Jay Hosler
Cartoonist scientists aren’t exactly a dime a dozen, but that hasn’t stopped Jay Hosler from defining himself that way. Hosler is an assistant professor of biology at Juniata College in Pennsylvania and creator of two comic books that mix his favorite areas of science with cartoon fiction.
His most recent work, “The Sandwalk Adventures,” follows the comical and philosophical dialogue between Charles Darwin and a society of follicle mites who life on his left eyebrow. Darwin is Hosler’s personal science hero and he felt a great desire to set the record straight on the matter while telling an entertaining and whimsical story about him, as well as explore the ideas of mythology and religious belief.
In the comic, the follicle mites relate their spiritual tales to Darwin, tales that, much to the scientist’s shock, integrate him as a creator and incidents in his life as part of their follicle mite religious tapestry. The religious aspect to the public discussion of science has been inescapable and lately characterized by best-selling books by atheists, in exact response to high profile religious views.
Hosler’s work can sometimes dissect the act of belief by documenting its process in contrast to the way in which scientific data is arrived at, while not devaluing the power of the myths created by belief. His research is in the area of sensory biology and behavior in bees — that is, how they learn odors. As he was refreshing his knowledge, he found that the pieces of their natural history just naturally fell together into a narrative. As it turned out, Hosler’s comic book “Clan Apis,” which told the story of a bee hive through the eyes of a honey bee named Nyuki, did turn out to be great at teaching people the life cycle of a bee while engaging them with story and character.
Hosler is currently working on two projects. One, “Optical Allusions,” is the result of a grant from the National Science Foundation to create a comic book science text book. The story will tackle the field of sensory biology in the realm of evolution, as discovered by Wrinkles the Wonder Brain.
SB: The power of comics as a means of communicating ideas about science and evolution to a general audience is surprising.
JH: Part of my impetus is that I just wanted to do a Darwin book. Can you have a hero in science? He’s my hero. You couple that with the idea that there are these nation wide declines in science literacy and this ongoing evolution/creation debate. It just really underscores the need for scientists to explain to the public why science is exciting, why evolution is exciting. And then I talk about how I try to use comics to do that, specifically about placing science within context of a story.
SB: Do you gear your work to kids?
JH: I don’t want to do anything that would alienate a member of the audience, especially with an evolution book. There’s a large segment of the population that’s overtly hostile or just under the skin hostile to the idea, so I’m not going to have any big-breasted sexual innuendos or foul mouthed cigar chomping individuals in there. That just gives them a distraction to point at and say ‘This is bad.’
I want to reach as many people as possible and for me – and this is an experience I had with my parents, largely my dad – we would watch Looney Tunes together. Here are cartoons that I purchased all the discs as they come out and I watch them with my kids. They get something out of it and I get something out of it and there are really a couple different levels there. My goal is to always try and write like that so that a parent reading it can enjoy it as much as a kid reading it. One of the challenges was how difficult do I make it?
I was in Columbus Ohio at the time, when I started writing “Clan Apis,” and I was at my weekly Wednesday pick-up, talking to one of the owners and he gave me great advice, he said “If the story is interesting and there’s enough there for the kids, they’ll skip over the stuff that they don’t get right now, they’ll keep going and each time they come back to it when they grow older, they’ll get more out of it, it’ll be a source for them.” I know that sounds very grand and I don’t want to sound like I think I’m some genius or anything, but that’s what I’m trying to do, I’m trying to create things that will continue to give things to people as they read them as they get older. In order to do that, you have to make it appropriate on some level, so we have giant zits and butt jokes in “Sandwalk,” but we also have discussions that border on the theological.
SB: Yes, cute, while filled with some theological ideas that might make someone cringe.
JH: Cringing is okay, cringing doesn’t mean you have to give up what you believe as long as you are willing to think about it. There are a lot of non-evolution religion questions that make me cringe because it’s not something I ever wanted to think about, but I didn’t want to back off from that too much. Even that interplay between Darwin and Mara, where when you see Mara it’s just those great big words.
When I would go to my grandmother’s house, we would go to this corner general store in Emma, Indiana, and they had on the shelves there these illustrated Bible stories and she would buy those for me, she had been the organist for the First Church of God for 40 years. Not too thrilled about comics, but Bible comics, I tell you what – Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, three guys get thrown in a fiery furnace? That’s cool stuff that keeps your attention.
It goes back to picking up things as you go along. Kids aren’t probably going to get that. It’s just funny that this great big giant man is talking to these itty, bitty mites and as your thinking becomes more mature, there might be something thought provoking in there for you as you read it later. That was my hope.
SB: Where do you fit in the world of comics?
JH: That’s a question I ponder myself. The answer is I don’t know. I think of myself as a comics guy, I also think of myself as a biologist. The truth is, do I sit down to make science comics to teach? That’s really not my motivation. My motivation is that I work with bees and bees are amazing and they have this social structure and this natural history and as I was reading about them for the first time as a graduate student, I could see how it lent itself to a story and what a cool story it would be.
Likewise, I just wanted to tell a story about Darwin, in large part because the man is often vilified, number one, and he clearly was not a villain and because, number two, the theory that he proposed, this revolutionary idea, was so simple and elegant and, frankly, obvious and logical that I felt the urge to explain it, in large part because you listen to the evolution/creation discussion and what you hear is lots of – I’ll speak from the evolution standpoint – a lot of inaccuracies in the way anti-evolutionists portray evolution happening. Those inaccuracies can be in some cases willful and in other ill informed and they are misinterpretations about the simplest elements of what I think is the simplest theory. What I wanted to do in part was to discuss this theory, to lay it out, what I think is the obvious and logical thing that happens. That’s another thing that I wrap in there with the storytelling and the mythology.
SB: Darwin’s vilification coincides with a rise in outspoken atheism.
JH: It isn’t necessarily a closeted thing anymore. Atheists have become a little more strident in defense of their position and, perhaps, a touch more offensive, instead of being defensive. Offensive can sound two ways.
SB: People walk on eggshells.
JH: They do. I do. We are not a society that values directness very much. We like to be very diplomatic. If you are direct, you are either a bitch or a bastard – or maybe you’re a good leader, I don’t know, it depends on your perspective. We’re at a stage where we want to believe that everything’s okay to believe, the concepts of acceptance, which are good, but I think that applies to everybody but people who are not religious. We accept people of this faith and this faith and this faith, because at least they have a faith. I grew up hearing these things. But if you don’t have a faith, that’s unacceptable, because it automatically means you’re a bad person, that you are amoral. I think that’s the thing that Dawkins and P.Z. Myers, who does the blog Pharyngula, are responding to and I think justifiably so.
In science and academia, I know lots of people who are not considered people of faith, who have no religious beliefs who are good moral people. The question really becomes ‘Why are you good to your family? Why are you good to your neighbor? Is it because you are afraid of eternal damnation or is it because of something else? Maybe because they were good to you? Why do I love my parents? Because my parents loved me. You don’t necessarily have to be a person of faith to be a good person and I think that’s the tough thing that a lot of people in this particular debate wrestle with.
SB: Your work and the views contained within are very gentle.
JH: I try to be gentle, I’ll accept that moniker. I am not by nature a confrontational person. I would prefer us to have a calm discussion. I don’t do well in an argument. When you’re arguing, no one’s listening, and I really am interested in the exchange of ideas.
SB: Tell me about your scientific work.
JH: My work focuses on bee biology, sensory biology and behavior. I study how they learn odors. They go to a flower, how do they remember if that flower gives nectar or doesn’t? The primary cue is going to be the smell. Just like the smell of chocolate chip cookies makes you salivate, the smell of a flower that a bee has gotten good sucrose reward from makes it excited as well. I study how that l earning takes place. Most recently in our lab, we’ve been looking at honeybee aggression, how it changes, if it changes throughout the season.
It’s tough for us because we are visual organisms, our ancestors had to have eyes or they were going to be mulch on the bottom of the rain forest floor. But insects, bees in particular, they spend half of their life in the completely dark hive and they have to navigate, communicate, pass messages, change jobs, they have to do all that without any visual cues whatsoever. Obviously smell becomes quite useful in that type of environment. The other half of their life is spent foraging. You find flowers by color but you remember in large part because of smell. Insects in general but bees in particular are olfactory organisms. It’s their big sense. It’s inevitably going to creep into my work and I just think it’s cool anyway.
SB: When did you decide to mix this with comics?
JH: I was preparing for my post doc. As a graduate student, I had looked at the electrical properties of muscles and nerve cells in bees and once I got my PhD and was going for my post doc, I knew I was going to be working with smell and wanted to reread up on bees and their natural history and as I’m reading this, I’m thinking to myself ‘This would be a great story someday, someone should do a comic.’ At the time I was doing comics for the newspaper, but it never occurred to me that it would be me. Eventually, I realized that no one is ever going to do a bee comic, at least not the way I would want to do it. And I loved comics, I wanted to contribute something different and new and I saw this as a way to do that. For me, in my mind, as I was reading about their life history, a story just came together.
What I did was, I layered some of my own self into Nyoki – she tells bad jokes, but she’s also pretty afraid of her own mortality. I put some of myself into the bees and t hen used the natural history to construct a story. The truth is that a lot of the biology, I saw as major plot points, and so my ego loves the attention when people say ‘This is really weird, this is really different” well, sort of different, but all good fiction, all good writing teaches something, unless it’s pure absolute entertainment, but even then, it can teach you what you think is funny. A novel can teach you about the human condition. Shakespeare wants us to know about jealousy in Othello. You construct a story so you can examine the concept of jealousy. I wanted to talk about honey bees and I wanted to talk about fear of mortality and stuff like that, and I had their natural history, so I began to construct a story that would tell you their natural history and, as a result, the natural history became major plot points to that end. That’s what went though my head as I was doing this and at no point was I thinking ‘Wow, this will be great for teaching people things!’ I just thought it was a good story.
SB: It’s similar to biographical and historical fiction that uses facts as plot points — and your reasoning might not be to teach, but that you are interested in the person.
JH: Their world is similar enough that we can relate, but it’s so different that it’s fascinating. To live in a group where there’s only one person who reproduces, where everybody in the hive is your sister, where you’re not a visual creature you’re an olfactory creature, where you have this amazing offensive weapon that comes shooting out of your butt but if you use it on a mammal, at least, you will die — all of that is really cool. I guess that I was, in a way, writing a book that I thought I would like as a kid, because all those fun, interesting, bizarre facts would have made the book so much more exciting for me beyond the story.
SB: Put human figures into what you just described and it would be a science fiction book. It seems like you upped the ante by using the real figures and bringing it down to earth.
JH: So much of science fiction is you see this really cool thing in nature and you put it on some humanoid organism and you introduce a story and you see how it causes things to spin out. In a way, I’m just saying ‘that’s kind of cool, but maybe humans aren’t the be all, end all of the universe, maybe if we looked at the critters who really do it, it would really be more interesting and more complex — and I think that’s sort of what I found as I did this. I had worked with bees for awhile, but the more I read about their natural history outside of my own focused area of expertise, the more bizarre, the more interesting, the more fascinating they became.
The two that always spring to mind at the time – and I grew up reading Marvel Comics and was sort of a big Spiderman fan, not surprisingly, you have an alter ego who is skinny and bespectacled, a nerdy science kid who girls don’t really like,s o I really related to him. At the time I was discovering things like Bone and Usagi Ojimbo. I had seen a little bit of R. Crumb. I grew up in Northern Indiana, so we didn’t see a lot of that stuff. I was getting tired of the superhero thing, not surprising as you get older. They’re fun, don’t get me wrong, but you can’t have cake all the time and it was exciting to see all these different ways that comics can be used and all these different types of stories that can be told.
One of the stories that I tell usually when I talk is about reading a sequence in “Usagi Ojimbo.” Just two days before I had been reading an issue of Smithsonian and they were talking about how samurai swords were made. I had a hell of a time following this thing, I really did, and I put down the article and had a vague idea of how it was done. There were pictures of samurai swords, but no pictures of the process. A couple days later I pick up an issue of “Usagi Ojimbo” and there’s a two page sequence there of how a sword is made, illustrated, some text but not text heavy. It was perfectly clear. My goal had always been to be a teacher at a small college, my parents had worked at schools, I had married a teacher, I’m an explainer. I was really moved by how effective the medium was at explaining that.
You have two things going on there. You had comic books that were showing all these different things you could do with comics and simultaneously I was seeing all these powerful ways comics could be used to tell people about interesting, strange, complicated things. All of that came together at the same time I was thinking that someone should really write and draw a honeybee comic book, so it was an interesting confluence of events.
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