Batman, Alice and Descartes: What Does a Columbia PhD Dissertation "Written" as a Comic Actually Say?

"How do we keep that passion alive in people? How do we keep their lives and minds vibrant, instead of extinguishing them?"

At 13, Nick Sousanis created his first superhero: Locker Man.

The idea came from his fascination with the lockers lining his school hallways; Elmont High School's printer handled the print run. More than a decade later, Locker Man came back to life in another comic — this time to finish Sousanis's doctoral dissertation.

Doing scholarship in comics form had no real precedent — a "heretical" act — but it had the backing of Sousanis's advisors. In 2014 he graduated from Teachers College, Columbia University with a doctorate in education, the first person in the school's history to complete an academic dissertation as a comic.

This "academic work" was later published by Harvard University Press as the book Unflattening. It has since been translated into French, Korean, Portuguese and other languages, with a Chinese edition out this year. It became a bestseller in several markets and won the Association of American Publishers' 2016 PROSE Award in the humanities, as well as the 2015 Lynd Ward Prize for graphic novel of the year.

"Unflattening," the Lynd Ward jury noted, "is a multilayered graphic novel innovating on comics, art and visual thinking... It takes readers on an odyssey through multiple dimensions, inviting us to view the world from alternating visual vantage points."

For all its graphic-novel exterior, readers quickly find a core of philosophical inquiry.

The themes of Unflattening are not complicated; a few may even look shopworn. On one hand, it argues that text is not the only way to carry information or do scholarship: only when another dimension — the visual — is brought in can people break out of their usual limits and escape so-called "flattened" thinking. On the other, it describes how cognitive frameworks form, and asks how language, and the culture and social structures we live inside, shape the way people think and act.

That roughly matches Sousanis's two identities. As a cartoonist, he challenges the way Western thought has sidelined images and held them in suspicion; as an educator, he is impatient to push people out of habit and into reflection on themselves and their surroundings. He was deeply influenced by the twentieth-century American thinker John Dewey, who argued for learning through practice and stressed how much a democratic society depends on individuals who are informed and take part.

The Paris Review described Sousanis this way: "[He] seems like a committed citizen; his ideas are thoroughly utopian, yet also resolutely useful and positive. He calls to mind the kind of small-town high-school teacher students love, because they believe he will tell them the truth and is not afraid to stray from the assigned script."

Sousanis has taken a winding path. The small money Locker Man earned in high school did not set him on course to become a cartoonist. As an undergraduate he read mathematics, and he spent several years on the professional tennis tour. Before moving to New York he immersed himself in Detroit's thriving art scene and co-founded the arts and culture site thedetroiter.com. Today he is an assistant professor of humanities and liberal studies at San Francisco State University, where he runs his own comics research program.

Perhaps that is why readers find firsthand knowledge from so many different fields in his book.

By Sousanis's account, he grew up in a loose household that always encouraged him to try things. So what felt natural to him often struck outsiders as rebellious: Unflattening has been called "an uprising against established thinking," and writing a dissertation as a comic drew objections at academic conferences.

Still, catching the attention of Harvard University Press was more than he expected. When editor Sharmila Sen contacted Sousanis to say she was interested, he assumed it was an elaborate prank — the press had never published a comic.

Unflattening has no continuous storyline; it is closer to a collection of arguments. Across 160 pages of images, Sousanis draws on well-known theories from science, religion, philosophy and art to make his case.

But what stands out most is how complex and finely made the book is to look at.

It is full of inventive metaphors and borrowings: footprints, rivers and puppet figures recur, and mythological figures from unrelated traditions meet across a page. The way the pages are cut, layered and given perspective, and the way every element is used, show careful planning and an ambition to compress dense information into the space.

At the back of the book are more than a dozen pages of reference notes and a pile of sketches that bear out the effort. There are Easter eggs too: repeated nods to Batman comics and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and the author's defense of the strange creatures he draws — "My mother is a naturalist. She wouldn't let me draw them any old way."

While working on the doctorate, facing doubts, Sousanis took encouragement from his advisor Ruth Vinz, who asked: "Is a dissertation a path to a diploma, or a path to a deeper understanding of knowledge and meaning... a way to share what you have learned with others?"

By that second measure, Unflattening does the job well.

As scholarship, the dissertation offers no breakthrough insight. But as an experiment in education it is a fascinating case, one that breaks down part of the wall between the public and academia, and many critics recommend it as an entry-level philosophy book worth reading for anyone.

On the whole, reading it feels like walking into the science museum of childhood, the one with the great domed roof and the volcano-eruption simulator. It has to be said that even for adults, the pull of a science museum does not fade. Every principle is laid out in the simplest, most direct and most entertaining way available, and readers get to feel the surprise of "discovery" and "epiphany" again. It is the kind of place people want to stay in a long time, and come back to.

More than three years after Unflattening came out, Sousanis is already at work on his next comic and, as usual, finds it hard to say in words what it will turn out to be. "Hopefully it will all be clear once it's finished."

Below is an edited excerpt of QDaily's conversation with Nick Sousanis:

Q = QDaily N = Nick Sousanis

Q: Unflattening began as an academic dissertation, and it has no plot to follow — some readers feel lost when they first pick it up. How do you explain to different kinds of people what this book is about?

N: True, most people assume at the start that there will be characters, a plot, at least something explanatory; very few expect this. So the easiest thing for me is to carry around free samples and hand them out. Cutting myself out as a narrator was a very deliberate choice. You may know Scott McCloud's comic book Understanding Comics (1993), where a little figure moves across the pages explaining things — today we're going to learn this and that. Since then most educational comics have followed that format. I badly wanted a different approach: to carry some very complex ideas using only visual metaphor and the page itself. I'd call it a philosophical treatise in comics form.

Q: Which chapters did you print in the samples?

N: Mostly the first half, but I took a bit from nearly every chapter. As you can see, almost every page in the book can stand on its own.

Q: The book stresses how important it is to use visual language to break through the limits of text, and how images can be a complete form of expression on their own. If this dissertation had been written in text, how might it differ from what it is now?

N: The process might have been simpler, maybe — it's hard to say. I didn't write the text first and then turn it into a comic. There was no script to begin with; the elements and combinations in my thinking were woven together as I sketched.

Starting from drawing changed the way I think, and let me make decisions with a visual system instead of ordinary textual logic. In pure text I might have lost some of the nonlinear connections that are there now. Marjane Satrapi, who wrote Persepolis, once said something like: "I use images when words fail me, and I write words when images don't work." The advantage of images, I think, is that you can reach a very high density of information and still be readable. If I regret anything about this book, it's that I still wish one chapter had no text at all.

Q: As you say, comics have a long history in the United States, and graphic novels like Maus and Persepolis have even entered university classrooms. But why do people still accept text more readily than images? Visual language doesn't seem to enjoy the same broad recognition.

N: For a long stretch, comics really were treated as the lowest form of literature. The fact that very young children could read them seemed to make them unserious; at the same time plenty of comics were not made for children at all, with far more conflict and adult material, which complicated matters further and even got comics cast as public enemy number one for teenagers.

Even for me, someone who had been drawing since I was small, by the time I reached college I didn't see comics as a "proper" career, so I studied math instead. Things are better now, so when I decided to write my dissertation as a comic I thought it was no longer a big deal — it turned out it still was. My advisors gave me a lot of support, but as I worked I felt that inside the academy this was still seen as a radical move, and I started to learn about earlier attempts that had been shut down partway. That wasn't my original intention. My intention was simply that comics interested me and I thought they were a good way to reach different kinds of people. But along the way the book became more and more about itself.

Of course, this isn't an anti-text campaign. Plenty of supporters say, hey, this is great — but sometimes it makes me sound like I'm trying to knock something else down. That's not it. What I want to show is that images have a very important side of their own. When you draw, you notice connections you would not otherwise notice, and that is something every ordinary person, not just artists, ought to know.

Q: On the many visual metaphors in the book — a good number clearly borrow from elsewhere, like the identical, expressionless people coming off an assembly line, or the discussion of dimensions taken from Flatland. Others are your own. Could you talk about how those images came about? The spinning top at the end of the first chapter, for instance?

N: I had a mentor named Maxine Greene, a philosopher of aesthetic education, and she was the first person I made that image for. Our first class, I remember, was in the living room of her home. She was already 90, and she came slowly out of the back room in a wheelchair, plainly not mobile — you couldn't help wondering whether she would make it through the class. But the moment it was Greene's turn to speak, it was as if energy had been poured into her: lively and sharp. Later, for an assignment in that class, I drew her a comic built on the image of a spinning top.

A top moves fast and careens in every direction. That was how it felt to me: each of us enters the world with wide-open eyes, moving our bodies with excitement, and then, as things happen to us, the excitement drains away. At her age, Greene still had hers. In fact my daughter was born not long before my dissertation defense, and at three weeks old she met this 96-year-old woman, and the two of them looked out at the world with the same wide gaze. That, I think, is what I want to know as an educator: How do we keep that passion alive in people? How do we keep their lives and minds vibrant, instead of extinguishing them?

Q: And Locker Man, who turns up later — the superhero you created at 13?

N: Ha, right. My father was a teacher, and in middle school I often stayed at school until late at night, sometimes for club activities, sometimes because he was working late. So, you know, I'd be in those dark hallways with hundreds of lockers. A lot of my later story ideas came from that; what's hidden behind those secret doors was especially interesting to me. Though I suppose every kid finds that interesting, right?

Q: Both your parents taught for many years. What kind of educational environment did you grow up in?

N: My father taught physics and my mother taught environmental science. Both were, in their own ways, devoted to practice and to finding things out for themselves, and that had an enormous effect on what I could do and what I was encouraged to do. Most environmental study is about seeing the connections between things and understanding the natural world; physics is about working out how things run. Both show up in the direction my academic research took.

My family strongly encouraged trying things, and if you really liked something you stuck with it. So I played a lot of sports, and after college I played some tournaments as a tennis player and started coaching. Teaching people how to learn became a large part of my life. Everyone learns very differently, and tennis taught me a great deal about how people think and learn, and a great deal about the body. It also kept me trying new things. For a while I found it hard to say what I wanted to become; I didn't want the label "tennis player," "artist" or "mathematician." Then I realized I was more complicated than any of them, and that for me there was no set route.

Q: How did that environment shape the way you judge the education system? What do you think is wrong with it now?

N: I get into some of this in the book's notes. My father was a physics teacher who practiced John Dewey-style experiential teaching for years, and after he retired he was invited to teach at a fairly high-end private high school. But the teacher who had the job before him would basically just hand out worksheets every class. Over time not a single student knew how to ask a question, which frustrated my father enormously.

I'm the next generation of teachers in my family, and a teacher myself, so I don't think it's right to point every finger at educators. My classes are full of future teachers, and I often feel that after going through an education system like that, they are thrown straight back into the same loop, and it's hard to get out. It's a very complicated problem, and the real difficulty is that people always lean toward the simplest answer.

Q: But acting on experience and common sense serves us well in plenty of situations too. Do you think "independent thinking" and "fitting into your environment" contradict each other?

N: True, in some situations having a rule to follow helps. I often get comments like, "Oh, your book argues that we should think outside the box." More precisely, it's about recognizing that the box exists.

It isn't about total freedom; it's about recognizing the structures that bind us, and using that recognition to control them as far as possible. Take gravity. What is gravity? I am almost certainly not going to start floating, but I can understand it better and play with it. I won't contradict myself by opposing all frameworks, because comics themselves are made inside boxes, large and small.

Or take wanting to understand why the education system looks the way it does — why kindergarten comes first, then first grade, second grade. The more we understand about why things are as they are, the better we can decide whether we want to take part in them. Letter grades, A, B, C, actually come from the way butchers used to grade cuts of meat. Unlike gravity, the grading system is a decision somebody made 150 years ago, and it may have been a good decision or it may not. It may be an effective way to rate quality, but does it have anything to do with a person's curiosity, or their future? Is it good for a student's growth?

My physiology is more or less fixed at this point, but my health isn't, and neither is my way of living. So this isn't an argument about breaking out of frameworks in the usual sense. It's a hope that people can choose consciously: is this really something I want to be part of? That isn't easy — it's much harder than lying on the couch watching TV — but if everyone really did pay attention, the ones who aren't so good would have a much harder time getting away with it.

The cover image and the unlabeled illustrations in this article are excerpts from Unflattening, courtesy of Houlang Press.