Excited to be back in the classroom with Comics as a Way of Thinking at the University of Calgary! See below for my thoughts on it – but first, a bunch of news from August. Really brilliant and insightful review conversation of Unflattening by Peter Wilkins & Damon Herd on The Comics Grid. An excerpt: [Unflattening] is attempting to…
Last week, I was quite pleased to be interviewed by renowned art director, design critic, and professor Steven Heller in Print Mag. It’s a lengthy conversation in which we talk about my background, process, and influences. I’m sharing a small excerpt here and the rest is on Print Mag’s site. Heller asked me about my influences – I spoke…
On this post, excited to share a roundup of new reviews and interviews, a video conversation, plus more process sketches. First up, I was interviewed in great depth by Tim Hodler for The Paris Review. Hodler’s questioning took the conversation in a number of directions I don’t normally go, and I greatly appreciated the opportunity. An…
In this post, new reviews and detailed sequences of process sketches below. Extremely smart and insightful review of Unflattening in Canada’s Quill & Quire by Ian Daffern. He opens with the question, “Can comics inspire the next leap in the way we think about physics, philosophy, or even our everyday lives?” And closes by calling Unflattening “terrifically ambitious, and…
Over the last few weeks, Unflattening has received a great deal of kind attention from a wide range of outlets. Cory Doctorow’s feature on it in this article on Boing Boing introduced a lot of new eyes to the work. This bounced around the internet and was also picked up and reworked for features on Open…
Unflattening was featured in the New York Times Book Review! Writer Douglas Wolk said, “Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening is a genuine oddity, a philosophical treatise in comics form. ‘Flatness,’ for Sousanis’s purposes, is not the quality of abstraction that Clement Greenberg lauded in modern art, but the lamentable condition of the inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott’s ‘Flatland’:…
Following up on my previous post, I’m sharing a second deleted scene that appeared in the dissertation but was cut from the published edition. Like that previous one, which dealt with my process of Spin/Weave/Cut, this too comes from Chapter 4: “Our Bodies in Motion,” which delves into thinking about drawing through our perception. On this page, I took up…
Unseen art – a deleted scene from Unflattening! I’ve been asked frequently how the published version of Unflattening differs from the dissertation. After I defended, I submitted the work to HUP and went up to Cambridge to work with my wonderful editor Sharmila Sen. We trimmed text throughout to tighten it up and keep a consistency of…
Some recent reflections on doing my dissertation in comics form have just been published as part of a Media Commons collection on doing alternative scholarship in the academy. Fellow contributors include Cathy Davidson, Jade Davis, Gregory Donovan, and Amanda Licastro. This is a continuation of a conversation we had together at CUNY in NYC last…
A fun week of early feedback, as people have been sending me pictures of Unflattening on bookstore shelves and arriving in their mail! I appreciate all the support and look forward to conversations to come over the work. It’s been sighted at The Strand in NYC, Tattered Covers in Denver, Quimby’s comics in Chicago, and alongside…