by Mike Rhode
The Kickstarter launches today!
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.
 |
| Barravecchia cover art for Islands in the Sky |
Aydin’s
new project, with a host of collaborators, is to make comics to benefit,
explain, and explore Appalachia.
Islands in the Sky: A Comic Anthology -
Uniting Stories, Art, and Survival in the Wake of Hurricane Helene, the first
book of the
Appalachian Comics
Project, is launching via a
Kickstarter
funding campaign to help transform personal experiences into powerful
visual storytelling. Specifically,
Islands in the Sky pairs southern
Appalachian residents – and especially those impacted by Helene – with
professional writers and artists to help bring their lived experiences out of
the hollers and onto the page. In a bid to counter the distribution of rampant
mis- and disinformation surrounding Hurricane Helene’s devastation of southern
Appalachia, comic book creators are mobilizing to capture the true voices of
those affected while helping to revitalize the storm-ravaged mountain
communities. The Project’s motto is “Empowering Appalachia through Comics,” and
more books are being planned. In an hour-long interview, Aydin (whom I’ve known
casually for years) talked about his various comics projects, as well as a lot
of politics (that we’ve left on the cutting room floor to focus this
interview).
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?
 |
| Aydin from March website |
Andrew Aydin: Well, it seemed like a more reputable living. [laughs] I
was really lost after John Lewis died. He played so many roles in my life, and
I think it was more than just losing a boss. I'd lost my mother in 2017 and I
think I just needed to get away - to be somewhere healthier. To be doing
something that I looked forward to doing every day. I moved out to my mother's
farm after he passed.
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.
 |
| 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.
 |
| Domo Stanton cover |
Comics
of the Movement - we're incredibly proud of this issue. It's already our
bestselling issue just based on pre-orders. It's a combination of Martin
Luther King and the Montgomery Story, which everybody's heard me talk about
for many years with the comics that were produced by SNCC and the Lowndes
County Freedom Organization in 1966 in Lowndes County to support the Freedom
Day movement, the first primary campaign, primary election, and then the first
general election that black people in Lowndes County were allowed to
participate in under the Voting Rights Act.
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.
 |
| John Jennings cover |
They're
full of this interesting information, but they also represent the first time a
Black Panther was depicted in a comic in the mid-century. They actually predate
Fantastic Four 52, by several months in terms of their first release.
There's been a little bit written about how the Lowndes County Black Panther
logo was essentially inspired by the Clark Atlanta design for their mascot. It
was used on billboards and in these comics in Lowndes County in very early 1966. I think for comics collectors and
comics fans that makes it the first true appearance of a Black panther. And I
think Marvel has always said, well, the Black Panther party was established in
October of ‘66, and they're right, I think Fantastic Four 52 was
released in May or June of ‘66. These are being produced in February of ‘66.
It's always interesting to me that the more you pull a thread, the deeper you
can go and actually find what’s behind what we think of through our memory.
When you really get into the research, you can always find something earlier if
you look hard enough, and what all these ideas were inspired by. And then we
look at it in this historic context. There's a reason we paired Martin Luther
King’s Montgomery story with these SNCC comics from Lowndes County.
 |
| Val de Landro |
In
many ways, the Martin Luther King Story was a comic that was made the
way a comic was thought to be, the way it was supposed to be, at that time. And
then the SNCC students developed their own way, and they made these drawings
into comics, and they printed them on mimeograph machines, and they engaged in
some incredibly important grassroots organizing that has become a foundational
model for many of the grassroots organizers that we see today. And I think March in its own way is the Martin
Luther King and the Montgomery Story of its time. But now we have to call
on the students and the young people, and people not so young as the
congressman used to say, [laughs], to follow the example of the Lowndes County
Freedom Organization and make their own comics, to find ways to teach people
about government, to find new ways to teach people to vote, and what the roles
and responsibilities both for themselves as citizens, but also for the elected
officials that they're voting for. This is about the next chapter.
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.
 |
| 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]
 |
| 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.
 |
| 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.
 |
| Barravecchia 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?
 |
| 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. Eastling,* 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
*Corrected August 8, 2025
