by Mike Rhode
The Kickstarter ends this week!
Andrew Aydin, who lives in Western North Carolina, is a partner in Good Trouble Productions. Before this second act, he worked in Congressman John Lewis’ office and introduced the Congressman to a whole new generation via graphic memoirs March vols 1-3 and Run vol. 1. I’m on record somewhere as saying March is America’s version of Maus, and I stand by that. If you haven’t read it, now is the time to do so, especially in light of the actions of the current administration.
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| Barravechia cover art for Islands in the Sky |
Good Trouble Comics is an imprint of Good Trouble Productions, LLC, based at the Creative Media Industries Institute at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. Good Trouble Productions specializes in works of creative nonfiction in comics and other visual media, publishing through imprints Good Trouble Comics and Appalachia Comics Project. It was founded in 2019 by Andrew Aydin, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Valentine De Landro, Matt Fraction, and Vaughn Shinall. (studio description from their Etsy page). An amusing anecdotal history is on their website.
Mike Rhode: You're best known as a comic scripter for March and Run with John Lewis and two artists. So when you left Capitol Hill, you've decided to continue as a comic scripter. Can you tell us about that decision?
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| Aydin from March website |
I live in Edneyville, North Carolina. I live right next to Bat Cave and Chimney Rock. It just got hit so hard by Hurricane Helene. Matter of fact, one of my adjacent neighbors actually passed away in the storm. We got hit really hard. I'd been taking care of the farm on weekends, and Congressman Lewis used to make fun of me. He'd say, “well, I spent my whole life trying to get off the farm, and now you're trying to go back.” [laughs]
You know, I bought a tractor. The thing that was so healthy or enriching or beautiful, or the thing that resonated with me was that I really enjoyed my garden. And it was my mom's garden. She'd built it and I fixed it back up. Every year I get my tomato crop and my okra and my eggplants and strawberries. I live in the Apple Valley of the area. And it's a peaceful place to write. It's a good place to travel from, because I'm only about a half hour from the airport. I just needed to go home. It wasn't where I grew up necessarily, but it was where my mother retired to, and my grandmother lived here the whole time I knew her - ever since I was born.
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| Rep. John Lewis |
My grandfather was actually the mailman for this valley, and there was something really kind about the people looking out for me, as I was trying to figure out how to keep this farm going. To get it back to being designated a farm, which I successfully achieved a few months ago. I am an officially government designated farmer [laughs] which is not what anyone would expect from me. It was a deliberate choice to try and heal. I think the March years were also particularly difficult, because from Congressman Lewis and I's perspective, there was a dark storm coming. We were operating with a sense of urgency about teaching people nonviolent civil disobedience, not just so that they could advance the progress, but so that they could defend themselves. And, you know, from that perspective, it was a tremendous success. But still not enough.
When you look at it in the context of what happened in 2020, the first generation of students taught comprehensive civil rights education in schools through March, all go out and, and engage in non-violence, civil disobedience and, and push the country forward. But we also knew the pushback was inevitable. That's why we kept working. That's why we worked on Run. We were trying to show what happened after the civil rights act, after the passage of the Voting Rights Act because it would be the same playbook. And then you saw, first it was CRT, then it was the book bans, now it's the attack on libraries and librarians. I think the far right saw the success of what we did and devised plans to come after us and many others. They're afraid to take on John Lewis and his memory directly, but they have engaged in attacks on every piece of the support structure that allowed March to be so successful. So part of what I also wanted to do was to build on what we pioneered with March, because the medium of comics is not used to its full potential. A lot of that has to do with the way the businesses operate. Risk is not welcome on a lot of balance sheets, and so it takes some people who are young and scrappy and true believers to try and change it. I think at this point, people forget how many publishers said no to March and said it wouldn't work. So we're trying to do something similar, but to grow, and not just repeat the past, but to try and build something new and, and build on those lessons.
Mike Rhode: Just for the record, but also because I’d like to see it, do you have any hope or thoughts that Lewis's story will be continued in Run vol. 2, or is that project at a halt?
Andrew Aydin: You know, I don't know. I have no plans to work on it at the moment.
Mike Rhode: How have you been distributing your comics? Your website has an Etsy store page. You've done Registered which isn’t for sale and two issues of Recognized which is - can you tell us what they are?
Andrew Aydin: Both were series that we were asked to produce for the New York City Department of Education classrooms because they needed those curriculum elements filled. We made them, and New York City uses them in their classrooms, and now we're making them available in a reformatted way, so they're a little bit easier to use, a little bit more durable, and a little bit more affordable. They're actually 64-page comics, so you get essentially a mini graphic novel. But they're still in the format of comics so that kids find them fun. And Register is about constitutional amendments. The first issue is about the 26th Amendment, which is the history of the “old enough to fight old enough to vote” movement that led to the amendment.
The
second half of the issue is about the 15th Amendment and the reasons why it was
weakened to use negative language instead of positive language. And that negative language is what
allowed the legal loopholes that gave rise to Jim Crow. It's important to
understand, because the reason it was weakened was not because of racism
against the newly-emancipated; it was against Chinese and Irish immigrants out
west, and it was the Western delegations that weakened the language. There's
a real lesson in that about the interconnectedness of the black struggle and
the struggle for immigrant acceptance in this country, and how both are abused
over and over again, pitting each other against each other, in this pendulum
swing where the justification to marginalize one ends up being used against the
other.
Recognized is about unsung heroes of the LGBTQ+ movement. It's fun because it's a series where we also get to give first-time comics writers, and also experienced comics writers, their chance to do non-fiction comics. It's kind an amazing roster of creators. We have Clay Cane who's a Sirius XM host, and a New York Times bestselling author, and this is his first comic. We’ve got other creators who are very experienced, and they're getting to practice and grow in the nonfiction comic space, which is not something that most comics writers get the opportunity to do.
Mike Rhode: How are you finding the people to work on that series?
Andrew Aydin: These are all people that one of us know, or have read
their work, or been recommended to us. You see someone at shows, or you've
worked with them in the past on something else, and then this is a story that
we think will be uniquely suited for this particular individual. I'm always
keeping my eye out for talent, because one of the things that John Lewis was
always instilling in me was that everyone has a role to play. There are people
who have tremendous abilities that they've never gotten to use or rarely get to
use, because of the way comics publishing works. We have the
freedom to identify those people, talk to them and get a sense of what they
want to do, and then try and find places for them. We're tiny, so we don't get
to do all that we would like to do, but where we do find opportunities, we try
and help creators grow, expand and learn new tactics, and then also we get to
learn from them.
Mike Rhode: Let me ask about the other two titles you have listed before we move on to the new one that's coming up.
Andrew Aydin: Comics of the Movement comes out July 2nd, but we're offering pre-orders on the website. I just got this shipment from the printer delivered this afternoon. I was unloading it [laughs] from the truck myself. We're also distributing through Lunar; we had distributed through Diamond, but we'll wait and see what happens there. Right now all of our products are available through Lunar Distribution.
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| Domo Stanton cover |
Mike Rhode: It's the first time it's ever been reprinted, right?
Andrew Aydin: Yes. In fact putting together complete copies was quite a challenge. It took me years to track down the different pages to get scans that were reproducible. And I think it's incredibly important because these comics were made by Jennifer Lawson and Cortland Cox to educate the people who were voting for the first time, both on how it works and why it's important, but also on the roles and responsibilities of the elected officials in Lowndes County. So they knew who they were voting for and what their jobs would be. Even I learned something I did not know - that the coroner in Lowndes County became the sheriff whenever the sheriff left the county.
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| John Jennings cover |
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| Val de Landro |
Congressman Lewis always used to say, “you had to dramatize the conflict,” and we found so many ways to do it. It's like the children's march he did in San Diego, which was clearly dramatizing what his goals were. Comics are another way to dramatize the conflict. We are putting the first student work next to the new grassroots work. Now is the time for the grassroots work. I deeply hope that people will read this comic and see that making comics is not scary. You don't have to have this perfect studio house style comic. You just need a piece of paper and information and inspiration, and you can make a comic that is just as influential.
Mike Rhode: Normally I would think that libraries would be a big purchaser of that type of book. But who knows what'll happen in the current climate?
Andrew Aydin: We're hoping they're going to want a bound version, and it'll be more expensive both to produce and at retail. So that's why we started with a comic book version, because if this goes well and everybody buys it, then we can afford to do a book version with more research included, more pages and, a nice design that could then go into schools and libraries to stay on a more perpetual basis.
We got a plan, but man, we're tiny. We're bootstrapped. I mean, we don't have any private investment or anything like that. It's just a bunch of us who like to make comics, making comics.
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| Monster Appreciation Society Cover |
Mike Rhode: The Monster Appreciation Society, is that a fiction book?
Andrew Aydin: This ties into the Appalachia Comics Project. Because even before Helene, I had really started to get frustrated at the fact that there are so few representations of where I live in popular media, and the ones that we do see are things like JD Vance [laughs], and that garbage. You see the New York and LA publishing crowds breathlessly embrace it, but that's because they've never actually been to Appalachia.
And to me, I thought it was incredibly important to start making something that reflected the, the community that I live with. This wonderful artist, Jonathan Marks Barravechia had reached out to me at some point saying he just wanted to work on something if we'd figured out what it is.
And me being me, I admired the hustle and the willingness. So I talked to him about this idea that I'd had that there should be more comics that speak to this region, because, you know, if anybody's read Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver goes into some fantastic storytelling that speaks to Appalachia's unique appreciation for the medium of comics And it was here that I read my first comic, when my grandmother took me and bought it for me at the Piggly Wiggly. [laughs]
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| Monster Appreciation Society ashcans |
We started talking about how people really like Cryptids, but we wanted to try to do something new and personal. We came up with a twist. We can't reveal all the twists that we want to do. This ashcan is just to show people the art and give them a very, very gentle introduction to the storytelling.
The best summary of what we thought the series was really about is on the book: “monsters lurk in ancient mountains, Bigfoot, the moon-eyed people, real estate developers… [laughs] In the Southern Appalachia Mountains, the greed of man collides with the unseen world of the first inhabitants. For a group of extraordinary young people in the small town trying to raise them, the fallout changes everything. “How do you parent your kids when they're best friends are Bigfoot, and how do you save them all?”
Jonathan and I have been working on this for a while, and so we decided to go ahead and print up some of the stuff that we've been working on as this teaser, so that we could have another thing to sell as a fundraiser to raise money for the Appalachia Comics Project. And then hopefully we'll be able to actually publish Monster Appreciation Society through the Appalachia Comics Project, so that if it does well, then that money will go to making more comics about Appalachia.
Mike Rhode: Let's move on to the Appalachia Comics Project then. It is not strictly a Hurricane Helene fundraising project?
Andrew Aydin: No. It's for creating and publishing Appalachian-themed works. As I said about Monster Appreciation Society, I've been thinking about this for a while, and then Helene happened, and I got really frustrated seeing all the misinformation that was going around online. Misinformation about what was happening by people who don't live here, who never lived here, and who were barely here, who just cruised through to get some disaster porn videos to throw up on their Instagram. And a lot of us felt this way, a lot of us, and I was thinking, “I can do something about this.” I went to the partners and said, one, I think we should do something about Helene. And two, I think maybe this is finally an opportunity to start something larger to help the whole region. Because I don't think people in politics or people in government fully understand the importance of Appalachia to the nation and the history of this country. I don't think it's a coincidence that JD Vance chose the Appalachia ideology as a cloak to put himself in and to manufacture himself as a candidate.
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| Marquez Cover with title treatment |
To me it was an opportunity. I read a graduate thesis from the MIT media lab that came out a few years ago that talks about how one of the reasons that Appalachia is so poorly depicted in media is because so few people from Appalachia are given the opportunity to write about the region, their experiences, their life in fiction or nonfiction. They just weren't given the opportunity. In that thesis, she had proposed a solution, which was a co-authorship model. And obviously that perked up my attention. And at the same time, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, they released a report on essentially how comics just had better outcomes with kids when used in the classrooms. One reason of the better outcomes from using comics is that comic creators are more accessible. Children who have the opportunity to meet the creators are more likely to be able to fully actualize their ideas and also engage in creative professional pursuits. Because by seeing comics creators, by interacting with them, it seems like something you could do. And I thought about myself, going to comic conventions when I was a teenager and meeting creators, and being so amazed that these people were able to make a living from the power of their ideas. I put all that together into an intellectual blender, [laughs], and talked to my partners Kelly Sue, Matt, Val Vaughn as well as our production team Lauren and Chris. And the Appalachia Comics Project idea is what came out of that. We wanted to start with Islands in the Sky, a history of Helene, for two reasons. One this is an example of something that has never happened before in the United States, but that will happen more and more frequently, namely that we had a region the size of Connecticut completely cut off from the rest of the world by road and communications.
And for those of us who survived it, who lived in this world where cash was the only way to trade, where gas stations ran out of gas, and people were walking on the side of the road as the only way to get anywhere… where you didn't know if you took a wrong turn, if you would be stuck there overnight because the road would be jammed and you wouldn't be able to turn around. For those of us who lived through this, there are a lot of lessons that the rest of the country needs to know. And then secondly the initial months of response to the storm were pretty impressive. I played a role in helping relay information to different people in government and elsewhere because of who I was in a former life, and they were former colleagues, as there was a whole period where there was really no chain of command at least on the ground here. We were all just pitching in. And that response was really, really incredible. I think people, in an almost sad way, look back on it with some longing for a time of people putting down whatever biases or affiliations they might have had and just helping each other. But what we've seen since January is almost a near abandonment of the region by the federal government.
At a time when there's estimated to be billions and billions of dollars of repairs needed, my neighbors and myself, now we can't get responses. We have tried to apply for SBA loans and we've been given the runaround. All of a sudden, things that were fine before aren't fine anymore. They want documents that don't exist. It seems like a deliberate and systematic effort to starve the region,
We have to make sure that people know what happened to us, what we're dealing with and we have to be creative about it. And we have to, just like Appalachians always have, we have to make our own solution.
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| Barravechia cover with title treatment |
Mike Rhode: So in contrast to current federal ideology, FEMA was actually very helpful in your opinion?
Andrew Aydin: Yeah. I mean, FEMA came to my house. FEMA came to my neighbor's houses. They provided initial grants and the process isn't perfect. It certainly always needs improvement, but that's what I would say for anything that was created by Congress. I think local officials certainly need some more control over the process. But on the whole, the experience that I had, and many, many people I know who worked with FEMA in those early days was that they showed up. And it will never be possible for a region to suffer as much damage as we did and have things go back to normal very quickly. And also a lot of that damage was worse because of a lack of infrastructure investment. Many of these infrastructure items that failed were things that were actually slated to be repaired, or funding was in the pipeline to be improved. Now they no longer seem to be in the pipeline as we see these funding cuts go through. So it only makes it more likely that this will happen again and could be even more severe.
Here's one other thing about the project. All the professional writers are donating their time. And that is so if we raise enough money, what would normally be allocated as a writer's fee in a production budget, instead that money goes to the survivors who are co-authoring their stories.
Mike Rhode: Is it going to be biographical sketches about people's experiences?
Andrew Aydin: Yeah. They're first-person accounts of their experiences during and after Helene. And we're really excited about the level of interest. The Smoky Mountain News wrote about us, and it's a local newspaper out of Haywood County, North Carolina. And we got more than three dozen submissions within the first day or two. There was a tremendous amount of interest by people who wanted to tell their story. Maybe the hardest part about this for me, from the early days when we first put the news out there that we were doing this, was that we couldn't tell everybody's story. We just couldn't guarantee that we would have enough money. Because even If the Kickstarter fails, we still guarantee we will pay the local writers for doing their stories. And we're doing that out of pocket because it's the right thing to do.
It's the only way to get this going, and that's just how it works. So we had to narrow the list of authors. We tried to narrow it down to 10, and we've failed at that. So we've narrowed it down to 13 scripts that we've commissioned, including something that I'm particularly proud of, which is that Dr. David Easterling, who used to run the NOAA climate statistics office here in Asheville, has agreed to write one of the chapters. And as far as I am aware, I think this is going to be the first time he's written about his experiences during the storm, since recently leaving NOAA. So there's an important scientific element that will be included in this that would never have otherwise been created.
Mike Rhode: What does the book’s title Islands in the Sky mean in this context anyway?
Andrew Aydin: Islands in the Sky is something I write about in my story and it came from the day after the storm when we were cut off from everything and the flood waters were at their peak. It was just me and the dog at the house and the only thing you could hear were the rushing waters from the creeks turned rivers. After a while I started to feel a need to hear a human voice. Because the power was long out and the phones didn’t work at all, I dug out my mom’s old battery powered radio. Most of the stations were down, but finally I spun the dial far enough to find a church broadcast from one of the churches high up on a mountain. I remember the preacher coming on and giving a brief update on people that were missing. And the he said: this area may be known as the Land of Sky, but for now we are Islands in the Sky until the flood waters recede. I looked around realizing my house on the knoll that Mama picked out so many years ago was essentially an island at that moment. And that stayed with me. You don’t forget that feeling.
Mike Rhode: Are you doing oral histories with the people to use and turn into a script?
Andrew Aydin: No, they're working with the writers so that they get the experience of co-authoring a script. This goes back to that co-authorship model that I talked about. It's crazy, right? It's Brian Michael Bendis sitting down with woman who was supposed to get married the weekend the storm hit. We've got Gene Yang and Matt Fraction's writing, and Nate Powell's doing a story, and this really incredible roster of creators. Who've all followed me into this breach once more [laughs]. Because I think they also understand that what happened during the storm is this model for us setting aside so many of our differences and that this could play a role in sensitizing people to set aside the things that are being forced into our eyeballs and into our brains through social media. That's this unique role that comics can play.
Mike Rhode: You mentioned the writers, but who's doing the art?
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| Jarrett Rutland art for Islands in the Sky |
Andrew Aydin: I’m very excited about Jarrett Rutland’s art, who's local, and he just turned in this beautiful piece. It's sort of Bruegelesque. I think he's a fantastic creator that I hope people see more of. Valentine De Landro is illustrating the story I’m writing. Nate Powell is working with Dr. Eastland, doing double duty as co-writer and artist. C.A.P. Ward is illustrating the wedding story. And June Kim who has worked with us on several things is working with Steve Orlando telling the story with a reporter and what the aftermath was like from someone trying to make enough sense of the damage to write the news. Josh Adams is illustrating a harrowing story with a survivor who was stranded on their roof as the floodwaters rose. Oh and Nick Filardi, he’s a colorist for a lot of comics, and his wife Shannon are writing a story illustrated by Brett Schoonover. And Gene Yang brought some serious talent with his friends Thien Pham and Briana Loewinsohn illustrating their story with a survivor who runs an animal shelter and what they went through trying to save all their animals.
I’m so grateful to all of them because need this level of talent to tell these stories so that they can break through all of the noise. For us here in Western North Carolina and the Appalachia region more broadly, we have to start now both telling our story and also finding ways to give people opportunities to, to earn a little bit of money. With this project, people are able to tell their story, feel empowered, and also jumpstart a creative economy because we can't rely on tourism anymore. When we have these sort of disasters, even though many of the places are open again, people are afraid to come because they don't know. If we do want to help foster people coming back to the region for tourism purposes, they've got to know how things stand. We have all these things we need to stand up in order to survive - economically, personally, financially, all these things. This is the weird niche or the thing that I am good at. Bringing people together, here with co-authorship, and setting a big goal, and then doing all the little steps to get there.
Mike Rhode: Why Kickstarter? Obviously to raise money, but Kickstarter is a
specific choice, so why did you decide to do it with them?
Andrew Aydin: First, I went around to a lot of the foundations, and they all said the same thing I heard when I proposed March, which was “no, what are you talking about? That won't work.” I was a little disappointed in that but not surprised, they can still come around. We chose Kickstarter because early on when I was trying to think about this, I reached out to Oriana who I'd known for years and she had reached out trying to find a project that we could work on together. And I said, “Look, we're in crisis. Can you help us?” And Kickstarter agreed to pull out all the stops, to do anything they can do to help us. They understand the urgency.
But also that this is a unique opportunity to build grassroots support for a project that is uniquely suited for a crowdfunding model. I think sometimes we're seeing these big corporations come in and use Kickstarter, and I guess that's fine, but we're tiny and we're just trying to help people. And this is really what crowdfunding started with and is its strongest leg to stand on. We're trying to be a model too for how communities can deal with crisis, and how we capture history. I think it allows us to do something that I'm more familiar with too, which is to wage a campaign. You’ve got 30 days to get everybody to agree on something, or at least a majority or a large group of them, like John Lewis trained me to do. [laughs] It made sense in a lot of ways. Now Sam, who runs the comics portion, he's been very, very helpful. And we've had so many great creators donate special one of a kind items that are signed or to offer commissions or things like that, so people who have an interest in the book will also find a lot of reasons to want to support it.
One of the things that I'm putting up personally is a signed first edition of March book one, and this is signed by John Lewis, along with the ashcan preview edition from 2012 at San Diego Comic Con of which only 300 were produced, and only the people who listened to my incredibly enthusiastic pitch [laughs] on why March was going to be a big book [laughs] received it. It is the rarest March item there is out there except for maybe some of the things that John Lewis and I made ourselves [laughs]. This is probably the only chance people will ever have to get one. It felt like it was important, with so many people putting in their time and energy and money, that I demonstrate the same sort of commitment. I'm not just putting in my time, but I'm putting skin in the game. I'm putting these things that mean something to me up to benefit the greater good.
There is untapped value in these people's stories and the lessons from their stories. And just like John Lewis tried, we have to give them the vehicle to express it in a way that reaches the most people, that reaches them in the language of the people. And that builds then greater understanding of these important lessons, the history that came before them. And so we see that there are heroes who walk among us that we do not appreciate the way we should.
Appalachia Comics Project links:
https://www.appalachiacomics.org/
https://bsky.app/profile/appalachiacomics.bsky.social
https://www.instagram.com/appalachiacomics
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61576151262703
https://www.youtube.com/@AppalachiaComics
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/878258985/appalachia-comics-project
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