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News Briefs featuring James Sturm
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Publishers Weekly interviews JAMES STURM
Updated February 9, 2010
Teaching and Drawing: James Sturm Returns with Market Day
by Sasha Watson
Like so many creative professionals, James Sturm wears more than one hat. Both a dedicated comics educator and a critically acclaimed cartoonist, Sturm is publishing a new work of fiction, Market Day, which will be released this spring by Drawn and Quarterly. The book is set in an Eastern European Jewish community in the early 1900s and turns on the difficulty of balancing creation with commerce.
Sturm co-founded The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS), a unique M.F.A. and certificate program in White River Junction, Vermont, which he now runs and where he teaches. If it’s hard to balance these activities, that doesn’t make him any less successful at them. His comic The Fantastic Four, Unstable Molecules, which used a heightented sense of realism to reimagines the Fantastic Four with new backgrounds, won the 2004 Eisner Award for Best Limited Series; Adventures in Cartooning: How to Turn Your Doodles Into Comics, a teaching tool for children, which he co-wrote with former students Alexis Frederick-Frost and Andrew Arnold, is in its fourth printing from First Second. CCS attracts some of the best talents in cartooning, as both students and teachers.
The main character in Sturm’s new book, Market Day, Mendleman, is a rug-maker. Mendleman’s plaintive “how I long to be in my studio surrendering to the steady rhythms of the work” will feel familiar to any artist who has struggled, as Mendleman does, to sell his works in the marketplace. The quiet starkness of Sturm’s drawings depicting the landscape in which Mendleman’s story takes place contrasts with the emotional rollercoaster he rides during the 24 hours of the tale. Sturm talked with PW Comics Week by phone from White River Junction about the book, the challenges of the creative life, and CCS.
PWCW: How did you come to set Market Day in this particular place and time of Eastern Europe in the early 1900s?
JS: I was in grad school in New York in the early 90’s, and I remember picking up books of Roman Vishniac photos and another book called A World at Twilight: A Portrait of the Jewish Communities of Eastern Europe Before the Holocaust by Lyonel Reiss, and knowing I wanted to set something in that environment. There's something about photography in general that’s very evocative, and I was fascinated by the material I found. As I flip through the photos, someone's smile will remind me of my wife or her cousin. You realize that you are related in some way to these people. Knowing what happened to them makes it even more poignant, and you want to bring that lost world back to life in some way.
PWCW: And yet the story’s themes feel very contemporary, too. Mendleman’s issues are also those of a contemporary artist.
JS: The only way for me to bring it back to life was not to make it a folktale but to overlay my own issues on it and make it pertinent that way. And, yes, these are my challenges, how to follow my own muse and do this work that sustains me spiritually and also attend to my other responsibilities of teaching and running a school and being a parent to two small children.
PWCW: So how do you pull off doing all that?
JS: It’s a constant balancing act, and it changes as you get older. When you're younger you can live and breathe it; you can wake up and roll to your drawing table or stay up working until three in the morning. Now I have to get up and get my kids to school and you can bet, if I stayed up until three the night before, I'll have a big fight with one of my children. I did go to MacDowell about a year and a half ago and two weeks there was like six months of work. It set me up for the next year and a half. I went there with a stack of penciled pages and I just started inking. There was nobody knocking on my door, no email, I was just inking all day. I did like forty pages. Having the time to sink into the work that way was just an amazing opportunity.
PWCW: Do you find it difficult specifically to balance your teaching and your own cartooning work?
JS: Well, it’s a double-edged sword because the difficulty of teaching is that it takes time away from your work, but I started a school because I love teaching. And I do believe that there's a place for teaching art, for creating an environment where students can learn from one another. I think being a working artist, that brings a lot into the classroom. The teaching can energize my work, too. It holds me to a higher standard.
PWCW: What made you decide to found CCS? Were you responding to a specific need you saw out there?
JS: At the time, I was attending small press expos, like SPX in Maryland, and there'd be all these cartoonists creating comics there. These were real auteurs with the same passion and intent as a poet or a sculptor would take to their medium, but none of them did this work in their classes, it was all outside their art department curriculum. There were only a couple of schools that taught cartooning and they were mostly part of bigger art and design schools. I just thought that curriculum could be done a lot better.
PWCW: I imagine your students really thrive in that environment.
JS: I’m really thrilled by the quality of the students. When the majority, if not all of your classmates, are mature and ready to learn and engaged, the work is better all around because you’re challenging each other. I think the isolation of White River Junction with its long winters, builds a certain kind of solidarity among the students. Everyone’s waiting out the winter and buckling down. There’s no Starbucks to sit around and people watch. For the most part, the people who come here are serious about working. The students really are inspiring for me.
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MARKET DAY in Tablet
Updated February 2, 2010
On the Bookshelf
Graphic novels and vivid memoirs
by Josh Lambert
Writing fiction about writing fiction can be a tricky business, so novelists often substitute an artist of another sort—most typically, a painter—as their protagonists, examining through them the vicissitudes of a creative vocation. James Sturm, creator of the critically acclaimed graphic novel The Golem’s Mighty Swing and a founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, chooses an unusual craftsman as his alter ego for an extraordinary graphic-novel-style künstlerroman. In Market Day (Drawn & Quarterly, March), Sturm’s stand-in, challenged to balance commitment to his craft against financial responsibilities, is a Jewish rug weaver in early 20th-century Eastern Europe. Sturm illustrates this milieu with precise, somber drawings based in part on the photographs of Roman Vishniac and Alter Kacyzne.
Sturm’s protagonist struggles with the commercial constraints on his skilled labor, a problem grounded in the historical experiences of Jewish artisans. In a classic 1970 study of labor activism in Eastern Europe, now back in print as a paperback—Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Worker’s Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge, February)—the historian Ezra Mendelsohn remarks that by the late 19th century, “the Jewish weaver in Bialystock was in a sorry plight. By the end of the century, it was obvious that hand looms were no longer profitable.” Mendelsohn analyzes efforts by the Jewish proletariat to organize and assesses the consequences of those campaigns.
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JAMES STURM interviewed by BOOKLIST
Updated March 20, 2008
Booklist Interview: James Sturm: Comic Visionary (Eye of the Sturm).
Karp, Jesse (author).
FEATURE. First published March 15, 2008 (Booklist).
Comics visionary James Sturm gives his work an emotional depth and complexity that allow “small” stories to capture the significance of entire historical eras. An Eisner Award winner, he is director and cofounder of the Vermont-based Center for Cartoon Studies, a school devoted exclusively to cartooning and sequential storytelling.
BKL: What comic books in your early life made you sit up and take notice?
STURM: I was introduced to comics in our local newspaper. It wasn’t long after that I began accumulating Fawcett Peanuts paperback collections. You can’t overestimate the impact Charles Schulz had on my generation of cartoonists. My next big discovery was The Fantastic Four, which led me to other Marvel comics. I had an incredibly intense relationship with those comics. They were a crucial part of my childhood.
BKL: Weren’t you a production assistant on RAW, Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s generation-defining alternative comic?
STURM: My time at RAW was one of the most important parts of my cartooning education. I was exposed to some amazing books and cartoonists. One of my tasks was to shoot photostats of a chapter of MAUS—there were no desktop scanners in those days. I would go into the darkroom and pull a MAUS page from a plastic sleeve. Underneath that page would be the previous draft, and beneath that, another. This was before most cartoonists were doing graphic novels, and I was struggling with the process, trying to figure out how to work through a longer story. Being exposed to Art’s process was a revelation.
BKL: What authors do you count among your great inspirations?
STURM: I love Steven Millhauser. He’s really interested in underlying mysteries and structures, and he poetically articulates the creative process. I like Russell Banks and Allegra Goodman; both craft fantastic stories in which neither a character nor fate seems to have the upper hand. And Richard Ford, for the way he weaves the mundane into the larger social fabric (and he’s the master of the parenthetical comment). I’m also a huge fan of Paul Auster, whose unpretentiousness allows him to take the reader into some wild places, and also Philip Roth, for his total commitment to interpreting his world through the novel.
BKL: In Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow and The Golem’s Mighty Swing, you produced suspenseful and exciting baseball sequences. What would you tell a student of cartooning who wanted to create the same effect?
STURM: Try to capture the feel and rhythm of the game and pay attention to its subtleties. Of course, it helps if you like baseball. But I would also recommend looking at Japanese baseball manga. American baseball comics have been pretty bad, always halting and truncated. The Japanese get it right; they let baseball unfold at a leisurely pace.
BKL: What place do graphic novels have as educational tools?
STURM: My hope is that Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow is so visually engaging that the issues of racism, education, and violence it deals with emerge naturally from the story. Nothing will turn readers off faster than material that comes across as pedantic or preachy. Compelling stories make readers want to learn or do more. I remember as a kid watching the bike-racing movie Breaking Away. The next day, I was on my bike, inspired to ride. I hope kids get a glimpse of real life in the biographical books, feel how compelling the person’s world was, and want to explore more of it on their own. Google and Wikipedia can provide a biography in seconds. It’s stories that give information meaning. It was after Columbine when reactionary forces started blaming and destroying computer games and DVDs that I realized comics were finally off the hook and free to roam classrooms and libraries.
Was it so long ago that comics were considered detrimental to a child’s educational development? Now teachers and librarians are thrilled to see students turn away from a computer to read.
BKL: Does the Center have many women students?
STURM: More than I saw in my other teaching gigs, but still far too few. Although historically women have not had the same impact on comics as men, it’s wrong to see their contributions to visual narratives only through the prism of comics. I’m more inspired and influenced by the work of Virginia Lee Burton and Marie Hall Ets than, say, Milton Caniff. Their work flows so effortlessly and has a spellbinding emotional core. Burton’s page designs are as revelatory as Will Eisner’s. Ets’ gentle stories and expressive drawings are positively enchanting. Male cartoonists of the same era seem crass and constipated by comparison. I’m pleased to see a lot of great female cartoonists emerging right now—Eleanor Davis (Bugbear), Rutu Modan (Exit Wounds), and Gabrielle Bell (Book of Ordinary Things). Their work is as exciting as anyone’s out there.
BKL: How do you expect to see the art form evolving over the next decade?
STURM: The work that ushered in this new era of graphic novels was inspired by comic books and reflects their influence on density and page layout. In the coming years, I think we’ll see more graphic novels shaped from an aesthetic informed from children’s picture books, graphic design, and painting. Drawn & Quarterly just released White Rapids, which is more influenced by graphic design than traditional comic books. Some of the work featured in the Kramer’s Ergot anthology appears to be informed by a sensibility not derived from comic books.
BKL: What graphic novels are you reading now, and what excites you as a creator?
STURM: I most recently read Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds. Adriane Tomine’s Shortcomings was excellent. I read Sardine, Moomin, and Little Lulu to my kids. I also get excited seeing CCS students grow over the course of the two years they are in school. I have a front-row seat to the creative journeys of talented, young cartoonists. A few years from now, many of these students will have lots of readers turning pages.
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JAMES STURM interviewed by Inkstuds
Updated February 21, 2008
James Sturm
INKSTUDS
Feb. 14, 2008
James Sturm is a man of many talents. He is the skilled cartoonist behind the Golems Mighty Swing (collected in the swell D&Q book: Gods, Gold and Golems). His latest book is Satchel Paige, a unique story using the life of a pioneering baseball player to explore a difficult time for African Americans in the south. James is also the founder of The Center for Cartoon Studies, helping a whole new generation of comix folks create some comiky goodness.
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JAMES STURM'S AMERICA reviewed by The North Adams Transcript
Updated January 10, 2008
Hidden American stories revealed
By John E. Mitchell
01/03/2008
NORTH ADAMS TRANSCRIPT
In James Sturm's "America: God, Gold and Golems," the United States is portrayed in a trilogy of tales that draw from its excesses in fervor, greed and bigotry through a lens of acceptability.
"The Revival" tells of a Kentucky revival meeting in 1801, where true believers gather to create an atmosphere more like a refugee camp than anything else. Joseph and Sarah are traveling to meet healer Elijah Young, on whom they've placed desperate faith to solve their problems. What Sturm understands is that as destructive as the old-time religious fire could be, it was also the fuel of change — somehow in their reckless search for a brush with a miracle, Joseph and Sarah find the real meaning of spiritual rebirth in context of a new country to be created.
In "Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight," a mine in 1886 Idaho becomes the center point of hate and greed. Built on the ashes of a lynching of Chinese miners, Soloman's Gulch is the place where misguided mine owner Ned Weeks is fixated on a payload of treasure and a workers' revolt peppers the turgid camp dramas that will overtake his greedy quest.
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"The Golem's Mighty Swing" introduces the Stars of David, a traveling, all-Jewish baseball team that goes from town to town playing local clubs in exhibition games and struggling for to live. It's a tale of immigrants walking that tightrope to assimilate while still retaining some of their culture. What ends up happening too often is that the assimilation compromises their beliefs — team leader Noah Strauss points out in the beginning that they play on the Sabbath and that's just the way it has to be in America.
There are larger challenges to fitting in, however — most notably a hovering bigotry that seems to be constantly swooping down for the kill. There are also the more subtle ones, such as the opportunity to sell out their culture. When a promoter offers them the chance for big money by having one team member dress up as the creature of Jewish legend, the Golem, the team at first turns it down, but then changes their mind when they find themselves stranded in a small town. With the introduction of the Golem to the team, though, the crowds get rowdier — and more hateful.
Sturm has a great talent for emotionally honest stories told through straightforward means — his no-nonsense style, with its clean black lines and olive washes, portray the faces and architecture of times gone by with a simplicity that doubles as power.
Sturm's vision of America is one of crowds where individuals must duck in and out according to the movement of the overwhelming throngs. Decisions are made by the mob, though change often happens despite the stifling movement meant to stomp progress dead in its tracks. Sturm also presents America as a country of outsiders bumping up against other outsiders — and the frictions from those interactions. In this way, the country is a chemical reaction, but once the initial explosion passes, more subtle changes take place, and this understanding of the delicacy past the bombast is at the center Sturm's mastery.
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ACME NOVELTY DATEBOOK: VOL. 2, JAMES STURM'S AMERICA reviewed by Metro Boston News
Updated December 21, 2007
Picture pages
Last-minute gifts for the comic-book nerd in your life
ROUNDUP. No gift says, “I’m going to make broad assumptions about how you enjoy spending your time,” quite like a book. If you’re going to go there, why not give the gift of a graphic novel? It’s like a book, but with pictures. Everybody loves pictures.
For the artsy-fartsy giftee:
‘The Acme Novelty Datebook, Vol. 2,’ Chris Ware
(Drawn & Quarterly, $40)
Chris Ware is the most celebrated artiste among contemporary cartoonists. (That’s what happens when you guest edit an issue of McSweeney’s and become the first cartoonist ever to have his work serialized in the New York Times.) The “Datebook” series gathers selections from his sketchbooks, giving an absolutely miserable (and lovely) portrait of what life drawing pictures for a living is like.
For the giftee who missed it the first time:
‘James Sturm’s America: God, Gold and Golems,’ James Sturm
(Drawn & Quarterly, $25)
Before he became the grand high muckity-muck at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, Sturm authored “The Golem’s Mighty Swing,” a gorgeous book about a barnstorming, all-Jewish baseball team set in the 1920s. This new volume also includes two of the artist’s earlier cracks at historical-fiction comics, the graphic novellas “Hundreds of Feet Before Daylight” and “The Revival.”
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JAMES STURM'S AMERICA and WHITE RAPIDS in the Edmonton Journal
Updated December 21, 2007
Save bookshelf space for graphic novels
From Popeye to James Sturm, 2007 saw steady flow of high-quality titles with great artwork and writing
Gilbert A. Bouchard
Wednesday, December 19
EDMONTON JOURNAL
- James Sturm's America (Drawn & Quarterly Press, hardcover). While a bit on the dark side, James Sturm's America was undoubtedbly one of the best things (in any medium) I read this year. This talented trio of period narratives ranges from a heartbreaking story of pioneer hardship set in an early 19th-century evangelical revival meeting to a quirky tale about itinerant Jewish baseball players in the 1920s.
- White Rapids by Pascal Blanchet (Drawn & Quarterly Press, tradepaper). Words don't do justice to this quirky tome by Canada's Pascal Blanchet, but if I had to pick two, I'd settle for "heartwarming" and "funky." Using a nostalgically laden visual vocabulary that evokes mid-century advertising illustration, this book tells the compelling rise-and-fall story of the tiny, titular White Rapids, a hamlet built to service a huge Quebec hydro-project.
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JAMES STURM'S AMERICA recommended by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Updated December 10, 2007
Give comics lovers something to laugh about
By ED HALL, KHARI J. SAMPSON
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 12/08/07
Feeling troubled because you've got no idea what to get that comics connoisseur or nostalgia nut on your gift list?
Let the AJC's comics reviewers come to the rescue with a few suggestions:
Two shorter tales open James Sturm's America: God, Gold and Golems (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95), but what makes the book indispensable is its revival of Sturm's out-of-print instant classic "The Golem's Mighty Swing." That story, about a fictitious 1920s minor league baseball team whose gimmick is dressing one of its players like the monster-hero from Jewish folklore, brings to sepia-toned life an obscure American past.
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JAMES STURM'S AMERICA in The Santa Fe New Mexican
Updated December 4, 2007
Comics old and new explore basic themes
By Brandon Garcia
10/28/2007
SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN
Going deeper into history is James Sturm's America, God, Gold and Golems (Drawn & Quarterly), a collection of three gorgeous stories spanning from 1801 to the 1920s, each one presenting a unique slice of Americana with its rewards and consequences.
Starting with a revival shortly after the nation's founding — the 19th-century's Coachella festival, apparently — Sturm presents a rough America, dangerous to her citizens. As a vocal portion of Americans likes to say, the nation has always been religious and this story illustrates that. It is easy to imagine with such uncomfortable surroundings the respite availed to them by faith but Sturm also presents this with caution, showing how, while tempting, reliance on faith alone can be unrewarding.
From there, he segues to a boomtown, with its promise of riches, demonstrating how although the nation may have been wild and filled with opportunity, it often came with a human cost. Sturm seems to be saying that humans succumb to greed and a nation like this one provides a dangerous number of opportunities for us to indulge in it.
The first two stories are fairly simple morality plays. But the third and longest, about a traveling Jewish baseball team, is considerably more ambiguous. Figuring out how the unremitting anti-Semitism the team faces and the gimmicky minstrel show it uses to draw in crowds work in concert seems to be key, but I haven't quite figured it out. Certainly, America has had plenty of race problems and, with equal certainty, sport is one of the great equalizers. That Sturm used baseball is also certainly significant. Somehow bigotry, capitalism and baseball became entwined in this story and as enjoyable as it was to read, its puzzling nature is another reason why I recommend it.
But that's America: Just when I think I have the country figured out, someone like Sturm throws me a curve.
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JAMES STURM'S AMERICA reviewed by Seven Days
Updated November 22, 2007
Moving Pictures
Book Review: James Sturm's America: God, Gold, and Golems
BY MATT FRASSICA
11.14.07
SEVEN DAYS
I'd bet anything that James Sturm is a picker of scabs. The part-time Vermont resident and director of White River Junction's Center for Cartoon Studies specializes in graphic novels chronicling historical wounds, from scrapes to gashes. Like humorist and National Public Radio commentator Sarah Vowell, Sturm is interested in the personal stories that combine to make up a big historical fact. But Sturm's fictional tales, in their particular tragic absurdity, give us more than social history — they give us art.
Sturm's America: God, Gold, and Golems aims to be a history of the United States in three chapters, each of which was originally published on its own. Through these three stories, the author's America emerges as a place of racial violence, religious fervor, exploitation and cruelty — but also generosity, humanity and humor. In other words, he paints an immediately recognizable portrait of our national character.
The first story, "The Revival,‚" opens in a dark, leafless wood in Kentucky at the turn of the 19th century. An exhausted couple trudges toward a revival camp meeting. They have walked, sleepless, for days in order to hear the preacher Elijah Young. They carry with them nothing but their faith — and the body of their daughter, dead from a snakebite. Since they have heard that "the stricken heal and the fallen rise‚" when Young preaches, they expect a miracle. But what they find at the Cane Ridge camp meeting is a grotesque millenarian spectacle: Zealous preachers threaten end times, while their listeners fall into fits and speak in tongues. After Young fails to return the girl to life, her mother holds the body aloft and, in four excruciating panels, implores her God to do the job.
To do justice to scenes like this, Sturm employs a powerful visual technique. He sustains moments of high emotion through a series of frames that differ from one another only in small increments, as if we were observing a scene lit by a strobe light, or looking at a flipbook one page at a time.
The second story, "Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight,‚" documents desperation and madness in a mining town in 1880s Idaho. In the opening section, two white business partners, Jem and Ned, lead a massacre of the town's Chinese residents and claim holders. Sturm renders this violence with unflinching intensity. After Jem dies in a mining accident, Ned is left with the burden of operating a barren mine — and managing impatient workers. These pressures, added to the grief of losing his beloved Jem, drive Ned to binge drinking, violent outbursts and worse. Sturm's talent for economical evocation of atmosphere lets him conjure the abandoned-carnival eeriness of the town in every frame. His rendering of imagination and dreams is creepily effective — as befits a story about the delusions of the gold rush.
But the story is about more than the ineluctable return of violence to a town consecrated by bloodshed. A second story line, in which a dying man in the care of Jem's widow turns out to possess a sack full of money, entwines with the main plot. This subplot reveals that the town's non-mining residents — women — are no less trapped than the men who blast tunnels out of the earth.
The final story, "The Golem's Mighty Swing," takes up more than half the book. Golems, soulless creatures made from mud by rabbis, have been lumbering through popular culture recently as Jewish avengers. In Sturm's take on the golem myth, a barnstorming baseball team of the 1920s called the Stars of David decide to costume their lone black player, Henry Bell, as a golem of swat. They hire a publicist to hype the game, and the golem gimmick fills the stands. But, as with the legendary Golem of Prague, their creation has unintended, violent consequences.
The graphic novelist, like a film director, tells a story through images as much as words. And reading Sturm is a little like watching Alfred Hitchcock direct a Todd Solondz script — he's got the eye-catching compositions of the auteur and the intense, painful curiosity of the squirm-inducing indie. His landscapes are particularly expressive: When the Stars of David bus wends through hilly country at night, the queasy, improbable topography calls to mind Krazy Kat and Van Gogh in equal parts. Sturm makes us feel by making us see — especially when his characters fall silent. His use of atmospheric detail, montage and body language turns speechless sequences into chamber dramas.
The power of Sturm's graphic novels comes from his use of this cinematic technique to tell complex stories. And, like most good historical fiction, from his insights into plausibly human characters. By illustrating historical moments through flawed, sympathetic figures, he gives his stories literary depth. Like many authors of historical fiction, Sturm's really writing about our present. After all, what's more American than baseball, greed and bigotry?
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JAMES STURM'S AMERICA reviewed by The Hartford Advocate blog
Updated October 25, 2007
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
World Serious
Alan Bisbort
HARTFORD ADVOCATE blog
On the verge of the World Series, I’m going to recommend a book that seems to have little connection to baseball—America: God, Gold and Golems by James Sturm (Drawn & Quarterly). Sturm, cofounder and director of the Center For Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont, is a graphic novelist. Judging from the way he depicts the National Pastime—in the third segment of this saga, “The Golem’s Mighty Swing”—he also loves baseball, deeply and poetically. Given that he lives in New England, Sturm is probably a Boston Red Sox fan. [And, since this entry is ostensibly about the World Series, here’s my prediction: Red Sox sweep.]
With three seemingly disparate segments—settlers and holy rollers in Kentucky, 1801; gold prospectors and coal miners in the American West, 1886; itinerant Jewish baseball team from New York, 1920s—Sturm weaves nothing less than a tapestry of the North American continent. It’s not an altogether pretty picture: The theft of the land from the indigenous peoples; the desecration of the land in search of wealth; and yet it also offers moments of redemption, using the “National Pastime” as a stand-in for all things that fill Americans with joy and wonder. All of these themes are stitched together in the book’s extraordinary cover image, a breathtaking panorama worthy of William Blake.
Baseball! Relief from mere survival in America! Let's enjoy the next week
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JAMES STURM'S AMERICA reviewed by Las Vegas Weekly
Updated October 25, 2007
[Comics] America: The Comic Book
October 18, 2007
by J. Caleb Mozzocco
James Sturm writes the history of a nation with three short stories
The stories composing America, the new collection of cartoonist James Sturm’s work, were previously published individually, but when they’re gathered together between the same set of covers like this, each takes on a greater meaning. Not only is the whole greater than the sum of its parts, but, in this case, the parts are also greater now that they’re part of a whole.
Each is set in a different, influential period of American history, recognizably distinct enough that it would have its own chapter in a high-school textbook. While the stories each encapsulate that period and thus reflect on the concept of America to a certain extent, they’re also small, intimate tales about fictional, unfamous characters. Sturm makes no grand statements about what America is or why it’s that way. (Such contextualization is left to the reader, after he or she closes the book and ruminates on it.)
The first is “The Revival,” set at an 1801 religious revival in frontier Kentucky, the biggest such meeting in history. It follows a desperate couple into the sea of the devout, seeking a miracle. To say much more would spoil the plot, but Sturm winds up for a mighty gut punch halfway through, toying with the limits of faith ... and how you can believe in God, but you can’t test him.
That’s followed by “Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight,” a longer, grittier tale of a late-19th-century mining town’s rise and fall. Finding some Chinamen making a living off an abandoned mine, some gruff entrepreneurs slaughter them, seize the mine and then find a hard time living off the increasingly meager yield, right up to the dark punchline of an ending.
The third and final tale is also the longest and most polished, “The Golem’s Mighty Swing.” It’s also the one that tackles the most obviously “American” topic, as it deals with our national pastime, back when it really was our national pastime.
It stars the Stars of David, a traveling, all-Jewish baseball team that packs into a cramped bus and travels around small-town 1920s America taking on local teams, with each match having an undercurrent of rooting against the Jews, something the team trades on in an attempt to scrape by, eventually going so far as to dress one of their members in a secondhand Hollywood golem costume.
Sturm’s art style progresses through the eras, beginning very rough and very dark before emerging into the brighter, cleaner look of the baseball story, which adds brown shading to the panels, where previously they were stark black and white.
All too often our history gets reduced to a series of wars, discoveries and presidencies, so Sturm bringing life to the relatively quieter moments here is particularly interesting, and what better medium to dramatize such stories in than an all-American one like comics?
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JAMES STURM'S AMERICA reviewed by The Onion A.V. Club
Updated October 18, 2007
Comics Panel, October 11, 2007
More than half of James Sturm's America: God, Gold, And Golems (D&Q) is taken up by "The Golem's Mighty Swing," an acclaimed graphic novella about the barnstorming Stars Of David all-Jewish baseball team. While a lot of comics fans already own "Golem" (or should), the book's remaining two stories deserve more attention. "The Revival" takes place in the early 18th century, and explores the limits of faith, while "Hundreds Of Feet Below Daylight" examines the after-effects of greed and racism in an 1880s mining community. All three stories use Sturm's thick-lined, almost archaic-looking style to create an atmosphere of plainness and historical verisimilitude, which Sturm subverts with scenes of pure fantasy or extreme emotion, before returning to an eerie hush. These three stories represent some of the best American comics of the past decade, which makes James Sturm's America an essential volume for any serious comics library… A
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JAMES STURM'S AMERICA reviewed by ComicMix
Updated October 4, 2007
Tue Oct 2, 2007 — by Andrew Wheeler
GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: James Sturm's America
The subtitle says it all
The first thing to note is that America collects three previously-published stories: The Revival, Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight, and The Golem’s Mighty Swing. Sturm’s end-notes don’t make it clear where the 24-page Revival or the 44-page Hundreds of Feet were originally published, but Golem was a stand-alone graphic novel from Drawn & Quarterly in 2001. So if you’re a huge James Sturm fan – and there have to be a couple of them – you probably have all of this already.
Enough with the consumer report, though – what about the stories? All three are historical fiction, set in little-examined, unspectacular times in America. There are no wars, no famous people – none of the usual hoo-hah of historical stories. Sturm concentrates on ordinary people living ordinary lives, in what were fairly ordinary times for the people living them.
The Revival is set in eastern Kentucky in 1801 – as the first caption helpfully tells us. A married couple, Joseph and Sarah Bainbridge, are traveling to Caine Ridge to see the revival preacher Elijah Young. They arrive in the camp, meeting a niece, and are soon caught up in the religious fervor. They do see Young preach, on their second night there, but I don’t think I should tell you what Joseph and Sarah are praying for, nor whether they get it.
Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight takes place at the other end of the nineteenth century in a gold mine, presumably in California. A group of locals slaughter the Chinese workers running the mine and take it over – but it’s still not very successful. Tensions rise between the owners and the workers, exacerbated by the discovery that one dying, incoherent miner is secretly rich.
And The Golem’s Mighty Swing is the best-known work in the book, a story of a Jewish barnstorming baseball team in the ‘20s that signs up with a promoter to add a “golem” to their team to increase interest. This story is the most topical, since it’s partially about prejudice and hatred – not that those things aren’t eternal, of course.
Sturm has a good eye for detail, and strong, naturalistic dialogue throughout all three stories. His art style changes and evolves as the three stories go along – Revival is full of fiddly little pen-lines, while Daylight sees more large areas of black and more nuanced lines, and Golem has even cleaner, fatter lines and lots of grey tones for shading.
Golem is the best-realized and most successful of the three stories, but the earlier two are still compelling story-telling. He has a real gift for the rhythms of language, and for distinguishing between people of different backgrounds and educational levels by their dialogue.
I suspect the audience for this book will mostly be people like me who own and enjoyed Golem, and those people will have to decide if they want to buy that book over again to get two slightly less polished stories that add up to about as long as Golem. But for people who don’t own Golem, and have enjoyed things like Joe Sacco’s reportage comics, Moore & Campbell’s From Hell, and Craig Thompson’s Blankets, Sturm could be a real discovery.
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JAMES STURM'S AMERICA in The San Francisco Chronicle
Updated September 6, 2007
Review: 'James Sturm's America'
Paul Buhle
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Comic art has come a long, long way during the past few years, as most Chronicle readers know - whether they applaud or wince at the new visual reality.
Newspaper comic strips have been around for more than a century, of course, and long since proclaimed a distinctly American art form. Comic books emerged 70 years ago. But something new and remarkable happened in Berkeley and San Francisco from the end of the 1960s to the middle 1970s, and we are only now seeing the implications play out in some of the most remarkable books of our time.
Comics, at least the avant-garde variety, suddenly stopped being censored for politics or sex, and with the same logic, ceased being created only for preadolescent and adolescent readers. These breakthroughs foreshadowed others over several decades and led to a vernacular postmodernism - art never intended for museum walls. (Ironically, museum shows of comics history now garner serious critical praise.) Meanwhile, the graphic novel has skyrocketed in sales and respect.
Cut to James Sturm, born in 1965. Not only does he represent a 21st century comic art reality, but he is also shaping that reality himself. His mini-academy, the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vt., is turning out the newest prospects.
Sturm was a college newspaper cartoonist in countercultural Madison, Wis., then a production assistant at the first European-style comics publication produced on this side of the ocean, Art Spiegelman's Raw magazine. Sturm is not a particularly political person, and this sets him apart from the underground generation as well as mainstream survivors of the 1970s, such as Bill Griffith and Garry Trudeau. What interests Sturm most is the art form and its uses to tell very specific stories in which historical fiction and nonfiction merge.
"The Golem's Mighty Swing," a comic novelette included in his new volume, "James Sturm's America: God, Gold and Golems," is doubtless Sturm's magnum opus - at least so far. It first appeared several years ago, bound separately, but achieves here its proper context.
The story is pure 1920s Americana, the era of traveling baseball teams playing locals for personal glory and a little cash. Few of the players will ever make the majors. Most certainly not the superb nonwhite athletes.
Our protagonists, the bearded Stars of David, offer one example of these low-cost operations. They are up-front Jews in a nation where anti-Semitism was open and aggressive, where the KKK held power in at least a half dozen states and where not even a Catholic could be elected president. The Stars have only one real star: a huge, veteran black hitter passing as Jewish. At the urging of an enterprising PR man, he becomes the Golem.
What's most interesting here is hardly the story, though well told and realistic, but the art. The people and the industrial small-town setting are captured with a starkness that recalls the 1930s-'50s Canada drawn by the acclaimed comic artist Seth, whose work appeared serially in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. One could call it flat, but that would mistake affect for intention. Sturm, like Seth, mostly avoids melodrama, even amid violence.
Well, not always.
"The Revival" and "Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight" offer lesser looks at the American 1830s and 1890s, respectively, frontier tales of deluded faith and of greed that lead to assorted grotesqueries. There are victims here, no heroes, and death is an ever-present shadow driving the actors beyond the bounds of what we hope to call civilization.
Living in highly stressful conditions of geographical and social uncertainties, having perhaps convinced themselves that migrating west would bring them to an earthly paradise, they panic or turn brutal at the emerging reality. No one would claim that this is the whole story, of course, but social historians in recent decades have not shied away from the darker side of the frontier experience.
Were they about to create an unprecedented prosperity, at least for their own descendants, out of the resources newly at hand? Yes, but the cost is still being calculated. Without a shred of didacticism, Sturm is perhaps political despite himself, but not on any map of left and right. Like every fine artist, he has created his own world out of ours.
Sturm is one of those who, like Joe Sacco, Peter Kuper, Marjane Satrapi and 1960s veterans such as Spain Rodriguez, are at long last succeeding in bringing a large movement in popular art front and center. For that, they deserve great credit - with a tip of the hat to the Bay Area, where so much of that movement took a historic leap forward.
Paul Buhle is a senior lecturer at Brown University and editor of several comic art volumes in preparation.
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D+Q at San Diego Comicon
Updated July 20, 2007
D+Q @ San Diego Comic-Con
Miriam Katin, Joe Matt, Guy Delisle (making his first U.S. appearance!), and James Sturm are D+Q's guest artists at San Diego this year. They'll be on various panels and signing at our booth #1529. The schedule is as follows:
Thursday, July 26
1:00 - 3:00 Miriam Katin signing
3:00 - 5:00 Joe Matt signing
4:00 - 5:00 Room 3 "Spotlight on Guy Delisle." Moderated by Tom Spurgeon.
5:15 - 7:00 Guy Delisle signing
Friday, July 27
11:30 - 12:30 Room 3 "Spotlight on Joe Matt"
12:45 - 2:45 Joe Matt signing
1:30 - 2:30 Room 3 "Spotlight on Miriam Katin" Slide Show and moderated by Shaenon Garrity.
2:45 - 4:00 Miriam Katin signing
4:00 - 5:45 Guy Delisle signing
4:30 - 5:30 Room 4 "New Voices in Graphic Novels"
with Miriam Katin, Christian Slade, David Peterson, George O'Connor, Jamie Tanner, and Leland Myrick.
4:30 - 5:30 Room 24A "Center for Cartoon Studies"
with James Sturm and Tom Devlin
5:45 - 7:00 James Sturm signing
Saturday, July 28
11:00 - 1:00 James Sturm signing
11:30 - 12:30 Room 3 "Reality-Based Graphic Novels"
with Joe Matt, Guy Delisle, Miriam Katin, Rick Geary and Alison Bechdel.
1:00 - 3:00 Joe Matt signing
1:30 - 2:30 Room 4 "Great American Comic Strips"
with Drawn & Quarterly, Fantagraphics, IDW, and Classic Comics Press
3:00 - 5:00 Guy Delisle signing
5:00 - 7:00 Miriam Katin signing
Sunday, July 29
10:00 - 12:00 Miriam Katin signing
12:00 - 2:00 Joe Matt signing
2:00 - 4:00 Guy Delisle signing
PLUS, the D+Q booth will have a ton of great convention deals as usual, and every purchase gets a FREE Shortcomings poster, in anticipation of Adrian Tomine's long-awaited graphic novel, coming in October. We'll have lots of postcards & Lynda Barry's Free Comic Book Day Activity Book as well, so come say hello to friendly D+Q-ers Jessica, Rebecca and Tom, and check out our new stuff, and the classics too.
DEBUT titles will include Berlin #13 by Jason Lutes, and James Sturm's America: God, Gold, and Golems.
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THE GOLEM'S MIGHTY SWING in New York Magazine
Updated June 19, 2007
Every week, the Comics Page introduces you to brand-new graphic novels by the world's best artists and writers. Manga, superheroes, indie comix — we'll cover them all as our editors select the best the exploding comics world has to offer.
The Stars of David, an all-Jewish barnstorming baseball team, travels across twenties America. When a promoter offers them a chance to attract a bigger audience than ever before, the team's captain must make a difficult decision: Should the Golem walk on the field?
All week on the Comics Page, we're excerpting "The Golem's Mighty Swing," one of the three clear-eyed short stories in James Sturm's America, coming in August from Drawn & Quarterly.
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JAMES STURM'S AMERICA in Jewish Book World
Updated June 18, 2007
Jewish Book World
Summer 5767/2007
JAMES STURM’S AMERICA: GOD, GOLD, AND GOLEMS
James Sturm
Using the themes of faith, greed, and entertainment, this new compilation of three previously published graphic novels by James Sturm, founder and director of the Center for Cartoon Studies, offers readers a unique view of American history. The Revival takes place in the early 1800’s, during a time when religious sects flourished in the shifting boundaries of the American frontier. The second story, Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight, takes place in the late 1800’s, and shows the effects of greed on the lives of miners who have lost everything to find gold.
The final story in the trilogy, The Golem’s Mighty Swing, is the only one with any Jewish content. Originally published in 1998, it follows a traveling baseball team, The Stars of David, on their journey through Midwest America during the 1920’s. Faced with growing anti-Semitism, a broken bus, and no money, the captain of the team, Noah “The Zion Lion” Strauss, agrees to try a promotional stunt. By suiting up their only African-American player as a golem, the team’s gimmick not only draws crowds, but also violence stemming from fear and prejudice. Notes and sources for further reading round out this interesting trilogy. WW
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JAMES STURM'S AMERICA, KING-CAT CLASSIX, SPENT and EXIT WOUNDS in The Globe & Mail
Updated June 18, 2007
GRAPHICA
Art imitating life imitating ... well, you get the idea
Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso, God and golem, doodled cats and suicide bombers
NATHALIE ATKINSON
June 9, 2007
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Exploring the darker side of the supernatural, from acts of blind faith and men driven insane by guilt, James Sturm's America: God, Gold, and Golems (Drawn & Quarterly, 190 pages, $27.95) brings together the cartoonist's American trilogy, previously unavailable in its entirety in book form. Sturm chooses a drawing style unique to each story's period and setting. First, he looks heavenward in The Revival, imagining thousands of pioneer settlers attending an impromptu gospel meeting in Cane Ridge, Ky., in 1801, with finely detailed line work that evokes various illustration styles of early American broadsheets.
Turning to a heavier use of black, Sturm moves underground with Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight for the tale of a 19th-century mining town and the greed that only gold can breed, playing with darkness and contrast on the page.
Then, as he moves into the 20th century for the final and strongest novella, The Golem's Mighty Swing, he employs a more simplified and modern cartooning style. A barnstorming Jewish baseball team called the Stars of David travels through Depression-era middle America and exploits the public's interest in the supernatural - specifically, the golem legend. They use their giant baseball player, who happens to be black (a "member of the lost tribe"), to draw a crowd in the stands, until at one game, faced with extreme anti-Semitism, they only narrowly escape a bloodthirsty mob: "It's no surprise things got out of hand. That is the nature of the golem."
...
In stark contrast, John Porcellino's King-Cat Classix (D&Q, 383 pages, $33.95) is a collection of his self-published, photocopied and folded comic zines (1989-1996). Even assembled in a slick hardcover format, the stories retain the folksy, DIY charm of the original.
Porcellino's short stories and observations about his life and the nature around him are simple and spare, but manage to capture his awe at the world, and this sensibility is echoed in his minimalist drawing style: a haiku or Zen parable told in the cartoon shorthand of artful doodles. They have the deceptively simple allure of a Ron Sexsmith song.
Another long-time comics insider, the pathetic, self-deprecating Joe Matt, finds himself exhausted financially, sexually and creatively in Spent (D&Q, 120 pages, $22.95), the latest instalment in his series of ever-more-confessional autobiographical comics. The infamous cartoon onanist is a mix of Harvey Pekar and Larry David (if they peed in a jar, watched porn all day, obsessed over past injustices, girlfriends and money, and then watched more porn), and Matt's style does what classical American cartooning is supposed to do: tell the story without drawing attention to itself.
But the marrying of tone, content and drawing style is perhaps most elegantly accomplished in Exit Wounds (D&Q, 172 pages, $21.95), the first long work by Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan (a member of the publishing collective Actus Tragicus, a dominant force in Israeli comics). After a young man learns that his estranged father may be the unidentified victim of a suicide bombing, a female soldier drags him on her search for answers. But it is not the outcome that matters. The political conflict and the tension of everyday life in Israel introduced by the bombing contribute to the tone of the story like any other background detail, but are not part of the puzzle. Instead, Modan uses the situation to create relationships between characters and then explore them, without any trace of sentimentality. Her main characters are fallible, at times unappealing, selfish or duplicitous, but these flaws are mundane rather than crucial.
Modan's art, too, is dispassionate. Using largely flat, watercolour hues and a consistent clear line, she creates an effect that is subdued and subtle. Elements of her style echo Hergé, but she eschews his right angles - people are realistically lumpy, not geometric - and her panels more tightly frame the characters. In the end, that's where the real story lies: There is no resolution, only the banal, sometimes petty, powerfully understated elements of human relationships.
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JAMES STURM'S AMERICA in Kirkus
Updated May 11, 2007
Sturm, James
JAMES STURM’S AMERICA: God, Gold, and Golems
Kirkus Reviews
April 15, 2007
The interplay of darkness and light distinguishes this three-part graphic narrative that probes the seamier recesses of the American soul.
The alliterative subtitle provides an apt description of the contents of this historical volume from award-winning artist Sturm (Unstable Molecules, 2003). The “God” section, titled “The Revival,” launches the narrative in the frontier of the early 1800s, when Missouri and Ohio were still the untamed West, and pilgrims proceeded through a wilderness of sin for the promise of salvation. It’s hard to sustain the faith amid the drinking, gambling and rampant fornication, with God’s absence felt more strongly than his presence. Meanwhile, the “Gold” section takes place “Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight,” which provides metaphoric resonance as well as a literal description of a hellhole mine marked by greed and betrayal. The narrative then flashes forward to the 1920s with “The Golem’s Mighty Swing,” the longest and most ambitious of the chapters and the one that finally allows some daylight. Here, the ethnic divisiveness that has been simmering through the earlier chapters comes to a boil, as the barnstorming Stars of David baseball team (“The Bearded Wandering Wonders”) experiences ridicule and hostility as its novelty value packs parks across the country. The Jewish squad features an African- merican ringer, transformed into “the Golem” by an unscrupulous promoter. Sturm captures the essence of the country as reflected in the all- merican pastime.
It doesn’t take many words or strokes for Sturm’s graphic artistry to leave a lasting impression.
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JAMES STURM'S AMERICA in Publishers Weekly
Updated April 4, 2007
James Sturm's America: God, Gold, and Golems
JAMES STURM
Publishers Weekly
Three of Sturm's previously released graphic novels are gathered to create a Howard Zinn–like look at lesser-known episodes of America's past. "The Revival" is a short, sharp piece dramatizing the massive 1801 religious revival meeting in Cane Ridge, Ky. (the country's biggest ever), with the story of a traveling couple who arrive at the meeting with fire in their eyes and a dark secret pushing them on. In "Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight," successive waves of greed, racism and blind folly swamp a Western mining town in the late 19th century. Because the allegory for the evils of Western expansion is so blatantly rendered, it's by far the weakest segment. The strongest is the last and longest, "The Golem's Mighty Swing," which adds a welcome dose of lyricism. Building on scraps of early baseball history, the Negro Leagues and Jewish mysticism, Sturm weaves a parable on racism and spectacle around a barnstorming, supposedly all-Jewish team in the 1920s called the Stars of David. The more the players parody themselves as mystical Hebrews, the more they earn. Sturm's art changes with the time period, moving from the dark gothic style of "The Revival" to the last story's clean and airy nostalgia. (June)
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Newsarama interviews James Sturm
Updated March 16, 2007
ENTERING JAMES STURM'S AMERICA
by Daniel Robert Epstein
James Sturm's three books: The Revival, Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight, and The Golem's Mighty Swing have been collected into one edition called James Sturm's America. It’s 2007 and it still feels like we are living in his books. The first one, The Revival, examines the tent revival meetings in 1801 Kentucky, and with preachers talking fire and brimstone and “healing” the sick it has great relevance to people like Pat Robertson and The 700 Club. Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight looks at companies who will do anything, even sacrifice human life, for a buck and of course Sturm’s most famous book, The Golem's Mighty Swing, is about a Jewish baseball facing tension and racism as they travel through the American Midwest. I got a chance to talk with Sturm from his office at The Center for Cartoon Studies, which he co-founded.
Newsarama: Who's idea was it to package all three of your Drawn & Quarterly books into James Sturm's America?
James Sturm: From early on in the process I saw all three stories as being an interrelated single piece. That was something that [Drawn & Quarterly publisher] Chris [Oliveros] and I discussed many years ago. Then it was just a matter of timing. He has his concerns about the publisher in terms of selling through Golem books. When he switched distributors, there was a little window where D & Q wasn't putting out many books. The timing seems right now; because all the books are out and are more or less in print. Tom Devlin, who does a lot of the book design at Drawn & Quarterly, had been working through the book design and I couldn't be more thrilled to be working with Tom. I have a tremendous amount of admiration for all the books that he did at Highwater Books and all the books he's doing with Drawn & Quarterly. I just love working with people who know what they're doing [laughs].
NRAMA: Did you know it was going to end up being a trilogy?
JS: I didn't know it was going to be a trilogy when I did The Revival but I was doing Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight and I was really having a hard time figuring out what that piece was about and how it was going to proceed. Then I started writing The Golem's Mighty Swing and that started really moving along at a faster clip. It was at that point I realized, “Wow this is a trilogy.” Then Hundreds of Feet clicked. I went back to do that first, because I knew if I did the baseball book first, I probably wouldn't go back [laughs].
NRAMA: With having done Golem and this upcoming Satchel Paige book, I have to ask - is baseball is something you have an real affinity for, or just a subject to explore?
JS: I like baseball as much as the next baseball fan. I don't think I've watched a full baseball game in two years. I listen to them on the radio. My kitchen is never cleaner than during baseball season because I can just listen while I do stuff. But I had really no intention of doing the Satchel Paige book because of another project I was working on and I was getting the school up and running. It was really on the insistence of Brenda Bowen at Hyperion. She felt pretty strongly that I do this Satchel Paige book. I did it because I wanted the series to happen and I'm so glad I did. I got the sense that it was important that I do this book [laughs].
NRAMA: Better to do it than not do it is what you're saying.
JS: Well, I'm saying that Brenda was pretty insistent about me working on the Satchel Paige book. That was fine because I love baseball. It's funny because I did the Golem book, I did a New Yorker cover with a baseball theme and now I'm the baseball guy, but that's fine. This new book, even though there's baseball themes and all that, it's really different than the Golem book. You could probably tell a hundred baseball stories, one could be about racism, one could be about closeted issues of sexual identity and another one could be about corporate corruption. I love doing the research and it is very rewarding and fulfilling. I read narratives of folks who lived during the Jim Crow era and weaved that into the story. One of my favorite parts of creating books is the research and looking at all the old WPA [Works Progress Administration] era photographs and prints by Thomas Hart Benton and just interfacing with all this rich visual material and incorporating it into the book. One of the real pleasures for me in making comics is that research stage and all the things I have to immerse myself in before I feel like I'm making an authentic story.
NRAMA: How did you get interested in the pre-war American period?
JS: Many years ago, when I was just a young, hungry cartoonist [laughs], I did a series for Fantagraphics called The Cereal Killings. It was about breakfast cereal mascots and I was trying to explore questions I had about the way that culture and agriculture and food and entertainment, mix and mingle. When I did research about the breakfast cereal industry, that led me to the history of Kellogg's. The Kelloggs were Seventh Day Adventists and a lot of early American religion sprang out of this area in Western New York called the Burned Over District. I got very interested in how the origin of Kelloggs is so deeply rooted in early American religious movements. I was very drawn to the idea of breakfast cereal characters as commercial deities. When I was in graduate school, I traveled to India and in these villages there are parades with floating Ganesh and other indigenous deities.
Then you come down Fifth Avenue for Thanksgiving and what we have is not giant blowup Jesuses, but Ronald McDonald and Hello Kitty. I was thinking about what American figures do we have that aren't commercial legends and myths and I started thinking about Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Appleseed was a part of the Church of the New Jerusalem and he was a missionary. I started researching Johnny Appleseed and that led me to all these amazing accounts of the Cambridge Revival and when I read about those, I realized that that was what my book was about, not Johnny Appleseed. The Cambridge Revival sounded like a really intense affair, which I describe in the book. For someone living in Seattle during the 90’s, it struck a nerve because it was the intoxicating effect of the frontier of technology and how it was going to deliver us from all the ills of our world and bring us closer together and what could be accomplished if the whole world is connected together via the world wide web. It's a very similar vibe as the religious fervor that was happening in Kentucky in 1801 [laughs]. Also as someone that has gone to like 40 to 50 Grateful Dead shows, the descriptions really could have been right out of a Grateful Dead parking lot. People were just tripping back then, running around, barking, drumming, chasing imaginary animals up trees, speaking in tongues, dancing, ecstatic worship. This was really exciting stuff to read and think about, such as what are the powers and limitations of faith and how do we construct a reality through our belief system.
NRAMA: It seems like the second story in the book, Hundreds of Feet Below, seems less specific than The Revival, were you trying to make it more of a personal story?
JS: It's funny because I feel like The Revival is my high watermark in writing as a cartoonist whereas Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight, although just as thoroughly researched, was a fictional town and wasn't based on real events. So I guess maybe I don't necessarily share in your interpretation, but that's fine [laughs].
NRAMA: What made you keep going in that vein?
JS: I guess with Revival, you have this community that's looking up towards God for salvation, and Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight, asked what happens if instead of looking for spiritual salvation, instead of looking upward for God, you're looking straight down, literally into the ground for gold. The Revival is hopeful but with they move on. There are dark clouds but a sliver of light. But I feel like with Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight it's almost like a morality play. It is like what results from the profane pursuit of material wealth and how does that play out.
NRAMA: Touching upon some of your other work, speaking of Unstable Molecules which you did for Marvel, do you feel like doing that miniseries has satisfied your need to work with superheroes?
JS: [laughs] Did I deal with superheroes in that book?
NRAMA: Well, you dealt with the idea of them existing.
JS: Going back to Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Chapman was the real figure and Johnny Appleseed was the myth. In that sense, that's what the Unstable Molecules was. The Fantastic Four that exists at Marvel is Johnny Appleseed, my story was Johnny Chapman.
NRAMA: I know you were a fan of superheroes when you were younger, do you have any desire to do more with the mainstream heroes you grew up with?
JS: I don't think I would necessarily reject the opportunity if it was under the right circumstances. It has to be on terms I'm comfortable with but if it never happened, I'd be able to live with that. I don't think I'd lose a night's sleep or anything. There are a couple of characters or ideas that if the timing was right I'd say, "Yeah, I can work on this a little bit." But Marvel and DC have a lot of stake invested in these characters and they're very mindful of their own resources, so it's not always easy to do those kinds of things with them. Unstable Molecules editor Tom Brevoort gave me that space to do what I wanted to do and I appreciate that.
NRAMA: Did you see the Fantastic Four movie?
JS: I rented it about four or five months ago. Jaime Hernandez recommended it to me [laughs]. I asked him what he thought and he said it was a pretty good time, so on his recommendation I went and saw it. I thought it was fun. I saw the preview for the sequel online with the Silver Surfer being chased by Human Torch. It looks cool.
NRAMA: From what I’ve read it seems like things are going well at The Center [for Cartoon Studies]?
JS: This morning I got the school's first book. We're doing a book called Houdini: The Handcuff King with Hyperion that Jason Lutes and Nick Bertozzi wrote and drew. I edited it and co-designed it. It's a hardcover book. It looks really nice. You are always really afraid at the point you hand it to the printer. It's like your job is done in a way. I guess you could press check but there's a point where the book is going to be what it is. There's a huge feeling of dread right before I see the printed book because if something's wrong, there's no revision [laughs]. I got this book and it was a huge relief because it looks really nice with beautiful dust jacket and hardcover and the art is nice. I'm really thrilled to do these three books with Hyperion.
NRAMA: I didn't know The Center was going to be doing actual books. Was that always the plan?
JS: Yeah, we've been working on them the last few years.
NRAMA: How is it working with Hyperion?
JS: I was the series editor and I worked with an editor at Hyperion by the name of Brenda Bowen, who's is the Vice-President at Hyperion Books for Children.
NRAMA: How did you decide to do the Houdini book first?
JS: Basically Hyperion had an idea for doing biographies and they asked me to do a biography and they suggested Houdini. I knew that we needed Jason Lutes to work on that book. We decided the school could actually produce and package these books, working with Hyperion so that's what happened. Brenda is a really astute editor who really cares about making really nice books.
With startup business, you vacillate between incredible excitement and mild despair [laughs]. Actually, I shouldn't say that. That's not true. Not that much despair. I should say weariness sometimes, because we're doing these books with Hyperion, we're teaching, you recruit and you raise money and you're doing events and all these projects, but it's all good. I've got nothing to complain about.
NRAMA: Are you doing a book?
JS: I'm doing one that I wrote about Satchel Paige and Jim Crow. Rich Tommaso wrote it, drew it and inked it, and I did the layouts and design.
Then the third book is about Thoreau, by John Porcellino. It's a good marriage of artist and subject [laughs].
NRAMA: What's the application process like for The Center?
JS: They have to do a comic book featuring themselves, a piece of fruit, a robot and a snowman [laughs].
NRAMA: Those must be fun to read.
JS: They really are. The school just partnered with Diamond Comics, and we do a "Diamond in the rough" scholarship that Diamond promoted. The deadline was postmarked by February 1, so we're getting dozens of these applications from all over the country and I think we're going to announce the winner soon. But it's been great seeing all those come in and Diamond was great to work with. They really helped us. They sent packets out to all our accounts, all their stores, announcing the competition and follow stuff up with Diamond previews. It was good. They helped spread the word and sponsored the scholarship.
NRAMA: Do you have any ideas for where you’ll go after Satchel Paige?
JS: With two CCS students, I'm working on a how to make comics book for very young readers, five to ten year olds. It's partially inspired by [children's book author and illustrator] Ed Emberley. We've found a publisher but we can't announce it quite yet. Also Norton is reissuing all of Will Eisner’s instructional books and CCS is redesigning those. We're not going to be changing the content of his stuff or anything like that but just redesigning it to hopefully enhance what's already there. So between this how-to book for young kids and these instructional books and the how-to thing the school did with Kevin Huizenga, we're doing a lot of instructional books. But I guess that makes sense because we're a cartooning school.
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James Sturm's America reviewed by Booklist
Updated February 28, 2007
Sturm, James. James Sturm’s America: God, Gold, and Golems. June 2007. 192p. illus. Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95 (9781897299050). 741.5.
Three of Sturm’s stories drawing on American history are here brought together in a compilation that enhances each one’s historicity. The briefest, “The Revival,” portrays frontier life in the early nineteenth century. “Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight” is set in Gold Rush country after the initial euphoria has waned, and only the patient and the stubborn vie for the mineral and the wealth it could bring. “The Golem’s Mighty Swing,” the best known of the three (it was published as a graphic novel in 2001), concerns professional baseball outside of the major and minor leagues in the 1920s. Social issues, including racial prejudice and intolerance, poverty, and family dynamics, are broached via both plot and character. Sturm provides excellent facial and physical expressions as well as good architectural and civic detail, making this is an easy crossover graphic novel for readers who enjoy American history made into well-told stories. Meanwhile, graphic novel stalwarts familiar with some but not all of Sturm’s work will be most pleased. ––Francisca Goldsmith
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CCS in the Boston Globe
Updated February 3, 2006
Best of the New: Ideas
January 29, 2006
Cartoonist College
What do an Ivy League graduate and a former college basketball player from Texas have in common with a few art-school types? They're members of the first class at The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont, which opened last fall. Cofounder James Sturm believes his is the only institution of higher learning where applicants submit a comic featuring themselves, a snowman, and a robot. But it's not all fun; tuition alone is $14,000 - and that doesn't include colored pencils. Results from the first semester look good: "It's a pass/no credit system," says Sturm, "just like Harvard Medical School."
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Center for Cartoon Studies in the Village Voice
Updated January 19, 2006
The Interview
Picture This
Talking with James Sturm, co-founder of the nation's first school for cartoon studies
by Nick Mamatas
January 18th, 2006
"As soon as we are no longer a vital institution we shut our doors."
James Sturm planned to give up reading comics when he started college at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1980s, but exposure to underground gods like R. Crumb and Kim Deitch changed his life. Sturm attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and worked with the seminal comic magazine RAW before moving on to co-found Seattle's alternative weekly, The Stranger. Acclaimed for his graphic novel The Golem's Mighty Swing, Sturm recently co-founded the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont, to train the next generation of comics creators. CCS doesn't yet have degree-granting status, but is pursuing accreditation.
Generations of cartoonists are self-taught. Why found the Center?
I wanted to teach and create a cartooning program that was more reflective of comics as an art form and not just a commercial art. From The Iowa Writers' Workshop to the NYU Film School to Yale's Painting department so many of our country's finest artists have attended schools.
And schooling has been heavily criticized as well. The "workshopped" short story scrubbed clean of anything interesting is almost a cliché, as were "calling card" independent films for hopeful hacks in the 1990s.
The anti-school sentiment you are expressing is fairly common, and I suppose many schools are guilty of encouraging that criticism. However, I think there are a lot of frustrated young cartoonists in art departments throughout the country who want have a meaningful dialogue about their work. For the most part they won't find that at art schools and universities. My hope is that CCS functions as some sort of cartooning Black Mountain College. As soon as we are no longer a vital institution we shut our doors.
Are comics being taken more seriously now, or is every mainstream article still "Zap! Bam! Pow! Comics Grow Up!"?
It seems like comics have come of age in regards to how they are presented in the press. The current "Masters of American Cartooning Show" at The Hammer Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A. demands that comics be considered as thoughtfully as other art forms.
Where does this new seriousness come from, especially given the dominance of superheroes and newspaper strips?
I think it comes from the amazing comics being produced over the last several years. Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Seth, Marjane Satrapi, Charles Burns, Craig Thompson to name just a few that are producing work that can no longer be readily dismissed as an anomaly. I remember when Spiegelman's Maus first started showing up on people's radar, reviewers would say that it really wasn't a comic!
What about manga? Are you getting manga-influenced students?
Absolutely. I see a lot of bad manga-inspired work but I don't think manga is to blame. Young artists are more often drawn to style over substance and manga just happens to be the style of the day. On the plus side manga readership seems more gender balanced, which hopefully will get more women thinking about making comics themselves.
CSS's mission statement says that it is committed to "socially responsible business", yet it's a truism that the work-for-hire contracts the big companies offer are horrid, and that sexism is rife in the field. Lea Hernandez recently quit the comics scene; a giant ass-shot in All-Star Batman was the last straw for her. What's the gender/political mix of CSS faculty and students?
Eight out of CCS's first 20 students are women. Less than half but twice as many as I would find in a class room when I taught cartooning at other schools. Comics having been historically a "boys club" and that fact has certainly contributed to the medium's arrested development.
I think the type of student that CCS is attracting is more of an auteur and less concerned with finding a job penciling Iron Man. Our five female faculty members logged significant time in front of students. We've already have had visits from Alison Bechdel and Ariel Bordeux and look forward to a visit from Trina Robbins and novelist Myla Goldberg. If CCS's first students are any indication they certainly are a socially concerned do-gooder bunch.
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Publisher's Weekly Comics Week - CCS feature
Updated November 28, 2005
The Center for Cartoon Studies—More Than Just a School
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on Nov. 22, 2005
By Douglas Wolk -- 11/22/2005
Cartoonist Ed Koren Speaks; James Sturm Looks on
"You know what I got in the mail today?" James Sturm says excitedly. "All the preliminary sketches that Al Jaffee does when he does a Mad fold-in," he says referring to long-time Mad magazine cartoonist. Sturm, a cartoonist whose books include the critically acclaimed graphic novels The Golem's Mighty Swing and Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules, is the founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies, a new institution that's rapidly turning White River Junction, Vt., into a comics nexus.
The CCS features a cartooning school (which admitted its first students this fall), rotating exhibitions (most recently New Yorker cartoonist Edward Koren) and, now, in an old firehouse that's a short walk from its main building, the Schulz Library—a collection of thousands of comics-related books, pamphlets and ephemera, funded by Charles Schulz's widow, Jean Schulz, to which Jaffee and many other cartoonists have contributed original work. This summer, the school will offer a series of one-week workshops.
In addition, the Center has a deal with Hyperion Books for Children to produce a series of comics biographies; as Sturm points out, "We're called the Center for Cartoon Studies—we're not just a school." The first two titles under the Hyperion deal will appear next fall. The first book will be about Harry Houdini, written by Sturm and Jason Lutes and drawn by Nick Bertozzi, with an introduction by Glen David Gold. The other book will be on Satchel Paige and will be written by Sturm and drawn by Rich Tommaso, who just moved to White River Junction himself, and will include an introduction by African-American studies professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Next in line is Henry David Thoreau, by minimalist cartoonist John Porcellino (Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man).
On Mondays, the Center's 20 students have drawing classes (taught by cartoonists James Kochalka and Steve Bissette, among others); on Tuesdays and Thursdays, they have classes on writing (taught by Peter Money and Sarah Stewart Taylor) and the history of comics. On Wednesdays, former Highwater Books publisher Tom Devlin teaches a production and design class. All of their assignments are designed to allow students to work toward publication in some form. "Right now it's our first semester ever—we're just kind of feeling out the whole process and how the school's going to function," Sturm says. "We're going to offer a one-year certificate and a two-year MFA once we gain our degree-granting authority, which we do not have yet." Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), Barron Storey and Alec Longstreth have already been visiting artists at the school, and Chris Ware, Kevin Huizenga and Bill Griffith are scheduled to visit soon.
The Schulz Library (whose core is Sturm's personal collection from the past 30 years) is rapidly expanding; a few comics publishers, like Drawn & Quarterly, have sent their entire catalogues. And the students (who range in age from 19 to 32) are a close-knit group, Sturm reports; many of them live in the Hotel Coolidge, across the street from the school.
Any big surprises that have come out of the program so far? "In the back alley behind the school, we've put up a basketball net," he says. "It turns out that these geeky cartoonists are pretty good basketball players."
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Boston Globe Education Section Spotlights CCS
Updated January 25, 2005
FRONT OF THE CLASS
Cartooning with class
January 23, 2005
James Sturm, 39, has loved comics since before he could read. Born in New York City, he had the chance to take cartooning courses in college, but never took one, thinking it was kid stuff. Later, Sturm, who wrote the graphic novel, "The Golem's Mighty Swing," changed his thinking about cartooning classes and began teaching others the craft. He founded the National Association of Comics Art Educators to urge more schools to include cartooning in their curricula, and last year, decided to start his own school. The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vt., will begin classes in September and open with 20 students.
ON BEING A CARTOONIST: I don't think that anyone really decides to become a cartoonist; I think it's more of a calling than a decision. . . . I do comics for adults, for a more mature readership, which only now is becoming culturally accepted.
LESSONS TO LEARN IN CARTOON SCHOOL: If you're a competent cartoonist, you have to learn how to draw, you have to learn to design. If you're going to disseminate your work, which our curriculum covers, you have to learn how to scan your pages in, or create your work on the computer perhaps. . . . You have to learn the skills of desktop publishing. You have to learn research skills, let's say if you're writing historical fiction. . . . Costume design. Lighting. Staging. There's so much that goes into making a comic.
WHY WHITE RIVER JUNCTION? It's a place where obviously a lot of people have passed through over the years. We were able to find affordable space and long-term leases. It's just a neat old town that people just have very strong feelings about.
CARTOONS DESERVE RESPECT: I just think because they are so immediately accessible, they are easier to dismiss. Somehow we associate them with juveniles, that they're for kids. I don't know. . . . People were a little bit afraid of comics for a while. In the '50s they would throw them on the bonfires and burn them because they thought they were rotting the brains of America's youth. There were Senate subcommittee hearings, and comics were seen as an impediment to education, whereas today comics are [seen as] a great way to get kids excited about reading. In the '50s, they just thought that there were all these horror comics, and that there were homosexual underpinnings to Batman and Robin, and there was this backlash against them. The comics industry started self-policing, self-censoring, and it really put the medium back quite a bit in terms of its development.
GOAL FOR STUDENTS: Ultimately you want students to become intimate with their own creative process and learn how to ask the right questions. You just want to help them learn to problem-solve, to tell stories, to string images together in a way that creates meaning.
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Washington Post Features Front Page Article of Sturm's CCS!
Updated January 10, 2005
washingtonpost.com
Town Sees Its Revival in Art
School for Cartoonists Is Key to Vermont Community's Plans
By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 9, 2005; Page A03
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, Vt. -- The changing face of this gritty hamlet appears in the form of a glossy poster mounted under a tattered green awning in the Main Street window of the Colodny's Surprise Department Store, which closed more than a decade ago.
Pen-and-ink illustrations of a woman smoking a cigarette, a baby with a sailor's hat and a menacing-looking robot adorn the advertisement for the future home of the Center for Cartoon Studies. "All Types Welcome," it reads. "Opening Fall 2005."
"No one has ever tried anything quite like this," said James Sturm, the school's founder and a cartoonist who has taught and practiced his craft from Seattle to Savannah, Ga. "There are some programs within larger art schools or places where they train you to get work at Marvel or D.C. Comics. But I envision this as more of an art school than a trade school, a place where cartoonists can be intimate with the creative process."
At first glance, it would be hard to imagine a less likely home for what Sturm said will be one of just two academic institutions in the country devoted solely to cartooning. (The other is the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, founded in 1976 in Dover, N.J.) The heyday of White River Junction came and went almost a century ago. The downtown of brick storefronts once bustled as about 50 passenger trains a day rumbled through what was the busiest New England train station north of Boston.
"Then, after World War II, the interstate highway came along," said Gayle Ottmann, executive director of the local chamber of commerce. "And just like that, people didn't have much reason to come here anymore."
Like many New England towns, White River Junction, with a population of about 2,500, over the past century, found itself the victim of changing economic forces.
"We're not terribly different from a lot of industrial-age mill towns, except our mill was the railroad," said David Briggs, proprietor of the Hotel Coolidge, which has dominated much of Main Street since 1925. "The challenge for a long time has been trying to figure out how to make a transition to new uses."
While some communities facing a similar problem have turned to new industries, White River Junction is emerging as a vibrant artists' enclave. Local leaders created studios and galleries in dormant buildings and tapped a small but active arts community as a catalyst. The town's location near the intersection of two major highways -- as well as being five miles from Dartmouth College -- has helped attract new talent.
Among the recent additions to the town are the highly regarded Northern Stage theater company, staffed by a rotating troupe of professional actors from Broadway and London's West End; the quirky and avant-garde Main Street Museum, which boasts an exhibit devoted to "modern art created by accident" and a "hall of industrial antiquities"; and a former bread factory that has been transformed into thousands of square feet of affordable studio and retail space for more than 40 local artists and craftspeople.
More than 300 people attended a "Creative Economy Summit" that Briggs and other civic leaders helped organize last year to emphasize the economic potential of the community's new niche.
George Mason University public policy professor Richard Florida -- whose 2002 book "Rise of the Creative Class" argued that municipalities capable of attracting and retaining creative thinkers and entrepreneurs can boost slumping economic fortunes -- said that such community involvement is critical to the success of revival efforts.
"Cities and towns all over are undergoing similar creative rehabilitations, whether it's fixing up urban warehouse districts or renovating old rural downtowns," he wrote in an e-mail message. "There's no reason this project can't work, so long as people on all sides become genuinely involved in the town's social and cultural life."
Town officials say the cartooning school, which is slated to open in September, is the centerpiece of their development plan. Sturm, who selected White River Junction almost by accident, after moving north from Georgia to live with relatives in nearby Hartland, Vt., is reviewing applications for an inaugural class of 20 students.
"Because of some of the problems they have had here, it is the perfect place for a school like this," he said. "The issues and conflicts that make for great literature are all here."
The school is arriving at a time when cartooning itself is undergoing something of a renaissance. Mass-produced and mainstream superhero comic books have been adapted into Hollywood hits such as "X-Men" and "Spiderman." Graphic novels, the name given to more high-brow illustrated literature, have earned broad critical acclaim.
"This is a calling, like any other medium," said Sturm, whose own graphic novel about Jewish baseball players, "The Golem's Mighty Swing," came out in 2001 and sold about 10,000 copies.
He has already begun attracting the giants of the field to White River Junction, conferring legitimacy, he said, on the fledgling institution.
Art Spiegelman, author of "MAUS: A Survivor's Tale," an award-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, gave a lecture here last month and is on the new school's advisory board.
Matt Groening, creator of "The Simpsons" television program, which began as a comic book, donated animation cells to be auctioned off to raise money for the school.
And Peter Laird, co-creator of the popular "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" series that spawned a television show and movies, donated $150,000 last month to help remodel the Colodny building to create classroom and studio space.
Renovations of the storefront, which had not been consistently occupied since the early 1990s, began about six weeks ago. Sturm has also raised money from a mix of private donors, state and local foundations, and government sources. He plans to spend about $250,000 on renovations, plus another $150,000 installing a computer lab in the basement.
Some store owners are skeptical that the changes will help the town regain its status as a commercial center. "Not unless you lower the sales tax," said Jeremy Dixon, who owns Professional Camera.
Still, seven cartooning students, who were required to submit a portfolio, have been admitted to the two-year program here, and five have made deposits. The annual tuition is $14,000.
In its first year, the school will offer five courses to be taught by Sturm and more than 20 local and visiting practitioners. He is seeking state accreditation to confer associate degrees. Eventually, he plans to expand the student body.
Ottmann said it may be years before a quantifiable economic impact on the town can be felt, but she has already noticed one major difference on Main Street since the artists began arriving a few years ago.
"You used to have no trouble finding a place to park, because no one was around," she said. "Now you have to drive around a little bit, but it's not a bad problem to have."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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USATODAY.com's HipClix Spotlights CCS
Updated January 4, 2005
What classes are taught at comics college?
Welcome to my entertainment blog. I update it throughout each weekday, so bookmark this page. E-mail comments and suggestions to wmatheson@usatoday.com. If you like what you see, try my weekly column, Pop Candy.
Happy Tuesday: I just came across this story about the new Center for Cartoon Studies, the first college dedicated to comics. Classes include "Introduction to Graphic Narratives" and "Survey of the Drawn Story." My goal is to visit sometime in 2005, maybe after they open in the fall. Posted 8:29 a.m.
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Boston Globe features Sturm and the Center for Cartoon Studies!
Updated January 3, 2005
James Sturm (at right) with cartoonist Art Spiegelman and Dartmouth comics scholar Ana Merino, at the Center for Cartoon Studies' future home in White River Junction, Vt.
School for sketchers
A new cartooning college wants to promote the spirit of independent comics -- and help enliven a Vermont town.
By Jeet Heer | January 2, 2005
IN THE OLD DAYS, the only thing an aspiring cartoonist needed was a mailbox, a few stamps, and a dream. Throughout the early 20th century, a surprising number of successful cartoonists (and countless hopefuls) learned the basics through correspondence courses advertised in comic books and on books of matches. During the Depression, the teenage Charles Schulz learned lettering and perspective through the mail-based Federal School (where the future creator of "Peanuts" received a C+ in "drawing for children"). The mail-order schools also graduated such distinguished cartoonists as Winsor McCay ("Little Nemo"), Chester Gould ("Dick Tracy"), and E.C. Segar ("Popeye").
Others were lucky enough to get their start apprenticing themselves to the masters. After World War II, Jules Feiffer, then still a high-school student, badgered his way into a gofer job at the studio of Will Eisner, creator of the comic book detective the Spirit. "He kept me around for $10 a week, just to fill in, to do blacks and rule borders and things like that," he later recalled in The Comics Journal. Within a year of working for Eisner, Feiffer was writing the scripts for "The Spirit," often laced with an ironic wit that prefigured his subsequent career as a satirical cartoonist in The Village Voice.
In recent years, as cartooning has become more self-conscious as a distinct art form with its own traditions, the ad hoc tradition of mail-order schooling and apprenticeship is giving way to more formal education, from full-fledged MFA programs to courses on the history of comics in mainstream curricula from MIT to California State University.
Now, in an era in which maverick artists like Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware have created prize-winning and critically celebrated graphic novels, cartoonist and impresario James Sturm thinks it's time for a school where students master the craft and ethos of independent comics.
The Center For Cartoon Studies (CCS), which Sturm is setting up in an old storefront in White River Junction, Vt., won't be the first college dedicated entirely to comics. (The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover, N.J., founded by cartoonist Joe Kubert ("Hawkman," "Sgt. Rock") in 1977, admits some four dozen students a year, some of whom have ended up drawing comics for industry mainstays like DC and Marvel.) But Sturm sees his own academy -- which will open its doors to its first 20 students next fall -- as something different.
Sturm's school will take its lead from "cartoonists who consider themselves artists rather than just craftsmen," he says. "I see it as an Iowa Writer's Workshop or New York University Film School equivalent to cartooning. We're geared more towards the auteur."
. . .
In appropriating the highbrow -- and much debated -- film term "auteur" (coined in the 1950s by Francois Truffaut to describe the distinctive stylistic stamp that great directors put on all aspects of their projects), Sturm is placing himself firmly on one side of a fissure that divides the comics world. For most of the 20th century, comics -- whether newspaper strips or newsstand titles from "Superman" to "Garfield" -- have been thoroughly governed by the rules of mass production. Some supremely talented creators like Schulz and George Herriman ("Krazy Kat") created their own characters and worked with minimal assistance. But almost invariably, comics have been produced in an assembly-line fashion, with a sharp division of labor between the writer, artist, inker, letterer, and colorer.
It wasn't until the late 1960s that there first emerged a cohort of cartoonists for whom artistic self-expression and a fierce do-it-yourself ethic was valued as an end in itself. Instead of passing tasks like penciling, inking, coloring, and lettering to different hands, artists like R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman did everything themselves -- while telling stories that ranged from well-grounded biographies of blues musicians to harrowing autobiographical accounts of failed suicides.
Born in New York in 1965, Sturm belongs to the second generation of underground cartoonists, who inherited the self-sufficient ethos of the pioneers while doing more thoughtful work than the early underground comics, many of which were just extended sex-and-drugs joke books. Drawn with woodcut starkness, Sturm's graphic novels and shorter works offer an odd-angled view of American history. One Sturm story, "The Revival," is set in the Kentucky frontier of 1801, where a forlorn family is looking for religious redemption at a open-air revival meeting. "The Golem's Mighty Swing," his prize-winning 2001 graphic novel, records the misadventures of a Jewish baseball team barnstorming through early 20th-century America, where they come up against heartland anti-Semitism.
For Sturm, the essence of his new school is the integration of all aspects of cartooning, from the writing of the original idea to inking the finished work to the nuts and bolts of self-publishing, including haggling with printers and distributors.
"Traditionally the greatest comics, whether Spiegelman's `Maus' or Herriman's `Krazy Kat' are generally the result of one person's vision," argues Sturm, who studied with Spiegelman at the School of Visual Arts' MFA program in the early 1990s. "When you are teaching comics, you can't separate the writing and the drawing. I think other programs try and do that, so you have a course that is called `comics script-writing.' I don't think we'd ever have a course called `comics script-writing' because when you are writing with pictures and doing thumbnail drafts, you can't separate those two things."
CCS will have 20 students in its first class next fall, with an eventual goal of 80 students per term. Tuition is $14,000 a year for the two-year program. (The school is in the process of gaining accreditation, which will allow it to grant degrees and help students get financial aid.) In addition to its full-time faculty of five, the school has an all-star roster of visiting faculty that will include Spiegelman, Ware, Vermont's James Kochalka ("American Elf"), and Canadian cartoonist Seth ("Clyde Fans").
In setting up the school, Sturm has been helped by the fact that White River Junction, in economic decline since its heyday as a railway hub, is trying to revitalize itself by luring the so-called "creative economy." The state of Vermont has given the school a grant of $30,000 and leased them the former Colodny Surprise Department Store at a below-market price. Local businesses, ranging from lawyers and accountants to a cafe, have chipped in with in-kind gifts, often of services done pro bono.
The school has also received a $150,000 donation from Peter Laird, co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles -- and a man who understands the value of self-publishing. Laird and partner Kevin Eastman wisely decided to self-publish the initial comic books about their famous shelled heroes, thereby earning a fortune denied to the creators of Superman and Captain America.
. . .
Paul Karasik, a Martha's Vineyard-based cartoonist who studied with Spiegelman in the early 1980s, is enthusiastic about the possibilities offered by Sturm's school. But he does sound one note of warning: Cartoonists who shell out $14,000 a year to study there shouldn't expect to earn a living through comics afterwards.
"The practicalities of cartooning as a career are simple -- it is very impractical," Karasik notes. "How many cartoonists make a good enough living to sustain themselves, let alone a family? Very, very few."
While artists like Spiegelman, Ware, and Daniel Clowes ("Ghost World") have achieved big sales figures and a crossover audience, the vast majority of alternative cartoonists haven't been anywhere nearly as successful. Despite publishing (with coauthor David Mazzucchelli) an acclaimed adaptation of Paul Auster's experimentalist novel "City of Glass" and (with his sister Judy Karasik) a comic book about having an autistic sibling, Karasik hasn't been able to make a full-time career of cartooning. Today, he earns his living as development director of a charter school he helped found on the Vineyard.
Sturm (who previously supported himself by teaching at the College of Art and Design in Savannah and working as art director for The Stranger, Seattle's alternative weekly) acknowledges that it's very difficult to make money as an alternative cartoonist. But he insists that the skills that will be taught in his school do have some practical value.
"Spiegelman was just up here for a fundraiser and he talked about how the skills you develop as a cartoonist are very transferable to other mediums," Sturm observes. "It's not just illustration. It's distilling down images and using them to tell stories. You are really creating a visual language, learning how to balance words and pictures in meaningful ways in order to communicate. . .. I [have done] storyboarding and toy design. Any work like this is a manifestation of the skills you develop as a cartoonist."
Yet for incoming students, the pragmatic question of how to make a living at cartooning is less important than finding a supportive environment for honing their skills. "I've done the academic route and while some places are open to work with comics there were a lot of people who were skeptical about it," says Anne Thalheimer, who wrote her 2002 doctoral dissertation in the English department at the University of Delaware on lesbian alternative comics.
Thalheimer was attracted to the opportunity to learn from CCS's high-wattage faculty and visiting lecturers. "The thought of being able to work one-on-one with the people whose work I've read and admired was so captivating," she says. And then there's the chance for ordinary shop-talk. "It'll be helpful even to talk about the basics, like `Do you use a Bristol board? What kind of pen do you use? Is it Micron?"'
Talking to Thalheimer, it's clear that, for all its novelty, part of the appeal of Sturm's school is that it will recreate something that had been lost in recent years: the community of mentors and apprentices that has allowed the cartooning craft to survive from one generation to the next.
Jeet Heer is the coeditor of "Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium," which has just been published by the University of Mississippi Press.
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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Boston Phoenix features Sturm events as Editor's pick!
Updated November 12, 2004
TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY: One of the foremost literary cartoonists on the scene, James Sturm is preparing to open the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont; it will start up in the fall of 2005 with a faculty to include Art Spiegelman (with whom Sturm worked at Raw magazine), Chris Ware, Seth, and Craig Thompson. Sturm himself is the author of the highly regarded The Golem's Mighty Swing (about a barnstorming Jewish baseball team of the 1920s) and the forthcoming Above & Below (both from Drawn & Quarterly). On Tuesday at 5 p.m., Sturm will do a one-hour presentation of The Golem's Mighty Swing at Congregation Mishkahn Tefila, 300 Hammmond Pond Parkway in Chestnut Hill; call (617) 332-7770. And on Wednesday from 4 to 6 p.m. at Comicopia, 464 Commonwealth Avenue in Kenmore Square, he'll sign books and review portfolios of candidates for the two-year intensive-study program at his new school; call (617) 266-4266.
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James Sturm Events In Boston 11/16 & 11/17!
Updated November 3, 2004
James Sturm, of the critically acclaimed graphic novels THE GOLEM'S MIGHTY SWING and Eisner-winning UNSTABLE MOLECULES, will be making special appearances in the Boston area in November to promote his new D+Q comic book release of ABOVE & BELOW.
Also, James will be reviewing portfolios for the Fall 2005 class at the Center for Cartoon Studies a new graduate art school devoted to the medium of sequential arts in White River Junction, Vermont.
11/16/04 - 5:00 PM
A one-hour presentation on THE GOLEM'S MIGHTY SWING at Congregation Mishkan Tefila, 300 Hammond Pond Parkway, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 on Tuesday, November 16, 2004, at 5:00 pm. Signing to follow.
11/17/04 - 4:00 PM & 6:00 PM
4:00 PM Portfolio review at Comicopia in Boston. 6:00 PM signing. 464 Commonwealth Ave, Kenmore Square Boston, MA 02215
For more information visit:
www.drawnandquarterly.com
www.comicopia.com
www.cartoonstudies.org
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James Sturm Comic in the Boston Globe!
Updated November 1, 2004
James Strum creates an original comic about the Red Sox Curse for the Boston Globe!
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EW Reviews The Golem's Mighty Swing
Updated September 16, 2004
Entertainment Weekly reviews James Sturm's THE GOLEM's MIGHTY SWING!
THE GOLEM'S MIGHTY SWING (Drawn and Quarterly, $16.95)
James Sturm's newly reprinted graphic novel reads like the movie John Sayles should've made instead of Eight Men Out: In the 1920s, a Jewish baseball team barnstorms the heartland, content to play for love of the game. But when they allow a slick promoter to tweak their gimmick with a golem--the cabalistic automaton of Hebrew myth- -foretold chaos ensues. Sturm's prose is as elegantly understated as his line work. And every now and then he throws the heater: "They've been waiting for their Messiah a thousand years," says one opponent. "So they know how to wait on a curveball." A- --Tom Russo
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Edmonton Journal on The Golem's Mighty Swing
Updated August 27, 2003
This item from The Edmonton Journal dates from April 27, 2003, but was only recently brought to our attention.
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click here to download the PDF (328.98 KB)
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D+Q at MOCCA in NYC and Library convention in Toronto this weekend
Updated July 1, 2003
Although D+Q is temporarily a one man operation once again the company will still manage to be in two different cities at the same time this weekend. Amazing! In Toronto on Saturday and Sunday The American and Canadian Library Associations join forces for the first time since 1960 to host the biggest library convention on the continent. Publisher Chris Oliveros will be representing D+Q at the Chronicle Books booth. Meanwhile in New York City, D+Q will be in attendence at the MOCCA comic art show, with Peter Birkemoe (the owner of The Beguiling, one of the world's best comic stores), representing the company. MOCCA runs all day Sunday at the Puck building on Lafayette street.
In person at the Toronto Library convention: Seth and Chester Brown signing at 3:30 pm, Sunday June 22nd in the Chronicle Books booth.
At MOCCA, in New York, James Sturm and R. Sikoryak will be signing at the D+Q booth in the early afternoon.
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Sturm's Baseball issue New Yorker cover
Updated May 1, 2003
James Sturm's art graces the cover of the April 29th, 2003 New Yorker issue, the issue which celebrates baseball in the USA.
Congrats to James.
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The Comics Journal interview with James Sturm
Updated April 13, 2003
James Sturm
Interviewed by Tom Spurgeon
excerpted from The Comics Journal #251
Illustration from The Comics Journal #211, © 1999 James Sturm and Art Baxter
Still Understanding
TOM SPURGEON: Let me ask you about the McCloud comic essay that you and Art Baxter did for an issue of the Journal. You very recently made a positive reference to McCloud's book, even after the thousands of words that have been written either disparaging or picking over Scott's work. You referred to it as the seminal text for teaching comics.
JAMES STURM: Understanding Comics is a great text for teaching comics. Is it the Bible? No. But it's a way of initiating discussion. At least it's something there that you can respond to. I hear far more praise for it than I do criticism. I don't understand why people disparage it.
SPURGEON: Has it been useful to you as a teaching tool?
STURM: Yeah. It's wonderful. My intro class, there's so much studio work so there was not much time to read, but we read that, we read Maus, and we read On Directing Film by David Mamet. And these three texts give a pretty solid, at least a jumping-off point to talk about most things that I want to discuss or things that I feel should be brought up.
SPURGEON: Maus because of its understated formalism?
STURM: That for sure, and just how accomplished it is in every respect. Art is someone who thinks through every line he puts on paper and has a reason for it being there. I think the best cartoonists are very deliberate; nothing's an accident. Until Jimmy Corrigan came out, maybe, you'd be hard-pressed to compare anything to Maus in terms of what it accomplished. I'm sure you could, but I can't think of anything off the top of my head.
SPURGEON: You lay the responsibility for better work at the artist's feet.
STURM: Sure. You can complain all that you want about comics and how horrible the industry is and a lot of cartoonists are so defeatist about it. How do you change people's minds? How do you offer evidence to the contrary? You have to make good work. And you can't wait until someone publishes you. You have to have that faith that this will find a place. And if there's enough of this stuff, people will start recognizing it.
SPURGEON: Art Spiegelman said on Sixty Minutes II recently that he's almost come to a different opinion in the last six months to a year as to how many artists were taking up this responsibility to produce good work. Has your opinion changed as to how much good work is being done?
STURM: I think there's a tremendous amount of work, really interesting and good work being done. I think that a lot of these people are relatively young. People need to stick with it for longer. When I went to SPX and saw Kevin Huizenga's work or Clumsy I was blown away. There's a lot of people I think doing good work right now.
SPURGEON: And that's different from what you saw four or five years ago, when you wrote the piece?
STURM: I was supposed to respond to a specific chapter of Understanding Comics. I think I was reacting to something in Scott's general enthusiasm: "The medium itself was jet-propelled -- just strap it on!" I don't think he meant that, of course, but you know what I mean. Unbridled optimism is one of Scott's gifts and perhaps I was unfairly trying to balance that with some pessimism.
SPURGEON: You seem to have a very different opinion now than you did then. As an art form, you said back then comics are in a state of arrested development.
STURM: I still think that. I'm excited about it, but 99 percent of the stuff being done is still garbage. Isn't it?
SPURGEON: It seems to me that there is a definite increase in the amount of considerable work, maybe not great work, but stuff that you'd even consider to be decent work or worth looking at.
STURM: I agree with that. Just think of all of these cartoonists that saw Maus in their high-school and college years who are now coming of age. And now, think of all of those kids that are in high school and college who are coming across not just Crumb and Spiegelman but Seth, Ware, Clowes, etc. I'm optimistic about comics. I think there are always going to be people that want to do it. The general skill level is pretty high. With desktop publishing as well, people are able to make these beautifully designed things and make it look like something substantial rather quickly. Hopefully some of these people will have something to say. I'm optimistic. Yeah
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