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Rhodessa Jones |
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Behind the Story: More Than Aerobics The story of the Medea Project, Theater for Incarcerated Women, and its founder Rhodessa Jones was already something of a Bay Area legend by the time I'd heard Rhodessa tell it back in 1995. Rhodessa is a great educator who frequently uses her own experiences working at San Bruno County Jail for Women as a way to explain her ideas, and she had taken to using the story at conferences and workshops as an object lesson in how to respect the people in your community whoever they may be, in this case, women in prison. "I came in," she told me, "thinking I was bringing culture to these women, but I learned I was receiving it as well." 
Rhodessa's tale is very significant in the story of Beginner's Guide. It was the one that inspired me to orient the Guide around "parables of practice," that is, true-life stories of individual community based artists and arts organizations that somehow capture a truism in our field. It's also the story that convinced my partner, cartoonist Keith Knight, that this Guide might actually work as a series of graphic stories. "It was hard at first," Keith tells me, "I hated it. I was not really sure Mat's idea was going to really work. But little by little, as I actually dove into it, I realized how I could do this, and by the end of the process, it became my favorite story. I was so excited about what we had produced, I was afraid we wouldn't be able to do as well with any of the other 9!" 
As you click through our original prospectus for the Guide, you'll see these stories were just one of several elements. There was much more art theory and cultural history that I wanted to include, and the concept was not a unified series of graphic stories, but of a patchwork of different word/image formats. 
It wasn't until Keith and Christine Wong (graphic designer) introduced me to the work of Joe Sacco that I appreciated the possibilities using sequential art as the basis for the whole book. Sacco has this amazing ability to key into objective and subjective reality simultaneously, to convey the kinds of who-what-when-where bits of information one expects from a journalist, while conveying an enormous amount of additional information about what it feels like to be there. Like all well-told stories, his stuff is theatrical (note the dramatic end of page), but at the same time, real. We wanted that quality, too. We not only wanted to engage the reader emotionally and viscerally ('Wow, these people are amazing!'); we also wanted to provide useful information that enabled readers to imagine how they might do something similar in their own communities. I had thought it would require different formats, but fortunately, Keith and Christine showed me just how amazing comics can be as carriers of real-world content. To someone like me, who had been an avid superhero-style comic book collector in my teens and twenties, this was a revelation. 
But truth be told, it was not until I received Keith's page 1 first draft of Rhodessa's story that even I was completely convinced. The way Keith was able to use the illustration of Rhodessa-as-Goddess in panel one along with the text to quickly establish her as a monumental, and yet real character, clinched it for me. And then when I saw how well he'd captured her inimitable presentational style—without ever having met her—I was hooked. But don't take my word for it, try this: re-read the "More Than Aerobics" story from Beginner's Guide, and then read this promotional flyer (pdf) describing the Medea Project. Compare the information found in each. On the one hand, when it comes to answering "what" the Medea Project is, the language in the flyer is much more compact and efficient: it takes us seven pages to say almost exactly the same thing the promotional flyer says in the first paragraph. On the other hand, because it's a graphic story rather than an abstract description, you get a much stronger sense of "how" the Medea Project came to be, how events unfolded. It is this methodological type of information that is most important to us at the Crossroads Project. If you believe as I do that in human behavior, "cognition best follows desire"—in other words, we learn what we want to learn—then a well-told graphic story is likely to make a deeper impression than a well-told text written one, because it is more stimulating; it engages us through multiple centers of the brain. It is also a great example of what we say in the Beginner's Guide, "Art is Information" (page xx).
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