Booklist Interview: James Sturm: Comic Visionary (Eye of the Sturm).

Karp, Jesse (author).

Comics visionary James Sturm gives his work an emotional depth and complexity that allow “small” stories to capture the significance of entire historical eras. An Eisner Award winner, he is director and cofounder of the Vermont-based Center for Cartoon Studies, a school devoted exclusively to cartooning and sequential storytelling.

BKL: What comic books in your early life made you sit up and take notice?

STURM: I was introduced to comics in our local newspaper. It wasn’t long after that I began accumulating Fawcett Peanuts paperback collections. You can’t overestimate the impact Charles Schulz had on my generation of cartoonists. My next big discovery was The Fantastic Four, which led me to other Marvel comics. I had an incredibly intense relationship with those comics. They were a crucial part of my childhood.

BKL: Weren’t you a production assistant on RAW, Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s generation-defining alternative comic?

STURM: My time at RAW was one of the most important parts of my cartooning education. I was exposed to some amazing books and cartoonists. One of my tasks was to shoot photostats of a chapter of MAUS—there were no desktop scanners in those days. I would go into the darkroom and pull a MAUS page from a plastic sleeve. Underneath that page would be the previous draft, and beneath that, another. This was before most cartoonists were doing graphic novels, and I was struggling with the process, trying to figure out how to work through a longer story. Being exposed to Art’s process was a revelation.

BKL: What authors do you count among your great inspirations?

STURM: I love Steven Millhauser. He’s really interested in underlying mysteries and structures, and he poetically articulates the creative process. I like Russell Banks and Allegra Goodman; both craft fantastic stories in which neither a character nor fate seems to have the upper hand. And Richard Ford, for the way he weaves the mundane into the larger social fabric (and he’s the master of the parenthetical comment). I’m also a huge fan of Paul Auster, whose unpretentiousness allows him to take the reader into some wild places, and also Philip Roth, for his total commitment to interpreting his world through the novel.

BKL: In Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow and The Golem’s Mighty Swing, you produced suspenseful and exciting baseball sequences. What would you tell a student of cartooning who wanted to create the same effect?

STURM: Try to capture the feel and rhythm of the game and pay attention to its subtleties. Of course, it helps if you like baseball. But I would also recommend looking at Japanese baseball manga. American baseball comics have been pretty bad, always halting and truncated. The Japanese get it right; they let baseball unfold at a leisurely pace.

BKL: What place do graphic novels have as educational tools?

STURM: My hope is that Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow is so visually engaging that the issues of racism, education, and violence it deals with emerge naturally from the story. Nothing will turn readers off faster than material that comes across as pedantic or preachy. Compelling stories make readers want to learn or do more. I remember as a kid watching the bike-racing movie Breaking Away. The next day, I was on my bike, inspired to ride. I hope kids get a glimpse of real life in the biographical books, feel how compelling the person’s world was, and want to explore more of it on their own. Google and Wikipedia can provide a biography in seconds. It’s stories that give information meaning. It was after Columbine when reactionary forces started blaming and destroying computer games and DVDs that I realized comics were finally off the hook and free to roam classrooms and libraries.

Was it so long ago that comics were considered detrimental to a child’s educational development? Now teachers and librarians are thrilled to see students turn away from a computer to read.

BKL: Does the Center have many women students?

STURM: More than I saw in my other teaching gigs, but still far too few. Although historically women have not had the same impact on comics as men, it’s wrong to see their contributions to visual narratives only through the prism of comics. I’m more inspired and influenced by the work of Virginia Lee Burton and Marie Hall Ets than, say, Milton Caniff. Their work flows so effortlessly and has a spellbinding emotional core. Burton’s page designs are as revelatory as Will Eisner’s. Ets’ gentle stories and expressive drawings are positively enchanting. Male cartoonists of the same era seem crass and constipated by comparison. I’m pleased to see a lot of great female cartoonists emerging right now—Eleanor Davis (Bugbear), Rutu Modan (Exit Wounds), and Gabrielle Bell (Book of Ordinary Things). Their work is as exciting as anyone’s out there.

BKL: How do you expect to see the art form evolving over the next decade?

STURM: The work that ushered in this new era of graphic novels was inspired by comic books and reflects their influence on density and page layout. In the coming years, I think we’ll see more graphic novels shaped from an aesthetic informed from children’s picture books, graphic design, and painting. Drawn & Quarterly just released White Rapids, which is more influenced by graphic design than traditional comic books. Some of the work featured in the Kramer’s Ergot anthology appears to be informed by a sensibility not derived from comic books.

BKL: What graphic novels are you reading now, and what excites you as a creator?

STURM: I most recently read Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds. Adriane Tomine’s Shortcomings was excellent. I read Sardine, Moomin, and Little Lulu to my kids. I also get excited seeing CCS students grow over the course of the two years they are in school. I have a front-row seat to the creative journeys of talented, young cartoonists. A few years from now, many of these students will have lots of readers turning pages.