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ENTRY TYPE: new
WORK TITLE: SANTIAGO!
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.jayhosler.com/
CITY: Huntingdon
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME:
http://www.depauw.edu/news/index.asp?id=26345 http://www.pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/Hosler__Jay.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born ca. 1967; married Lisa Suzanne Guerra (a teacher); children: Max, Jack.
EDUCATION:DePauw University, bachelor’s degree, 1989; University of Notre Dame, Ph.D., 1995.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Entomologist, educator, writer, and illustrator. University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, assistant professional specialist/instructor, 1995-96; Ohio State University, Columbus, National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at the Rothenbuhler Honey Bee Research Laboratory, ca. 1996-2000; Juniata College, Huntingdon, PA, biology instructor, became associate professor, then professor and David K. Goodman ’74 Endowed Chair of Biology, 2000–. Lee G. Hall Distinguished Visiting Professor of Biology, DePauw University, 2007-08.
AWARDS:Albert E. Reynolds Outstanding Senior Award, DePauw University, 1989; National Research Service Award, National Institutes of Mental Health; Xeric Grant, 1998; Gibbel Award for Outstanding Teaching, Juniata College, 2005; National Science Foundation grant, 2006; William von Liebig Foundation and Kresge Foundation grants.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Behavioral Neuroscience, Journal of Comparative Psychology, Journal of Experimental Biology, and Journal of Insect Physiology. Consultant for Harcourt Achieve’s “Lynx” educational comics; manuscript reviewer for Journal of Insect Physiology and Naturwissenschaften. Contributor, as illustrator, to Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr’s Life, Discoveries, and the Century He Shaped, 2nd ed., by Jim Ottaviani, illustrated by Leland Purvis, G.T. Labs (Ann Arbor, MI), 2009.
SIDELIGHTS
[open new]A college professor and entomologist, Jay Hosler is also a comic creator and illustrator who embeds science in graphic novels filled with insect adventures and evolutionary explorations. As a young child, he was especially fond of drawing dinosaurs, such as on the backs of placemats at restaurants with a pen from his mother’s purse. He also sketched Snoopy and other Peanuts characters and would gain inspiration from Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin, Gary Larson’s The Far Side, and Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, among other comic creations. Hosler’s affection for terrible lizards eventually led him to his first comic book, Marvel Team-Up No. 19 (1974), “starring,” as he told Cameron Hatheway of Bleeding Cool, “Spider-Man and Ka-Zar as they battled … be still my beating middle school heart … Stegron the Dinosaur Man!” An instant fan of nerdy, bespectacled scientist Peter Parker, Hosler sketched Spider-Man endlessly, and by high school he was penning original “Spaghetti-Man” comics to pass around study hall.
Through high school and beyond—at DePauw University he commenced years’ and degrees’ worth of study in biological sciences—Hosler contributed comic strips to school newspapers. He penned the daily “Spelunker” during graduate school at the University of Notre Dame and also drew the weekly “Cow-Boy” for the Comics Buyer’s Guide. But the limitations of four-panel strips led him to team up with two others at Notre Dame, including future Marvel creator Bill Roseman, to self-publish a twenty-two-page, three-story Wired Comix. He soon produced his own seventy-two—page, seven-story issue of Cow-Boy, about which he remarked to Hannah Lodge of Comics Beat: “I loved it, but it was still primarily goofy humor and a super hero parody wasn’t really contributing anything new to the medium. Maybe it was the scientist in me, but I wanted to make a novel contribution to comics in the same way I was trying with my research to add a little something novel to our understanding of insect physiology.” While doing postdoctoral investigations at Ohio State University’s Rothenbuhler Honey Bee Research Laboratory, Hosler was reading up on bee biology when the idea of doing an extended comic about bees struck him. With the help of a Xeric Grant, he teamed up with business partner Daryn Guarino to found Active Synapse, an indie comic producer, and publish five issues of the comic book Clan Apis from October 1998 to June 1999, which were assembled as his debut graphic novel in 2000. That same year he took a post in the Biology Department at Juniata College, in Pennsylvania, where he would eventually rise to full professor and department chair.
With Clan Apis—later published as The Way of the Hive—Hosler uses realistic illustrations to tell the stories of several hive inhabitants (whose names all mean “bee” in different languages). Young Nyuki (from Swahili) is learning all about life as a worker honeybee from older sister Dvorah (from Hebrew). As seasons pass and winter challenges arrive, Nyuki passes on what she has learned to visiting worker Melissa (from Greek). A Kirkus Reviews reviewer praised The Way of the Hive as a “sweet story … rich with both information about honeybees and character development,” as well as “ample humor in the wry dialogue.” Overall hailing the “smooth storytelling,” the reviewer affirmed that readers ranging from graphic-novel fans to future ecologists “will be buzzing” over this “sublime” title.
A conservation between renowned scientist Charles Darwin and a mite residing in his eyebrow offers the framework for Hosler’s next graphic novel, The Sandwalk Adventures: An Adventure in Evolution Told in Five Chapters. The mite, Mara, is part of a colony that established itself during Darwin’s legendary voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, during which he gathered evidence that led him to formulate his theory of evolution. The mites have established their own creation mythology, leaving Darwin obliged to both enlighten Mara about his status as human, not God, and explain to her his theory. The back matter conveys additional scientific details and background from Darwin’s life story. Reviewing the book for the Skeptical Enquirer, Jerry Kurlandski said of longtime professor Hosler: “As a reader, you sense that he’s had to introduce the theory to students many times, and, in so doing, he’s figured out how to present it in an interesting manner without sacrificing accuracy.” Kurlandski summed The Sandwalk Adventures up as an “odd but cohesive amalgamation of the absurd and the scholarly,” which with “clever drawings and engaging style” proves an “informative, always-entertaining” tale.
Speaking with Hatheway of Bleeding Cool about his motivation for writing Last of the Sandwalkers—as well as his debut, Clan Apis—Hosler explained: “My goal was to tell an entertaining story that just happened to have plot points that hinged on understanding some of the biology and natural history of a group of insect that I think are (dare I say it) bleeding cool. … Our cultural fantasies are chock full of magical and super-powered beings, but we have an entire Justice League of beetles scurrying underfoot that go virtually unnoticed. I thought it would be fun to bring them to readers’ attention.” (The dual “Sandwalk” titles was a coincidence, as The Sandwalk Adventures refers to a stretch of Darwin’s property, while Last of the Sandwalkers refers to the desert beetle, or sandwalker.)
Suitable for middle graders, Last of the Sandwalkers is set in New Coleopolis, a palm-tree-sheltered insect colony where most beetles, along with moths and others, are content with their circumscribed daily lives. Young beetle Lucy, a researcher wanting to learn more of the world, rounds up a team for an expedition, including a couple of professors, some beetle muscle, and a clever firefly. But the colony’s elders are concerned that what Lucy might discover could upend New Coleopolis society, and sabotage leads to a more perilous quest than anyone expected.
In School Library Journal, Carol Hirsche enjoyed how “friendships and loyalties are tested to their limits as great, potentially life-altering discoveries are made.” Hirsche affirmed that Hosler’s black-and-white illustrations “complement the narrative” and endow “each protagonist with expressive emotions and personality.” A Kirkus Reviews writer celebrated Last of the Sandwalkers as an “epic adventure” that offers characters with “tremendous personality” as well as an “astonishing” abundance of science info. The reviewer proclaimed that Hosler’s “sincere excitement in both the pursuit of knowledge and the power of comics makes these bugs eminently memorable.”
A Nobel Prize–winning scientist with creative flair is the subject of Hosler’s Santiago! Santiago Ramón y Cajal–Artist, Scientist, Troublemaker, also suitable for middle schoolers. As a young boy in nineteenth-century Spain, Santiago had a naughty streak. Skipping school with his little brother landed him on his town’s list of troublemakers, and constructing—and firing—a cannon at Catholic school sent him to jail. Yet Santiago’s stern doctor father insisted that he abandon his artistic dreams to pursue a career in medicine. Santiago obliged, but his drawing skills proved essential when he deduced, and illustrated, connections between brain cells. Ramon y Cajal’s documentation of neural-cell pathways has earned him recognition as the father of modern neuroscience. The book’s back matter reveals the extent of Hosler’s abundant research and clarifies the aspects of the nonfiction narrative that he filled out with his imagination.
A Kirkus Reviews writer reckoned Santiago! “engaging” and “action-packed.” Hosler’s in-depth depictions the youth’s “wild antics” led the reviewer to observe that “slapstick humor and stylized, exaggerated representations of an impish Santiago contribute to the story’s liveliness and fast pace.” In School Library Journal, Emilia Packard likewise appreciated how Ramón y Cajal’s childhood is infused with “playful energy” through all the “dreaming, scheming, and creative pranks.” Packard affirmed that Hosler’s “twin passions for science and illustration find a kindred spirit” in the subject of Santiago!
About his guiding mission as an author, Hosler told Lodge for Comics Beat: “I want people to feel the sense of wonder I feel in the natural world. … I want them to develop an understanding of how things works and how living things are interconnected and I want to have fun doing it. I also want them to forge an emotional connection with the natural world. Laughing and crying connects us to stories and the world in powerful ways. We come back to things that make us feel.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2010, review of Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth; February 15, 2015, review of Last of the Sandwalkers; March 1, 2021, review of The Way of the Hive; July 15, 2022, review of Santiago! Santiago Ramón y Cajal—Artist, Scientist, Troublemaker.
Publishers Weekly, October 4, 2010, review of Evolution, p. 33.
School Library Journal, May, 2015, Carol Hirsche, review of Last of the Sandwalkers, p. 108; December, 2022, Emilia Packard, review of Santiago!, p. 87.
Skeptical Inquirer, May-June, 2004, Jerry Kurlandski, review of The Sandwalk Adventures: An Adventure in Evolution Told in Five Chapters, p. 57.
ONLINE
Bleeding Cool, https://bleedingcool.com/ (April 8, 2015), Cameron Hatheway, “Bugging Jay Hosler about His Graphic Novel Last of the Sandwalkers.”
Comics Beat, https://www.comicsbeat.com/ (April 7, 2015), Hannah Lodge, “Jay Hosler Interview: Comics Are the ‘Most Powerful’ Medium for Teaching.”
DePauw University website, https://www.depauw.edu/ (January 5, 2011), “Prof. Jay Hosler ’89 Authors Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth.”
Jay Hosler website, https://jayhosler.com (June 8, 2023).
Juniata College website, https://www.juniata.edu/ (June 8, 2023), author profile.
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (April 18, 2021), Vicky Smith, “Jay Hosler Gets Kids Buzzed about Science.”
Pennsylvania Center for the Book website, https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/ (June 8, 2023), author profile.
If you've been scouring the web seeking a site that could give you a healthy blend of science and comics, you've stumbled on the right place. I am a biologist and cartoonist on the faculty at Juniata College and for the last twenty years I have devoted a lot of time and thought to teaching biology and making science comics. On this page you will find links to my books, publications and various and sundry science comics that my students and I have made over the years.
Bugging Jay Hosler About His Graphic Novel Last Of The Sandwalkers
Published Wed, 08 Apr 2015 15:00:00 -0500 by Cameron Hatheway|Comments
Jay.Hosler2.credit.Lisa.Hosler
Photo credit: Lisa Hosler
Adventure, bugs, and comic books are definitely the way to any young reader's heart, and thanks to entomologist and cartoonist Jay Hosler the combination of the three is what makes his graphic novel Last of the Sandwalkers from First Second Books so enjoyable. Hosler is able to produce a science-fiction adventure story set in a civilization run by beetles so entertaining, that if you're not careful, you just might learn something. Hosler was kind enough to take some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few of my questions in an email interview.
Cameron Hatheway: How did the concept of Last of the Sandwalkers first come about? Was it first conceived as a tool to help teach students about the different species of insects?
Jay Hosler: Although I've done books that were designed expressly to teach, Last of the Sandwalkers is more in the vein of my first book Clan Apis. My goal was to tell an entertaining story that just happened to have plot points that hinged on understanding some of the biology and natural history of a group of insect that I think are (dare I say it) bleeding cool. Beetles are incredibly successful critters. There are more species of beetles than species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish combined. It is hard for me not to be captivated but such a whoppingly great evolutionary success. What's so great about beetles? For me, the answer is that you can find species that do virtually anything. Social beetles? Check. Beetles that can glow? Check. Beetles that swim underwater? Check. Beetles that reflexively bleed noxious toxin from their joints? Check. Our cultural fantasies are chock full of magical and super-powered beings, but we have an entire Justice League of beetles scurrying underfoot that go virtually unnoticed. I thought it would be fun to bring them to readers' attention.
The initial idea came to me over twelve years ago. My eldest son was only two or three at the time. We were at SPX and he was sitting on my lap at my table and I was trying to draw fast enough to entertain him. At some point I started drawing these hyper-simple, little bitty beetley bugs. These were probably inspired by the little bugs Zander Cannon drew in The Replacement God. Anyway, this kept him giggling for five minutes or so (a good bit of time with a toddler) and made an indelible impression on me. This was right around the time when I was finishing The Sandwalk Adventures and I was looking for a new idea that I could draw fast (cue ironic music). I even started the book in the same simple style as my rapid sketches, but found it totally unsatisfying. The art was unsubstantial and insipid and the beetles were so simple that it was difficult to tell them apart. I switched to a more realistic style and BAM! I banged the whole thing out in a little over a decade.
CH: What made you decide to assign certain characteristics to each beetle? Are some species of beetles either friendlier, conniving, or more curious in nature than others?
JH: The short answer is that all of the personality traits ascribed to the beetles spring from my somewhere on my extended family tree.
Owen_imageIt is always tough doing anthropomorphic animals because people naturally start to, well, anthropomorphize the animals. In some cases, I layered "personalities" onto to characters that are easy for us to accept given the beetle's natural behavior. Take tiger beetles, for example. These are aggressive, fast striking predators (as adults and larvae), so having our resident tiger beetle Ma'dog be a grouchy, aggressive fighter is a pretty easy leap. But, I could have given the same personality to Cokie the ladybug. Ladybugs are the ravenous scourge of aphids everywhere, but I think that would have been a bit jarring for readers. Blood-thirsty ladybugs don't really fit with our ingrained perceptions. Of course, now that I said it, I think it might be fun to do a take-no-prisoners ladybug story. Food for thought.
Beetles display a dizzying array of behaviors. The rove beetle Bugs uses pheromones to fool ants into taking him into their colony so I made him a conniving trickster. Rhinocerous beetles are the strongest critters per gram on the planet, so I made Mossy the protector of the group. Carrion beetles form mating pairs, build a home, provision it with food and watch over their kids so I made them a married couple. I suppose a purist might argue that this undermines the explanation of the biology, but I think that it works to underscore what we share with all animals. Even though humans and beetles are separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, we still share very basic behavioral drives.
CH: You mix together a beautiful blend of adventure, science-fiction, and education. How did you make sure each storytelling element remained balanced with the rest without one becoming more prominent than the others?
JH: Thanks! The first draft of anything I do tends to be a giant, bloated mess of all of the ideas that think are cool and utterly indispensible to the story. I'm usually quite pleased with how clever I am at this point and I set the draft aside for a day. Next day, I read it out loud, playing the role of each of the characters (I typically have my office door closed for this part as it would undoubtedly unnerve my colleagues in the biology department). The reading-aloud phase is the point in writing when I discover just how terribly wrong everything has gone. I find all the places where ideas don't flow into each other or spots where the story gets bogged down in an infodump. The editing at this phase needs to brutal. It's heartbreaking to watch lovely bits of character development or tantalizing pieces of biology go wafting onto the cutting room floor, but, ultimately, my goal is to tell a good story.
One of the things I learned early in my teaching career is that I couldn't expose my students to every morsel of content I found exciting. I've come to believe one of my main roles as teacher and as a writer is to inspire my students and readers to want to learn more than I can give them. To that end, the story should be fun, exciting and touching. All of the science-fiction and adventure elements were written to entertain the middle school boy that lives inside of me. I'm making the comics that he would have loved to read over and over again. To make them more than just vehicles for cool gizmos and interesting facts, stories need to have heart. Even though I love writing about insects, the story needs to be human. Everything I've ever written springs from a deeply personal place. Clan Apis is about my fear of death, The Sandwalk Adventures is about coming to terms with the concept of evolution, and Last of the Sandwalkers is about my family and asking questions about the things we take for granted.
When I think that I have edited and refined the story enough, I print it out and take it home. Then, around the table or on the couch, I read the story to Lisa, Max and Jack. These are the perfect critics for me. Open to laughing and honest enough to tell me how they feel. If the story is balanced enough for them, I figure it is getting close. As I start to draw, I invariable discover things I've left out or cool things I can add in. The art feeds back on the story and the story on the art so that there is a back and forth as I am working on a page.
last_of_the_sandwalkers_pages7273CH: Much like the world of "Hue-Mons," religion and science tend to buttheads quite frequently in this book, when questioning long-established ideas is seen as dangerous. Are you actively encouraging readers to question the world around them, and are you afraid that some parents might make too much of it?
JH: Everything is objectionable to someone. In Clan Apis, there's a short sequence at the beginning that talks about life coming from the primordial soup. Seemed pretty innocuous, sciencey stuff to me, but a technician in the lab I was working at the time said she wanted to rip those bits right out of the book. She made this violent claw with her hand when she said it and the moment stuck with me because, well, I didn't want anyone ripping up my book. I worked hard on that book! But it also left me with this queasy feeling. The idea that someone would want to tear an idea out of a book because they didn't like it or didn't agree with it went against everything I valued. Books are they way long dead brains communicate with the future. The idea of destroying ancient thoughts or hiding new ideas sends shivers down my spine. I was lucky to be raised in an environment where ideas weren't hidden from me. I was surrounded by teachers and faculty that encouraged me to question accepted ideas.
The truth is, questioning the world around us is a fundamentally human thing. It's the aspect of our biology and behavior that separates us from the vast majority of the animal kingdom. There would not be revolutions in science, music, art, politics and literature if we didn't question the assumptions of our elders. Questioning the world around us not only makes us humans, it makes us better humans. In the end, NOT questioning long-held ideas is the true danger. If humans hadn't, we might still think slavery is okay and that diseases were the result of evil spirits sent to punish the wicked. A failure to ask questions could quite literally be hazardous to your health. As parents I think it is our responsibility to encourage our kids to question old ideas so that they can replace the ones that don't work and make the world a better place.
last_of_the_sandwalkers_page130CH: Your illustrations are beautifully detailed, bringing this alien world of insects to life. At what age did you start drawing? Who were some major influences to your style?
JH: Thanks. Spending years looking at insects under a microscope has finally paid off.
My Mom still has drawings I did when I was two. My favorite was of my Grandpa Raef in his chef's hat (he had a little diner in northern Indiana). The first things I have a memory of drawing were dinosaurs. Loads and loads of dinosaurs. My best work was always done on the back of paper placemats when we went out to eat (Thanks for always have a pen handy, Mom!). Back then we didn't have all of the fancy schmancy CGI and richly illustrated books to bring these critters to life, so I had to create my own epic battles between T. rex and Triceratops.
As it turned out, dinosaurs are what lead me to my first comic: Marvel Team-Up #19 starring Spider-Man and Ka-Zar as they battled…be still my beating middle school heart…Stegron the Dinosaur Man! This book introduced me to Spider-Man and eventually to a geeky, bespeckled science nerd named Peter Parker. I was hooked. I started drawing Spider-Man all of the time. And Snoopy, too. I was big Peanuts fan, as well. I graduated from drawing single images to comic stories during high school. I had a study hall sophomore year (what a waste) and would draw Spaghetti-Man adventures and pass then around the room. Those comics earned me enough cred with the rough crowd that I could usually keep my milk money.
So, early on I was very much enthralled by Steve Ditko, John Romita and Charles Schulz. Each was very different, but they all all had such a great sense of design and I loved their clean styles. Later, I discovered Jack Kirby, Gary Larson, Bill Waterson, Lewis Trondheim, Jeff Smith, Stan Sakai, Larry Marder, Zander Cannon, John Kerschbaum and Linda Medley. All of them have influenced how I see a page and imagine a story. In fact, I like to think that I have stolen enough from each of them to cobble together by own Frankensteinian style.
CH: Lucy carries a notebook with her to sketch in throughout. Do you also keep a notebook handy in your day-to-day life?
JH: Absolutely. I love Moleskines because the lay flat and make me look all artsy when I'm in a coffee shop. I always have it in my backpack and, like Lucy, I almost always have my backpack within reach. There is a whole row of filled sketchbooks lined up on a shelf in my office. Sadly, they are remarkably unremarkable. Nothing like the stunning sketchbooks we see from some artists with their gorgeous color sketches of romantic locales and exotic doodads. Mine are mostly just faces of people I see, thumbnail sketches of pages and random stuff. I did a very nice drawing of Santa once while I was talking to my Dad during a Christmas visit. The illustrations in my sketchbooks appear on a need-to-draw basis. Jay the writer often asks for things that Jay the artist isn't very good at drawing. Like birds. So, lots of my pages are filled with visual explorations of critters I haven't spent enough time looking at.
Last_Sandwalkers-Cover300RGBCH: The end of the book leaves the reader on a bit of a cliffhanger. Will we perhaps get a sequel one day?
JH: Hmm. I've never done a sequel before. I guess we'll see how people respond to the story. If only three people read it, there probably won't be much of a demand. But, if folks like it, I would be up for another more beetle adventure if the right story strikes me. Of course, there are soooo many interesting insects and invertebrates out there, it's hard to stay tied to just one type. I mean, have you ever heard of the bone-eating snot flower worm? It's crying out to have its story told!
CH: You've taught biology at Juniata College for the past twenty years. With the release of Last of the Sandwalkers, can we expect to see the mascot change from the Juniata Eagles to the Juniata Beetles?
JH: Ooo, I wish. A few years before I arrived in 2000, the school had changed its mascot from Indians to Eagles. I applaud the move, and I'm proud to be a Juniata Eagle, but an invertebrate mascot would be pretty cool. Like the University of Richmond Spiders or the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs. At the time Juniata was looking for a mascot change, one of our (now retired) faculty members suggested the Juniata Hellgrammites. For those that don't spend much time in streams, a hellgrammite is the aquatic larvae of an insect called the Dobson Fly. Hellgrammites are nasty looking predators that would have made for a unique and intimidating mascot. The Hellgrammite was also a Batman villain so there would have been a comic book connection. Sadly, it wasn't to be. But I like your suggestion. Perhaps, I'll send out some feelers for a change. Maybe the Juniata June Bugs? Or Juniata Japanese Beetles? I think the alliteration could be a big selling point for marketing.
last_of_the_sandwalkers_page125CH: Will Last of the Sandwalkers be required reading in your class next semester? If so, will your students be charged for an autograph?
JH: On a few occasions, I've had student buy my books for classes but I always feel guilty. It feels too much like I'm trying to line my own pockets. In the end, any pedagogical advantage is outweighed by my own shame. It isn't worth it. If I want them to read something I've written, I usually just put a copy in my teaching lab and on reserve in the library. If they do break down and buy a copy, autographs and sketches are free. The same holds true for anyone who stops by my table when I'm at a show, so feel free to swing by and say "Hi."
Last of the Sandwalkers is now available. Special thanks to Hosler for taking time out of his busy schedule and Gina Gagliano for helping put this together.
Last of the Sandwalkers (First Second Books)
by Jay Hosler
320 pages, B&W
$16.99
Available Now
Cameron Hatheway is a reviewer and the host of Cammy's Comic Corner, an audio podcast. You can bug him on Twitter @CamComicCorner.
Jay Hosler Interview: Comics are the “most powerful” medium for teaching
By Hannah Lodge -04/07/2015 12:00 pm1
In Last of the Sandwalkers, Eisner nominee Jay Hosler combines his love of comics with his academic background in biological sciences and teaching. The result is a graphic novel aimed at students, ages 10-14, that has the intellectual weight to interest a much wider audience. Tackling themes like creationism vs. evolution, space exploration, and more, Last of the Sandwalkers features a pack of beetles searching for life beyond their home. With the graphic novel releasing today, we spoke with Hosler about the inspirations for the book and the utility of the graphic novel in the classroom.
What’s your “secret origin” in the comics industry? Have you always been interested in sequential art?
Like most kids, I was drawing at a very early age. The only difference between me and most of my peers wasn’t really the quality of the work so much as the fact that I never stopped drawing as I got older.
I have early memories of reading Tintin and Charlie Brown at my Grandmother’s lake cottage in northern Indiana. Grandma wasn’t a comics fan and I don’t think my mom or her siblings were either, but for some reason she had hardback volumes of Herge’s “The Secret of the Unicorn” and Schulz’s “Peanuts Treasury.” I would read and re-read those over and over.
I can remember being fascinated by the emanata each cartoonist used; squiggly lines and stars when someone got pegged in the head or sweat droplets flying into the air when they were nervous or tired. I started to reproduce those elements in my own drawings. Suddenly, all of the dinosaurs I was obsessively drawing were blushing, sweating and staring at stars circling their noggins.
It wasn’t until I was in second grade and got my hands on Marvel Team Up #19 that I started emulating sequential art. Stegron the Dinosaur Man drew me to the comic, but Spider-Man made me stick around for more. I started trying to tell stories with multiple pictures. These tended toward humor more than adventure stories and given my love of Peanuts most of what I tried to do was comic strips.
In high school, college and graduate school I did comic strips for the school newspapers. Unfortunately, they were pretty banal stuff; this class is hard, I can’t get a date, the bookstore charges to much, bad puns, etc. In the last 30 years, I’ve managed to shake all of those themes except bad puns. By the time I was in graduate school, I was doing a daily comic strip called Spelunker for the Notre Dame newspaper as well as a weekly strip called Cow-Boy for the Comic Buyers Guide. The problem is that I was really feeling the constraints of doing a four-panel strip and I wasn’t very good as a gag-man. I wanted to try something longer.
So, along with the editorial cartoonist at the Notre Dame newspaper and a fresh-faced aspiring writer named Bill Roseman (now of Marvel fame), I decided to give comics a try. We self-published a single, 22-page issue of Wired Comix. The comic contained three stories and was as well received as one could expect for something with such limited distribution. This whetted my appetite for more.
Eventually, I would make a 72-page issue of Cow-Boy that featured seven original comic stories. I loved it, but it was still primarily goofy humor and a super hero parody wasn’t really contributing anything new to the medium. Maybe it was the scientist in me, but I wanted to make a novel contribution to comics in the same way I was trying with my research to add a little something novel to our understanding of insect physiology. It was at this point that I made the leap addressed in the next question…
At what point did you decide to bridge the gap between your love and science and cartooning?
After I had gotten my doctorate, I stayed at Notre Dame for a year and taught a few classes. After getting your degree, the next phase of a scientist’s career usually entails postdoctoral work in another lab, so I was casting about for possibilities. I managed to land a position at the Rothenbuhler Honey Bee Research Laboratory at Ohio State University (sadly, no longer there, but not because I broke it).
My graduate research had focused on how insect muscle function was affected by low temperatures, but the work at Rothenbuhler would focus on how regions of the bee brain processed floral odors. To prepare for this work, I decided I needed to bone up on my knowledge of honey bee biology, behavior and natural history. Mark Winston’s book “The Biology of the Honeybee” was a revelation. Not only was it comprehensive and interesting, but it inspired me. I remember thinking, “Someone should do a comic about bees!” It wasn’t until I was a year into my postdoc that the little light bulb went off over my head and I realized that that someone could be me.
I wrote and drew the first issue of Clan Apis and submitted it for a Xeric Grant. Several weeks later, I got the news that it would be funded. In fact, I received that news in the same week that I received funding for a three-year grant form the National Institutes of Mental Health to fund my research and my salary. I think I was more excited about the Xeric.
You’ve crafted a number of graphic novels under your own publishing house (Active Synapse). What made you want to go that route from the outset? Did you find self-publishing came with its own challenges?
The decision to self-publish was ultimately made for me. No one was interested in publishing a biologically accurate comic book about bees in the late 1990s. I suppose if I had drawn them as buxom, gun-toting cyber bees I might have had a chance, but that wasn’t the route I wanted to go. Plus, I wanted the freedom to do the books the way I wanted. I used the Xeric Grant to get things started and then was lucky to form a partnership with my friend Daryn Guarino to form Active Synapse. This was great for my books and Daryn is an indefatigable business and distribution force. He is also a very talented man and has started writing his own books.
Self-publishing is difficult, expensive and it can consume your life and I think both of us wanted to channel our creative energies elsewhere.
How did the creative process for Last of the Sandwalkers compare to your previous offerings? Did you find that there were lessons learned that you could apply?
One of the big differences was the amount of ongoing feedback that I sought. I showed the first few chapters to a friend and his kids. These are bright, book loving kids and they weren’t sure what the heck was going on at the start of the book so their feedback stimulated me to add the short first chapter as a means of clarification.
When I had it half done, I passed the book around to a few cartoonists and comics loving friends to see if what I was doing was working. All of their feedback, along with my own glacially slow deliberations, helped me make the story better. Ten plus years is a long time to work on something without feedback. Thankfully I got some excellent advice and the book didn’t wind up a hot mess (IMHO).
I think the toughest thing for me was the fact that it wasn’t a strictly linear story like my past books. There were all of the hints of past event and flashback that I wanted to tie together with the present, but I wanted them to unfold like a mystery. This required mapping out the story, drawing connections, decided how much I could say and when I could say it. What was too subtle? What was too obvious? And how do I do all of this and make it appealing to the broadest audience possible? How do you entertain comic savvy folks and comic newbies? Kids and adults?
In terms of tone, my approach was the same with all of my other books. I emulated Looney Tunes cartoons. A Bugs Bunny cartoon had slapstick for me as a kid and word play and political commentary for my Dad. There was enough there to keep us both entertained and provide us with a shared experience. That is how I hope people respond to this book.
Did you feel as though you had a specific mission statement while working on Last of the Sandwalkers?
The science writer Matthew Ridly wrote a cover blurb for Richard Dawkin’s book The Greatest Show on Earth in which he praises Dawkins as a master of “wonderstanding.” I’m usually not a fan of cutesy words but this one has been a useful touchstone for me.
I want people to feel the sense of wonder I feel in the natural world. My goal is to share that excitement and to help provide them with more than just a surface appreciation. I want them to develop an understanding of how things works and how living things are interconnected and I want to have fun doing it. I also want them to forge an emotional connection with the natural world. Laughing and crying connects us to stories and the world in powerful ways. We come back to things that make feel. And if I can cultivate a sense of wonderstanding in my readers, then insects will become more than creepy crawling things we squish without a second thought. They will enrich our sense of who we are and our connection to the natural world.
When you’re creating a work as long as Last of the Sandwalkers, what exactly is your day to day work process?
My process was fundamentally the same for this book. I found a topic that captured my interest and started doing research, cobbling together notes and story ideas. I would write a script for a chapter, read it out-loud, edit, read it to my family, edit, start thumbnailing pages, edit, start drawing, edit, show the pages to my family, edit. Lather, rinse, repeat for each page. There were some false starts. I drew a version of the first chapter in a completely different, hyper-simple style that didn’t work.
For most of this book, there was no reliable day-to-day process. I could go an entire semester without having a chance to work on it at all. But the minute the semester ended and finals were in, I could get back to it. On the first day after my final class I usually drew a page and triumphantly posted it to Facebook.
My goal was usually to get a chapter of two done over the summer, but there were times when even that wasn’t possible. Last of the Sandwalkers took the back seat when paying gigs would pop up. I couldn’t pass up the chance to work with Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon on Evolution any more than I could miss the opportunity to illustrate entomologist-extraordinaire May Berenbaum’s book The Earwig’s Tale. So, the beetles got shuttled to the back burner at times, but they were always in my mind percolating.
Sandwalkers-Final_100-26 (2)
Do you script first and then move on to to the illustration stage or is there another method you find works best?
The story comes first. I need to work out the balance of science and adventure so that it isn’t too insipid or too ponderously didactic. But, as I noted earlier, once the first draft is done, there is a very dynamic feedback loop between drawing and writing.
At what point did First Second become involved? How has working for a large publishing house impacted your work?
Working with First Second was a dream. Our relationship started when I met Gina Gagliano (marketing) at SPX several years ago. I can’t remember how we started talking, but I had a draft of the first half of the book at my table and after she looked through it she said, “We’d be interested in this.” I was very flattered (and a bit surprised), but at the time I was still planning to self-publish. Of course, being self-absorbed, I tucked that compliment away in my mental files for future review. When my self-publishing circumstances changed, I put together a pdf of the first 160 pages and sent it to Gina. I don’t have an agent, so this was probably a bit brassy, but fortunately I was too dumb to know any better.
My future editor Calista Brill got back to me very quickly with a proposal and we were rolling. Calista was incredibly supportive and patient and the book is better because of her. Likewise Colleen Venable (the designer at the time) was an inspiration. She worked so long and patiently with me on the cover and in the process taught me a lot about design. Her covers are great, so I just followed her lead and we arrived at a cover that is infinitely better than the one I initially proposed.
Now, I’m working with Gina to market the book. She is so on the ball, it’s tough for me to keep up sometimes! She has lined up so many opportunities for me to promote this book and I am deeply grateful.
At every step of the way I have been treated with respect, patience and creative freedom. They’ve taught me so much and new knowledge is the greatest gift you can give an academic. I feel really lucky to be working with them.
Can you explain the relationship between The Sandwalk Adventures and Last of the Sandwalkers?
It was accidental at some level. Or perhaps serendipitous, I’m not sure. For most of the time I was working on the Last of the Sandwalkers, I was using a very different title. Once the ball got rolling at First Second, we decided that my working title might not be the most effective way to go, so we went back and forth for a long time and finally settled on Last of the Sandwalkers.
In The Sandwalk Adventures, the sandwalk was the place on Darwin’s property in Downe where he would take a noon stroll and talk to the follicle mite in his left eyebrow. In the comic, the sandwalk is where they would have adventures (both imagined and real).
In Last of the Sandwalkers, the main character is a desert beetle, or sandwalker, named Lucy. And, as the title implies, she is the last of her kind as far as she knows. Calling Lucy a sandwalker was meant to be a shout out to the Darwin book, but it really inspired my editor Calista Brill and she eventually convinced me that this was the better title.
That said, there are some interesting parallels. Darwin walked a sandwalk, so he was a also sandwalker. Lucy is a scientist living in an island oasis that is surrounded by a sea of sand. She eventually leaves the island and makes discoveries that reshape our view of nature. Sounds to me a lot like Darwin leaving England on the voyage of the HMS Beagle. Clearly, something may have been at work in the back of my mind that I wasn’t even aware of.
Is it difficult to find the right balance between providing educational facts and creative storytelling?
It can be, although I don’t think of the science I weave in as “facts.” My hope is that they are knowledge of natural history that the characters need to advance the plot or tell a joke.
As far as my approach to this is concerned, imagine a sci-fi show where the characters need to reverse the polarity of the tachyon beam to generate a ripple in subspace gravity field so that they can collapse a rift in the space-time continuum. When I structure a story, I just replace all that made-up sci-fi exposition with real natural history exposition. When I can, I try to set the stories in the real world, just not the human real world. The trick is to be willing to look at a worm or an insect as a marvelous, mysterious thing. An alien underfoot. You have to see the everyday from a different perspective, but when you do it can be startling and breathtaking.
Teaching has taught me a lot about weaving storytelling and science together. For every lecture I give or lab I run, I need to see the story in what we are discussing. Throwing a slide on the screen that is packed with information is a universal guarantee of trigger the sleep response. Information in any field requires context and cohesion and these are the elements that stories provide. A worm isn’t just a worm, it is a necessity for aerating soil or the scourge of terrace rice farmers. It is a force of nature working completely out of our site, moving and transforming the ground beneath our feet.
These are the things I keep in mind as I write, but I can easily delude myself. After all, I can enjoy a good textbook as much as a novel and I know that makes me weird, so I read everything I write to my family. They’re the final arbiters of what works and what doesn’t. They will tell me when to dial back the science or give them more. They will tell me when things are too frenetic or confusing or when I need some more excitement or humor. If I can get it right for myself and for my family, then I’m usually pretty confident the story is in a good place. For a book this long and complicated, I also sent it to several colleagues and friends to get feedback as I worked.
What attracted you to do the graphic novel medium as a tool for teaching? Have you seen an increase in the use of graphic novels as an educational tool?
Our brains are wired to receive information as pictures. When I give public talks, I often throw up a slide with a block of text describing an item. The definition I use comes from the dictionary and after about thirty seconds of reading and processing a few people raise their hands to tell me what it describes. Many other are still working it out when I through up a picture of a cog and everyone in the room immediately gets it.
Our brains also appear to be wired for story. Work form cognitive scientists is starting to demonstrate the importance of storytelling for memory formation and contextualizing information. Stories scaffold ideas for us and help us hold onto to those ideas and use them effectively.
As McCloud points out in Understanding Comics, we know this intuitively because we give kids picture books. Recognition of the power of pictures doesn’t go away when kids get to college. I pick the textbooks I use based on the quality of the illustrations and figures. But, the storytelling component is all but gone. For me, comics sit between these two extremes and I believe comics are the most powerful of all three possibilities for engaging and entertaining students and casual readers.
Of course, the medium itself is just fun and the best learning happens when we are enjoying ourselves.
The protagonists in this story are battling views very similar to creationism. Do you feel creationism is still a threat to our educational system?
Absolutely. We live in a free country and people are allowed to believe what they want to believe. You want to believe that the world was created in seven days? That’s your right. But that’s a belief that has absolutely no scientific evidence to support it. Of course, that isn’t an issue for creationists, because faith in that belief does not require evidence. The problem comes when believers start demanding that their faith-based beliefs be taught as a alternative to theories that are grounded in over a century’s worth of scientific evidence from paleontology, developmental biology, geochemistry, physics, anatomy, physiology, behavior, etc.
A science class is for science. Unfortunately, having the freedom to believe what you choose and pursue your beliefs without persecution doesn’t appear to be enough for some folks. They feel compelled to try to change laws and influence school boards and teachers to make their religious beliefs a part of the science curriculum.
Proponents of creationism are constantly changing their tactics looking for ways into the classroom, so we need to be vigilant. Remember Intelligent Design? It was all the rage in the 1990s. Proponents promised they would have experimental proof that never came, but in the meantime they managed to get their philosophy into several classroom.
The even bigger problem is that creationists have written the playbook for science denial. Their tactics have been modified and deployed by everyone from those denying climate change to the anti-vaccination crowd.
Is it difficult to espouse a pro-science message without creating an anti-religion tone? Or is that the point?
Any pro-science message is going to be read by someone, somewhere as anti-religion. It is true that Lucy butts heads with a religious fundamentalist in Last of the Sandwalkers, but I’d like to believe the story is more generally about the conflict between science and the powerful individuals and organizations that oppose it. The majority of those that seek to discredit climate change scientists and their results do so for economic reasons, not because of religious objections.
As I read, I definitely got a space/sci-fi feel from the book, even though it all takes place in small corners of the Earth. Last of the Sandwalkers is about the pursuit of science and exploration – is any of it meant as a commentary on the low levels of government funding in NASA and space exploration?
You bet. The human race has become like a comfortable older couple. We don’t going anywhere anymore! We need to dream again about the worlds beyond our comfort zone. When we are at our best when we are exploring and seeking to understand the universe better. Plus, the work done to get ourselves into outer space invariable generates technologies that make life better for us that stay on Earth..
…And lastly, we have to ask, just for fun. Any interest in the upcoming Ant-Man film?
Absolutely! The current Ant-Man comic is a hoot and it has some well drawn ants. Plus, I did do my own short Ant-Man fan film…
Jay Hosler
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jay Hosler
Jay Hosler
Jay Hosler
Born Jay Scott Hosler
Occupation Full Professor of Biology at Juniata College, Author, illustrator
Nationality American
Notable works Clan Apis, The Sandwalk Adventures, Optical Allusions The Last of the Sandwalkers
Jay Hosler is the author and illustrator of science-oriented comics. He is best known for his graphic novels Clan Apis, The Sandwalk Adventures, and Optical Allusions. Clan Apis, a Xeric Foundation Award winner, follows the life of a honey bee named Nyuki; the story conveys factual information about honey bees in a humorous fashion as Nyuki learns about each new stage of her life. The Sandwalk Adventures, an Eisner Award nominee, follows a conversation about evolution between Charles Darwin and a follicle mite living in his left eyebrow. Optical Allusions, funded in part by a National Science Foundation grant, explains the evolution of the eye and vision by following the story of Wrinkles the Wonderbrain. Hosler is also an entomologist and associate professor of biology at Juniata College.
Biography
Hosler grew up in Huntington, Indiana and is a 1989 graduate of DePauw University. He received a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in 1995, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Ohio State University's Rothenbuhler Honey Bee Research Laboratory.[1][2]
Hosler was not formally trained in art, but grew up reading comics and says he "was always a doodler". He drew comic strips for the student newspaper when he was at DePauw, and was paid for a daily comic strip in the student paper when he was at Notre Dame. He first mixed his interests in science and cartooning with his 1997 publication Cow-Boy.[1]
As an associate professor at Juniata College, Hosler has brought his interests in comics and teaching together in several ways. In addition to creating Clan Apis and The Sandwalk Adventures, Hosler was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to create a hybrid of comics and traditional textbook covering the evolution of vision and sensory biology, Optical Allusions. "Student performance ratings in science in secondary education are dropping at an alarming rate, so clearly something isn't working well in the classroom," Hosler says. "We can't be afraid to try something radical to change how students learn."[3] Hosler has also team-taught (with a historian) a course on "Comics and Culture".[4]
He and his wife Lisa have two sons, Maxwell Scott and Jack DeMoss.[1]
Influences
Hosler cites Steve Ditko, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as early influences that drew him to comics. He also cites Gary Larson, Bill Watterson, Jeff Smith, Linda Medley, and Larry Marder as later influences.[5]
Bibliography
Graphic novels
Clan Apis, published by Active Synapse, 2000
The Sandwalk Adventures, published by Active Synapse, 2003
Optical Allusions, published by Active Synapse, 2008
Evolution. (art by Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon) Hill and Wang, ISBN 978-0-8090-9476-9, 2011
Last of the Sandwalkers published by First Second, 2015
Comics
Cow-Boy #1, Active Synapse, 1997
"The Conundrum of the Killer Coronavirus" in the Emerging Diseases issues of Your World: Biotechnology and You (14.1), 2004
"The Diabolical Dr. Nonono" in AWIS Magazine, 2004
illustrated 6 pages in Suspended in Language by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Purvis, G. T. Labs, ISBN 978-0-9660106-5-7, 2004
Scientific Publications
Hosler, Jay S., Buxton, Kristi L. and Smith, Brian H. (2000). Impairment of Olfactory Discrimination by Blockade of GABA and Nitric Oxide Activity in the Honey Bee Antennal Lobe. Behavioral Neuroscience 114 No. 3 pg. 514–525
Hosler, Jay S. and Smith, Brian H. (2000). Blocking and the detection of odor components in blends. Journal of Experimental Biology 203, 2797–2806
Chandra, S., Hosler, J. S. and Smith, B. H. (2000). Heritable variation for latent inhibition and its correlation to reversal learning in the honey bee, Apis mellifera. Journal of Comparative Psychology 114, No.1, 86–97.
Hosler, J. S., Burns J. E., and Esch H. E. (2000). Flight Muscle Resting Potential and Species-Specific Differences in Insect Chill-Coma. Journal of Insect Physiology 45 No.5 pg. 621–627
Jay Hosler Gets Kids Buzzed About Science
BY VICKY SMITH • APRIL 18, 2021
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Jay Hosler Gets Kids Buzzed About Science
Jay Hosler. Photo by Lisa Guerra Hosler, background by Donny Jiang on Unsplash
When readers first meet Nyuki, the protagonist of Jay Hosler’s new graphic novel, The Way of the Hive (HarperAlley, April 20), she’s a smart-mouthed larva who isn’t too keen on metamorphosis. Under the tutelage of her sister Dvorah, however, she reluctantly pupates and then emerges as a worker bee, physically if not mentally ready to take on the sequence of roles all workers perform as they age through their life cycle. Nyuki ultimately ventures from the hive, bumbling into maturity with enormous charisma and teaching readers an astonishing amount about honeybee biology as she goes. The Way of the Hive was initially self-published as Clan Apis in 1998; in between, Hosler has explored other stories that combine science and comics, including Last of the Sandwalkers (2015) and Optical Illusions (2008), the latter being the first comic funded by the National Science Foundation. He spoke with Kirkus about bees, storytelling, and existential questions from his home in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, where he is chair of the biology department at Juniata College. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me how you came to the story.
What led me to graduate school was neurobiology and animal behavior. Those are two of the big classes I teach [at Juniata]. I made a transition through rotations into a lab [that] studied honeybees and insects in general. Then, once I’d finished my degree, I had set up a postdoc on honeybee learning. I thought I should probably know a little bit more about this bee biology. With that baseline of interest, I read Mark L. Winston’s The Biology of the Honey Bee. And that’s when the narrative possibilities popped open for me.
I was primed at that moment. When I was in graduate school, I had a daily comic strip for the Notre Dame newspaper and a weekly strip for the Comics Buyer’s Guide. I was doing six strips a week. A lot of it was banal, college-y kind of humor. But I really wanted to contribute something good to the medium, because I love it, right? I was always communicating in pictures, even with my slide presentations and whatnot. So I wanted to do something unique. It was the 1990s, and everything was extreme. I really wanted room for stories that were an adventure story but a little gentler. For me it was about exposing people to a world.
The Way of the Hive is really about my fear of death, wrapped up with a fear of change. That anxiety, that part of the book, is autobiographical—it’s deeply personal and human. But I’m showing you a world in which organisms live in a house built by their own bodily secretions, right? They walk around on six legs and have wings sprouting out of their back. They smell and taste with feelers sticking off the front of their head. That’s the kind of world that I love exploring and discovering.
In about 1996 I applied for a Xeric Award, which was a grant that was set up by Peter Laird, of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fame. I had also applied for a three-year grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health to fund my research. I found out the same week that I got both. That grant actually set me up to do little brain surgeries on honeybees. It was going to pay for my salary and everything for three years. And then I got this little $1,500 grant to self-publish a single issue of a comic. And that’s the one that I was really excited about.
Let’s talk about your creation story, about the world flower.
I grew up pretty religious. I’m not anymore, but I understand the comfort of it. And I understand near the end of your life, hoping for something that’s beyond that. In the bees’ mythology not only is there a myth for creation, but there is a myth for what happens after [death]. Nyuki doesn’t get to live forever. But she’s come to understand that part of her can. You know, I try to avoid things like “the circle of life,” and I don’t want to start singing. But the fact that bits and pieces of all of us, after we die, shift out into the world and become bits and pieces of other living things? That to me is a great comfort, to know that I’m a part of that.
How much contact do you have with your readership?
In the early 2000s, when I was going to comics shows, I heard a lot from kids. And I was always struck by how enthusiastically they would come to my table and tell me everything that they learned. But they wouldn’t say, “I learned this,” they would say, “The bees can do this.” They would almost be repeating back to me what I had written, [with] this bubbling enthusiasm.
I once had two women who were college students [who] said that their father read it to them frequently. And as they talked about it, they started tearing up about the death of Nyuki. Now this is an organism that up until that book they may have swatted with impunity. So I have managed to help forge an emotional connection with the subject of my science. This is one of the things I think we, as scientists, don’t do very effectively. We do amazingly tedious work in order to collect data. Why do we do that? We do it because we love it. In science, I think one of the great problems in communicating is we focus on our methods, right? Oh, I did this. And I did this. And I did this. And as I tell my students, “Nobody cares. Absolutely zero people care. Nobody cares about the pain you went through to get this data, nobody.” It would be like me saying, “Here’s my book. But I’m going to start with 40 pages on all the agony that I went through to show you how important [it is], and then you can read my book.” It would be dreadful.
How did you land on the 10 to 14 age group as the target audience for your storytelling?
This is when it’s still OK to be enthusiastic about something. And when you actually have the knowledge base to understand. It’s also the time that you begin to have those feelings of exclusion or loneliness, emotional things that [an author] can tap into. So you’ve got some enthusiasm, you’ve got some anxiety about the world. And you’ve got the mental apparatus.
It’s also the time when we start losing kids in science, right? We start losing girls at that age, we start losing kids of color, and we don’t want science to be run by a bunch of White guys. We want that diversity of thought. Even if you don’t become a scientist, if you start having an appreciation for science, that’s going to make you a better voter, it’s going to make you a better citizen. I’m not delusional—I’m not sitting here in central Pennsylvania thinking, Jay’s turning the ship with his books. I’m not. But [my wife] puts my books in her [seventh grade] class. Every year, there’s one or two that will read all of them voraciously. So there’s a couple kids there that may have been affected. And I think that’s the goal.
Vicky Smith is a young readers’ editor.
HOSLER, Jay. Last of the Sandwalkers. 320p. First Second. 2015. pap. $16.99. ISBN 9781626720244.
Gr 5 Up--New Coleopolis is a community of beetles, moths, and a few other insects. The sanctuary is protected under a palm tree. Most residents are content to live within the confines of their oasis, going to school, restaurants, museums, and other routine activities without a thought for what lies beyond. Yet there are a few independent thinkers who yearn to explore the mysterious world away from home. Lucy, in particular, is adamant about venturing out. The group of elders attempts to stop her, as they seem to already know what is out there and will do whatever it takes to keep it a secret. Eventually, Lucy and a small group head out on a grand expedition. Things go awry from the start, and the beetles will be lucky to return safely to New Coleopolis with or without any new information. Friendships and loyalties are tested to their limits as great, potentially life-altering discoveries are made. This graphic novel is reminiscent of Richard Adams's Watership Down, Brian Jacques's "Redwall" series (Philomel), and Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.M.H. Though the characters are not human, they have their own unique and individual characteristics that will resonate with young readers. The black-and-white illustrations adeptly complement the narrative and infuses each protagonist with expressive emotions and personality. The text is well written, complete with scientific information and humorous puns. VERDICT This epic graphic novel adventure is recommended for fans of animal fantasies.--Carol Hirsche, Provo City Library, UT
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
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Hirsche, Carol. "Hosler, Jay. Last of the Sandwalkers." School Library Journal, vol. 61, no. 5, May 2015, p. 108. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A413169508/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b65b8511. Accessed 15 May 2023.
he Sandwalk Adventures. By Jay Hosler. Active Synapse, Columbus, Ohio, 2003. ISBN 0-9677255-1-8. 160 pp. Softcover, $20.
Jay Hosler begins his graphic novel The Sandwalk Adventures with a parody of a creation myth. Like all parodies, this one extracts the essence of the thing being parodied--just enough to make it recognizable--and presents this essence in an unexpected context. Here we learn soon enough the context of this particular creation myth: it belongs to a colony of follicle mites residing in Charles Darwin's left eyebrow, and refers back many mite-generations to the time when Darwin made his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle.
The Sandwalk Adventures is a historo-scientific comic book, if such a genre exists. As a comic book, it relates an amusing series of conversations between Darwin and one of the aforementioned mites, a young female named Mara. We learn that the mites, imagining him to be a god, have built an entire mythology around Darwin, whom they refer to as "Flycatcher." Only with great difficulty is the mighty Flycatcher able to convince Mara that he is not a god, that he is not all-powerful and did not, in fact, create the world--which turns out to be much, much older than she and her fellow mites traditionally believed. Much of the fun of the comic book side of the novel occurs when Hosler lampoons the other mites who--against all evidence--cling to a literal interpretation of their myths.
Mara is a curious creature, and she wants to know the true answers to the questions that her colony's myths attempt to resolve. When Flycatcher begins explaining his notions of the origin of the species to her, the book starts to fulfill its second role--that of an introduction to the theory of evolution. Hosler is a well-published biologist on staff at Juniata College in Pennsylvania. As a reader, you sense that he's had to introduce the theory to students many times, and, in so doing, he's figured out how to present it in an interesting manner without sacrificing accuracy. A reader well-versed in the theory is unlikely to learn much from Hosler's exposition in the graphic novel part of the book, but at the back there is a lengthy annotations section providing details that cannot be served in a comic book format. This section also contains a good deal of biographical information on Darwin, thus fulfilling the book's third main function.
Some graphic novels manage to fuse text and drawing into a distinct art form; The Sandwalk Adventures is not one of them. Hosler is first and foremost a biologist, not an artist. Still, his work is entirely competent, and often witty, as when he visually puns on the well-known "March of Progress." His previous graphic novel, Clan Apis, received a number of awards and nominations, including a 1998 Xeric Award.
The Sandwalk Adventures is an odd but cohesive amalgamation of the absurd and the scholarly. The book provides an informative, always-entertaining look into the theory of natural selection and the man who first formulated it. With its clever drawings and engaging style, it should appeal to the specialist as well as the lay person. Because we live in a time and place in which Darwinism seems to losing rather than gaining public acceptance, perhaps this book, and more like it, could help to reverse the tide.
Jerry Kurlandski is a software engineer living and working in the New York City area. E-mail: jkurlandski@hotmail.com.
Kurlandski, Jerry
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
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Kurlandski, Jerry. "Darwin as comic book super-hero." Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 28, no. 3, May-June 2004, pp. 57+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A116585772/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9c6dff83. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Hosler, Jay EVOLUTION Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) $18.95 1, 11 ISBN: 978-0-8090-9476-9
A graphic introduction to evolution, full of cheerfully silly but educational digressions.
Repeating the conceit of their The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA (2009), Hosler (Biology/Juniata Coll.) and the Cannons reintroduce their alien professor, Bloort 183, who delivers an illustrated lecture on the inhabitants of the bizarre, newly discovered planet Earth, which contains the first life known to exist outside the professor's own world, Glargal. The occasion is an exclusive, pre-opening royal tour of the Glargalian Holographic Museum of Earth Evolution. His audience, King Floorsh 727 and a precocious son, do their pedagogical duty by interjecting appropriate questions. Notwithstanding the comic-book format, Hosler does not dumb down his subject but provides a precise overview of evolution beginning with the cooling of the primordial Earth, the origin of life and the rise of single and multicellular organisms down through geological eras. A comical biography of Charles Darwin leads into an accurate description of the mechanism of natural selection-random variation within a species with survival of advantageous traits-and the text proceeds smoothly to the origin of species, sexual selection, evolutionary constraints, vestigial organs and extinction. Despite the advertising and imaginative, droll illustrations, the book may not win over science-phobic readers, but it's a solid introduction.
An accessible, nuts-and-bolts explanation of evolution for adults who want a refresher and high-school teachers searching for a simple primer.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Hosler, Jay: EVOLUTION." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2010. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A256562177/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2ce0bbdf. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth
Jay Hesler, Kevin Cannon, and Zander Cannon. Hill and Wang, $18.95 (160p) ISBN 978-0-8090-9476-9
Featuring the same amusing characters as those found in Mark Schultz's The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA, Hosler's sequel does for natural selection what its predecessor did for human genetics. The intrepid Glargalian scientist, Bloort 183, has returned and serves as the book's principal narrator. This time he has invited King Floorsh 727 and Prince Floorsh 418 on a tour of the newly opened Glargalian Holographic Museum of Earth Evolution. Hosler (Clan Apis; Sandwalk Adventures) is also a professor of biology and provides readers with much more than a simple graphic primer on evolution. With the Cannons' wonderful illustrations providing a visual anchor, Hosler discusses everything from the atomic to the planetary, from endosymbiosis to mass extinction. The book, like its predecessor, may be too dense with information for instance, the 54 million years of the Cambrian period is covered in a mere six panels. However, readers should find at the end of their journey through Bloort's Holographic Museum that they've learned a tremendous amount about earth's evolution, and have had more than their fair share of amusement in doing so. (Jan.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 PWxyz, LLC
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"Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth." Publishers Weekly, vol. 257, no. 39, 4 Oct. 2010, pp. 33+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A238911908/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=744d1714. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Hosler, Jay LAST OF THE SANDWALKERS First Second (Children's Fiction) $16.99 4, 7 ISBN: 978-1-62672-024-4
Entomologist Hosler offers an epic adventure that delivers an astonishing amount of information in its interstices.Impetuous, baseball-cap-clad Lucy, a rising young beetle researcher, heads the first expedition to leave New Coleopolis since its founding 1,002 years ago, when the god Scarabus annihilated old Coleopolis with a barrage of coconuts. As in any good quest novel, her band is made up of a variety of types: There's maternal Prof. Bombardier, pun-loving firefly Raef, doughty Hercules beetle Mossy, and crusty Prof. Owen, a Cape stag beetle. New Coleopolis is a beetlecentric theocracy, and Lucy's expedition poses significant threats to the status quo--which is why very early on, Prof. Owen (who is evil as well as crusty) engineers its abandonment. Lost in the wilderness, Lucy and her companions encounter spiders, birds, bats and an enormous variety of insects--even beetles--that they've never heard of. Cool bug facts are presented in infodumps (and further explained in disarmingly personal closing annotations); fortunately, they are so interesting that readers are likely to forgive the contrivance. Hosler's clean lines sometimes make foliage difficult to distinguish from characters, but he invests his beetles with tremendous personality, and the dialogue never lags. Though the novel's a trifle overstuffed, the clarity of its theme and appeal of its characters carry the day. Hosler's sincere excitement in both the pursuit of knowledge and the power of comics makes these bugs eminently memorable. (illustrated cast of characters) (Graphic fantasy. 10 & up)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Hosler, Jay: LAST OF THE SANDWALKERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2015. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A401284155/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=76abd1e8. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Hosler, Jay THE WAY OF THE HIVE HarperAlley (Children's None) $21.99 4, 20 ISBN: 978-0-06-300736-9
This graphic novel swarms with facts, all conveyed with smooth storytelling.
In the natural cycle of the beehive, worker bee Nyuki (Swahili for bee) learns about the history of the universe and the way of her hive from her older sister Dvorah (Hebrew for bee). Through Dvorah’s tutelage (and many of her own mistakes), Nyuki learns what it means to truly be a honeybee, her ignorance an effective means of eliciting information that readers will lap up thanks to ample humor in the wry dialogue. As she ages, Nyuki is able to pass along these lessons to a young worker named Melissa (Greek for bee), who will overwinter with the hive and help prepare it for spring’s return. Although it takes place over only a few seasons, the sweet story is rich with both information about honeybees and character development. Hives may have thousands of workers, but the art and the plot create three unique personalities that will have readers invested in learning more about this all-too-important insect—a feat made even more impressive by realistic illustrations that never anthropomorphize the characters and factual details that are far from honey-coated. Graphic novel fans, lovers of nonfiction, budding ecologists, and readers looking for their next great obsession will be buzzing around this title for years to come. Caregivers and educators will too, especially once they’ve seen the packed, excellent backmatter.
Sublime. (Graphic fiction/nonfiction. 9-12)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Hosler, Jay: THE WAY OF THE HIVE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A653125533/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=742dcabd. Accessed 15 May 2023.
HOSLER, Jay. Santiago!: Santiago Ramon y Cajal! Artist, Scientist, Troublemaker. illus. by Jay Hosier. 224p. Holiday House/Margaret Ferguson. Nov. 2022. Tr $22.99. ISBN 9780823450367.
Gr 4 Up--Hosler's twin passions for science and illustration find a kindred spirit in Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience and gifted medical illustrator. This book sketches Ramon y Cajal's childhood high jinks with a Calvin and Hobbes-like playful energy, full of dreaming, scheming, and creative pranks. Young Ramon y Cajal struggles with his strict 19th-century upbringing, as his demanding father forces him into a medical career--a blow to his artistic dreams. Ultimately, Ramon y Cajal combines art with medicine, inventing tissue dyes for microscopic slides and documenting neural cell pathways, a breakthrough which earns him the Nobel Prize. Ramon y Cajal's bumpy road to greatness is copiously researched, as detailed in the end notes, but the line from childhood struggles to scientific success is long, leaving the "why" of the story largely unanswered till quite late in the book. VERDICT A meeting of science and art that urges readers to hold onto their passions, this graphic novel is a dense, funny, ultimately inspiring read.--Emilia Packard
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Packard, Emilia. "HOSLER, Jay. Santiago!: Santiago Ramon y Cajal! Artist, Scientist, Troublemaker." School Library Journal, vol. 68, no. 12, Dec. 2022, p. 87. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A729548045/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fdbf5c86. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Hosler, Jay SANTIAGO! Margaret Ferguson/Holiday House (Children's None) $22.99 9, 20 ISBN: 978-0-8234-5036-7
The childhood antics and later achievements of Nobel Prize-winning Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ram�n y Cajal (1852-1934) are given an engaging graphic-novel treatment.
As children, Santiago and his younger brother, Pedro, skipped school and were added to their town's official list of troublemakers. Their strict doctor father, who came from a background of hardship, was intent on Santiago's following him into a stable career in medicine. Though he was forbidden to pursue art, his true passion, Santiago stubbornly refused to give up on it, even when he was sent away to a brutal Catholic school. There, Santiago found plenty of opportunities for mischief, even building and firing a cannon, which landed him in jail. Eventually his path did lead him to medical school, and his enduring love for art paid off when he illustrated in groundbreaking work how the brain's nerve cells are organized. The skills Santiago cultivated during his misspent youth allowed him to achieve greatness in the field of neuroscience. His wild antics are depicted in humorous detail in illustrations that bring the historical setting to life. Slapstick humor and stylized, exaggerated representations of an impish Santiago contribute to the story's liveliness and fast pace. Extensive, detailed source notes show how much research went into the work and indicate which elements are based on fact and which Hosler imagined to fill in the narrative.
Scientific discoveries spring to life in this action-packed graphic novel. (bibliography) (Graphic nonfiction. 8-14)
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"Hosler, Jay: SANTIAGO!" Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A709933326/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c8f7a56e. Accessed 15 May 2023.