Richard Ivan Jobs and Steven Van Wolputte Figure It Out As They Go

Kate Carpenter 0:01
Hey there! This is the Drafting the Past podcast, a show all about how historians research and write history. I'm Kate Carpenter, and for this episode, I got to interview two authors who wrote a book unlike anything I have featured on the show before. Historian Rick Jobs and anthropologist and illustrator Steven Van Wolputte teamed up to write, illustrate, and create In the Land of the Lacandon: A Graphic History of Adventure and Imperialism. Part graphic history, part historical essay, part poetic commentary, and more, the book not only tells the history of one moment in 20th-century imperial exploration and anthropology, but it also takes apart the act of historical research and narration and turns it inside out for the reader. As you'll hear in the episode, I think it would be an incredibly useful book for teaching what historians do and the limitations to how we do it. I had a great time talking with Rick and Steven about how they conceived of and developed the project and how they collaborated across countries and formats. Our conversation also delved into the possibilities of historical narrative itself. I think you're going to get a lot out of my conversation with Rick Jobs and Steven Van Wolputte. Here's Rick first.

Rick Jobs 1:16
I'm a historian of modern Europe. I did my graduate work at Rutgers University a while ago, and I've-- most of my most of my work has been in history of youth and young people and pop culture, 20th century stuff. My first book was about post war France. My next monograph was a very big project dealing with youth travel and backpacking, history of backpacking, and eurailing and interrailing, and that sort of stuff. Yeah, and I teach at Pacific University, which is a small private liberal arts college. You know, no graduate students. I'm in a history department of three people, so very much teaching centered. But I've you know maintained an active academic scholarly sort of agenda profile. Steven?

Steven Van Wolputte 2:05
So I'm Steven, and I'm an anthropologist, social and cultural anthropology at KU Leuven. We have a slightly bigger department than Rick has, which probably is not that difficult. And I've, most of my work is situated in Southern Africa, mainly Namibia, and nowadays also South Africa. And I worked mainly on the in the border region between Namibia and Angola with cattle herders. So it's very far away, quite literally an ocean away, from the Lacandon. And what I have been publishing on on on a lot of stuff ranging from popular culture to music to to beer. I like I like especially my beer book. On futuring, making futures, that was, and then the latest one is the one that you have read.

Kate Carpenter 2:53
How did you come to illustration?

Steven Van Wolputte 2:54
When I was young, until I was 16, I liked to make comics myself. And then there is a hiatus from about I don't know 30 years or something, and then I started to, well, basically I wanted to do something with with something that one of my colocuters or interlocutors had said, and and he also made a little, well, draw, sketch in in my notebook, and years later I found that sketch and I wanted to say I can I can do something with that. So I decided like okay, but years and years ago I was making comic books. Let's make a comic book out of that. And then it got published. Another another one got published. And then via mutual friend, when Rick had his idea of doing something on Bernard de Colmont, via mutual friend, he arrived at at me, and then that was the start of five years of back and forth across the ocean via Zoom, via Teams, an occasional meeting somewhere in a in a Starbucks in in Belgium.

Kate Carpenter 3:40
Well, In the Land of the Lacandon is a an unusual book. I almost want to say unique, and I wonder if you could just start out actually by describing it for listeners who haven't gotten to read it.

Rick Jobs 4:07
In the Land of the Lacandon is a short book written for a more general public, perhaps even undergraduate audience, that tells the story of a French explorer who goes to Chiapas, southern Mexico, in the 1930s to be the first to film the Lacandon, a quite famously quote unquote lost tribe, but of course they're not lost at all. And to tell this story, we have tried to do it in multiple genres, in multiple medias. So, so there's there's four main components to the book. So the first is a graphic history telling the story of Bernard de Colmont and and his adventures as he described them in. And then there's a historical essay after that, sort of historicizing Bernard de Colmont and exploration and the Lacandon and all that sort of stuff. And then we have a contribution from Manuel Bolom Pale, an indigenous writer poet from Chiapas who wrote a poem about this whole episode-a long poem that's printed both in Tsotsil Maya and in English-and then we have a dialog among the three authors in which we sort of talk about process and method and what we were doing and what we were thinking and why we made choices that we made, so it's it's sort of as a it takes a historical a little historical story, and ruminates quite a bit on historical storytelling, and what that looks like through different medium of writing.

Kate Carpenter 6:00
How did you come to this project, and how did you how did you come to work on it together?

Rick Jobs 6:04
About a decade ago, a little more than a decade ago, I was brought in to be the historical consultant on a documentary film that had significant focus on Bernard de Colmont. And in 1938, the film is about this moment in his life when he kayaks down the Green and Colorado rivers, and he films it in color film. And so the filmmaker was a local Portland filmmaker, and he sort of recreated that trip of kayaks following that route and what it looks like now and that sort of stuff. That documentary film is called Voyagers Without Trace. The filmmaker was Ian McCluskey. So I was introduced to Bernard de Colmont by being brought into this film project, and then you know learned about this trip to Mexico that had happened a few years earlier than the subject of the film. And anyway, Bernard de Colmont has lots of interesting aspects and dimensions to his life, and so my initial idea was a book that would sort of each chapter would be in a different genre, would would adopt a different sort of genre of sort of telling these different episodes of Bernard de Colmont's life. For example, the chapter after this graphic history was was going to be a history, you know, what does it look like when a historian writes a history in the style of a historical romance, for example, which was what I was working on when the the book project eventually fell apart because of well elder care, I had elder care duties. So I wanted I wanted to play with historical methodology and historical storytelling and genre, and I also wanted to collaborate. So one of the things I liked about being on this film was sort of seeing, okay, how's this filmmaker approaching this topic, and and sort of the behind the scenes. I I love behind the scenes things, sort of seeing how things are made, how things are done. Anyway, so I was describing this to, Steven already mentioned this mutual friend, Paul Silverstein, who's an anthropologist here in Portland at Reed College, and I was describing to him, oh, you know, I think I want to do something really different. Backpack Ambassadors has just come out, which was this huge, huge project, a big monograph, and I was like, okay, I feel like I've done that, and I want, I want to do something creative, possibly artful, and I said, "Gosh, this episode in Mexico really seems like it ought to be, it ought to be a comic. It ought to be. It just I was familiar with mid 20th century francophone comics. My very first publication was a journal article about you know censorship of of comics in the mid 20th century in France. So quite familiar with the genre, but I'm not an artist at all. And anyway, Paul said, "Ah, you should talk to Steven Van Wolputte because he's been experimenting with graphic ethnography. Like he's been incorporating graphic and comics into his ethnography as an anthropologist. And the fact that Steven was an anthropologist was great also because Bernard de Colmont was there doing an ethnographic film, right? And so we had a collaboration then of you know historian and anthropologist, researcher and graphic illustrator, and yeah. So that's how that's how it came together,

Kate Carpenter 9:21
Steven, what did you think when you heard about this project?

Steven Van Wolputte 9:24
I was intrigued. That's one thing. And well, Rick was very enthusiastic about the entire project, even though I must admit, and he knows it, that he was like a little hungover when we met for the first time. Sorry, Rick. I had to. I had to mention.

Rick Jobs 9:47
Yes. Yes. Yes.

Steven Van Wolputte 9:43
Yeah. We are both. We are both beer aficionados. So that also helps. Anyway, so I was. I was enthused by his enthusiasm, and then, but also played a role. So we met, I think, Rick was it in December 2019 or? So around that time, and then so we parted ways, and then we started to kind of you know like think about it and and ruminate on it, and then COVID struck, and that first year I think I made one or two drawings just to, you know, like COVID time, spend some time, and then I sent it to Rick, and then it was like, yeah, okay, let's let's do this. And then at first, like at first, the very the very first version was like 15 pages or so. That was finished one one year or two years after our first meeting, and then we thought like there is more to it, and then so it kind of evolved in in subsequent versions, with lots of back and forth on. And and Rick Rick really knows his comics, so that also helped. And it was also that we had really fun discussions online. Really knows his comics, and then that link was also not that far fetched because you know the the early comics in the 19 say 20s 30s they were of course also in black and white and you had many of them if not all of them that were about adventures in faraway places, Tarzan is just perhaps the the best known, and of course the Belgian connection, Tintin who around that time was about to publish, Herge was about to publish his third or his fourth album by then. So, and again, Rick mentioned French censorship, which was a a very important element also in Belgian comic production.

Kate Carpenter 11:29
What was the process like for producing the project? How did you work together?

Rick Jobs 11:39
I did the archival research I did, you know, archival research in France and the U.S. and Mexico, turned up quite a few periodical publications after this. After his, he makes two trips, as you know. After the first trip, there's a press conference in Hollywood, actually, and sort of gets covered pretty widely. And then De Colmont himself authored a few like magazine spread sort of things, and of particular value in an archive, I found radio transcripts of of a radio program, of basically you know 10 to 12 page scripts that he had written as radio lectures, and also did some archival work in Mexico, and so I would sort of, as I was doing this, I would feed stuff to Steven, and he would, he he was really in charge of the graphic, you know, thinking about he he laid out a storyboard and was doing the drawings, and we would confer quite a bit, and I would be working on the essay and fleshing it out, and doing more digging in the secondary source, you know, research that needed to be done to figure out what was going on. And we would sort of, we would sort of say, okay, so I'm going to be able to dedicate time working on this the the last two weeks of February or whatever. Like we would just sort of share each other's schedule and when we thought we could hunker down, and sort of set a loose deadline for when we would sort of exchange and then comment and revise, and so we would have yeah meetings on video and share things via email.

Steven Van Wolputte 13:14
Exactly. And then Rick fed me with the archival materials and stuff. There was also a movie that de Colmont had made in, help me Rick, 1937. It was it was published.

Rick Jobs 13:29
It came out, yeah, 37.

Steven Van Wolputte 13:30
So we also got hold of we we also got hold of that, and so and I was feeding him with drawings and ideas, and he also commented a lot on not just on the drawings but also on the the storyline, the dialogs, which, as you know, is the most difficult thing to write. Also in comics, also because the space that you have is quite limited, so you really have to kind of boil it down to the very essence, and and so it went back and forth a couple of times, and then once that we had something that we thought was presentable, then we shared it with colleagues. I shared it with my students, and so on and so on.

Rick Jobs 14:08
Yeah, we would. I think, Steven, I don't know when you started referring to them as version 1.0, version 2.0, version three. Like that, that became the version that once we got we got to a certain point, and we felt like okay, let's let's share it with people and get some feedback, and so that would be different people. So you know, I would typically send it to historians and with expertise in particular areas, and Steven would send it to anthropologists with expertise in particular, and some people who were experts or you know had expertise in graphic stuff and that sort of thing. So that and that was quite influential and shaped quite a bit. So, for example, version 1.0, when it was like the graphic was maybe I don't know 14, 15, pages, and the essay was maybe 6000 words or so. That's the initial thing we shared with about half a dozen people, one of whom was Alice Conklin, who's a historian at Ohio State. And an expert on French imperialism who wrote a book on the Museum of Man, which features significantly in this, and and she wrote back very quickly, very enthusiastically. It was still pretty rough, but she said, "Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, you know, this I imagine, she, as I said, she said Ohio State. I imagine being able to teach with this, you know, that that this would be such a tool for me to talk to my you know I think she said my Big 10 now it's the Big 16 I don't know what it is now but to talk to to reach those students. And at that point we hadn't yet fully decided that we were going to lean into this as a teaching tool, but that really that really helped us sort of, we'd already been thinking about it, but it helped us sort of go, okay. So somewhat in our in my head, at least, I had, you know, in my head who who the audience was was students in a a modern European history class at Ohio State.

Steven Van Wolputte 16:00
And that is also what germinated, Rick, was basically Rick's idea to have, to basically he said like, why don't you draw me and introduce an avatar, Rick the avatar, and so that was also the idea behind situating its start and and ending of the graphic in in a lecture hall.

Rick Jobs 16:18
Yeah, the avatars actually we didn't originally have Avatar Rick in there. We had a few problems or a few challenges that we needed to deal with, and Avatar Rick helped us deal with that. First is, one thing that's quite unique about this: the graphic history part of this is both the images and the narration are based on primary sources. Most graphic histories, the images are invented, as is the dialog. But we had Bernard de Colmont's words through those radio lectures and his magazine articles, and we had images. We had dozens of photographs, and we had a film. So we really wanted Bernard de Colmont to tell the story, but we needed to we needed to distinguish Bernard de Colmont's voice from our voice as authors. We didn't want the reader to confuse those things, so Avatar Rick helped us distinguish that, and it also helped us introduce a means of of sort of very subtle citation. So there's no footnotes in in the in the graphic history, but anything that any any speech bubble that's you know black text on a white is all primary sourced, and anything that's white text on black is Avatar Rick speaking, and that's the secondary information and source criticism, and so it enabled us to sort of visually create kind of a citation system of showing how primary and secondary material works together, but it also helped us to introduce the topic and move from the graphic into the essay. We were really concerned that the reader would read the graphic and then not continue into the the next part, the essay, and so by having Avatar Rick sort of frame that story in that classroom lecture hall at the end when we have those students ask those questions in the graphic, and Avatar Rick, you know, it's a way of inviting the reader to sort of recognize, oh, there's still, there's still so much more to the story, and keep reading. Turn the page and now read the essay. So it solved like a bunch of different challenges that we were facing.

Steven Van Wolputte 18:29
What you now told in, say, three or four minutes actually took four years, but just just a little note.

Kate Carpenter 18:37
Steven, were there other challenges that you encountered of presenting these primary sources visually?

Steven Van Wolputte 18:43
Yeah. But what we, I I also did you know what you can call visual research, such as like the the vehicles that we use, they're they're supposed to be more or less more or less historically correct because we don't know what vessel he took to cross the ocean, but I found a vessel that was called Mexico and that was dead Mexico and that was traveling between France and Mexico, for instance. That was very likely, or not unlikely at least, that he was on on that one. So that was one thing, and we tried to stay as close as possible to the the visuals that we had that we did have. So, but that also meant, for instance, because the film was shot on 60 millimeters in the 1930s, that's very coarse and very coarse grain, and it was very difficult to kind of include the the video stills because when you print them, you can hardly see anything. You see some black and some white spots and and stuff. But with drawings, you can you can do something with that. That you can, but these much of these drawings were based on actual footage and and and photographs. And then one challenge was then how do you fill in the blanks? And so I haven't I haven't I don't have the count in my head, Rick, but we once made a count, like, these were you know, like, images that were derived directly from primary sources, and these were the images that we kind of made up. And sometimes you need to intervene, as I as I said, also to present the interaction between people. That that of course that you kind of fill in the gaps to make the story more fluent and to continue to tell the story, because as a storyteller, I mean, one big challenge for for everyone, also when you write anthropology or history, but also when you make drawings, is to kind of bring a narrative, bring a story that that is not only you know that not only says something, but that is also captivating, that also drags the reader into the story, and that is always, okay, being an academic, being an academic, that is especially a challenge. Without dumbing it down and wanting to say something, wanting to say what you want to say, but in a way that people a understand it, and secondly, that it is good to read, which is another challenge. Hence, also the importance of dialog, which of course, in in a written text, you can hide behind descriptions of the landscape or or whatever. But in a graphic, actually, apart from the drawings, the the written text that is there is basically all dialog, and that is one of for me that is also in my academic stuff. That is also one of the more, like you mentioned, Kate, challenging aspects of of the storytelling to keep the the narrative going and at the same time convey ideas, basically.

Rick Jobs 21:32
Right, but you also but but you're you're conveying you're conveying information. You, I mean, let me. I mean, I didn't do any of the drawing, so this is Steven. But you you convey you convey information visually too, right?

Steven Van Wolputte 21:44
Of course.

Rick Jobs 21:44
You're conveying some of that content that in a in a written narrative would be descriptive through visual presentation.

Steven Van Wolputte 21:52
And visually, when you work with visuals, you do have a number of advantages. For instance, is relatively easy to express, take now emotion or emotional states because you can you can see the face and you can manipulate eyebrows and mouth and and all that stuff and and of course the descriptions that you normal, that normally take up quite quite some space in in anthropology books, for instance, like this is how the landscape looks like this is how the the house looks like that is what you convey quite directly, or more directly via via an image, on the condition, of course, that your readership is able to read images, because that's another thing, and that is also what you, what we were hoping for at least. So that also means what level of detail do you include? For instance, do you work with color? We decided against that to remain in the spirit of 1930s comic culture. So, yeah, these are all decisions that were taken in the course of those five years.

Rick Jobs 22:50
We would occasionally disagree about things, and one of us would sort of convince the other one. So, I'll give an example. This is one that, this is one that Steven, Steven won this one. So you might recall in the graphic, there's a page where where Bernard de Colmont is sort of in the superhero pose, you know, and he's all big, muscly, and that sort of stuff. We need, we knew we needed to do more commentary with about gender and masculinity, and we had we had the textual, the narrative stuff that we could sort of use to talk about that, but we didn't have anything visually that necessarily that would work, and so Steven presented this superhero pose, you know, of a of a big burly, you know, like Paul Bunyan sort of Bernard de Colmont, and I was like, this isn't really, you know, for if we're sticking to primary sources, this isn't really a primary. He says, yeah, but this is, you know, this is doing multiple things, right? It's calling attention to the emergence of the superhero comic, which was exactly at this moment. It's suggesting that, but also this is this is a way, this is a visual interpretation of what these words are describing here. That we have this journalist sort of describing de Colmont, and this is this is an interpretation of a primary source, but it's visual, you know. And I was like, okay, you're right, you're right. Ex

Steven Van Wolputte 24:11
You explain it better than I could, but okay.

Kate Carpenter 24:14
You know, I loved all the different components of this book. It's so interesting. I too thought about how great it would be to teach with this because you really, you sort of like have a narrative, but then you deconstruct how that narrative comes together. Did you always have all of those components in mind, or did some emerge as you were working on the project?

Rick Jobs 24:34
We knew components would be part of it. We didn't necessarily know what it would be or what they would look like. I tend, as a as a researcher and and particularly as a writer, I figure things out as I go. So, Kate, I've listened to your you know podcast quite a bit, and of course, so many of your your authors are are producing you know trade press books, and I hear these descriptions of these proposals, right? These detailed proposals in which they have. Like I could, I can't do that. Like I don't know, I don't know until I'm in it and figuring it out as I go. So, you know, we knew the graphic would be a part of it. We knew there'd be an essay about it, and of course, we have the dilemma of the Lacandon. Like Bernard de Colmont never lets them speak, right? They never, they never articulate anything in in his tellings, various tellings of this episode, but we knew we didn't want to speak for them. We knew we didn't want to invent anything. I mean, in part because we wanted to call attention to it. We wanted to call attention to this, you know, in the graphic and in the essay. And so, we just started to think about well, what could we do? We thought we need someone, you know, we need someone indigenous to do something, and so I went to the library, you know, and started doing some more reading, and came across Manuel's work, and just thought, ooh, this, this fellow's, I like I like what he's doing, I like his work, and it it took a while to get in contact with him, and then we just sort of said, Listen, do you want to? You know, he he he's a he does poetry, he does photographic essays, he does you know short stories. He he's sort of does lots of different things. We just sort of said, "Do you want to participate? Here here's what we're doing. Here's our materials as far as we've gotten, which would probably be version 3.0 or 4.0, the the amount of book came in. I think the published versions maybe version 6.0, I would guess. And he saw what we were doing, and then he says, "Yeah, all right." And not long after, a couple of months later, it's pretty fast, really. We got this poem, you know, that was like this extended version from the point of view of the Lacandon, and it just opened up. It just opened up so much more, right? Sort of. One thing about this project that sort of evolved as we did it is, you know, how does, what does a historian do? How do they think about these questions? What's their method? Same thing with anthropologists, and then we have a poet, and what a contrast that poem is to the comic and to the essay. And at the same time, each of those pieces are sort of commenting on each other. One thing I really love about it is, and one thing we played up is how each approach has its advantages and its disadvantages. That is, they each have limitations to what within the realm of of methods and process of what they can do, and therefore what they can each contribute. So, for example, the poem. So, as historians, right, one thing we we struggle with a lot is interiority, right? Motives and stuff. Because unless you have, which is rare, you actually have a source that really articulates your historical subject's interiority, what they're thinking and why they're doing things and that sort of stuff. And so, we sort of we write around those things as best we can because it's difficult to comment on that stuff, and we draw attention to that. I mean, we wanted to draw attention in the comic and in the essay to the limitations of what was knowable, right? We very much point out what we, what questions we weren't able to answer through research that we couldn't find those answers, and then the poem comes in, and it's all about interiority, right? It's all about subjectivity, and Manuel writes, and in the voice of these different Lacandon, describing sort of very situated in place and in nature and in the jungle, and and so I just I love that, right?

Rick Jobs 28:40
And then the dialog at the end, which is another traditional form of of writing, gives us a chance as the authors to likewise dig into what we were thinking and why we were thinking that and what the challenges were. So, I mean, all of that sort of gets figured out as we went, to answer your original question about the components, I very much this is true. My monographs too. I figure it out as I go. Once I have a piece figured out, then I figure out okay, what's the piece that needs to come before that, and then what would logically follow, and and things sort of build out like that.

Steven Van Wolputte 29:19
Same here. I also like to figure it out as I go along, and also I'm a I'm an amateur, so I can do that. Amateur draw-- I'm not a professional artist, on the contrary. So, but I also liked, you know, like to figure out how to make that particular drawing, and there were many many failed attempts, by the way, for each and every drawing.

Kate Carpenter 29:38
I think it's really interesting, this book, this book has two additional components too. There is a discussion guide at the end, and then there's also a really interesting note section where you were not only sort of citing your sources, but also they're kind of discursive, talking about how those sources became images and what went into them. How did you think about those sections too?

Rick Jobs 29:57
Go ahead, Steven. You wrote the notes, so.

Steven Van Wolputte 29:59
I thought it was important that I mean, okay, in a in a graphic you don't include footnotes. That would be awkward to say the least. And footnotes in general are or can be quite awkward. But I thought it was also important for not just for the mentioning of the sources. That's one thing. So that was where it started. And then I thought it was also important to kind of comment on these drawings in a way that helped people to situate not just where they came from, but also how to place them within the narratives. It's kind of a meta commentary. Also, to I mean, drawing is much, drawing is much like writing, of course, and with visuals, you do have, like I said, it's not always you can't always assume that your audience has the necessary visual literacy, if that is a term, in order to to to see where these images come from or what they mean or why they are look why they they they are framed like that, for instance, or for instance, how to read the space between the so-called gutter in in comic book theory, and that is main. And I thought it was also fun to to do and to also have some some some some of my own ideas that I smuggled in. Not that that was an issue, because we had a lot of discussions, and it was all always, if I recall well, always very friendly and amicable.

Rick Jobs 31:24
And we put in some Easter eggs. There's some Easter eggs in there too that are explained in the notes.

Steven Van Wolputte 31:28
That was also a fun part.

Kate Carpenter 31:30
Did you ever consider making it longer?

Rick Jobs 31:32
I mean, it kept getting longer. I mean, certainly initially. So initially, like when I first approached him, it was just going to be you know a chapter in a bigger thing, and you know we were imagining 12 to 15 pages, and it ended up like I don't know 50 plus maybe. But I feel like I mean I yeah I mean Steven, I mean, I feel like it's, I feel like it's complete. However, oh this is kind of juicy. So about a month before, about a month before the book came out, you might recall that de Colmont made two trips, and the second trip, which is incorporated into the graphic, we didn't find a lot of material about. It's it's not, he he returns to record their language after having made the first trip where he filmed them. Just like a month or maybe before the book came out, we were contacted by the grandson of his assistant on that second trip. He he he had I don't know he he'd found out that we were doing some research in Bernard de Colmont. He didn't know the book was about to come out, but anyway, he has he and he shared with us his grandfather was an artist, and so he had all these sketches of the Lacandon that his grandfather had made, and lots of additional photographs. His grandfather was also a musician and played the flute. And there's there's images of his grandfather with the Lacandon playing musical instruments. And he told also a tale that that supposedly, according to family lore, Bernard de Colmont abandoned him in Guatemala at the end of the trip, something we'd never heard before. So anyway, so there were, as it turns out, and there probably still are out there, materials that could have helped us make the graphic longer if we had found them or known about them. But of course, this also feeds back into our whole point that we make in the book to the reader about sources and what available source material allows you to say and questions that allows you to answer. And if you don't have the source material as a historian, it's really difficult to do those things. But then you know there are there's stuff out there and you don't know if you can find it. But I think what we did it as it is the stories feels complete, right? Like the arc feels nicely accomplished narratively.

Steven Van Wolputte 33:47
I think when we finished the book, that was also the material that we had. It was only after it was already in in print but not yet published that this email came along, which of course sparked ideas of like maybe we can make a sequel, maybe we can make a part two, but the jury is still out on that.

Kate Carpenter 34:07
I'd like to know a little bit more about the publishing process. Was it challenging to find a publisher who shared your vision, who was willing to put all of this together?

Rick Jobs 34:15
Yes, our initial thought was to publish with with a a comics publisher, but someone that did nonfiction and that sort of stuff, and and Steven even approached a small press in in Belgium, and they were sort of, and then we approached a press in the United States that we were sort of keen on. They publish a lot in like medical anthropology, and you know, lots of nonfiction, semi-scholarly stuff, but have a lot of experience doing that. And there was some initial interest from them, but then the editor was sort of not very responsive, and that's just that's a red flag, you know, for me. I've been very fortunate, I've always, all my books have been with university presses, but I've been very fortunate to have really responsive editors. But I've had friends who haven't, and so you know that that was just like hmm, I don't know. And so then we started approaching other presses. I'll say, for example, Cornell was really interested, loved it, understood it, into it, but they they hadn't published anything, you know, graphic yet. And as, Bethany Wasik there was the editor, as she said, you know, I want this, I want this, I want to see this as a book, but I I don't feel like I'm not sure we can do it justice. I'm not sure, I don't want you to be the guinea pig. And then Emily Andrew at McGill Queens University Press. I knew she had moved there, and I had been a reader. I had, I'd worked for her as a as a reader of manuscripts before, and knew she was just really efficient and on it and direct, and I liked that. And that she was now at McGill Queens, and they had published a book, a really good graphic history of Canadian soldiers in the First World War at Vimy Ridge and that sort of stuff a few years earlier. Like really nice, really well done, well produced color, and and she and her colleagues at McGill Queens immediately jumped on it. They got it. They understood it. Stephen and I were sort of like, we really want to get this done. We want to get this out. And they they like did, they worked double time to make this happen, and so yeah, very happy with the work that so, lots of people at McGill Queens UP put into that.

Steven Van Wolputte 36:38
Indeed, and and this was the, once that we had them on board, it was the smoothest process I've ever experienced. I think within a few weeks we had three reviews. A couple of weeks later there was a contract, and these are processes that, in the academic world at least, can take two years or longer. So this was like, oh, this is going really fast, and then yeah, a couple of months later, the book was was was in the bookstores. But Rick, I also remember that one review that that came out that started with the question like, how the hell did they ever were able to convince a publisher to to get this out because it was so different from all all the normal things that come out just not yeah it's not -yeah exactly.

Rick Jobs 37:24
There's no you know you can't you can't point to oh it's it's this this book is like these books it's not quite like any other books that I know of.

Steven Van Wolputte 37:33
So we took that as a compliment by the way but.

Rick Jobs 37:36
Oh yeah, he was happy he was happy it was published but the reviewer was like how did they ever convince a publisher to do this?

Kate Carpenter 37:42
You know, Rick, in your email to me, you you described this book as an experiment in in form of historical storytelling, which I really liked. What do you think the results of the experiment were?

Rick Jobs 37:52
Good. I think they're good results. I'm sort of, I guess I'm interested. So to go back a little bit, I enjoy reading and teaching graphic nonfiction, and I enjoy reading and teaching micro histories, and so this sort of was a way to sort of do both in terms of graphic nonfiction, which I I'm not really into the com like the superhero stuff, like that. But I love graphic nonfiction, like Joe Sacco's Journalism, Alison Bechdel's graphic memoirs, and I teach them, of course. Well, I've taught Maus so many times, and it works so well. And Michael Vann and Liz Clarke's Great Hanoi Rat Hunt, also really excellent. And then there's other nonfiction like like Nick Sousanis's Unflattening, which is this just incredible intellectual projects. That's a, it was his dissertation. It's and it was it's in philosophy, and it's it's just epic and and incredible sort of a dissertation in the form of a of a graphic, and then of course, microhistory is Natalie Davis's Return of Martin Guerre, which I've taught many times. Carlo Ginzburg, but also some that, some that that mess with form, like Luisa Passerini's Autobiography of a Generation, which is a microhistory I love, in which she she tells sort of the late '60s, that '68 moment, you know, in Italy in universities, she alternates between telling sort of what's going on with conversations with her therapist. That's fascinating. Or Bonnie Smith's Confessions of a Concierge, which is a microhistory that plays with in three parts that plays with different voice and genre, fiction, nonfiction, and I've sort of always been interested in that that line of when something's history and when something's fiction, and I sort of wanted to dance along that line and let people let people you know say, oh well, you know that goes too far, or that's, or some going, oh, you know, fine either way, whatever way, whatever way you think. But as we got into it, and and as as we said earlier, we like to figure it out as we go. It became an opportunity to emphasize and highlight methodology and what historians do and how they work with sources and what they do, and they don't have sources that answer questions. You know, usually we just don't even we just sort of don't include it. Instead, this time we wanted to include that those gaps. And then you know, how does a how does a poet approach this story, and what what sort of themes does a is a poet going to lean into and be interested in, and an anthropologist as well. One of the one of the great things when we're doing the graphic and figuring it out, along with the essay, those things are those things were both produced in tandem. Steven was like, "We've got to do more with religion. This is the peak of his story when he gets to film them in the in the hut doing prayers, Steven's intuition as a as an ethnographer and anthropologist sort of recognized that very quickly. It's like we need we we've got to build this up more, and we need to talk about it more in the essay. And so, having those brains situated within their genre and their disciplines, I think throws all that into relief in a really effective way, and so I think we say in there somewhere, not only do we want the reader to sort of think about this subject and this topic, but who's telling these stories-that is, a historian, an anthropologist, and a poet, and how they do so-that then becomes a sort of a commentary on, I guess, on possibilities, like what's possible. You know, when I came across this story, I thought, "Gosh, this should be a graphic. Like it just, it just that immediately sort of came out to me that like this should be a comic, given the way you know the jungle and all that sort of stuff. I think part of it was, you know, listening to your sources. What do your sources enable you to say and do? What can you do with them, and still be adhering to professional standards? I guess, and how those professional standards differ between the different disciplines.

Steven Van Wolputte 42:21
One one thing that as as and I know it also interests you, Rick, is also that what when we talk about that interbellum period, when we talk about the 1930 s, we also talk about today's popular culture, where you still have the idea of going somewhere and finding a treasure, being on a quest, that kind of the very similar themes that you find not just in Hollywood movies, but in in many novels, for instance, and the kind of exoticization that you find that you see throughout, not just in superhero movies, but basically in well, it almost not almost all, but in many of the so-called adventure genre that we still kind of well that you find also in in computer games, for instance, and--

Rick Jobs 43:06
yeah,

Steven Van Wolputte 43:06
--the kernel, the the origin of that idea of explore, exploration, discovery that you find in the end of the second half of the 19th and and and the first half of the 20 mainly that period that century, second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th century, is still is around us. But the kernel is is is actually originates there, and actually most of the say the more mainstream comic books are about repetition of the same little big theme. So in that sense, we also wanted to kind of not point fingers, but just to kind of very subtly remind people, like, well, Indiana Jones is not that original, so and and he still is this kind of you know like looking for the Inca treasure, whatever it is that he's looking for, and and running away from boulders. That is basically what de Colmont was also doing. Not boulders in this case, but.

Rick Jobs 44:04
It's a short book, but there's there's a lot in it. Like it's doing a lot of things, I think. And part of it is a history of popular culture in this interwar period and how ideas for white populations in Europe and North America, how the indigenous other was sort of constructed in this sort of hierarchy of civilizations, hierarchy of race through popular culture, because that's what Bernard de Colmont is doing himself. Right, he makes a film, he does radio lectures, magazine articles, and so that so so part of this is a is a history is a little bit of history of popular culture of this era and how those ideas circulated, you know, about the other with the capital O, you know, in addition to sort of a little bit of a history of exploration, who were, you know, celebrity exploration, I should say, like this was a whole this was a whole thing, and of course relationships of you know histories of imperialism and France. His interest in Mexico and like it just touches on touches on a lot of different things.

Steven Van Wolputte 45:06
And just to add just one more layer, it's also the role of visual culture in our popular culture. That the big moments of of exploration and quote unquote exploration, discovery, colonialism, they go hand in hand with the arrival of first photography in, say, second half of the 19th century, and then later on film that became like a camera, film camera became affordable for say middle class families in the course of the 1920s, 1930s. I would really love to do something with family movies, but that's not my my expertise, but that would be great because that is also where people start to film their out their trip to the seashore or children having their birthday and and and so on and so on and so on. So that visuality, which is you know like a difficult word to talk about visual culture, the visuality that has permeated our our imagination of us of the other capital of other and of ourselves that that has has had and is having such an important impact on who we think we are.

Rick Jobs 46:13
Can you imagine? Can you imagine Bernardo Cuomo in the era of Instagram? He would have been an influencer.

Steven Van Wolputte 46:19
Oh my God!

Kate Carpenter 46:22
Well, Rick and in in his answer gave me quite a good reading list. Steven, are there people who you read for inspiration?

Steven Van Wolputte 46:30
If you want to know, like, what book would I recommend? Because Rick already mentioned a few titles, but one that I was really impressed by was Ginger Roots by Craig Thompson, which is a story about ginger. I mean, the root, and it's also a family chronicle of the American Midwest and how he grew up in a very conservative religious family and tried to literally draw his way out. It's also at the same time a story about about ginger cultivation over there and the difference, and then he also goes to China and stuff. Anyway, and it's first of all, it's fantastically, from a graphic point of view, from a visual point of view, it's fantastic. But also, it's such a good story where you also that is something that we all like, I guess, where you have different layers that you can, you know, like discover as you are reading and as you are rereading, and every time that you read, you come across something that you haven't seen before or thought of before, and then you go like, "Whoa! And that is one of those books that is-it's not that it's quite recent. It's from 24, I guess, but it's one of those books that I that I cherish. Yeah, much of his work, of if not all of his work, by the way, is really great. But this one really stands out as one of the best graphic novels that I've ever come across.

Kate Carpenter 47:50
Having worked on this book together, do you think that this experience will affect the way you write and the way you work going forward?

Rick Jobs 47:58
Absolutely. Like I, I like collaborating. There was a there's a way in which having a good collaborator. I I've never been one to participate a whole lot, and a lot of people do, and it works for them. You know, writing groups and and that sort of stuff. That sort of keeps you accountable. But having a having a collaborator also keeps you accountable. So, like for example, Steven mentioned COVID hit, and so all of a sudden everything shut down. And that moment, that moment in the spring and in early summer of 2020, you know, you don't know what's going to happen. You don't know what's going on or what's going to happen. This sort of stuff. And all of a sudden, Steven sends me some images. I've been working on this. He'd been working on it. I had stopped because I'm like, well, you know, because I I actually had a research trip planned to Mexico that summer, and that had to be canceled, and so I was just sort of stagnated and and had stopped and just thought, ah, well, I guess this isn't going to happen. But then Steven comes through and is like, oh look, I've been doing this. Here's what I've been working on, and it's like, oh, okay, all right, get back to my get back to my desk, right? So I I like that. I also like I'd like to do something creative. Whatever it is is next is going to be something that stimulates me both intellectually, but also creatively. What that what that is, I don't know because it's going to have to emerge from an engagement with the material, whatever it is. What does that material make possible? Enable. What's feasible? What could I do? Who who might want to join me in this and contribute whatever they might contribute? Yeah, I think part of it, and this is also true for both of us. We we've commented on this. Steve and I are similar points in our careers. We can't be promoted anymore. No, nobody's going to come. Nobody's going to come, you know, recruiting us to move to their program and that sort of stuff. So there's a way in which you know when we started this project, we sort of you know we're like, well, you know, we can do what we want. It doesn't, doesn't, you know, we don't have to get approval from any sort of promotion committee or departmental, and there, that's liberating, right? So like, what's what do I want to do, and how would I go about doing it?

Steven Van Wolputte 50:14
I agree. I mean, the kind of the freedom that you have at our at our the stage of our life or career or whatever you want to call it, is is is well, is is a present, and and like Rick said, I really appreciate. I, we are both individualists, and most academics are basically, especially when you're sitting behind your desk writing away or drawing away or whatever. But then it is fine that you find that you come across kindred spirits or something, and that you kind of together work on a project, but without having 25 people looking over your shoulder, and and it was also, I mean, it was also really nice collaboration, and it resulted in something which also kind of helps, but yeah, and and it's it's good sometimes to break away from or to break out of your academic silos. And and the fact I've been working on historical stuff as well, doing some archival work. I'm not an historian, but I did some archival work, and it was always had this interest in in history. And then finding someone with similar ideas or similar approach to to our materials are very different, right? And in my my my current future, how do you call this? One of my current future projects is I have like 30 years of ethnographic material, and I want to do something with that. Hopefully, not hopefully, also something creative with some graphic stuff included, but at the same time, also something hybrid academic. But we will figure it out as we go along.

Kate Carpenter 51:46
Before I let you go, I'd like to ask you both what what's the most influential writing advice or perhaps creative advice you've ever gotten?

Rick Jobs 51:54
The one thing that sticks out to me is is back doing dissertation work. My dissertation director, Bonnie Smith, I was, well, two things. She she gave me two pieces of advice that were really helpful. One was about so I was you know I work in European history and so I work in foreign languages. I was having trouble figuring out how to translate something, you know how to quote something, and she made some comments. She said, "Well, that's probably not a problem with your French. That's a problem with your English." And her point was, her point was, you understand what the French says. How would you say it in English? How would a person listening to English understand this point? And it was sort of, it really it you know was a point about being you know much more fluid and nimble, not very directly word by word by word translate, and then the other thing, another I don't remember what what it was, but there was something I was just couldn't figure out, and was like maybe I'll just take you know I won't I won't deal with this I'll take this out, and Bonnie also said no no no, the obstacle is the opportunity, figure it out figuring it out, and you will have something much better, much smarter. That's where that's where the opportunity is to do something, to think something, is figuring out the obstacle.

Steven Van Wolputte 53:11
Same here. Best advice people gave me was just do some writing, do do write, and it's first draft or zero draft writing, and afterwards you will, you know, like work it and edit it, and and and probably delete half of it at least. And another one was that was basically also what Rick just said. Like, look at the frictions, look at where where you see resistance, and where you find yourself feeling resistance to to write about stuff. And that is where you know, like you will, in the best of cases, you will find that diamond that you're looking for.

Rick Jobs 53:45
Now, my writing advice would be, always be revising. You know, like you think Glengarry, Glenn Ross, always be closing, always be revising. Whenever I, whenever I return to whatever I'm working on, I always reread. You know, so I get my head wherever my head was when I left it, but also I'm constantly editing and wordsmithing and doing like that's my favorite part of writing, is the once you have it the rough stuff out there, the crafting of it and that sort of stuff. Yeah, always be revising is sort of something I practice myself.

Steven Van Wolputte 54:18
It also takes up most of the time.

Kate Carpenter 54:20
Well, Rick and Steven, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past, giving me the chance to read this book and to talk about it. I'm I'm excited to see it out in the world.

Rick Jobs 54:28
Thank you, thank you. We're excited too. People have been teaching it, and and that's awesome.

Steven Van Wolputte 54:33
Also, from here, thank you, Kate. This was a fun talk.

Kate Carpenter 54:36
Thanks again to Rick Jobs and Steven Van Wolputte for joining me for this conversation. You can find links to "In the Land of the Lacandon" and many other great books mentioned in this episode in the show notes. In case you haven't heard the news, Drafting the Past is expanding in October, and I am thrilled for all that is to come. Head to draftingthepast.com to learn more and subscribe so you don't miss a thing. And if you'd like to be done with the pesky ads interfering with your listening experience, reminder that paying subscribers get access to an ad-free podcast feed, among other perks. Thanks for listening, and for remembering that friends don't let friends write boring history.