Presenting: a conversation with UNFLATTENING creator Nick Sousanis on his process, his work, drawing badly well, Bertrand Russell, Batman, and the joys and pains of drawing 500 babies.

In which: we not only codify the truth that comics are essential but discuss the capacity of children to teach us how to be more aware... his progress and process on the follow-up to UNFLATTENING, NOSTOS... the "extended cognition" drawing grants us when we fall into the trap of thinking too much like a writer (raises hand)... getting over one's fear of drawing badly through Grids and Gestures... and the upcoming Adapting Comics for Blind and Low Vision Readers symposium.

Nick's bio:

Nick Sousanis is an Eisner-winning comics author and an associate professor of Comics Studies, Humanities, & Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University. He received his doctorate in education at Teachers College, Columbia University in 2014, where he wrote and drew his dissertation entirely in comic book form. Titled UNFLATTENING, it argues for the importance of visual thinking in teaching and learning, and was published by Harvard University Press in 2015. Unflattening received the 2016 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in Humanities, the Lynd Ward Prize for best Graphic Novel of 2015, and was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Scholarly/Academic work...

Recent comics include “Against the Flow” and “Upwards” in The Boston Globe, “The Fragile Framework” for Nature in conjunction with the 2015 Paris Climate Accord co-authored with Rich Monastersky, and “A Life in Comics” for Columbia University Magazine – for which he received an Eisner Award for Best Short Story in 2018.

Chapters:

Intro and technical babystep preamble (00:00)
"Every page I have to learn new things..." (02:13)
"I could keep coming back to that word..."(05:00)
"Batman is my first word..." (13:18)
"You're dancing between those two modes..." (17:13)
On Grids and Gestures (24:07)
"They change how they think by drawing..." (28:34)
"It's helpful to me because I can see everything... the drawing becomes this sort of extended cognition..." (32:09)
"So much of the new book is about conversations I had around the first one..."(37:38)
"My kid learns through moving..." (39:33)
"You want them to be ... more thoughtful... more aware..."(45:04)
On the Adapting Comics for Blind & Low Vision Readers Symposium (50:23)
"The accident of bad drawing can teach you to go places you don't expect..." (58:55)
Outro (1:05:19)

Linkage:

You can connect with Nick and explore his work via his website, spinweaveandcut.com, and on Twitter, @nsousanis.
The complete Grids and Gestures exercise lives here; you can peruse Nick's complete education resources here.
The Adapting Comics for Blind & Low Vision Symposium was held on Thursday, 12 August 2021. A collection of videos from the event is available here.

Me, in 2018, on UNFLATTENING (which still stands)

At once a profound work of philosophy and of comics mastery, Nick Sousanis’s UNFLATTENING is an illumination of the seen and the unseen world rooted in the limitless potential of the comics medium, an exciting remix of centuries worth of thought that breaks free of the boundaries of the panel and the page and guides us through the flatlands of our prepackaged assumptions and hardwired, habitual beliefs into new, combinatorial realms of possibility.

Great works invite – no, demand – revisitation so that their innumerable secrets and layers might be fully explored and discovered. UNFLATTENING is no exception: in this love letter to both a medium and to our capacity for expansive thought, Sousanis has created something truly special: a journey into the furthest reaches of our awareness and understanding that asks us only for the best of ourselves, a journey that begs to be revisted time and again.

A must-read.

You can find previous episodes of THE SOCIALIZED RECLUSE here and, if so inclined, sign up for my monthly+ newsletter, MacroParentheticals, here; I'm told that neither are terrible.