Hi. Welcome to the boston book festival and todays session. My name is christine, and i am a board member of the boston book festival, and i am just one of dozens which feels like hundreds who work behind the scenes and truly believe that the festival is a wonderful source of inspiration and eyedsharing. Idsharing ideasharing. We have been gifted a beautiful new vespa, its under the welcome tent, and all donations will go towards keeping the festival free for you all. Donations are just 10, and i would love to see one of you riding around the city in that beautiful thing. So thank you so much. One other administrative thing is we will have a book signing right across the hall where you can ask the presenters any additional questions. So please enjoy todays session. Thank you. [applause] hello. Im Alexander Danner of the writers room of boston. I will be your moderator for tonights presentation with hillary chute and Sarah Glidden. I myself am an author, im also a writer of comics with contributions to the nonfiction colonial comics anthologies, and im cocreator of the audio drama Greater Boston which is a whole other forum, but thats mostly where youll find me working these days. Our format for today will see our two featured authors giving a presentation on their work in comics and comic studies which will be followed by q a from you in the audience. First to speak will be hillary chute, a highly accomplished scholar of comics literature currently teaching in the department of english as well as in the department of design. Her published works on comics began with her 2010 book, graphic women life, narrative and contemporary comics. She then associate edited metamouse, an annotated edition of the legendary holocaust biography tracing the development of that essential work. She edited outside the box be interviews with contemporary cartoonists and coedited a critical inquiry book. Shes earned several awards for comic scholarship, and she has facilitated the contemporary inquiry in comic scholarship in general. Her most recent book is disaster drawn visual witness, comics in documentary form. Which traces the history of illustrated witness as far back as the 15th century depictions of military tactics. She looks more deeply into the techniques and philosophies of three documentarians who come to this craft by three very different pass. The first chronicling his own experience, the second as biographer recording family history, and the third is a deliberate journalist inserting himself into conflict zones for the sake of witness itself. In the course of her inquiry, hillary examines the power of comics to convey history with emotional honesty while acknowledging the problem of memory and the friction that arises between truth and fact in an artisticallyrealized historical document. Our second presenter is Sarah Glidden. Her first book, how to understand israel in 60 days or less is a memoir and a travelogue. The realities of effort life in one of the most complex regions of the world. Her latest book is rolling blackouts dispatches from turkey, syria and iraq. Another middle east travelogue. She is accompanying a pair of journalist friends as well as a veteran of the war returning to the country to see the end results of the conflict he participated in. Glidden does more than chronicle what she witnesses, she chronicles the process of witness itself and the ubiquitous cameras and microphones that accompany the travelers become betweening elements in the story itself. Glidden paints a complex portrait of the relationship between the documentarian and the subject and the fleeting nature of truth. Finally, i want to mention that after the presentations all three of us will be signing books next door in the gordon chapel, you can find us there. We are going to be rushed off the stage quickly to make room for the next people, so that will be a time for further can conversation. And now, hillary, if you would, please. Start talking. Okay. Well, its such a pleasure to be here and such a pleasure to be here with you. So the book that you coauthored, coedited which i think is called comics of global history 1968present is a really key text in terms of thinking about the kind of work that im interested in happening across the world, which is to say drawing as a form of recording and comics as a form of witnessing. And i end my book as ill describe with trying to think about this new category of socalled comics journalism. So its such an honor to be on stage with sarah who is one of the key figures in this movement. So thanks for having me. Im just going to talk pretty briefly and pretty just in a basic way about what my book, disaster drawn, is about. And that will be followed by sarahs presentation in which which she will show you beautiful images from her graphic narrative. Youll just have to bear with me only talking with no visual aids for my part of this. So this is my book, disaster drawn. This cover, which im sure is very hard to see, ill just mention briefly, is by the comics journalist joe sacco. And it is an image of the july 1995 massacre. And this is the kind of work that i got very interested in when i was a ph. D. Student in english. So i have this kind of strange specialty. I have a ph. D. In english, but i study and research comics, and i study and research comics that are nonfiction. So the more i started getting interested in certain stories like art speeg beingmans mouse and joe sack sews dispatches saccos kiss patches from the middle east and from the balkans, i started wondering why this form of comics was so good for telling certain kinds of stories about world historical conflict and about trauma and about violence and about a certain kind of mass suffering, actually. So what i wanted to do in this book was to investigate all of these references that cartoonists that i had been talking to for years, like Art Spiegelman with whom i worked on a book and like joe sacco who ive now known for years and interviewed for various publications, i wanted to figure out why they always talked about Francisco Gioia, for example. I thought i really want to know what this means not just as a reference, but as a sort of trajectory of forms and a trajectory of trying to do the work of witnessing. So id say there are two things that my book is trying to do. One is its trying to offer a longer genealogy for contemporary work like sarahs, like Art Spiegelmans and like joe saccos. And to that end, my first chapter is actually about the printmaker who did a series of etchings about the 30 years war called the grand miseries of war that then influenced Francisco Gioia in his disasters series of war etchings which he did in the 18 teens. So i wanted to try to come up with a history of what it means to bear witness to war and violence through the work of the hand, right . So the common place idiom is that one takes a photograph but makes a picture. Is so what does it mean to be doing this kind of making with your eyes and your hands when youre bearing witness to war which is what we see in this case, in what we see in Francisco Gioias case. So i wanted to put that work in conversation with contemporary comics. The other thing i wanted to do, and this is part of the reason im so honored to be on stage with you, is i wanted to try to give a more International Dimension to a lot of the nonfiction be comics work that is coming out. And the person i had been interested in for a very long time a japanese cartoonist who just died a few years ago, actually, in hiroshima. He survived the bombing when he was 6 years old. And he, he lived, his mother lived, his mother gave birth that day. She was pregnant, induced by shock on the road. That baby lived four months and then died. Several of his siblings died, and his father diesed. And he died. And he, obviously, was deeply affected by this experience, and he went on to do a comic book in the early 70s in japan that is called translates as i saw it. Which is a direct reference to one of the etchings in Francisco Gioias disasters of war series where you have an image, and you have a caption, and some of the captions say things like this is how it happened. And one of the most famous captions about bearing witness simply says, this i saw. So he publishes this comic book, its about 45 pages about his experience and his mothers experience surviving the bombing of hiroshima. And this really changed cultures of expression in japan and opened up comics as a form of bearing witness to these kinds of stories. 1972 also the year that Art Spiegelman publishes a threepage version of what would become his twovolume work called mouse. So Art Spiegelman publishes mouse, three pages in an underground comic book the exact same year, in San Francisco in 1972, in a title called funny aminals. Im not misspeaking, the m and n are reversed. It was an underground publication. Spiegelmans piece mixed in quite awkwardly with some lascivious work by robert crumb about some foxes chasing a chicken woman and eating her for dinner. There was a real mix of different kinds of tabooshredding work happening in what was called the comics underground which was this uncensored, uncommercial space where people did comics and distributed them and published them independently. So part of what im trying to investigate in this book is whats happening in the early 70s thats giving rise to these new cultures of expression from opposite sides of the war across the globe. And as im sure you can tell, im quite interested in world war ii as an event that really reshaped how people think about how they can tell certain kinds of stories. And maybe ill just stop there, i think its about ten minutes, and turn it over to sarah. Okay. Thank you very much. I have a little Remote Control here. So, yeah, im Sarah Glidden. This is my book, rolling blackouts, ask its funny and its funny that all of the people hillary talks about in her book were people who inspired me early on, way before i started drawing comics myself, joe sacco, barefoot jen, i think, is the same yeah. So this comic book called i saw it became a tenvolume serial called barefoot yeah. And that was one of the first kind of serious comics that i read. And that was this kind of my introduction to comics as not mad magazine and not calvin and hobbs. And, you know, these were highly influential to me, but they were never things i thought i could do. Im not a journalist, i havent experienced an iranian revolution, but it did start getting me thinking about how comics can be used to tell other stories. Rolling blackouts is a work of comics journalism about journalism, but my entryway into journalism was kind of sideways through journalisms, like, second cousin twice removed memoir which is, you know, another kind of nonfiction. It was about ten years ago when i started making comics, and i started by doing autobiographical daily strips. This is a way of just kind of getting used to the language of comics. You do something every day. If its not good, it doesnt matter, you throw it away and do another one the next day. After a while, i wanted to do a longer work, and thats where how to understand us kneel 60 days or less israel in 60 days or less came about. It was sponsored in part by the state of israel and, you know, as a massachusetts, leftwing, progressive jewish girl [laughter] i thought, you know, oh, im going to go on this trip, and its going to be crazy, and its going to be propaganda, and im going to make, like, a comic about my experience, and it will be just kind of like my journal comics, only longer, and itll be a book. So thats what that book was. And it really was about my personal experience, and it was memoir, but it was also memoir that followed my interests, and my interests have always been politics can kind of contemporary issues and how my identity as an american and American Foreign affairs play into what happens in the rest of the world. So as i was working on that book, some friends of mine two of whom are on the cover of this book, theres Alex Stonehill whos a videographer and photojournalist and sarah stewedville who ease a prose journalist they started a nonprofit multimedia project called the seattle globalist. Oops. I thought i ed fitted these slides edited these slides, but i guess i didnt. Sorry. So they i knew them from new york, but they moved back to seattle to, you know, kind of make their journalism collective happen. Journalism was in disarray at the time that they started this, and they really wanted to just, like, do their own work at a time when institutions werent really providing jobs for new journalists who are, like, optimistic about reporting underreported issues. So most of their work revolved around social justice issues, detention in the seattle area. But about once a year they were able to get Grant Funding to do larger Scale International reporting projects such as on the left there you see they went to east africa to report are on water scarce the city and how that affects conflict scarcity and how that a affects conflict. They went to pakistan a year later to report on madrassas and education. I would visit them in seattle, and they would always have these stories about their reporting, you know, brushes with the taliban or, like, having to sleep outside when there are lions prowling around in kenya and just stories about finding their stories, and i was just fascinated. Journalism sounded like this amazing, exciting career where, like, youre doing this heroic work of telling stories, and youre seeing these amazing places and, you know, they were also telling me about how difficult it was and how hated journalists are and all of, you know, the kind of annoying logistical things they had to deal with, but those or were not the parts i listened to. I just listened to the exciting parts. And it really made me think about how i didnt really know much about where my journalism came from, you know . Like, i use the metaphor all the time think of it like when you turn on the faucet and your water comes out of your sink, like, you just never really think about where it comes from. You dont think about the pipes or the reservoir or how the reservoir stays clean. You just, you know, you kind of take it for granted, and thats how i had treated journalism for so long. I just kind of opened up my web browser, and there was the New York Times for free at the time. [laughter] and so i thought, like, wouldnt it be interesting to go with them on one of their large reporting trips and do a book about how they do their jobs, how do you find an interpreter, how do you find your stories and, like, what is a fixer . Because i really didnt know. So they said yes, and in late 2010, november and december, we went on a reporting trip to the middle east starting in turkey. So in turkey we were interviewing iranian refugees and i should say they were interviewing. I was really just there as a shadow to watch them work. And from turkey we went over the border into Northern Iraq to a town called assume man ya which is near the border with iran. And in turkey in iran sorry, in iraq we were there because they were doing a documentary about this man who has a very interesting story. He was an iraqi kurd who was drafted into the iraqi army during the iraq iran war in the 80s. He deserted with his pregnant wife to iran. She committed suicide, tragedy create tragically, he was left with his daughter, went to pakistan. They were refugees for eight years there. He got remarried, started a new family, and finally they were granted asylum in the United States in seattle where everything was looking fine until he was brought in for questioning because the fbi had connected him to an alqaeda terrorist who was part of the bombing of the world trade center. So although they couldnt find any actual evidence connecting him to these terrorists, he was deported back to iraq where hes from, and we went there to interview him and talk to him now separated from his family. He feels unjustly accused of this crime and kind of just newly in us isolation. The focus of their reporting trip, although had been to talk to iraqi refugees, because they the way they saw it and the way i agreed with them is that after barack obama was elected, i think the United States and especially liberal americans kind of decided to turn the page on the iraq war. It was so much easier to be optimistic about obamas term starting and to kind of forget that, you know, this war which we had all been against in the first place had really affected millions and millions of people and left a country shatteredded and, you know, started the conflict that we see now in syria. And so they felt and i felt that our generation especially who were young when that war started needed to really look at what the effects of this war were, the human fallout. And that would be iraqi refugees, half of whom were live anything syria at the time and half of whom were living in jordan. And most of the refugees in syria were in damascus. It was a very different syria at the time. This was about three months before everything started falling apart. And we werent there to report on the Syrian Government or what they were up to, we were just there to talk to iraqi refugees. The other wrinkle in this story was that sarah, the lead journalist, decided to invite along a childhood friend of hers named dan obrien who was, like her, raised in a very progressive seattle, hippie environment. His mother founded an organization that tried to ban war toys. And his response to the iraq war starting in 2003 was to join up in 2005. He joined the marines and went over there to fight in the war. And this is something that his family and his friends couldnt really understand at the time. And i think still bothered sarah to that day. So she invited him on the trip to kind of revisit the country as a civilian, to meet the people who had been displaced by this war he had been a part of. And her idea was that she would interview him as he went along on this trip and kind of see how a marine returns to iraq. And she would write a story about him. You know, i think for her it was a little bit like showing some reallife journalism. Like, the idea of journalism is that someone goes into an issue with kind of preconceived notions, they think they know something. You read something new or you see something new, and then you change a little bit at the end. And that is true, but unfortunately, that doesnt work on a timeline that you can set. And i think for dan and for her, you know, they had a complex relationship as friends, and so their conversations turned less into interviews and more into kind of arguments that they had a hard time getting through to each other. So that is a big part of the book, is their conversation about the war. We were there for two months. The book took five and a half years for me to make, and part of the reason that it took so long was because i wanted the whole thing to be real dialogue. So i was recording everything. Thats me in the corner there with my little digital recorder. And i was recording everything. Not just the interviews that i sat in on to, but also our conversations at breakfast about what we were going to report on that day, you know, us Walking Around these towns that we were in talking to different people and then definitely, you know, processing the days interviews over, like, three or four beers and talking earnestly about journalism and our place in the world as americans. So all of that turned into hundreds of hours of audio that i transcribed, you know, myself for about a year it took me to transcribe all this tape and figure out how i was going to make this book. And some people ask me why i didnt just hire someone else to transcribe it for me or why dont you use one of these programs that translates speech to text. But really for me listening to these recordings over again helped me think of the book visually. When you listen to audio, you can remember how people moved because youve been observing them so long, and you were watching their body language, and you can kind of hear how they talk and remember, like, how they shifted and, you know, when they have pauses and when they were unsure or sarcastic about things. So it was really important to me to listen to all of these tapes again, and it created this weird situation where i was reliving two months of time for five years. And that was very strange. The other reason it took so long is because it was just a more complicated book for me to do than my first book which was more of a chronological travelogue. I wasnt going to be writing about my imagination and my own interior thoughts, i really wanted to explore the relationship between journalistses and people that they journalists and the people that they interview. And those relationships range. There are Expert Interviews, for example, on this panel our journalists were interviewing a representative of the unhcr which is the agency that overlooks refugees. And it was an Expert Interview that this person is used to talking to journalists, and hes just there to give statistics and just, like, plain old information. So thats kind of a distant relationship. But with the other interviews, theres more of, like, a deeper connection going on. So with sam, for example, we were there for ten days, and he has a painful story, one where he needs to reveal his life. So the journalist i was with spent a lot of time getting to know him as a person, getting to know his family and, you know, listening to his story. For sams section of the book, i do do some flashback scenes like this one where hes talking about his University Days in baghdad. But i really wanted for this book to keep it grounded in the present because this is a book about the process of journalism. These people who are experienced trauma arent now in their lives. So, for example, we did the interviewing of sam in this room here. Heres a photo of them interviewing him. And this room was significant because it was a room that he shared with his first wife before she died. And so in my comics i really want to show setting, a sense of place is really important in my work. I take a lot of photo reference. And i use photo reference to show how, you know, these countries and towns that im visiting are different because most likely my readers have never been to Northern Iraq. But i also want to show how theyre the same. You know, that blue chair in the center there, the ubiquitous plastic lawn chair, is something that i think all of us can recognize. Its a chair that, you know, might be in your backyard, but its also in iraq, and its everywhere else. So i really want to show those little pieces of peoples lives that are similar to yours maybe because the point of journalism, if its narrative journalism, especially to show that if situations were a little bit different, this could be you. This could have happened to you. I need to speed up because im running out of time. But thanksgiving, you know, sam get but this is, you know, sam getting ready for breakfast. Another example of trying to keep things rooted in the present. And i use family photographs because we got to know sam fairly well. I wanted to show who these people are who he cares for so much. For the iraqi refugee situation, we werent there to do a profile of one person, we were there to kind of show the scope of this, you know, really tragic situation, this refugee crisis which now seems small in comparison to the syrian refugee crisis buzz like, you know, was but was, like, an extremely large problem. And here are people who are just like my parents. Iraq was a very professional class country. People were very educated. They, you know, most of the refugees we spoke to were lawyers and pharmacists, and here they are in safety in syria but not able to work and kind of forced to wait for three hours every two weeks to get a little bit of rice and some oil. And so its a crowded situation. Theres a lot of indignity, and i really with these panels in this section of the book wanted to show the crowdedness of what these people were living with. A little note about how i represent language. I struggled trying to decide how to show people speak anything a foreign language, and i was inspired by documentary film and radio documentary where someone will start speaking in their original language, and the interpreter will kind of come in overdubbed on top of them. So in all of the scenes ill have their balloon kind of sitting on top, and sometimes you can see pieces of arabic or kurdish sticking out on the side to show that two people are talking at once. There are scenes like this one, for example, where the interpreter this young woman we were with didnt want to translate what this woman was saying because she was saying some pretty angry words to us as americans. Trying everything but the reality is drying people on time and cant Pay Attention to what people are saying when you are drawing so hopefully, took audio and photos where you need to draw interviews where it would be inappropriate to take pictures but here is some photo reference in damascus and this is how i worked that into the panel. My drawing style is simple but specific. I want people who have lived in damascus to be able to recognize places they know and i want minivans in syria to be syrian minivans and the key to be accurate which i take a lot of pictures. In syria when you first get there if you went there before now, pictures of assad are ubiquitous. They are everywhere and that at first is shocking but you get used to overtime so in the book it is mentioned by the characters, as time goes on i flipped him into the background because i want you to have the experience of getting used to the jarring image. I cant use photos at the Border Crossing so i take a lot of sketches. This is the Border Crossing into Northern Iraq. That building on the side, this is the famed building on the inside, take sketches of these chairs we are waiting on but i use floor plans a lot because they can give you schematics to work on later when you are trying to make an accurate drying. Some places you have to use a combination of drawings and pictures. We went to a cockfight with one of the people we are interviewing in iraq. It is not technically illegal because birds dont die, the men would prefer not be photographed so we were told not to take photographs while the event was going on so i took sketches again but after everybody left, i took pictures of the space and those i worked into the final drawing so i combined sketches and photos to make the final work. For my work i am using cartoons of people so i have one or two photos making them into a character. I take my sketchbook and do a lot of drawings, from different angles and after i am confident in how they work i will draw the pencil page and start watercolor ring. On my book is watercolor, do it all by hand. This is the end result, and a little bit pissed off at us. That is my accreditation. I did that in record time. Thank you. [applause] we have a significant amount of time left for discussion. A couple questions of my own before i open it up to the audience was first and i want to ask about, thinking about comics as journalism, as visual journalism, in most media we think of as video or photography, i see two differences between this kind of journalism and photographic journalism. The real thing versus the image of the thing. The matter of temporality. The photograph is immediate. You spent several years recording two months of experiences, recording decades after experiences. I am curious what you think that does as a form of journalism that there is this essential gap of time between what is documented. Talking to someone working in this field. The last person profiled, it is specifically a kind of ethical stance. The quality of today at news media. It is a value, the incidence of getting this down for the nightly news or internet cycle. Slow kind of work to focus on other kinds of details, every day life details, what it means because of blockades and things like that, wouldnt make it onto the nightly news. I agree. There are different kinds of comic journalism. A website, political comics does have faster journalism. The pipeline protests, she was able to draw a story like that in several days, incredible and you see a lot of countries doing work like that but especially i agree that to come. Something like this becomes history and the way to understand the world and people in it. Sometimes journalism when i started thinking about doing journalism this idea journalism is going to create and respond in a certain way because of what they just read, going to rally for the government to make certain changes and that is dangerous sometimes. Certain journalists push us into the war, journalism shouldnt always be with the idea of something happening now to make a decision, what we as a country or people should do about that. It is a way to understand human beings and the relationship between people and their government. With a book like mine this is about a war that at the time was already old, it is not about a war that happens but the aftermath, what happens to people who live their lives even if it is turned upside down a little bit. Sometimes we Pay Attention to a hotspot in the world when something is actually going on and we forget those people but for them those conflicts last the rest of their lives. Something you said in the first part of the question, i pushed back a little bit. Not that photography captures reality either, or pros capture its reality either. When i teach comic journalism, you think there is something in the New York Times that is subjective, there is no such thing as neutral history or neutral journalism. One of the benefits of trying to record is it is often asking people to think about what it means to record in the first place and to document. A wonderful point. Such an ingrained assumption that photography is intrinsically neutral and objective, the photographer has to stand somewhere and that is meaningful. Mechanical objectivity, the lens, outside the frame, the issue that comics call attention to a gutter sequence. Then a person you photoshop, digital manipulation, you never know what is going on in that progress and that is the reason a lot of comics are ones that include our doubles in the work. It is just to drive the point home a little more that we were there, we observed this and we are human beings with our own biases even if we dont talk about them that much, show the journalism is made by a person, observed certain things and certain things are selected, not a magical eyeball floating in and seeing something and the drawn image, handdrawn images can really show people someone did this, not just a snapshot, you can forget there is a hand behind that. That hasnt always been comfortable and that is why i got so interested in taxonomy. And when they came out it was on the New York Times bestseller list so for those who havent read it, you glossed it over a little bit too but it was a work that came out in 1986, 1991 about a cartoonist trying to visualize his testimony having survived auschwitz. So they were both survived auschwitz. He got interested in what his father had been through. It shuttles back and forth, in the 1980s in new york. On the New York Times bestseller list, art siegelman wrote to the times and he said david duke would like to think what happened was fiction. Novelists having that, i spent researching and writing. One of the features, and he draws jews, polish gentiles as pigs, americans as dogs, british as fish, and i know i created the promise of taxonomy, and for the first time in the papers history, and this anecdote has been so evocative for me. People have a hard time thinking of drying is a system of communication. The editors of the times debated about this, lets go down to soho, and a giant mouse answers we will put it in fiction which of course is going to happen. I need to open up to the audience, questions for the audience, let me stress these must be questions. I will cut you off if you are speaking. [inaudible question] [inaudible question] editor of the comics. Thank you for that question. I like the term comics. To me comics is a medium that might sound pretty awkward to peoples years. I had to fight for the syntax but to me comics is a medium the way film is a medium and so forth and so on. It is not a genre of art or literature but its own artform, its own medium. There is a lot of awkwardness especially because it is a field so the terms are not codified but one thing i tried to push back on a little bit is the term graphic novel. This is basically a publishing term that became a big deal in the 80s and cartoonists generally, maybe sarah feel differently, like being called cartoonists. Prestige graphic novel seems to imply can be irritating to some cartoonists because it is just a publishing term and they are often not publishing work they think of as novelistic at all especially creators im listed in interested in. I like comics, i like cartoonists, sometimes they are fictional works, graphic novels. I would not call mouse a graphic novel. I love to address that. I personally dont care what someone wants to call me or my work. We have a problem with terminology. Comics to a lot of people mean funny. I find when i am doing my work and telling someone i am a comic journalist that means i make fun of them. Bring an example to show this is serious but comics always had a problem. It did start as something funny. When people say it is not a graphic novel, it is not funny either. It is hypocritical to say one is okay and what is not france it is a drawn strip which is more accurate for it. In spanish it is small stories. I do think we have a problem with terminology. I am sympathetic to people who dont know what to call it because it doesnt make much sense. With comic journalism, they go to barnes noble and the graphic novel section and a lot of people might not have had exposure to serious comics which people can get turned off of the idea without even reading the works. For me, we as comic journalists have a lot of work to do to show people and other comic journalists try really hard to make sure the work is accurate. And has integrity, we need to work past a little obstacle which is the terminology. Remember the novel isnt new anymore but we call it the novel. Sometimes names are not descriptive. Thank you, it was really interesting. I am also curious about what determines what kind of stories, a big piece with a large arc, is it something where you have enough of an Attention Span to make it worth the effort. I understand the ethical pushback you brought up and curious about because your book came five years later were you tempted to bring elements of a conversation that iraq had changed in your work . Definitely. I have an epilogue a year later, when it already started but the mandate of my projects was to report on reporters at the time they are there. I am not an expert in what has happened in syria or iraq afterwards. I had to stay limited even though it is something i care about. When it comes to you are asking, what was the other part of the question . The kinds of stories you tell. Next a difference, what you are reporting on and the kinds of comics that are interesting. For example there are lots of comics that are info graphic heavy, explaining things, explaining political conflicts, Financial Systems and those have a lot more of a guy narrating like this and showing you a graph and this is what happens and that is a great way for people to approach a new topic visually, something complex and might be hard. And article they can see into infographics or images and for me the stuff i work on, they are more characterbased and based around narratives. That is a different kind of journalism. And a cartoonist who does mostly funny things, movie reviews, that is comic journalism and that can use humor, completely different kind of storytelling so comic journalism we need to think of it as a wideopen field to do a lots of different things. A lot of these works that come out as books like palestine, and individual comic books, it was incredibly nearly 90s during the first intifada to have comic books called palestine that you could buy for 2. 50 at the local comic book store that were so different from other kinds of comics you could find at the store. Also serialized in raw magazine before it came out so that question about duration and temporality, you can get something out of comics, the serial nature of comics. No magazines for comics anymore, we have the internet. Be change i would like to seize on the opportunity of having a comic scholar and comic artist together to give a demo. And draw out complexities, and looking at the iraqi woman yelling at her the change can we flip that you by visual witness and the complexities of it. Do we feel we can do that in a timely manner . You can say no. I will say quickly having a looked at that image when it came up because i dont to bore everyone, one of the things i find so powerful is what you point did theed out, perfect illustration of what this form can show. The overlap balloons, that is something a photograph cant show, that is a visual conceit, a visual image, and you are making material on the page, peoples words and the way they exist in space temporarily. It is an incredible image. That was a lovely and informative technique, stopped at that. Since that was about ethics and ethical witnessing, a panel like that draws the reader in 2 understanding, in other media, the into relationality going on. If we think of ethics broadly speaking, understanding the attempt to understand the other. It is giving us a deeper window into how the dynamics are working. Be change most comics deal with drama and violence. What about comics as a medium lends itself to those topics . I think it lends a lot of empathy, that is what i like to focus on, what is strongest to me. Allows you to understand the other person, hand drawn, someone put time into it. I went readers to empathize with that and empathize trauma in a way even if im not showing it as it happened, Something Interesting when drawing comics, drying someone smiling unconsciously. You find yourself mimicking the person on the page and this happens to people talking about traumatic events come most difficult about making the feet book with drying people talking about losing family members or witnessing really horrible things because as you are drying it you are embodying them your self and i hope that translate to someone reading it too but i am not sure. I will say two formal things. One is the kind of visual detail one can present in a drawing can be really powerful for displaying certain kinds of scenes of violence, something quite different than watching a film because the reader controls the pace so the reader can put the book down, the reader can linger as long as she wants on an image but because comics is a print form you read on a screen, that you read at your own pace, it can present a certain important visual realism especially around difficult violence that gives the reader the chance to engage or disengage in a way that seems important, thinking about violence and spectacle in general in todays media landscape. One last question. One comment and question, there has been talk about the relationship between photographs, how they encapsulate greater perspective than the original photo but when you show the space he shared with his wife drawn and showed us a photograph i was completely knocked out by the photograph, the authenticity and psychological space, using photographs as well. Josh neufeld recently did a piece on a syrian refugee journey to europe and used photojournalist photos with the piece, there is a book called the photographer that uses photos. It would take out of the narrative, and take you out of the experience of going along with people and create an immersive story, this kind of journalism is trying the chaos of a real experience and turn it into a narrative, that is how human beings can understand Human Emotions and life. This is a very narrative work but i can see there are definitely times to be appropriate and beneficial. I find it a little jarring reading a comic that mixes the photograph and it takes you out and that can be appropriate but it can detract in a way. Personal choice. We have hit again we will be next door signing. If you would like to talk a little more with hillary chute and Sarah Glidden they will be there with their books and thank you for coming. Thank you. [applause] good afternoon. Welcome to the nonfiction keynote of the eighth annual boston book festival, the history of time travel. Has anyone today come here from the future . Anyone here from the past . A few. Not too many. I should be relieved. I am debbie porter, founder and director of the second book festival and no matter where you come from i would like to welcome you today and i would like thank you. I went to thank our presenting partner, and a great job, radio and a point, at the boston book festival. I would like to thank the sponsors of the foundation and Plymouth Rock foundation and great supporters, one more quick thing, this afternoon we will announce the winner of this shiny tesla, someone is going to win it and it could be you. Selling tickets at the merchandise table where james will be signing books after the session and proceeds go to benefit the boston book festival. Lets not waste any time and get to the main event, welcoming james gleick and tom ashbrook. Thank you very much, welcome, james. Wonderful to have you. First question can you get us out of this time . I really need to get out of this time. Future, past, i dont care. I heard somebody wouldnt it be possible to travel back in time, teach a certain future dictator manners, which i thought was a good theme of going back in time and killing hitler was a more polite variation. Which future dictator . You write about so much would you write about chaos and genius and information about isaac newton and richard feynman, now you