Late Night with Seth Meyers

So last week I got an email from Ellen Waggett, the production designer of Late Night with Seth Meyers. Writer Ben Warheit had written a crazy rant about AI and the singularity and car crime and would I like to do a big Waldo-y spread of what a giant Car Jail would look like?

Would I?

WOULD I?

My spouse and I love the show and are big Corrections fans, so going HAM on show jokes was a dream come true.

PW Article: Confronting Cultural Illiteracy: LGBTQ Books 2022

PW spoke with creators of LGBTQ+ books that’ve been banned or challenged about the wave of bigoted censorship sweeping the country.

“The recent spate of challenges to books with LGBTQ content has been met with equally vocal resistance from booksellers, librarians, parents, and other advocates. Caught in the middle are the people who create the books. George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, a YA essay collection revolving around themes of identity and family, was, according to the ALA, the third most challenged book of 2021; it was cited for LGBTQ content, profanity, and because it was considered sexually explicit. “It’s never easy to wake up to Google alerts mischaracterizing your work as something that it isn’t or seeing it used as a pawn for political partisanship,” Johnson says. “It only makes me want to create more stories in the world—find newer, cooler mediums to tell my stories.”

Another author, Jarrett Dapier, had a virtual presentation of his picture book Mr. Watson’s Chickens cancelled when the school librarian told the principal that the story features a gay couple. The principal then suggested offering parents the choice to opt out of the event, which Dapier found unacceptable. The presentation was rescheduled, the author says, after the school agreed to his terms: he insisted that the principal not send the opt-out letter, and that “teachers would not change their approach to the book or point out the characters’ relationship in anything but a positive, normal light, if they did at all.”

PW spoke with Johnson, Dapier, and other authors and illustrators about their challenged titles, the importance of writing books with LGBTQ themes, and how they and others in the publishing ecosystem can best serve readers.”

Jarrett Dapier (author of Mr. Watson’s Chickens) and I joined in:

(click image for full article)



What's Happening with Mr. Watson's Chickens

Last week a public elementary school in IL suddenly canceled a virtual visit with Jarrett Dapier, the author of Mr. Watson’s Chickens (which I illustrated). As I understand it, the school was concerned that inviting an author to read a book that centers queer characters would result in a homophobic backlash.  The administration is currently working with Jarrett to reschedule. I want to talk about what’s happening because it’s larger than our one book and this one school.

This is happening as part of the vicious and organized attacks on schools against LGBTQIA2+ people - as creators, as characters, as students and teachers, as human beings. It’s part of a bigger and focused movement trying to erase the voices of LGBTQIA2+ folks and people of color in schools. These attacks frighten school administrators into preemptively doing the anti-LGBTQIA2+ movement’s hateful work. This school has been terrorized into choosing who to appease and who to sacrifice. 

But hate can’t be appeased. 

This is bigotry at work. This is wrong. This is harmful. Homophobia and transphobia hurt everyone they touch, but especially threaten LGBTQIA2+ folks by getting people to act as if our essential humanity is in some way debatable, inappropriate or dangerous. Censoring queer content doesn’t make us exist any less, but it does turn us into targets. 

We have the right to exist in our stories, survive in our neighborhoods, and be safe in our schools. Whose stories get told and whose stories are silenced shows who can live openly and who has to hide. It certainly shows students and teachers who their community is willing and unwilling to protect.  

If you think it’s not happening in your community, I want to say: this fight is everywhere and this fight is now. If bigots are loud, we all have to be even louder and bigger and bolder in asserting that LGBTQIA2+ people are people. Your teachers and schools need your support in affirming this and holding the line against hate, because they can’t do it alone. 

A few months ago, I got to be part of a panel on graphic novel format and storytelling with Greg Pizzoli, Drew Brockington and Andrea Colvin, and I shared some annotated spreads from Kondo & Kezumi Visit Giant Island (by David Goodner). You can see the talk here:

Anyway, I totally meant to post a longer ig live or something stream explaining all these, but the fall was busier than I’d thought. Still might do the talk, but in the meantime, here are the slides:

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