I am a community college educator, and write comics and cartoons about a variety of education, medical, political and personal subjects in collaboration with amazing artistic collaborators which have been published The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Nib, Truthout, The Believer, Project Censored and more. My forthcoming book Going Remote: A Teacher’s Journey (with Peter Glanting from SEVEN STORIES and CENSORED PRESS) combines all these areas, along with my love for sci-fi! You can also see me on film in LONG LIVE MY HAPPY HEAD (click the menu above)
Here are my current works of graphic journalism and memoir which have appeared in The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle,The Los Angeles Times, Pacific Standard, FUSION.NET, The Nib, Narrative.ly and Truthout. Thanks to all the wonderfully talented graphic journalists/artists I’ve worked with thus far: Josh Neufeld (cover image by Josh!), Jason Novak,Marc Parenteau, Dan Carino, Dan Archer and Arthur King. CLICK ON THE TITLE TO ACCESS THE COMIC!
Cancer Comix
The Perfect Cancer Patient (with medical sociologist Gayle Sulik and Marc Parenteau at Narritve.ly. CLICK HERE FOR AN Extra Scene, not published in the original!
Here is an EXTRA SCENE from my comicTHE PERFECT CANCER PATIENT (with co-author medical sociologist Gayle Sulik and co-author/illustrator Marc Parenteau). This is the concluding scene that we decided to leave out for this version at Narrative.ly.
Here are ALL my current works of graphic journalism, memoir, and editorial cartoons which have appeared in The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle,The Los Angeles Times, Pacific Standard, FUSION.NET, The Nib and Truthout. Thanks to all the wonderfully talented graphic journalists/artists I’ve worked with thus far: Josh Neufeld, Jason Novak,Marc Parenteau, Dan Carino, Dan Archer and Arthur King. Below, you can find interviews, scholarly articles, and contact info. CLICK ON THE TITLE TO ACCESS THE COMIC!
See also: The Comic Book Cure for Cancer (a brief personal essay discussing the role of comics writing in my cancer journey, Brain Tumour Magazine, June 2016). The title is inspired by Salvatore Iaconesi’s “My Open Source Cure for Cancer,” which is discussed in “A Scanner Constantly.”
“Unmasking the Graphic Novel: Learning Summary and Close Reading Through Comics.” Inside English: Journal of the English Council of California Two-Year Colleges. 2009. Winner of 2009 ECCTYC Best Article of the Year. Republished in Visions Across the Americas, 8th Edition (Sterling Warner, Ed). [Email for a copy]
From his offices at the Daily Planet, journalist Clark Kent stripped into spandex and saved the world outside his mahogany office doors. Now, it looks like the Daily Planet is in need of Superman’s help, as the Fourth Estate is under threat from dwindling sales and dwindling real news content.
“Journalism will survive, but it will reach a limited audience, as the sparsely attended productions of Aristophanes or Racine in small New York theaters are all that is left of great classical theater,” Former New York Times writer Chris Hedges worries, prognosticating a bleak future in which news is only for the elite, the rest of us left to fed on Kayne West and Kim Kardashian’s kerfuffles.
Could comics save the day? That’s right, comics – those immensely popular picture and word stories you always flipped past the real news to get to – can they bring real news back to the masses?
Graphic journalism – “real” journalism with pictures and words (and sometimes, interactive elements) – has pretty much nothing to do with Superman, except for the fact that he was a journalist in a comic. Graphic journalism are comics about reality, about our world – not fantasy, nor escapism. This medium is still in its infancy, but illustrates a clear path forward, one especially critical for students growing up in an media-satured world, in which it’s hard to tell Kayne from Kosovo, the kerfuffles from the real news.
Below is a brief overview to the emerging field of graphic journalism, including canonical works like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Joe Sacco’s Palestine, new and emerging artist/journalists like Susie Cagle and Sarah Glidden, and publications like Cartoon Movement (which is free!). For more background, you can read my article for Truthout “Warning: This Article Contains Graphic Journalism,” which includes a history of this emerging medium, along with interviews with Pulitzer Prize cartoonist Ted Rall and graphic memorist/journalist Sarah Glidden (amongst others).
FINAL NOTE: This post is intended primarily for the participants in my presentation at The English Council of Two Year Colleges, but I hope will be useful for any educator interested in exploring graphic journalism and non-fiction comics in general as a powerful means to critically engage students in our media-saturated world. Links take you to more background/purchasing info.
Last year, I had the honor to work with the illustrious illustrator and journalist Dan Archer on our series “The Disaster Capitalism Curriculum,” a three-part non-fiction expose of the reality of education reform at Truthout. Here’s a taste, with a real interview with a Washington DC English instructor:
By Adam Bessie and Dan Archer. Courtesy of Truthout.Org
Truthout)
Adam Bessie 
