MattBrady
03-15-2007, 04:24 PM
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/JSA1cvr.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/JSA1cvr_t.jpg" border="0" align="right"></a><i>by Daniel Robert Epstein</i>
James Sturm's three books: <b>The Revival, Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight</b>, and <b>The Golem's Mighty Swing</b> have been collected into one edition called <b>James Sturm's America</b>. It’s 2007 and it still feels like we are living in his books. The first one, <b>The Revival</b>, examines the tent revival meetings in 1801 Kentucky, and with preachers talking fire and brimstone and “healing” the sick it has great relevance to people like Pat Robertson and The 700 Club. <b>Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight</b> looks at companies who will do anything, even sacrifice human life, for a buck and of course Sturm’s most famous book, <b>The Golem's Mighty Swing</b>, is about a Jewish baseball facing tension and racism as they travel through the American Midwest. I got a chance to talk with Sturm from his office at The Center for Cartoon Studies, which he co-founded.
<b>Newsarama</b>: Who's idea was it to package all three of your Drawn & Quarterly books into <b>James Sturm's America</b>?
<b>James Sturm</b>: From early on in the process I saw all three stories as being an interrelated single piece. That was something that [Drawn & Quarterly publisher] Chris [Oliveros] and I discussed many years ago. Then it was just a matter of timing. He has his concerns about the publisher in terms of selling through <b>Golem</b> books. When he switched distributors, there was a little window where D & Q wasn't putting out many books. The timing seems right now; because all the books are out and are more or less in print. Tom Devlin, who does a lot of the book design at Drawn & Quarterly, had been working through the book design and I couldn't be more thrilled to be working with Tom. I have a tremendous amount of admiration for all the books that he did at Highwater Books and all the books he's doing with Drawn & Quarterly. I just love working with people who know what they're doing [laughs].
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/JSA1.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/JSA1_t.jpg" border="0" align="left"></a><B>NRAMA</B>: Did you know it was going to end up being a trilogy?
<b>JS</b>: I didn't know it was going to be a trilogy when I did <b>The Revival</b> but I was doing <b>Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight</b> and I was really having a hard time figuring out what that piece was about and how it was going to proceed. Then I started writing <b>The Golem's Mighty Swing</b> and that started really moving along at a faster clip. It was at that point I realized, “Wow this is a trilogy.” Then <b>Hundreds of Feet</b> clicked. I went back to do that first, because I knew if I did the baseball book first, I probably wouldn't go back [laughs].
<B>NRAMA</B>: With having done <b>Golem</b> and this upcoming <b>Satchel Paige</b> book, I have to ask - is baseball is something you have an real affinity for, or just a subject to explore?
<b>JS</b>: I like baseball as much as the next baseball fan. I don't think I've watched a full baseball game in two years. I listen to them on the radio. My kitchen is never cleaner than during baseball season because I can just listen while I do stuff. But I had really no intention of doing the Satchel Paige book because of another project I was working on and I was getting the school up and running. It was really on the insistence of Brenda Bowen at Hyperion. She felt pretty strongly that I do this Satchel Paige book. I did it because I wanted the series to happen and I'm so glad I did. I got the sense that it was important that I do this book [laughs].
<B>NRAMA</B>: Better to do it than not do it is what you're saying.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/Satchel%20Paige%20cover1.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/Satchel%20Paige%20cover1_t.jpg" border="0" align="right"></a><b>JS</b>: Well, I'm saying that Brenda was pretty insistent about me working on the Satchel Paige book. That was fine because I love baseball. It's funny because I did the Golem book, I did a <i>New Yorker</i> cover with a baseball theme and now I'm the baseball guy, but that's fine. This new book, even though there's baseball themes and all that, it's really different than the Golem book. You could probably tell a hundred baseball stories, one could be about racism, one could be about closeted issues of sexual identity and another one could be about corporate corruption. I love doing the research and it is very rewarding and fulfilling. I read narratives of folks who lived during the Jim Crow era and weaved that into the story. One of my favorite parts of creating books is the research and looking at all the old WPA [Works Progress Administration] era photographs and prints by Thomas Hart Benton and just interfacing with all this rich visual material and incorporating it into the book. One of the real pleasures for me in making comics is that research stage and all the things I have to immerse myself in before I feel like I'm making an authentic story.
<B>NRAMA</B>: How did you get interested in the pre-war American period?
<b>JS</b>: Many years ago, when I was just a young, hungry cartoonist [laughs], I did a series for Fantagraphics called <b>The Cereal Killings</b>. It was about breakfast cereal mascots and I was trying to explore questions I had about the way that culture and agriculture and food and entertainment, mix and mingle. When I did research about the breakfast cereal industry, that led me to the history of Kellogg's. The Kelloggs were Seventh Day Adventists and a lot of early American religion sprang out of this area in Western New York called the Burned Over District. I got very interested in how the origin of Kelloggs is so deeply rooted in early American religious movements. I was very drawn to the idea of breakfast cereal characters as commercial deities. When I was in graduate school, I traveled to India and in these villages there are parades with floating Ganesh and other indigenous deities.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/JSAmericapanel2_t.jpg" border="0" align="left">Then you come down Fifth Avenue for Thanksgiving and what we have is not giant blowup Jesuses, but Ronald McDonald and Hello Kitty. I was thinking about what American figures do we have that aren't commercial legends and myths and I started thinking about Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Appleseed was a part of the Church of the New Jerusalem and he was a missionary. I started researching Johnny Appleseed and that led me to all these amazing accounts of the Cambridge Revival and when I read about those, I realized that that was what my book was about, not Johnny Appleseed. The Cambridge Revival sounded like a really intense affair, which I describe in the book. For someone living in Seattle during the 90’s, it struck a nerve because it was the intoxicating effect of the frontier of technology and how it was going to deliver us from all the ills of our world and bring us closer together and what could be accomplished if the whole world is connected together via the world wide web. It's a very similar vibe as the religious fervor that was happening in Kentucky in 1801 [laughs]. Also as someone that has gone to like 40 to 50 Grateful Dead shows, the descriptions really could have been right out of a Grateful Dead parking lot. People were just tripping back then, running around, barking, drumming, chasing imaginary animals up trees, speaking in tongues, dancing, ecstatic worship. This was really exciting stuff to read and think about, such as what are the powers and limitations of faith and how do we construct a reality through our belief system.
<B>NRAMA</B>: It seems like the second story in the book, <b>Hundreds of Feet Below</b>, seems less specific than <b>The Revival</b>, were you trying to make it more of a personal story?
<b>JS</b>: It's funny because I feel like <b>The Revival</b> is my high watermark in writing as a cartoonist whereas <b>Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight</b>, although just as thoroughly researched, was a fictional town and wasn't based on real events. So I guess maybe I don't necessarily share in your interpretation, but that's fine [laughs].
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/JSA3.jpg" border="0" align="right"><B>NRAMA</B>: What made you keep going in that vein?
<b>JS</b>: I guess with <b>Revival</b>, you have this community that's looking up towards God for salvation, and <b>Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight</b>, asked what happens if instead of looking for spiritual salvation, instead of looking upward for God, you're looking straight down, literally into the ground for gold. <b>The Revival</b> is hopeful but with they move on. There are dark clouds but a sliver of light. But I feel like with <b>Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight</b> it's almost like a morality play. It is like what results from the profane pursuit of material wealth and how does that play out.
<B>NRAMA</B>: Touching upon some of your other work, speaking of <b>Unstable Molecules</b> which you did for Marvel, do you feel like doing that miniseries has satisfied your need to work with superheroes?
<b>JS</b>: [laughs] Did I deal with superheroes in that book?
<B>NRAMA</B>: Well, you dealt with the idea of them existing.
<b>JS</b>: Going back to Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Chapman was the real figure and Johnny Appleseed was the myth. In that sense, that's what the <b>Unstable Molecules</b> was. The Fantastic Four that exists at Marvel is Johnny Appleseed, my story was Johnny Chapman.
<B>NRAMA</B>: I know you were a fan of superheroes when you were younger, do you have any desire to do more with the mainstream heroes you grew up with?
<b>JS</b>: I don't think I would necessarily reject the opportunity if it was under the right circumstances. It has to be on terms I'm comfortable with but if it never happened, I'd be able to live with that. I don't think I'd lose a night's sleep or anything. There are a couple of characters or ideas that if the timing was right I'd say, "Yeah, I can work on this a little bit." But Marvel and DC have a lot of stake invested in these characters and they're very mindful of their own resources, so it's not always easy to do those kinds of things with them. <b>Unstable Molecules</b> editor Tom Brevoort gave me that space to do what I wanted to do and I appreciate that.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/JSA4.jpg" border="0" align="left"><B>NRAMA</B>: Did you see the <i>Fantastic Four</I> movie?
<b>JS</b>: I rented it about four or five months ago. Jaime Hernandez recommended it to me [laughs]. I asked him what he thought and he said it was a pretty good time, so on his recommendation I went and saw it. I thought it was fun. I saw the preview for the sequel online with the Silver Surfer being chased by Human Torch. It looks cool.
<B>NRAMA</B>: From what I’ve read it seems like things are going well at The Center [for Cartoon Studies]?
<b>JS</b>: This morning I got the school's first book. We're doing a book called <b>Houdini: The Handcuff King</b> with Hyperion that Jason Lutes and Nick Bertozzi ( http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=100568) wrote and drew. I edited it and co-designed it. It's a hardcover book. It looks really nice. You are always really afraid at the point you hand it to the printer. It's like your job is done in a way. I guess you could press check but there's a point where the book is going to be what it is. There's a huge feeling of dread right before I see the printed book because if something's wrong, there's no revision [laughs]. I got this book and it was a huge relief because it looks really nice with beautiful dust jacket and hardcover and the art is nice. I'm really thrilled to do these three books with Hyperion.
<B>NRAMA</B>: I didn't know The Center was going to be doing actual books. Was that always the plan?
<b>JS</b>: Yeah, we've been working on them the last few years.
<B>NRAMA</B>: How is it working with Hyperion?
<b>JS</b>: I was the series editor and I worked with an editor at Hyperion by the name of Brenda Bowen, who's is the Vice-President at Hyperion Books for Children.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/HOudini.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/HOudini_t.jpg" border="0" align="right"></a><B>NRAMA</B>: How did you decide to do the Houdini book first?
<b>JS</b>: Basically Hyperion had an idea for doing biographies and they asked me to do a biography and they suggested Houdini. I knew that we needed Jason Lutes to work on that book. We decided the school could actually produce and package these books, working with Hyperion so that's what happened. Brenda is a really astute editor who really cares about making really nice books.
With startup business, you vacillate between incredible excitement and mild despair [laughs]. Actually, I shouldn't say that. That's not true. Not that much despair. I should say weariness sometimes, because we're doing these books with Hyperion, we're teaching, you recruit and you raise money and you're doing events and all these projects, but it's all good. I've got nothing to complain about.
<B>NRAMA</B>: Are you doing a book?
<b>JS</b>: I'm doing one that I wrote about Satchel Paige and Jim Crow. Rich Tommaso wrote it, drew it and inked it, and I did the layouts and design.
Then the third book is about Thoreau, by John Porcellino. It's a good marriage of artist and subject [laughs].
<B>NRAMA</B>: What's the application process like for The Center?
<b>JS</b>: They have to do a comic book featuring themselves, a piece of fruit, a robot and a snowman [laughs].
<B>NRAMA</B>: Those must be fun to read.
<b>JS</b>: They really are. The school just partnered with Diamond Comics, and we do a "Diamond in the rough" scholarship that Diamond promoted. The deadline was postmarked by February 1, so we're getting dozens of these applications from all over the country and I think we're going to announce the winner soon. But it's been great seeing all those come in and Diamond was great to work with. They really helped us. They sent packets out to all our accounts, all their stores, announcing the competition and follow stuff up with Diamond previews. It was good. They helped spread the word and sponsored the scholarship.
<B>NRAMA</B>: Do you have any ideas for where you’ll go after <b>Satchel Paige</b>?
<b>JS</b>: With two CCS students, I'm working on a how to make comics book for very young readers, five to ten year olds. It's partially inspired by [children's book author and illustrator] Ed Emberley. We've found a publisher but we can't announce it quite yet. Also Norton is reissuing all of Will Eisner’s instructional books and CCS is redesigning those. We're not going to be changing the content of his stuff or anything like that but just redesigning it to hopefully enhance what's already there. So between this how-to book for young kids and these instructional books and the how-to thing the school did with Kevin Huizenga, we're doing a lot of instructional books. But I guess that makes sense because we're a cartooning school.
<i>Check out the official website for <b>James Sturm's America: God, Gold, and Golems</b> here (http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/shopCatalogLong.php?item=a45d38c68413e1)
James Sturm's three books: <b>The Revival, Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight</b>, and <b>The Golem's Mighty Swing</b> have been collected into one edition called <b>James Sturm's America</b>. It’s 2007 and it still feels like we are living in his books. The first one, <b>The Revival</b>, examines the tent revival meetings in 1801 Kentucky, and with preachers talking fire and brimstone and “healing” the sick it has great relevance to people like Pat Robertson and The 700 Club. <b>Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight</b> looks at companies who will do anything, even sacrifice human life, for a buck and of course Sturm’s most famous book, <b>The Golem's Mighty Swing</b>, is about a Jewish baseball facing tension and racism as they travel through the American Midwest. I got a chance to talk with Sturm from his office at The Center for Cartoon Studies, which he co-founded.
<b>Newsarama</b>: Who's idea was it to package all three of your Drawn & Quarterly books into <b>James Sturm's America</b>?
<b>James Sturm</b>: From early on in the process I saw all three stories as being an interrelated single piece. That was something that [Drawn & Quarterly publisher] Chris [Oliveros] and I discussed many years ago. Then it was just a matter of timing. He has his concerns about the publisher in terms of selling through <b>Golem</b> books. When he switched distributors, there was a little window where D & Q wasn't putting out many books. The timing seems right now; because all the books are out and are more or less in print. Tom Devlin, who does a lot of the book design at Drawn & Quarterly, had been working through the book design and I couldn't be more thrilled to be working with Tom. I have a tremendous amount of admiration for all the books that he did at Highwater Books and all the books he's doing with Drawn & Quarterly. I just love working with people who know what they're doing [laughs].
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/JSA1.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/JSA1_t.jpg" border="0" align="left"></a><B>NRAMA</B>: Did you know it was going to end up being a trilogy?
<b>JS</b>: I didn't know it was going to be a trilogy when I did <b>The Revival</b> but I was doing <b>Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight</b> and I was really having a hard time figuring out what that piece was about and how it was going to proceed. Then I started writing <b>The Golem's Mighty Swing</b> and that started really moving along at a faster clip. It was at that point I realized, “Wow this is a trilogy.” Then <b>Hundreds of Feet</b> clicked. I went back to do that first, because I knew if I did the baseball book first, I probably wouldn't go back [laughs].
<B>NRAMA</B>: With having done <b>Golem</b> and this upcoming <b>Satchel Paige</b> book, I have to ask - is baseball is something you have an real affinity for, or just a subject to explore?
<b>JS</b>: I like baseball as much as the next baseball fan. I don't think I've watched a full baseball game in two years. I listen to them on the radio. My kitchen is never cleaner than during baseball season because I can just listen while I do stuff. But I had really no intention of doing the Satchel Paige book because of another project I was working on and I was getting the school up and running. It was really on the insistence of Brenda Bowen at Hyperion. She felt pretty strongly that I do this Satchel Paige book. I did it because I wanted the series to happen and I'm so glad I did. I got the sense that it was important that I do this book [laughs].
<B>NRAMA</B>: Better to do it than not do it is what you're saying.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/Satchel%20Paige%20cover1.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/Satchel%20Paige%20cover1_t.jpg" border="0" align="right"></a><b>JS</b>: Well, I'm saying that Brenda was pretty insistent about me working on the Satchel Paige book. That was fine because I love baseball. It's funny because I did the Golem book, I did a <i>New Yorker</i> cover with a baseball theme and now I'm the baseball guy, but that's fine. This new book, even though there's baseball themes and all that, it's really different than the Golem book. You could probably tell a hundred baseball stories, one could be about racism, one could be about closeted issues of sexual identity and another one could be about corporate corruption. I love doing the research and it is very rewarding and fulfilling. I read narratives of folks who lived during the Jim Crow era and weaved that into the story. One of my favorite parts of creating books is the research and looking at all the old WPA [Works Progress Administration] era photographs and prints by Thomas Hart Benton and just interfacing with all this rich visual material and incorporating it into the book. One of the real pleasures for me in making comics is that research stage and all the things I have to immerse myself in before I feel like I'm making an authentic story.
<B>NRAMA</B>: How did you get interested in the pre-war American period?
<b>JS</b>: Many years ago, when I was just a young, hungry cartoonist [laughs], I did a series for Fantagraphics called <b>The Cereal Killings</b>. It was about breakfast cereal mascots and I was trying to explore questions I had about the way that culture and agriculture and food and entertainment, mix and mingle. When I did research about the breakfast cereal industry, that led me to the history of Kellogg's. The Kelloggs were Seventh Day Adventists and a lot of early American religion sprang out of this area in Western New York called the Burned Over District. I got very interested in how the origin of Kelloggs is so deeply rooted in early American religious movements. I was very drawn to the idea of breakfast cereal characters as commercial deities. When I was in graduate school, I traveled to India and in these villages there are parades with floating Ganesh and other indigenous deities.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/JSAmericapanel2_t.jpg" border="0" align="left">Then you come down Fifth Avenue for Thanksgiving and what we have is not giant blowup Jesuses, but Ronald McDonald and Hello Kitty. I was thinking about what American figures do we have that aren't commercial legends and myths and I started thinking about Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Appleseed was a part of the Church of the New Jerusalem and he was a missionary. I started researching Johnny Appleseed and that led me to all these amazing accounts of the Cambridge Revival and when I read about those, I realized that that was what my book was about, not Johnny Appleseed. The Cambridge Revival sounded like a really intense affair, which I describe in the book. For someone living in Seattle during the 90’s, it struck a nerve because it was the intoxicating effect of the frontier of technology and how it was going to deliver us from all the ills of our world and bring us closer together and what could be accomplished if the whole world is connected together via the world wide web. It's a very similar vibe as the religious fervor that was happening in Kentucky in 1801 [laughs]. Also as someone that has gone to like 40 to 50 Grateful Dead shows, the descriptions really could have been right out of a Grateful Dead parking lot. People were just tripping back then, running around, barking, drumming, chasing imaginary animals up trees, speaking in tongues, dancing, ecstatic worship. This was really exciting stuff to read and think about, such as what are the powers and limitations of faith and how do we construct a reality through our belief system.
<B>NRAMA</B>: It seems like the second story in the book, <b>Hundreds of Feet Below</b>, seems less specific than <b>The Revival</b>, were you trying to make it more of a personal story?
<b>JS</b>: It's funny because I feel like <b>The Revival</b> is my high watermark in writing as a cartoonist whereas <b>Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight</b>, although just as thoroughly researched, was a fictional town and wasn't based on real events. So I guess maybe I don't necessarily share in your interpretation, but that's fine [laughs].
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/JSA3.jpg" border="0" align="right"><B>NRAMA</B>: What made you keep going in that vein?
<b>JS</b>: I guess with <b>Revival</b>, you have this community that's looking up towards God for salvation, and <b>Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight</b>, asked what happens if instead of looking for spiritual salvation, instead of looking upward for God, you're looking straight down, literally into the ground for gold. <b>The Revival</b> is hopeful but with they move on. There are dark clouds but a sliver of light. But I feel like with <b>Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight</b> it's almost like a morality play. It is like what results from the profane pursuit of material wealth and how does that play out.
<B>NRAMA</B>: Touching upon some of your other work, speaking of <b>Unstable Molecules</b> which you did for Marvel, do you feel like doing that miniseries has satisfied your need to work with superheroes?
<b>JS</b>: [laughs] Did I deal with superheroes in that book?
<B>NRAMA</B>: Well, you dealt with the idea of them existing.
<b>JS</b>: Going back to Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Chapman was the real figure and Johnny Appleseed was the myth. In that sense, that's what the <b>Unstable Molecules</b> was. The Fantastic Four that exists at Marvel is Johnny Appleseed, my story was Johnny Chapman.
<B>NRAMA</B>: I know you were a fan of superheroes when you were younger, do you have any desire to do more with the mainstream heroes you grew up with?
<b>JS</b>: I don't think I would necessarily reject the opportunity if it was under the right circumstances. It has to be on terms I'm comfortable with but if it never happened, I'd be able to live with that. I don't think I'd lose a night's sleep or anything. There are a couple of characters or ideas that if the timing was right I'd say, "Yeah, I can work on this a little bit." But Marvel and DC have a lot of stake invested in these characters and they're very mindful of their own resources, so it's not always easy to do those kinds of things with them. <b>Unstable Molecules</b> editor Tom Brevoort gave me that space to do what I wanted to do and I appreciate that.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/JSA4.jpg" border="0" align="left"><B>NRAMA</B>: Did you see the <i>Fantastic Four</I> movie?
<b>JS</b>: I rented it about four or five months ago. Jaime Hernandez recommended it to me [laughs]. I asked him what he thought and he said it was a pretty good time, so on his recommendation I went and saw it. I thought it was fun. I saw the preview for the sequel online with the Silver Surfer being chased by Human Torch. It looks cool.
<B>NRAMA</B>: From what I’ve read it seems like things are going well at The Center [for Cartoon Studies]?
<b>JS</b>: This morning I got the school's first book. We're doing a book called <b>Houdini: The Handcuff King</b> with Hyperion that Jason Lutes and Nick Bertozzi ( http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=100568) wrote and drew. I edited it and co-designed it. It's a hardcover book. It looks really nice. You are always really afraid at the point you hand it to the printer. It's like your job is done in a way. I guess you could press check but there's a point where the book is going to be what it is. There's a huge feeling of dread right before I see the printed book because if something's wrong, there's no revision [laughs]. I got this book and it was a huge relief because it looks really nice with beautiful dust jacket and hardcover and the art is nice. I'm really thrilled to do these three books with Hyperion.
<B>NRAMA</B>: I didn't know The Center was going to be doing actual books. Was that always the plan?
<b>JS</b>: Yeah, we've been working on them the last few years.
<B>NRAMA</B>: How is it working with Hyperion?
<b>JS</b>: I was the series editor and I worked with an editor at Hyperion by the name of Brenda Bowen, who's is the Vice-President at Hyperion Books for Children.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/HOudini.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/general/Sturm/HOudini_t.jpg" border="0" align="right"></a><B>NRAMA</B>: How did you decide to do the Houdini book first?
<b>JS</b>: Basically Hyperion had an idea for doing biographies and they asked me to do a biography and they suggested Houdini. I knew that we needed Jason Lutes to work on that book. We decided the school could actually produce and package these books, working with Hyperion so that's what happened. Brenda is a really astute editor who really cares about making really nice books.
With startup business, you vacillate between incredible excitement and mild despair [laughs]. Actually, I shouldn't say that. That's not true. Not that much despair. I should say weariness sometimes, because we're doing these books with Hyperion, we're teaching, you recruit and you raise money and you're doing events and all these projects, but it's all good. I've got nothing to complain about.
<B>NRAMA</B>: Are you doing a book?
<b>JS</b>: I'm doing one that I wrote about Satchel Paige and Jim Crow. Rich Tommaso wrote it, drew it and inked it, and I did the layouts and design.
Then the third book is about Thoreau, by John Porcellino. It's a good marriage of artist and subject [laughs].
<B>NRAMA</B>: What's the application process like for The Center?
<b>JS</b>: They have to do a comic book featuring themselves, a piece of fruit, a robot and a snowman [laughs].
<B>NRAMA</B>: Those must be fun to read.
<b>JS</b>: They really are. The school just partnered with Diamond Comics, and we do a "Diamond in the rough" scholarship that Diamond promoted. The deadline was postmarked by February 1, so we're getting dozens of these applications from all over the country and I think we're going to announce the winner soon. But it's been great seeing all those come in and Diamond was great to work with. They really helped us. They sent packets out to all our accounts, all their stores, announcing the competition and follow stuff up with Diamond previews. It was good. They helped spread the word and sponsored the scholarship.
<B>NRAMA</B>: Do you have any ideas for where you’ll go after <b>Satchel Paige</b>?
<b>JS</b>: With two CCS students, I'm working on a how to make comics book for very young readers, five to ten year olds. It's partially inspired by [children's book author and illustrator] Ed Emberley. We've found a publisher but we can't announce it quite yet. Also Norton is reissuing all of Will Eisner’s instructional books and CCS is redesigning those. We're not going to be changing the content of his stuff or anything like that but just redesigning it to hopefully enhance what's already there. So between this how-to book for young kids and these instructional books and the how-to thing the school did with Kevin Huizenga, we're doing a lot of instructional books. But I guess that makes sense because we're a cartooning school.
<i>Check out the official website for <b>James Sturm's America: God, Gold, and Golems</b> here (http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/shopCatalogLong.php?item=a45d38c68413e1)