Drawing Durham: Documenting the Indie Comics Scene Through Story and Memory

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Related Links

Adam Rosenblatt Instagram @researchcartoonist
Cemetery Citizens: Reclaiming the Past and Working for Justice in American Burial Grounds
Graphic Narrative on the Move for Everyone (GNOME) Instagram @Gnome_Durham

Full Transcript

Welcome to season two of Duets, a Duke Trinity podcast that explores research collaborations between faculty, students and community partners across Durham and North Carolina.

Today we’re joined by Professor Adam Rosenblatt and undergraduate student Shreya Joshi, whose collaborative research uses oral history and visual storytelling to document Durham’s independent comics scene. From in-depth interviews with self-published creators and small-press artists to exploring the key spaces that sustain the local indie comics community — like the Durham Public Libraries — this community-engaged research preserves the stories, places, people and culture that shape North Carolina’s creative pulse.

Adam: I'm Adam Rosenblatt. I'm a professor of the practice in International Comparative Studies and Cultural Anthropology, and most of my research is about the ways in which the dead and their burial places matter to living people who are seeking justice in some way. I'm also a cartoonist and very interested in how comics can be used as ways of thinking through and disseminating research.

Shreya: I'm Shreya Joshi. I'm a sophomore majoring in International Comparative Studies and minoring in Economics and Asian American Diasporic Studies. 

Adam: I want to ask you about where comics fit into your memories of childhood. 

Shreya: One of the first comics I remember was actually, it was a myth, or like a Hindu religious story, and it's about this goddess who has 10,000 arms. She had, like a shield in one hand and a sword in the other, and she's riding this lion. And it ended with her, you know, conquering the demon, restoring balance to the village. But because, I think in the US especially, we view comics as so related to like the big corporate superheroes such as Marvel or DC, it didn't occur to me that my childhood was filled with comics. And so that is, my memory of comics is actually learning about culture, learning about colonialism through the comic form. 

What was your first experience with comics? How did you get into them? 

Adam: So, my first encounters with comics and enjoyment of them was reading newspaper strips. I don't think I was particularly more interested in superhero comics than other kids, but there was one summer where my friend's older brother had some comics on the shelf, so I started to read those. And I remember very clearly they were from a storyline called “The Fall of the Mutants”. And I just was really shocked by them because characters were dying and the stakes were really high, and there was this kind of almost political vein. It was sort of, sub-textually, about ethnic cleansing and persecution, and it was just way different from Batman and Robin chasing the Riddler. And, so, I read and re-read and re-read those, and that was just like — that was it?

Shreya, one of the things you were hoping for from our summer of research together was to try out some new research methodologies that you hadn't tried before, and kind of learn how to do new things and also see what sticks. So, I'm curious where you stand on that now? What things you feel like you really learned how to do, what things you maybe gained some curiosity to want to do more in future? 

Shreya: My primary takeaway was that research, especially within a community, ought to be collaborative and not extractive, because I remember that you had a really big emphasis on making sure that we're giving our research back to the community. We're not just taking our findings, presenting them at the symposium and then calling it a day. The other thing that I found really interesting were those ethnographic methods, right? Observing and asking people about the state of the world, the state of the art scene, what makes Durham different. And so, I think the summer taught me that you need to take a minute to just, sometimes, ask people, right? And let them tell you, if they're willing.

Has there ever been a time when your research has made you feel hopeful?

Adam: I'd say my research is helping fuel my hope right now, in a very challenging time. It's one of the few sources of some glimmers of hope, particularly around the sustained attacks on what is being called DEI but really is, actually, I think, an attempt to erase the presence of Black and brown people, women, disabled people literally from our visible landscapes — from history. And in the cemetery work that I do, both as a researcher and an activist, I work alongside these grassroots groups that have been telling the histories of forgotten and marginalized people for decades now. And their work is multidisciplinary, so it's about cleaning up the cemetery, weeding headstones, making the place look dignified and beautiful, but it's also about all these other things like researching who's buried in the cemetery, creating historical narratives about them, and putting them on a website, seeing if they can trace any descendants, and reaching out to descendants who may not know that their ancestors were buried in the cemetery, or may not know much about their history. And that work has continued on in a very like self-starting, you know, grassroots way through ups and downs of all kinds. And I think because it's all sort of community made and happening in spaces — whether it's gathering at the cemetery or on like the website of the Friends of Geer Cemetery, which is private — there's a level of sort of control and ability to just keep telling these stories, no matter what obstacles are appearing on the national stage, that I find very hopeful.

So what about you? Was there something in our research that gave you hope? 

Shreya: So, at the end of the program, you had to present your research with everybody else who was doing research from across the country. And it was, it was a very STEM-heavy symposium. And in the field of research, I discovered very quickly that certain research is inherently more valued than others. And something like, you know, cataloging oral histories is pushed aside a little bit, or it's not seen as ‘as valuable’. But when I was presenting, and I had people come up to me, I had people ask questions it gave me a little bit of hope that people are interested in the humanities research, and especially they are interested in their surrounding community. Because the way that symposium started off was actually a man came up to me, and he took one look at my research poster, which, to be fair, was in a very different format. It was a zine, like I made my poster into a comic to accurately represent the community that we had worked with. And he took one look at my poster and said, “So you’re in the Trinity side of things.” And I was like: “Oh, is that what the next two hours is going to be like?” But it wasn't, and a lot of people were really interested. They were even people who were wondering how to get involved, where to go. And I think that gave me a lot of hope.

Is there something you think that people misunderstand about community engaged research?

Adam: I think less of something that people misunderstand than of kind of two poles, and I'm always trying to be somewhere in between them. So, the easiest kind of danger zone for me to identify, I think, because there's been so many great critiques of it, some of which we discussed, is of being arrogant and extractive of thinking of the interaction between Duke researchers and, quote unquote, “the public” as one where we deliver our knowledge, right? But on the other side of that is to go too far in the other way and try to completely erase yourself and see community-engaged research as this thing where you, literally only have to sit there and sort of collect the oral history or code the different responses. And I think, first of all, that it's really hard to build trust that way. When you come into somebody's home or studio with a tape recorder, they want to know who you are, they want to know why you're doing this project. Research should be different if it's you and I in there asking the questions and analyzing the results, you know, versus any other two or three or four people, just as we saw when you talked about your very unique childhood experience with comics, you know? I could have worked with a bunch of other students who, when they think about comics, colonialism is not what they're thinking about. 

And so, there were questions that we had and questions we asked that were different because you had a less US-centric framework, because you had a very unique, very non-,as you said, non- Marvel, non-Avengers history with comics. And at least in the form of community-engaged research that I practice, I don't approach it as an empty vessel, and I do meet people and form relationships and try to be really conscious of power and of not sort of taking up too much space. But it matters that I'm me, and that I'm building this relationship as a specific person with a bunch of other specific people.

At the beginning of our research together, we went to the main library and pulled like 80 comics off the shelf and, you being you, you read them at a pace of like four a day. From that stack of comics that you read to sort of have a crash course in contemporary, non-superhero comics, are there any that stand out to you as like, "oh, I didn't know comics could do this?”

Shreya: I think so many of them changed my understanding of what a comic could be and what it could do, but I would pick two. So, one was a comic, it was called “Guantanamo Voices” and through comic form, it interviewed people who were detained at Guantanamo. As you can imagine, these interviews are brutal, right? They're telling you about conditions that are deplorable, and so you're reading these graphic descriptions of what's happening, but the images are all in really warm tones to kind of counteract the darkness in the words, and I thought that that juxtaposition made the story that much more powerful. And the second comic, I would say that has just stood with me, is called “Ducks” by Kate Beaton. It's such a complicated narrative, both politically and socially, but the reason it stood out to me is just the artwork is hauntingly beautiful –– like you have pages that are just devoid of words, but they tell an equally profound story — and I ended up having to re-read it twice because it was so, so interesting and fascinating to me.

Adam: One of the things I've become interested in lately in the comics I've been reading is the ways in which just the format of comics itself — breaking things up into panels — and that kind of power that our minds as readers have to want to create narrative, even when there are little gaps, or even with the spaces between the panels. I've become really interested in how, how far can you dial back all of the traditional elements of what would make a comic — the representational images, the word balloons and things like that — and still, just by virtue of having one box after another on a page, still have this tremendous narrative drive. 

So, we interviewed Ellen O'Grady, my dear friend here who lived in Palestine for nine years and has been making comics about the violence in Gaza. And with Ellen's comics that she usually posts online soon after she's made them, there are days where she gets a lot of time or where she has a lot of head space, and so you get — she's a beautiful artist — so you get these beautifully rendered kind of panels that are full of people talking or memories of her own from when she lived in Palestine. And then there are days when she's grieving too hard, or she doesn't have time, or what she needs to say feels so urgent that it's just an empty box with some words in it, but box after box, it still somehow works incredibly powerfully as comics. 

Shreya: I think it was Meg Lentz who said that comics is a process. Not only is it a process in making it, but it is a way to process what's happening around you. And I think about that a lot, actually. 

Adam: In terms of comics, I post my own work on Instagram at the handle @researchcartoonist, and that's a mix of things I'm doing related to my scholarship, but also doodles and experiments and fictional comics as well. 

Now we have this project that we've named GNOME –– Graphic Narrative on the Move for Everyone — which is a simple pop-up mobile studio for making zines and comics, and the idea is to partner with local artists. 

Shreya: What we're doing now with GNOME is trying to not only integrate it more into the community, but also other spaces at Duke that are about community building. 

And as far as our research goes, if you want to learn more or keep up with the comics community, follow our Instagram account at GNOME_Durham and so keep an eye out, because we'll be at a couple of events soon.

Duets is produced by Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University. 

Senior Editor and Producer: Cara August, Trinity Communications
Audio Editor and Mixer: Marc Maximov
Music Composition: André Mego, T’20 | MMS ‘21
Production Sponsor: Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Duke University
Recording Date and Location: March 2025, Bryan Center Studios