click to enlarge - Eleanor Davis
- Center for Cartoon Studies Applied Cartooning Lab graphic
James Sturm grew up "mesmerized" by Marvel Comics, so getting to write and lay out a Fantastic Four miniseries for Marvel 20 years ago "was a dream come true," he said.
Unstable Molecules: The True Story of Comics' Greatest Foursome won an Eisner Award, the Oscars of the comic book industry.
Now Sturm harnesses his own superpowers — and those of fellow cartoonists — to change the world by making comic books to promote civic engagement, empower health care consumers and explain how our brains allow us to read. Comic books about those subjects are among the many projects of the
Center for Cartoon Studies' new
Applied Cartooning Lab. Sturm, cofounder of the 18-year-old White River Junction college for cartoonists, directs the lab, which has its grand opening on Friday, October 6.
The work isn't new, Sturm acknowledged. The school has long been socially engaged, creating cartoons designed to explain complex topics. In those efforts, it has partnered with local and national organizations, including Vermont Humanities, the Vermont Secretary of State's Office, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Prison Studies Project at Harvard University.
By pulling such projects together under the auspices of the lab — giving it a name, a website and a physical address: 173 South Main Street, White River Junction — Sturm hopes to expand and more easily explain the effort to potential students, partners and financial backers. "It's almost like doubling down on that and focusing on it," he said.
click to enlarge - Courtesy of Center for Cartoon Studies
- This Is What Democracy Looks Like: A Graphic Guide to Governance
A host of cartoonists, many of them Center for Cartoon Studies grads, have contributed work. Published titles include
This is What Democracy Looks Like: A Graphic Guide to Governance, Health and Wealth: A Graphic Guide to the US Healthcare System, Let's Talk About It: A Graphic Guide to Mental Health, How We Read: A Graphic Guide to Literacy, and
Freedom and Unity: A Graphic Guide to Civics and Democracy in Vermont.
In the works are books about climate change, sexual assault and mass incarceration.
Dan Nott, a Center for Cartoon Studies graduate who teaches at the school, was lead cartoonist for two of the books and works with the lab. Nott's graphic nonfiction book
Hidden Systems: Water, Electricity, the Internet, and the Secrets Behind the Systems We Use Every Day, has been
longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Young People's Literature. In applied cartooning, he said, cartoonists collaborate with each other and with nonartist experts and mission-driven organizations to produce comics that help readers understand and learn about the world.
In addition to publishing comic books, the lab designs public education campaigns and leads workshops. It partnered with Chicago's
Mikva Challenge to send cartoonists on a five-state midwestern tour to teach middle- and high-school students about government and civic engagement.
Closer to home, cartoonists visited the White River Junction VA Medical Center to talk to residents who have PTSD and substance-use disorder. Their yearslong effort produced two comic books,
When I Returned and
A Whole Lifetime of Firsts, which have been sent to veterans' centers around the country.
Those books, like most of the lab's other comic books, can be downloaded for free on the
lab's website.
The Center for Cartoon Studies remains primarily a college for cartoonists. It offers a master of fine arts degree, one- and two-year certificates, and a variety of workshops and has 32 students, its average enrollment.
"One of our core missions is to explore the past, present and potential of comics," Sturm said. "And there's so many things that comics can do really well." Besides creating worlds and telling fictional and nonfiction stories, they can tease apart seemingly impenetrable topics.
By drawing comics about the health care system and federal government, "you're taking these very intense, complicated, complex and sometimes even secretive systems, and you're breaking them up," Sturm said. "And you're putting them into panels that are much more easy to understand and digest." Helping people understand gives them agency, Sturm said. "With all these books we always try to encourage people to take next steps and to give a mission of hope and promote some type of activism and advocacy for yourself or loved ones."
Applied Cartooning Lab Open House, Friday, October 6, 5 to 8 p.m., 173 So. Main St., White River Junction, appliedcartooning.org