My newest piece for the Boston Globe Ideas section came out October 3! “Against the Flow,” explores the idea of entropy and the moments when things swirl back against the downward dispersal of energy – vortices that emerge briefly. It was inspired by my dad’s physics lecture that references Robert Frost’s poem West Running Brook, and…
DetailsLast week, I went on a whirlwind speaking trip back East, doing six talks in four days! It started at the Brooklyn Bookfest with a panel alongside cartoonist and comics educator Jessica Abel and moderator Alex Blumberg on Sunday the 20th, then back at Teachers College, Columbia, on Monday the 21st, followed by College Unbound in Providence…
DetailsThis weekend, I’m headed back East for a slew of talks and book events through the following week! First up, on Sunday September 20th at 11am, I’m excited to be a guest of the Brooklyn Book Festival! I’m doing a session titled Look and Listen: Stories of the Senses alongside Jessica Abel, who will be sharing from her new book on…
DetailsExcited 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…
DetailsLast 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…
DetailsOn 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…
DetailsUnflattening 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’:…
DetailsFollowing 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…
DetailsA 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…
DetailsWith thanks to the US and Canadian postal services, I was thrilled for my very own copy of Unflattening to arrive last week! It was nearly a year ago that I defended the dissertation, just after we welcomed our daughter into the world, and as she turns one and is starting to get up on her…
DetailsUnflattening has been released into the wild! Copies have surfaced – and I’m itching to see mine! Last week, it got its first review from Publishers Weekly and a Starred Review at that! A little excerpt: “Sousanis has made a profound contribution to the field of comics studies and to semiotics, epistemology, and the burgeoning study of visible thinking. Essential…
DetailsWelcome to my new site. While I’ve had this domain all along, it’s been bouncing to a blog for the past six years and it was finally time for an upgrade. This new home (courtesy of the good folks at Loudbaby.com – the architects behind the Detroit arts-mag I used to run) brings along my…
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