oh, it's just about like an A, B, or a C." And it's like, "Really. No." It's about, "Can you apply these things that we've given you in a way that is effective?" And how do you show that? Well, you show it through your portfolio. You show it through the actual work, and you make the work the most effective thing.
I hate grading. I know you guys probably still have to do it. I think it's dumb. BU makes me do it. And I talk to my students about it all the time. I'm like, "Because in five years, when you are out of school and you say I got a degree in art, are you going to show them your transcripts or the work?"
[0:21:13] BB: Right.
[0:21:13] JA: Right.
[0:21:14] JCG: What are you going to show? You're going to show the work. You're not going to show that. And I think that the work should be the end evaluation method.
[0:21:19] JA: A lot of this can be extrinsically motivating, right? But just earlier, you had talked about sort of your approach for yourself. The question you ask yourself is, "Is this dope?"
[0:21:31] JCG: Yeah.
[0:21:31] JA: I like this. And sometimes it's so challenging even to get a student to own their own taste for what they like and try to embed that into the work and get them to be intrinsically motivated.
[0:21:45] JCG: Well, I think there's this thing that happens in art. I've seen this in a lot – you can see it in a lot of artist writings, specifically 20th-century, early 20th-century artist writings. I always think about Kandinsky's Spirituality in Art, which I had to read. And I just remember reading that in college and then rereading it after college when I was teaching and just coming to the conclusion that this is just bullshit. 100%.
I remember I was teaching this in a seminar class, my first class, and I told my students, I said, "I think this is –" I said, "I strongly believe that this is bullshit." Because no artist sits in front of a work of art and goes, "Okay, there are these triangles, and we have to make sure that this thing is connected to this thing and connected to this thing. Nobody does that. Right? And I said the reason that people love what Kandinsky wrote when he wrote Spirituality in Art is because he stepped back after the making of it and sort of rationalized it, right? He looked at it after the fact.
And so in that context, I used to tell my students it's bullshit fired, right? It's like it holds water. He fired in a kiln, he put a glaze on it, right? It actually holds up to scrutiny because what he was saying was like, "I'm looking at this work after the fact, and I'm evaluating what I've done." And I said, "So, when you're doing this as artists, we have to think like chefs and not bakers, right?" When you're following a recipe for a bakery, you can't leave anything out or it doesn't get made, right? But if you're a cook and you're making something, you're just like, "You know what? I think a little bit more garlic will –" you do it that way as opposed to – and I think that's what you have to do.
Now, when you step back and you look at it, that's when you apply that process and sort of think about it. I think every artist, in my opinion, has ever written about their work has always written bullshit, right? Because we don't make stuff like that, right? We make it because we're thinking in our head, "This is dope." Right? And then you have to step back and you go, "Yeah, I'm really interested in the socioeconomic institutions of how capitalism affects the black community and how you could metaphorically translate that into a comic." I'm not thinking about that. And I'm like, "Wouldn't it be cool if capitalism was a monster?" That's the way I'm thinking about it, right? And I think that's what you have to do. But I think it's also important to have that – be able to do that other thing, too. Because sometimes people want to hear you sound like that, even though at your core, it's just like, "This was just really dope. I thought this would be really cool."
[0:23:58] BB: Well, getting back to your admirer, Dexter, in some ways, and thinking about you reference – your work is so much rooted in history, and biography, social justice. What was it that brought you to that in the first place? Is it the lack of voice that was available in this medium?
[0:24:15] JCG: No, it's actually way more superficial than that, which is really funny. I was struggling to figure out how to tell stories, and I started running across – I mean, there's a couple of things, right? When I was in undergrad, that same professor, Brian Sieveking, who was great – I actually just saw him recently. I asked him one thing because he used to paint all of these random things. He used to paint pictures of Jerry Lee Lewis or like Ty Cobb, right? He just painted these random things.
And then he told me this story, and he was talking about the stuff that had happened with the Contras. Because he was in college in the 80s. And he was like the stuff that happened with the Contras and how giving money to them was like setting up these death squads. And everything that was happening in South America was really bad. And he started doing these paintings about them. And he just like realized that as much as he cared about them, it wasn't something he was passionate about. He was like, "I'm just trying to say something that makes people think, right?" And at the same time, he was like really obsessed with Ty Cobb, right? Because he's like into baseball and sports. And so he started doing these paintings about Ty Cobb, right?
And a friend of his looked at the paintings, it's like, "These paintings are so much better than the other thing." And it was like what he learned from that, because he was also really big into folk art. He's probably got a better folk art collection than any museum in the country. But he was meeting Howard Finster and Mose Tolliver. And these guys were just painting what they liked. Paint what you like and what you're interested in.
And so that's what he told me to do, right? And so I struggled with that for a long time. And when I was drawing comics originally, I was going to tell my own story. I was going to tell this fictionalized version of my own sort of story, which I just didn't know how to tell a story at that point. And so I happened to run across this cartoonist, Box Brown, who I know now. And I sent him a message, and I said – I was cyberstalking him because I was like trying to learn about him.
[0:26:01] BB: As you do.
[0:26:02] JCG: As you do, right? And I sent him a message, because I typed in Box Brown into Google. And the story of Henry Box Brown shows up. And I'm like, "Well, you're a white kid in Philadelphia. Why do you have the name of an enslaved African?" And he said, "Well, that's funny. I'm square-shaped, so my friends call me Box." He said, "But I might do a comic about that guy someday." And I'm like, "That's a really good idea. I'm going to draw a comic about him." So, I drew that comic about Box Brown.
And then subsequently, people started telling me other stories. They were like, "Have you heard of this one? Have you heard of that one?" And so when I got published, the way I was thinking about these stories and a lot was like, "Oh, this is important history." But it was more like quirky little stories that hipsters will – my favorite joke is, what do you call a group of white guys in a fedora? A podcast.
I would say things like a hipster. Hipsters will spend $9 for avocado on toast. They will buy these $3 mini comics, right? And I did my first book signing in Maine. One of my stories in Strange Fruit, my first book, was the story of Malaga Island, which was a bunch of formerly enslaved Native Americans and white people who intermarried and lived on this island. And then they had been there for about 50 years. And they were completely wiped out by the state of Maine in the 1900s. The houses were burnt down. The people were moved to the home for the feeble-minded. Some of them were castrated. They dug up their dead and reentered their dead. It was terrible. Maine actually apologized for it in 2011 because it was a hundred years to the day that this thing had happened.
And so I was telling this story, and this guy comes up to me and he had tears in his eyes, and he was like, "Thank you for telling this important story." And it dawned on me that this was not just stories that hipsters would like. These are important stories that make this connection. And so from that moment on, I think I was fired by this idea that history had not been told. It wasn't originally like this idea of uncovering stories. This was just like a vehicle for my creativity. This is a way to understand how a story works. Because when you're telling the story of someone's life, they already have like a spark, and an escalation, and a denouement. And they have all of these different things that stories actually have. And I didn't have that previously. And using those to help me figure out how to make stories was the thing that pushed it along.
And then it just became – I just kept discovering more and more things, more and more ideas. And the more I read, I became a de facto. I don't have a degree in history, but I've probably read more historical research papers than most historians. People on the internet are like, "We know you're an Americanist. What did you concentrate on when you were in college?" And I'm like, "Painting." All of the history that I've learned has been from just like didactic reading about it and doing deep dives into people's dissertations about black enslaved women's agency when it comes to being conjoined twins. It's the kind of stuff that I spent time doing.
By reading more and sort of coming to this conclusion, it's sort of the thing that drove me and fired my ideas. And even the fiction story that I'm telling is really deeply rooted in history and how history works. And even though it's like a fantastical, supernatural superhero story, there's a lot of subtle history involved in it.
[0:29:12] JA: You're definitely obviously a great storyteller. Because like the way that you were able to summarize kind of how you struck a vein, I guess, in your creativity, you found something that begot something else that you started to make connections with other people that ended up telling you stories. And you kept moving through that. And I feel like that's something that I wish for everyone, to be able to find something that is both resonant to them but also other people respond to.
[0:29:38] JCG: Yeah. My wife gets mad at me about this because she's like, "You're lucky because your job is to do the thing that you love. And then when you're not at your job, you're doing the thing that you love."
[0:29:47] JA: Sure.
[0:29:49] JCG: She's always angry about that. She's like, "Not everybody can get that." I'm like, "I know. I understand that." And I think that's the thing that people misunderstand. Because we think, when we are creatives, that we have to do some big, bold. I was just talking to you about this Saturday. We were just talking about this. You have to do some big, bold thing. And it's like, "No." You just do things that make you feel good. Because when you do those things that sort of like make you think this is really amazing, other people will feel that too, right? It's like my professor Brian told me, he was like, "When I did those paintings about Ty Cobb, which nobody really cares about, but people could see my passion in those paintings, right?"
It's the same thing with Howard Finster painting Elvis as a baby, or Henry Ford's wife, or the path to hell was paved with good intentions, or Mose Tolliver's watermelon slice, or Freedom Bus. Those were things he was interested in, right? And I say when you paint the things, it's not being disingenuous in your ideas, right? And at some point, people become complacent, and they make the same thing over and over and over again. Which I remember one time, I caught into a talk show that was on WBUR when I was in grad school, and they were talking about a Basquiat work. And I'm like, "Yeah, Basquiat's paintings, at the end of his life, became these things that were just feeding his addiction." Right? It wasn't until he started painting with Andy Warhol that he actually started doing something interesting again.
Because for a long time, those paintings were exactly the same. He just knew that he could just make this. And people would spin, and he could get a hit, he could get more heroin, right? This is a thing he could do. I mean, it wasn't until he started making stuff with Andy Warhol. And Andy Warhol started making stuff again at that same time, too, that you can see that they weren't just resting anymore. They were actually moving forward. Some of those are really interesting paintings that we don't see now because sometimes people just get it in their head, like, "I have to make some grand statement." Not realizing that it's just being sincere in the work that you're making.
[0:31:39] JA: Yeah, I think I heard it described once that artists model creative wayfinding. It's like you're always moving from one source of water to the next, and you're just navigating gradually. And I think maybe what guides you is that sincerity, right?
[0:31:52] JCG: I think it's really important because you can have success without sincerity. I know somebody that – I won't say their name. But I know somebody who's in my head right now who I would argue is the least sincere creative. That doesn't mean she's not a good person, right? It doesn't mean she's not a good person. And it doesn't mean that she doesn't make good stuff. It just means I just know that it's not really about the passion of driving. It's about some measure of success that she's trying to reach, right? It doesn't matter how she gets there, right? But for me, it matters, right? It matters how I get there. I want people to read my books. I want my books to be turned into pop culture. This is what I want. This is the thing that I'm passionate about. I want to tell these types of stories.
But her is just like, "Oh, if this is the thing that'll pay attention to me, I'll do that. If this is the thing, then I'll do that." And it's always a bunch of different things. And I just think that you just have to be careful. You don't want to be insincere, but you also want to be cognizant of the idea that there might be something that is successful, right? And that people will make – my professor in undergrad said, "People will want that." So, I have to balance those things, and that's not an easy thing to do.
[0:32:55] BB: How do you personally define success as an artist, a comic, and a storyteller?
[0:33:00] JCG: I don't know. I don't think I've ever really thought about it. I just kind of make stuff.
[0:33:05] JA: Success is doing the thing.
[0:33:06] JCG: Yeah. I feel like I don't really think about – there's always a hope, like, "Oh, this will be a hit, or that'll be a hit, right?" But, really, it's just about the work in and of itself is the thing that is – I used to tell my students all the time, and I still do, make the work because you want to make it. And if that's the reason why you're making it, it doesn't matter what anybody says afterwards, right? That will be the thing that is important to you. And so I think just making something that I feel I want to show people is the success.
[0:33:34] JA: It sounds like that's the thing that I think you mentioned earlier that your wife was jealous of you for, is people just trade their labor and time for money, and it's like very transactional.
[0:33:45] JCG: Yeah.
[0:33:45] JA: And you're in a position where you can trade your time for money but also creative fulfillment.
[0:33:51] JCG: Yeah. Exactly. I think that's the thing. And it's a difficult thing, but it's absolutely possible. Any of you listening, if you are a student, an art student, you can do this. Anybody tell you you can't, there's a way to do it. There are plenty of artists who are doing it. You just have to be open to a lot of different avenues of creativity.
[0:34:07] JA: Right on.
[0:34:08] BB: What is one thing you wish more people understood about being a cartoonist?
[0:34:12] JCG: I think it's really funny because people don't – when I say cartoonist – it's like I was doing another interview once and they were like, "I don't want to call you a cartoonist because it feels like you're so much more." And I'm like, "If you think it's simple, try it."
[0:34:22] BB: Yeah. Yeah.
[0:34:23] JCG: Try it. Right? Just trying to distill human emotions down to a very economical sort of idea, just this thing that you absolutely will get is a difficult thing, right? People look at the Peanuts, and they're just like, "Oh, Charlie Brown is really easy to draw." But you didn't draw it. It's the same thing as a Jackson Pollock painting, right? It's the exact same thing. It's very simple and you can see it, but it wasn't your idea and you did not figure it out, right? You did not come to the end of that conclusion. That's what I think I wish people understood. I mean, I guess a lot of people do.
And it's not about drawing perfectly, right? It's about this seamless transition between words and pictures, so that when you are reading the story, that you're not cognizant of one or the other, right? You shouldn't be thinking, "I'm reading words. I'm looking at pictures." You should be absorbing this. This is what I was telling you about the other day, right? We were talking about this the other day, and it was two books, neither one I'm going to say. But one book, I understand why this book did not get any awards, was because it had lots of words, right? And you feel cognizant that you're reading the words. And then this other one, which did not have as much words to it, that won a lot of awards. And it was because there weren't that many words in it. And I think it's like there's no specific number. It's more about the seamless transition, right?
And I think what cartoonists tend to do, and I'm positive that I'm not the only one, because some of my students are the same way, sometimes I think I wrote something down, and then I look at my sketchbook and I actually drew it. And sometimes I think I drew something, and I look at my sketchbook and I actually wrote it down. Right? Because we're thinking about stories. It's not about the individual image; that's the important thing. It's about the combination. We do all of that for one thing, right?
[0:36:07] JA: Yeah, it seems like like a hyperspecific literacy.
[0:36:10] JCG: But it's a hyperspecific literacy that is embedded in everybody, right? The ways in which we use comics to tell story are really focused on visual literacy and how people really understand images. And it's something that we are inundated with on a regular basis. And so what cartoonists tend to do is to tap into that creative literacy and that semiotics of understanding about how images work and basically tell you a story. And it's like the thing that's the hardest thing about that is like if a picture tells a thousand words, let it. What other words are you going to add to it? Because a picture's got a thousand words. So, how many more words do you need to add? Right?
[0:36:49] JA: Chip Kidd. Did you ever see his TikTok?
[0:36:51] BB: Oh, yeah, yeah.
[0:36:53] JCG: I know Chip.
[0:36:53] JA: Oh, you do?
[0:36:54] JCG: Yeah.
[0:36:54] JA: Oh, right on. That's cool. Yeah, it's you either show an apple or the word apple. You never show an apple and the word.
[0:37:03] JCG: And the word. Yeah, exactly.
[0:37:03] BB: Right. Graphic design 101.
[0:37:06] JCG: He just did the editing for a book for a friend of mine.
[0:37:08] JA: Oh, cool. That's great.
[0:37:10] BB: I think we've got to jump into some rapid-fire questions now.
[0:37:12] JA: Okay.
[0:37:13] BB: So, what other artist has influenced you the most?
[0:37:18] JCG: Oh, that's a hard one. Chris Ware is probably – Chris Square is probably the greatest living cartoonist.
[0:37:25] JA: And then we got a run of just favorites. Starting with what's your favorite color?
[0:37:30] JCG: I don't have a favorite color.
[0:37:31] BB: Favorite scent?
[0:37:32] JCG: Lilac. Lavender. Lavender. Lavender.
[0:37:36] JA: Sound?
[0:37:37] JCG: Favorite sound? A fan.
[0:37:39] BB: Oh, that's a good one. White noise kind of. Yeah.
[0:37:41] JCG: White noise. Yeah, white noises.
[0:37:43] JA: Yeah, I'm trying to make a Kendrick reference.
[0:37:48] JCG: He's a fan.
[0:37:50] BB: Favorite texture or touch?
[0:37:52] JCG: I don't think I have a favorite texture or touch. I don't think that's something I've ever thought about.
[0:37:55] JA: Okay. What's the most inspiring location you've traveled to?
[0:38:00] JCG: I think probably Martha's Vineyard. And that's more about just the people there than it is like, because it's really like my house in New Boston. It's really the similar, but it's just the people there. That's probably most inspirational.
[0:38:10] BB: What is one of the last new things you've learned?
[0:38:14] JCG: The last new thing I learned? There's this eraser in Clip Studio Paint that's like erase along the edge. So you can over-color things, and then you can just take this one eraser and it will erase up until the line. It's called erase along the edge.
[0:38:27] JA: That's a game-changer.
[0:38:28] JCG: Yeah.
[0:38:29] JA: Our clincher question. If you could go back in time, what advice would you give your younger self?
[0:38:34] JCG: Draw comics earlier. Yeah, probably wouldn't have changed anything other than just like also draw comics earlier.
[0:38:40] JA: Stay with your high school girlfriend.
[0:38:41] JCG: Stay with my high school girlfriend even if I'm still painting. You know what I mean? Even if you have two girlfriends.
[0:38:49] JCG: Not in real life. Not in reality.
[0:38:51] BB: Well, Joel, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. There's so much more that we could unpack, I'm sure. But it's been great just to kind of peel away a little bit and learn a little bit about your experience, background. And what you are presenting is so important, I think, especially for our students, the books that you're producing. I think I've learned more about African-American culture and history from you and reviewing your work over the last few years than I ever did in school, and I'm grateful for that.
[0:39:21] JCG: Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
[0:39:23] JA: I mean, this has been a great pleasure. And I wish we had two, three more hours to chat.
[0:39:27] BB: Yeah, I know.
[0:39:29] JA: But it's all right. We'll just have another quick hour instead.
[0:39:30] JA: Yeah, absolutely.
[0:39:31] BB: There you go.
[0:39:31] JA: Awesome.
[0:39:32] BB, JA, JCG: Show us your creative guts.
[0:39:39] BB: Another huge thank you to Joel for joining us on the podcast today. I'm pretty blown away. You have a really wonderful, rich background with Joel from when you were a student, but now seem to be pretty close friends. And he even officiated at your wedding.
[0:39:54] JA: Yeah. If you ever had a student that was just like constantly bugging you and want to be buddy-buddy with you, I'm basically that student for him.
[0:40:01] BB: You were that kid.
[0:40:03] JA: Basically. Yeah. Yeah. But I was really grateful to have him on to be able to share some of his insights, sort of introduce himself to our community, and just tell us a little bit more about his work. And yeah, so much to take in.
[0:40:15] BB: It is. And I got so much information that not only learning about his background and his creative practice, but also different things to consider as an educator, the advice to offer to kids on how important it is to just keep on learning, and keep on practicing, and trying, and failing, and failing again. But also asking your students, and this is something I'm looking forward to doing, is what can you teach me? Because that's so important. We are not the masters of all of the information of the world and all of the artistic practices in the world. And what can our students teach us is exciting to think about. And I look forward to kind of applying that at some point.
[0:40:53] JA: We always talk about our education background, but that's because we're mentors and we're trying to walk the walk with our students. And something that always resonates to me, and I never get tired of hearing it, is that idea of you just got to keep doing. Just keep doing, keep making, keep pushing. And if you're out there and you have a little bit of impostor syndrome like myself, I just always try to remember.
[0:41:13] BB: We all have it. We all have it. Yeah, failure is part of the process. And that was something that Joel brought up a couple of times. So, I really appreciate that.
[0:41:21] JA: Definitely. You can learn more about Joel and his work by visiting the links in the episode description and on our website, creativegutspodcast.com.
[0:41:29] BB: You can also find Creative Guts Podcast on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Discord. If you're not on social media, but you want to stay in the know about what we're doing, join our newsletter list. We're on Substack, and you can find the link to sign up on our web page.
[0:41:44] JA: This episode is sponsored in part by the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts. Thank you to our friends in Rochester for their support for the show.
[0:41:50] BB: Did you know that donations to Creative Guts not only helps with our administrative expenses? Your donations go towards the development of programming like our annual film festival, Zines, and Art 'Round the Room. Programs like these are only made possible with a little help from listeners like you.
[0:42:06] JA: If you like listening and want to support Creative Guts, you can make a tax-deductible donation today. Learn about our sponsorship levels on our web page. Interact with our content on social media, purchase some merch, whatever you're able to do, we appreciate you.
[0:42:19] BB: Thank you for tuning in. We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode of Creative Guts.
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