Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotch tank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States. It's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with Jeremy Dauber about his new book, American Comics, A History. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs on our YouTube channel. This Wednesday, December 15th, at 1 p.m., we'll present a program entitled Anti-Federalists and the Bill of Rights. Professors Mary Sarah Builder and Woody Holton will discuss the arguments of the Anti-Federalists and present a controversies over how we teach the Bill of Rights. And on Thursday, January 6th, at 1 p.m., award-winning historian and biographer Kate Clifford Larson will tell us about her new book, Walk With Me, a biography of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer. Cartoons and comic books might not be the first thing to come to mind when thinking about what one can find in the National Archives. However, you can find records relating to 19th century Thomas Nast, creator of the Democrats donkey and the Republicans elephant, original drawings by 20th century political cartoonist Clifford Berryman, creator of the teddy bear, and even storyboards for Superman comic to promote President Kennedy's Council on Physical Fitness. The largest concentration of comic books is in our Center for Legislative Archives. In the 1950s, the Senate subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency collected a number of comic books as evidence, including Mad Magazine number one. Elsewhere in the National Archives, you can even find Batman in a copyright infringement case and Superman in special issues created for the U.S. Navy. Today, author Jeremy Dobber will tell us about the history of the American comics over the last 150 years. In a review in the New York Times, Michael Tisserrand praised Dobber's book American Comics as an entertaining and richly detailed new history of comics, a scholarly survey that is both opinionated and frequently funny. And Michael Saylor, writing in The Wall Street Journal, says Dobber's perceptive critical overview is enlivened by a jaunty style that bops from the political cartoons of Thomas Nast in the 1860s to the devise of an equally influential gadfly Mad Magazine in 2018. Jeremy Dobber teaches American Studies at Columbia University as Director of Columbia's Institute of Israel and Jewish Studies. His books include Jewish comedy, A Serious History, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Now let's hear from Jeremy Dobber. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much to, Ferio, thank you to the National Archives. It's a real honor to be here, getting a chance to talk to all of you and to talk about my new book American Comics of History. And you know, one of the, what I tried to do in this book was to say, I'm going to take this 150 years of this medium, which was really central in the history of American culture, this American art form. It tells the whole story of American politics and culture in its own different way and has hundreds and hundreds of mass pieces. I'm going to try and tell this within sort of the body of a single book. And I wanted to try and sum all of it down in a certain way for the people who came to the National Archives to listen, you know, in less than an hour. And obviously that would be impossible to do. And even if I did it, you know, I wouldn't leave you wanting more. What I've decided to do is to narrow it down and tell the story of American comics in a very comic book way. And I decided to do that through 10 battles, right? What are comic books, if not full of huge, post-founding, amazing battles? I thought I would tell 10 different stories of comics, the history, through 10 different stories of battles. And in order to do that, I'm going to go back close to the very beginning. Not quite, as Mr. Ferriero said, with Thomas Nast, although he's a hugely important part of the story of American comics, really getting it in the minds of all kinds of American citizens in the Civil War era, in the immediate post-war era, but really with the start of American comics as even more of a mass medium. And that comes with the rise of the mass-produced, mass-circulated American newspaper chain. And in doing that, I want to introduce you to two figures who are the protagonists of our first comics battle. And can I have the next slide, please? These two figures are the people who shaped the American newspaper history, as we have it, in the late 19th century. And they are on the left, Joseph Pulitzer, and on the right, William Randolph Purst. So these names are probably familiar to many of you who are interested in American history and American culture. Joseph Pulitzer in 1883 bought the newspaper known as The New York World from Jay Gould by two years later. He had, he was selling 200,000 copies a day, right? So just this remarkable kind of growth. And he did it in a way which was a little bit surprising for those of us who are familiar with the Pulitzer name, really for the Pulitzer Prize is in kind of the most elevated kind of journalism. He practiced what we would now kind of more call a kind of tabloid journalism, if it bleeds, if it leads, and was always interested in more ways of increasing circulation. And as a result, he saw this new technological development, these rapid high-speed rotary color presses. And he said, look, at first he thought, I'm going to use these to reproduce great works of Western art. But subsequently, he realized, you know what, I really want to sell these comics, these newspapers, excuse me, to a new wave of people who are flooding into the cities to immigrants. To, you know, a backbone of American society, right? But immigrants obviously coming from different countries. English is not often their first language. A newspaper which is composed primarily of words, not going to be the best product for them, right? And as a result, comics became a natural kind of possible circulation booster. And starting in 1895, one character who was called Mickey Dugan, but nobody knew him as Mickey Dugan. Everybody called him the yellow kid, became prominently featured and became sort of a national merchandising character. And the yellow kid really in some ways combined a lot of the features that we now think about as commercial comics. It was an ongoing regular character. It combined word balloons and pictures and text and pictures in these sort of fascinating kind of ways. So, Pulitzer was doing quite well. And then in that same year that the yellow kid appeared in the New York world, we have a new player into the market, sort of the son of a mining, a new mining fortune out west named William Randolph Hearst. Hearst buys The Morning Journal, another newspaper in 1895. And he and Pulitzer start going at it by producing competing slates of comic strips in these newspapers that would then grow to buy other newspapers and other markets, which would publish their own comics that belong to these empires of Pulitzer and Hearst. Those groups were called syndicates, probably a name that's familiar to most of you, and many of the comics were either Pulitzer papers or they were Hearst papers. Hearst would later be known as King Features papers. And Hearst would gather talent kind of the old fashioned way, which is that he would steal it, right? So, many of you may be familiar with the movie Citizen Kane, that wonderful movie which is a thinly autobiographical lead, autobiographical picture of William Randolph Hearst and his successes. And you may remember a scene in which he poaches a lot of different people in that movie. That is basically among those people in the real life version of this, where all of the comics creators and editors from Pulitzer's papers, right? So Hearst sort of insta starts, so to speak, his own kind of comics empire. So there was really a lot of competition going back and forth. And in the process of that, and then other syndicates got into it, a syndicate from the Midwest by Joseph Middle Patterson, the Chicago Tributes Syndicate, created a lot of the indelible comics characters of the first great wave of American comics. And these are names which, while they may not have the quite the purchase and the luster as they once did, names like Dick Tracy and Popeye and Little Orphan Annie and Al Cap, all of these names that sound very familiar. I think to many of us, this was one of the central lingua franca of American culture. And this was something really that transcended class, presidents and working class people all wanted to know the next adventures of Little Orphan Annie or the gumps or what have you, right? It transcended age, right? This was not just a juvenile thing, kids and adults, and it really was nationwide. A number of anthropologists, cultural observers would say, look, you know what? If you really want to understand American culture, you really have to understand the comic strips. The left, as I say, is Pulitzer. On the right, as I say, is William Randolph Hearst. So those were the two guys, okay? And the comic strips were the essential basis of American comics and American culture, right? This battle that comes out between them and then grows to envelop all sorts of these newspaper slides. Now can I move to the next slide, please? Thank you. So what we have here, right, really is, of course, the next great wave in the history of American comics. And this battle that I would like to call it is Superman versus the bad guys, right? This starts in the late 1930s. You can see the cover date of Action Comics number one right there, June 1938. And what we have here is the brainchild of two Jewish teenage kids from Cleveland who really want to break into that comic strip business. They don't want to make comic books. Comic books in the mid 1930s really is a very sort of kind of second rate operation. You're putting together, mostly speaking, chopped up and collected collections of comic strips because after all, yesterday's newspaper is today's fish wrapper. Nobody kept those things particularly. So there was a kind of business in sort of gathering these things together. But that was really kind of a second rate status. So you're going to just really, really wanted to break into the comic strip syndicate business. It was quite lucrative, or at least it could be. And they said, you know what, we want to do this. But nobody was taking Superman. All these newspaper strips passed. All these newspaper syndicates passed on Superman. And so eventually they had to go to this company, National Comics, which was basically putting together what was considered a fairly new idea now in this comic book business, these Book of Comics business. Which was a all new collection of material sort of inside these pamphlets. And originally I should say these pamphlets weren't even, no one even had the idea of paying for them. They were going to be given away with buying sort of a new fill up at your gas station or something like that. But according to the story, one of the creators of this medium, a guy named Max Gaines had a couple of these sort of giveaways that were hanging around and he said, you know, he tried an experiment, which was he stuck a 10 cent sticker on them. He put them on some new stands and they sold out over the next weekend. And the new stand dealers were asking for more. And so these, these, these comic books began to come and sort of develop with them. What ended and what really sort of drove that was eventually this character by Siegel and Schuster. Now I do want to point out that if you look at the cover, this is such a famous cover, it's very hard to kind of peel away all of our understandings of Superman. But it's worth pointing out that if you just look at the cover by itself, as you see on the screen, it's hard to tell whether or not Superman is a good guy or a bad guy. Right. Here's this random guy. We don't know who Superman is, right? This random guy. He's crashing a car into a rock. People are running away. It looks like out of fear. We have no idea. Maybe they're good guys. Maybe they're bad guys. We don't really know. And that's not surprising because many of Superman's origin started including from an earlier short story by Siegel as a kind of bad guy. And, and he was also supping of a lot of characters from the pulps and other kinds of things whose moralities were somewhat ambiguous. And it's certainly the case that Superman, although from the beginning in the service of a kind of Rooseveltian liberal goodness, right, is very uninterested in what we might call due process. Right. He's not bringing everybody to the police for arrest and trial. Right. And he's certainly more interested in what we might call justice rather than fairness. Right. And finally, right, his answer to everything is through force. Right. And some of these points were things that would be very interesting to critics of comic books because this new superhero craze, which developed, which became immediately massively popular among the juvenile set. Right. This was something that educational sociologists and people who were worried about kids, we became very interested in, you know, which was again not surprising because very soon the money spent on comic books eclipsed all the money that was being spent on books for kids in schools and public libraries. Right. So we're talking about a lot, a lot of sales, not just of Superman, but of all of these other superheroes or costume characters that were being developed at the time. Now, I will say I pointed out that Siegel and Schuster were Jewish and this first wave of superheroes, the vast majority of people who were involved as creators in the industry, not all of them, the vast majority, the overwhelming majority were Jewish. And as a professor of Jewish literature, I'm often asked, you know, what is the connection between Jews and comic books? And I think this is really is in many ways, it's an American story, right? It's a story of a minority group at that time suffering a great deal of social discrimination, not being able to be allowed into certain kinds of elite professions. And so they went to kind of low status professions, like as comic books were at the time, and then they hired their friends and relatives as often these communities tend to do because again, nobody really cared so much about the quality of many of these comics. That's one way in which these comics were very Jewish. But another way, and now please let's move to the next slide. Another way is that in a period, thank you, in a period of still a decent amount of isolationism. Remember that 1938 on the last cover, right? Jews who had a lot of relatives in Europe at this point, many of them were either immigrants themselves or they were first generation, right? They were very, very well aware of Hitler's rise to power and what that meant for the Jews, or what that might have meant, what that might mean for the Jews. And so they were very pro war, right? They were very pro getting into World War II, fighting the Nazis before, unfortunately, a lot of Americans were. This was before Pearl Harbor and two other Jewish men, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby came together and they created Captain America who premiered in Captain America comics, premiered his own comic right away. This is before Pearl Harbor. And of course, as you can see, he's giving Adolf Hitler a good right hand socked at the jaw, right? Which is, you know, making no bones about where this comic book stood. And it is fair to say that not everybody was all right with this. Fiorello LaGuardia, the mayor of New York at the time, had to send police to the offices of Simon and Kirby because they received threats after this kind of material was being published. So that said, once Pearl Harbor happened, America and its superheroes, its costumed heroes came into the war with both booted feet, right? Very, very, very active. All sorts of American heroes fighting in the war, many new characters coming up. And as you can see on the bottom of the screen, you see that from the very beginning of Captain America, you can see his young ally, Bucky, right? One of the audiences for these, in fact, one of the large audiences for these superhero comics, young people by definition were too young to go and actually fight and actually serve in the war. But the comics in some ways served as a wish fulfillment for the kids to get involved through these kind of young characters who could serve as sidekicks. And later on, there would be a lot of issues about what exactly, what role these sidekicks had in all this. But at the time, this was one way of getting the kids involved rather than in the case of Superman or Batman or some of these other characters, a kind of metaphorical wish fulfillment of saying, boy, I wish I could be like Superman. It was easier to imagine yourself as a young kid being a young ally, a boy commando, you know, some of these other kind of boy groups that were in the comic books actually taking the war and being a part of this great enterprise. There were other ways that comic characters got involved too. Characters helped sell war bonds. They helped encourage people to have victory gardens, to recycle paper, all of these kind of things that went on. Comics in many ways, certainly from 1941 to 1945, really became, in many sort of fundamental ways, very much a part of the American patriotic war effort. You did not see really in any sort of meaningful way a kind of anti-war movement sort of playing itself out within the comics. I really just did not have it. So after the war, there is this real process of trying to come back. Back is a kind of complicated word here. But trying to achieve a certain kind of post-war, I'm putting this in quotes, normalcy, right? There were all sorts of social stresses, all sorts of social shifts. Obviously the fact that so many men went abroad to serve in the armed forces had women taking in that kind of Rosie the Riveter mode that we all know, certain kinds of steps into the workforce, steps that now we're going to be rolled back to a certain extent. This led and other kinds of things led to a great deal of social stresses. Not everyone came home from the foreign theaters of operation. There were stresses on families. There were stresses on the children of those families. And many of those stresses were playing themselves out, not explicitly but implicitly, in the rise of a series of genres of comics, that gestured at these issues. The most famous of these are three types. The first being romance comics, which were also in some sense created by Simon and Kirby, which kind of had this wish fulfillment of a certain kind of heterosexual white picket fence marriage and sort of a nuclear family as a kind of, again, restoration is not the right word, but a kind of creation in the anxieties of these social stresses. The other two were roughly speaking crime comics and horror comics, which in their own ways both suggested, and I don't have time to go into this in great detail. You can see this in great detail in the book that I wrote about the underlying discomfort and trauma and dislocation that was under this sort of pretend normalcy. That really, if you scratched sort of those white picket fences, you would find all of these noir type criminals and you would find these murderers would be horribly punished in these kind of horrific ways. And the person who is the most associated with that is one of the subjects of our next battle, battle number four. So can we have our next slide, please? Okay, that person, although he looked a little different in the 1950s on our left, the son of that 10 cent sticker guy, this guy's name is Bill Gaines, and he was the one of the main he was the head of the company that at first was known as educational comics under his father, but was then turned into entertaining comics or EC as everyone knew it. Okay? So EC was really a specialist in these kind of horror comics. It put together some of these famous ones, these names sometimes still have some resonance now, names like Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror, and Gaines was one of these these these figures sort of responsible for a huge, huge wave in these crime and horror comics. Now I want to remind you, if you were a 10 year old reading Superman in 1938, by the time it's 1952, it's been 14 years have passed, right? So you're in your mid-20s. Some of people absolutely said, you know what? I'm tired of comics. I'm not going to read comic books anymore. But a lot of people weren't. They just wanted comics that were a little bit wilder, that were a little bit more suitable to their kinds of interests. This was true of soldiers who were carrying comics at the front. This was true of people who came back. This was true of people who had been on the home front the entire time. And so they're reading these kind of comics. But of course these comics are available on newsstands. They're available for kids to read. Kids certainly were reading them. Adults were reading them. The kids were certainly reading them too. They were passing them around. And they began to become a kind of moral concern. And it was led in the popular press by a psychologist named Frederick Wortham. But that led itself in a kind of moral panic to these references, these concerns, I should say, that were being taken up by the United States government. And in no small part, by the man on our right, a senator named Estes Kefauver, who was, as David Ferriot suggested in the introduction, responsible for a subcommittee on juvenile delinquency, and the role of comic books in perpetuating, in causing, in creating juvenile delinquency. Now, for Wortham, that psychologist and Kefauver, the hope really was not to outlaw these comics via legal fiat. That would fall afoul of constitutional grounds. And they knew that. But the hope really was to create some kind of very strong incentive for the comic book industry to censor itself along the lines of motion picture ratings codes. And this came to a head very famously in the senatorial hearing where Bill Gaines, that character on left, testified. And his testimony went extremely badly. This was in 1954. And part of this, there were all sorts of reasons for that. Part of it had to do with the fact that Gaines had taken, this was legal at the time, but he had taken amphetamines to kind of help get himself ready for his testimony. And then the hearing was delayed and the amphetamines were off. And he was kind of crashing. But nonetheless, the hearing went very badly. And distributors and consumers really left EC in droves. And a lot of the other comics companies seeing the writing on the wall based on this kind of battle, they also abandoned this kind of model of comics that were a little bit more for adults. They were a little bit more mature. And they agreed to be regulated by a kind of comics code, which essentially speaking, stunted, I think it's fair to say, the growth of mainstream American comic books kind of kept them in a way that was sort of suitable for newsstands for anybody and everybody to read, which meant even sort of the littlest kids, which meant that they essentially were a juvenile medium. Now, in some sense, Bill Gaines really did have the last laugh. If this idea was to prevent a certain kind of juvenile delinquency, Gaines went on to take one of his comic books, a humor comic book, and recast it as a magazine, which was not subject to this kind of code authority. That magazine, of course, went on to become Mad Magazine, which then created more juvenile delinquents and anti-authoritarians and counter-cultural forces than anything I think any of those crime and horror comics would have done combined.  But comics for quite a number of years for most of the decade of the 50s maintained really a very juvenile status until the subjects of our next battle came. So next slide, please. This is number five. And these characters, maybe some are more or less familiar to you. This is in around the 1961, these two in much younger forms, Stan Lee on the left and Jack Kirby essentially put their heads together and started to say, you know what, we can create comics still under the ages of this code authority but in some sense that instead of looking to really appeal to kind of little kids are going a little bit more to kind of an adolescent or a college kind of audience that starts and those characters become between the two of them, the, and also Steve Ditko and a couple of other artists, the architects of the Marvel Universe that is still appearing very, very prominently on our television and movie screens to literally yesterday to today, yesterday and today. Now the reason that this is a battle is because as people who are familiar with the history of comics know, and maybe it's sort of even people who are not, there is a tremendous amount of discord and debate among the players, among the characters, among the critics as to who created what, what role did each of them have? You might think or it might have been thought that because Stan Lee's job involved sort of a typewriter and Jack Kirby's involved more of a brush that you have pencils and brushes that you, that you would have sort of some neat division there but that is really not the way that comics worked. It's not the way their relationship worked. For more details, I don't have time to go into this. We can either do it in the Q and A or you can sort of read some of the details in my book but suffice it to say that along with the creation of this new universe came a kind of discord that led to a lot of very bitter, very vitriolic and also very fruitful conversations about what creativity and originality means in the history of comics. The general consensus is that Kirby is who is less known than Stan Lee, who is very much a pitch man for Marvel, Kirby was one of the most, if not the most, fertile and imaginative and creative minds in the history of American comics. So I'm glad to have him as part of the portraiture here along with Lee, whose face is much better known for not least for his cameos sort of in these Marvel movies. Now I should say that this during the 1960s when the Marvel kind of revolution was hitting mainstream comics there was another kind of revolution that was coming out as well and it was growing up on EC Comics, those horror comics on Mad Magazine and who were becoming sort of more and more alienated from what we might call the mainstream of American culture of American politics. They were going to college in some cases as opposed to that first wave of American comics writers they were becoming increasingly alienated, the messages that American mainstream culture was putting out in short, they were of that generation that was interested in joining this sort of counter cultural movement of the late 1960s and they themselves create a kind of new cultural base for the creation of comics that base is on the west coast and particularly in the Bay Area they are a group of people interested in using that counter cultural motto of personal and free and unfettered expression to create a wide range of comic books and many of those comic books take free expression and push it to its limits and beyond in ways that strike us now as pornographic as racist as misogynist but also many of these comics are doing something that is entirely as a means of personal and indeed autobiographical expression and I will show you two examples of this in the next slide, battle number six next slide please so here we have two examples of this the first on the left is arguably one of the most famous products of this sort of counter cultural alternative comics movement this is the first cover number zero comics by Robert Crum and you can see that kind of electric excitement almost like a Tom Wolf thing that is going on here it plugs you in and not surprisingly many of these comics are also about dropping out turning on all of this sex drugs and rock and roll kind of comics that very much focuses on much of the underground they are also in their own ways political but sort of in a broadly speaking mode they are often anti-war very environmentally focused and as I say they sort of support pushing back against the norms of the culture one norm of the culture however that zap comics which would later expand not to just include Robert Crum but another six artists was not interested in expanding sort of egalitarianism women were not invited to be any of the members of the zap seven they were frequently not invited to join many of the kind of collaborative comics efforts they were being excluded in certain ways and so many of them came together in other kinds of collectives one of the earliest and I think one of the most famous is this it ain't me babe comics on your right and you can see what I think is wonderful here you can see comic characters from a number of different periods earlier on in comics history sort of giving sort of a high fist and salute sort of walking out right there's olive oil and little Lulu and Wonder Woman and Mary Marvel and so forth so you have these characters and it ain't me babe comics and some of the other comics one of which is called women's comics you see a lot of very powerful others in the late in the early 1970s autobiographical stories stories about people coming out stories about people having being the victims of sexist behavior in the workplace trying to find their own space for their own personal liberation a lot of these kind of stories that are told with tremendous vigor tremendous talent and ability and that both Zab and it made me babe comics in their own ways would kickstart a whole wave of other kinds of comics that are the seeds of a lot of the graphic novels that we see winning a lot of the awards today one of those comic a younger a slightly younger member of this generation this Bay Area generation was a cartoonist whose name was art Spiegelman a name that I think is probably familiar to quite a number of you Spiegelman would be in the Bay Area he would then go to Europe he would learn something about some of the European comics that were flourishing then he would come back to New York and he would start along with his partner Francois Mouli he would start a magazine called raw magazine which in its own ways like Zab raw right you would have sort of a showcase of some of the artistically ambitious button-pushing comics but even as those comics were being published Spiegelman was working on his own project that would be produced as a separate insert within these raw magazine comics that were coming out in the now we're moving into the very early 1980s a comic book that both used sort of very complicated narrative storytelling techniques artistic techniques but also was a complicated autobiographical techniques it was telling the story not only of Art Spiegelman's father Vladek Spiegelman and his experiences as a Holocaust survivor but also Art Spiegelman's own responses as what we would now call sort of a second generation survivor someone who was the child of Holocaust survivors Art Spiegelman was also in that comic trying to make sense not just of his father's behaviors his father's history but also his mother's suicide she was also a survivor but then killed herself when Art Spiegelman was a young man so you have this this combination all of this comes together as I'm sure many of you are familiar with in a work which Spiegelman called Maus the first version of which comes out in 1986 we have the next slide please this is battle number seven Art Spiegelman versus the New York Times as you can see Spiegelman produces sort of Maus it's in two parts the first part you see as a picture on the left the second part excuse me if you look on the right in the best seller list it appears as nonfiction in the second volume which comes out in the early 1990s as Maus too and actually Spiegelman gets into a little bit of a battle with the New York Times because obviously on some level this is absolutely a true story this is a true story of Laudek Spiegelman Art Spiegelman interviews extensively, we have the tapes but of course Laudek Spiegelman and Art Spiegelman don't look like this they don't have Maus heads they don't have tails the Nazis are not cats and what have you and so originally the New York Times wanted to put this in fiction and Spiegelman wrote them and said he was very concerned about this because it wasn't fiction the story and he was worried that this would give credence and aid and solace to holocaust deniers and so the Times agreed to put this on the nonfiction best sell on the nonfiction list which is where it ended up and it really gets again to some of these questions which are present in any autobiography but I think are much more visual and therefore evident in comics biographies, autobiographies and whatnot about the level of storytelling of narrativization and fictionalization that goes on. Maus did it first one can argue that it still remains if not the one of very few high watermarks in the history of these sort of aesthetically ambitious kind of nonfiction sort of storytelling. It comes out that first part comes out in 1986 the same year of this sort of miraculous year that a Batman story The Dark Knight Returns and a story called Watchmen come out which also begin to sort of transmogrify these mainstream comics fully and fundamentally away from being thought at as a juvenile medium no one could read Watchmen and think that this was aimed at little kids it also becomes for both Maus and Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen they become really released in these between hard or cloth covers that could be shelved in bookstores they could appear very very beginning in public libraries so you begin to have this real sense of how do I put this this real sense of beginning of a more elite kind of popular acceptance of this elite and popular acceptance among adults of this kind of material so that begins to go on at the same time that many of these audiences for let's call the mainstream comic books they are growing up they're still staying with this material and thanks to the new venues of comic shops and comic stores that are really aimed to sell this stuff at higher prices to people with more disposable income they can buy sort of more grown up versions of this and that receives its kind of culmination in a certain type in the early 90s with the next slide so can we have that please this is this death of Superman that occurs sort of in the early 90s you know as we sort of now kind of know or feel you know characters don't really die to a certain extent they do they come back but this actually felt like a huge event it sold enormously widely it sold in all sorts of versions and part of that was not only for how would I put this the narrative value or the emotional value it did remind adults of that emotional connection that is kid but also the idea that people were buying these as speculative or investment kind of properties and they would sell multiple editions and people would sort of buy these as investment properties and that really develops a kind of sense that hasn't really ever quite gone away from the comics market which also led increasingly to these kind of event driven sagas right everything is huge Superman dies this character dies this universe explodes and with each of these in some ways one of the concerns is that this battle this kind of battle approach makes things a little less special each time with each time there's sort of a multi-versal crisis we take it a little bit less serious so in some ways the comics the mainstream comics business was being concerned in certain ways about this kind of relevancy and purchase even at the moment of one of its biggest victories but at the same time that those kind of things were happening a new revolution was beginning and I'm going to turn to the next slide the battle of what I call black panther or Marvel comics you could say versus conventional wisdom and the conventional wisdom starting about ten years ago was that you could not really make a very 20 years ago I should say was that you could not very make a very successful comic book movie with very very few exceptions the first Superman movie of course that first Batman movie but it was going to be very hard to make an aesthetically successful and commercially successful a movie no one had really cracked that code and they certainly hadn't really been able to do this in the way that gave some real sense of the magic of these mainstream comics which was these sort of grand panoramas with lots of different characters that sort of went back and forth from different things and then Marvel Studios sort of developed as a studio they began to sort of unravel all of these rights questions that they had had they made these terrible deals where they had sold sort of many of their flagship characters the rights to different film studios and they started with Iron Man and continued to sort of build under the leadership of this guy Kevin Feige this sort of Marvel Universe Marvel Cinematic Universe that really sort of had this kind of enchantment in this magic this was aided by in many ways the development of special effects special digital effects to allow for a kind of presentation of that awe on the screen that you hadn't had before and also with that concomitant expansion came the possibility of telling different kinds of stories from different kinds of corners of Marvel Universe and in fact there was an interview with the producer of Black Panther a little bit before it came out and the concern was raised that maybe people would not go to see a movie in which the characters were not looking like so many of the superhero characters that had graced the screen before which was to say white people and this producer who was Black said look you know I think of this as the fast and furious movies the movies which were very successful they have a multi-ethnic cast people did not come to see the multi-ethnic cast they came to see the cars they came to see all the car chases people are going to come to Black Panther for that and they're going to stay for sort of how good a movie it is for the superhero aspects they're going to stay to see how good a movie it is not being quite true that the only reason people came was because of the superheroing thing there was a real appeal to seeing the story being told that looked different from a lot of the stories before but it did not hurt that it was a tremendously accomplished movie on many different grounds of course as probably everyone who is here knows it was enormously commercially aesthetically successful successful sort of on really on every grounds and again really overturned conventional wisdom and really paved the way for a very welcome development of having a lot of corners of the Marvel Universe to be explored, boosted, reinvented restructured in ways that really reflect a very welcome diversity there so that kind of conventional wisdom I think is in the process hopefully of being overturned but there's one last battle that I want to sort of talk about before we get to the questions and answers and for that I will have the next slide which is that if you've noticed the last let's say half of our battles have really been battles that have been fought in the adult audience among the adult audience that adult range of comics and when we started our story it really was a story about kids mostly speaking and juvenile materials and so for a while it might have well been asked are comics still possible for kids? Does the maturation of this medium mean that there aren't comics left for kids? And I am as many of you may know I am here to delightfully inform you and delightedly inform you but that is not the case yes we have comics like Batman's The Dark Knight Returns which are very much dealing with very grim and gritty and dark and adult and psychologized themes but we are also seeing a real renaissance in comics for kids often although not always between sort of hard covers things like daft Pilki's Dog Man and a Telecom Irish Comics so we have just a wide variety of materials for people of all ages and just to end on a quick autobiographical note you know when I was a kid you know you can go to a public library you can look for comics as I did you couldn't find really almost anything any collection of comics now of course they're everywhere you know you would never have found them in school libraries at all even sort of limited collections they are now again they're everywhere and I see my kids I have little kids sort of reading these things loving these things just a new generation sort of being enchanted with different comics in different ways but that same medium and long way to continue so I'm going to stop there with my 10 battles that is the 1010 final battle of I'm sure there are more and to thank you and to that is the book and I'm going to take some of the questions that are being sent over to me from the YouTube chat the first question I think is you know does this book make a great gift for friends or family members in this holiday season maybe I added that one but of course the answer is yes yes it does I think that everybody here as I think you can see has some connection with comics I really hope that it's a sort of fun story of these comics I think it will be fun for everybody but now I'll get to the real ones can you explain the motivation between comics directed towards adults or children is the first question that I have and I think that you know that's a great question because it gets to questions of motivation and it gets to questions of audience so there are different kinds of people who are in the comics who make comics or make certain kinds of comics primarily for the purpose of meeting a market need right and depending on that market right that could be aimed towards children or adults right if you're writing a Walt Disney comic you know the odds are that you're aiming this for kids and you know while you make it in the way that Carl Barks did with the Donald Duck stories appealing for adults as well you know you're very mindful of that audience if you're DaV Pilkey you know adults may have a fun time reading this with their kids but it's really a new kids on the other hand if you are writing a kind of Grim Gritty Batman series you know that there's an adult set of audiences out there who are very interested in hearing sort of a grown up Batman story that would be too terrifying or to whatever for kids I think also that you know those stories can have within themselves in different ways different kinds of aesthetic ambition so there are certain kinds of stories whether they be superhero stories or science fiction stories or romance stories or autobiographical tales that you want to get into issues and want to be told in ways that really are not appropriate for children and I mean that not just in terms of the content but also in sort of the way of storytelling in sort of the way that it's described and that I think really also is now effectuated by really a wide different variety of media and venues in which to tell those stories not least the internet that you can sort of put up on your own and put up comics and no one really is going to stop you or can't stop you from doing that but there are others as well you can produce them in a book and have them publish etc so those two things and I talk about this in the book those two things really have existed in different ways all through kind of comics history all the way back some of those comic strips really were not designed primarily for kids even though they appeared in the same section as others moving on to what about comics for minorities is a great question one of the stories that I think is hugely important to tell in the book and I do right is the way that certain groups their stories are not told in comics or they're told in very caricatured ways and the efforts by those groups to reclaim to claim to tell kind of their own stories or and or to be part of these larger franchises these larger kind of companies these are very and this happens in different ways all through comics history from different syndicates which really specialized in comics by women or by black people by different kind of independent comics like the one I talked about in a mid-babe comics by attempts like the milestone universe the Dakota universe sometimes called in the 1990s to try and create a kind of sweet of superhero comics by Hispanic or Latinx individuals and creators sometimes in sort of similar companies I tell a lot of these kind of stories in the book and again thankfully we are also at a time where the pool of people of all kinds of different ethnic backgrounds all kinds of different backgrounds were participating in sort of the grand storytelling machineries of our time really is increasing maybe it's not as increasing as fast as all this would like but it certainly is increasing and we are getting to to hear more of those stories I think which is great I think one other question that's coming up is one about collectible comics and I think that's one of the very very interesting questions about comics as an institution as a business as opposed to an artistic medium right or a storytelling medium is the way that comics have become a kind of business franchise it's fair to say that when you know comics start sort of first in the newspaper strips they start in the early comic book days it's very clear that nobody thought of these as items to be preserved or to be collected one of the things for example that you see in obviously very early comics is you know rip this page out of your comic book and it's suitable for framing if you take the staples out and sort of recycle the paper those kind of things in those early days and of course as time went on you had people continuing to say as they grew up we love these comics we're going to preserve these comics we're going to swap them at early conventions right before the internet the comics conventions really were places for the sort of trade and swap comics you begin to have something like the over street price guide which then sort of makes a market for these comics sort of saying this is actually what these comics are worth that really establishes these things and then as I said with that death of Superman you really begin to have the companies sort of realize how much money they can make on these sort of comics as not just sort of very popular things that might sell a lot of copies to read but investment properties and so they say you know we're going to release six editions of this comic, this special comic you know they're in different covers and it's a fancy stick attached with them and we assume some of them are already bagged right they're already put into bags sort of pre sold that way we don't expect you to be reading this we expect you just to I mean one of the things you see now is that very frequently when comics very old and rare comics come on sale they're already kind of sealed in this kind of like loose side block they really are not nobody thinks that you're going to open them nobody thinks you're going to do anything you're going to have a blast so to speak so that is really a very kind of different thing and the market in these comics the market in original art these are going for prices that none of the creators ever could have imagined and in many many cases and this gets to a very important question many of these artists or those original creators would never be able to afford and so that question of creators' rights that's another story that I tell in the book very important I think I'll end the final question here which is what do you think is the future of comics and I think that's a really important question and maybe it's not surprising but I'm very bullish on the future comics for two particular reasons in two different ways the first as I alluded to before really is the way that the internet has provided a really vast canvas for democratization of the comics so for many many decades if you were really working in mainstream comics even to a certain extent on a less alternative and independent comics you really had to be very geographically located in just a couple of places for a long time for mainstream comics with New York City in order to get the assignments in order to be noticed which is very hard otherwise that is not the case anymore if you draw your comics probably on a digital tablet now if you draw your comics you put them up there you know and you get a million you get 5 million views someone is going to notice someone is going to come calling and it doesn't matter where you live it doesn't matter what you look like it doesn't matter who you are if you've got the goods you are findable and you're valuable in that kind of way that's going to pay I think huge dividends already is for the kinds of talent that the industry gets stories that the industry is willing to tell so that I'm very very excited about I'm very bullish about I think also that in terms of the future of comics growing up as I said you would not have seen comics sort of accepted in schools, in public libraries in bookstores in the way that they are now I don't think that's going away I can't sort of see a story in which that goes away as a medium obviously there are particular titles that might constantly be under question but as a medium I think that's there so I think it is woven inextricably into the life of American culture I mean the fact that I'm here at the August National Archives telling and having the National Archives of the United States talking about comics again that's something that 20 years ago would have been hard to imagine so it's really comics are here to stay I think their future is bright and I want to thank particularly David Ferriero and the National Archives and all of you for your time and your attention thank you all very very much


Welcome. Thank you for joining us today. It was a brand new start to a week and we are starting with Mary Gleason. Back by popular demand, Mary joined us last year for an episode and we were just enamored with your wisdom and expertise. So Mary is a consultant and a coach. She's got some woo-woo in her, which I love. And the book across Mary's shoulder on her right shoulder is exactly the book in which she authored that talks about her woo-woo. But Mary is joining us today to talk to us about the secrets to building the cohesive remote teams that we are all experiencing. So before we do start into this conversation, we want to make sure you know who we are if we haven't met you yet. Julia Patrick, thank you so much for coming up with this wonderful idea. Julia is the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I'm Jarrett Ransom, your non-profit nerd, CEO of the Raven Group and grateful to serve alongside Julia as the co-host of this national broadcast each and every weekday. Thanks to our presenting sponsors. Please do check them out. If you are looking to do anything differently in the new year, you want to make sure that you know exactly what these sponsors can do to help you fulfill and forward your mission-driven goals. So again, thank you. Thank you. Thank you to our sponsors that keep these conversations with people like Mary going strong. Welcome back, Mary. Thank you. I was excited to be invited. I'm glad you find my content useful. Oh, yeah. We do. And it's going to become even more important because we were talking in the green room chatter. You know, this working remotely and managing remote teams, I believe is here to stay. And I think that it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that the American, if not global workforce, is really leaning into this. And so it has a lot of opportunity, but it has a little bit of a challenge. And so that's really why we wanted to have you on because it's a new year. A lot of us when we're managing teams think about, okay, this is when we institute new change or we institute new policy. And so we wanted to get you on first and foremost, shifting our brains to knowing that we have a remote team, number one. But how do we know when they're not cohesive? Like, what does that look like? Well, I think when you're not sure you can trust your team, I mean, and I guess I want to say that these comments are for anybody, not just leaders and managers, but from your perspective, possibly as an employee or a member of the team. But some of the things that things aren't cohesive is you're taking things personally, possibly because they're out of context in ways they never were before. You have a feeling of resistance. Somebody said to me once, as the manager, and she made her point quite effectively, she said, why is it that information from the top down is called communication, but information from the bottom up is called resistance. So are you resisting hearing things in a new way? Are you resisting the information that might actually solve some issues for you? You need to understand where that resistance is coming from.  So if it's idle for more than 10 minutes, they get a call saying, what's up? Why aren't you working? I'm sorry, that stuff's just got to go. It's just not going to work right now. That's absolutely devoid of understanding in addition to where your desk is located has changed. Everything that's happening around your desk has changed. So that kind of stuff is just not helpful. And it really gets in the way of team cohesion.  You feel like sort of an entity or a resource for a goal that somehow is impersonal to you. When people dread, and I said, coming to work, that's a sign that things are really off. Like, oh, I want to log in. It's just going to be the same old same old. Things are not cohesive if there's no flexibility for individuals or changing circumstances. People compare their work others in unhealthy ways. It's like, we really got to get a grasp on where you are, where you are in this process, and how you're making this work for you. Because even though we're all working from home now, what's happening around us again is not the same. And so sometimes lack of cohesion is people can't even agree with the goal is, which is a really big problem in communications. And that the big thing that I find is when there's been no change in one's approach to management, when in fact, everything has changed. Does that make sense? It does. And I'm curious if you can tell us more about that. And I'm still stuck on the communication is communication, but it's resistance bottom up. I'm still stuck on that, but I'm curious how you can talk to us and educate us now that this work. And again, we might call it work from home, but let's be honest, people aren't always at home. They could be with family, they could be who knows where, right? So it's really this remote workforce. And Julia, you shared a statistic that it used to be one in so many and now it's, can you repeat that statistic? So one in 67 people could have been work could have been identified as working remotely pre pandemic. That's like one in seven. It's like one in seven. And, and what we were talking about in the green room chatter is that, you know, there are a lot of things driving this. But one of the things that I think is apparent is that there are a lot of people in the workplace that this is their preferred method. I mean, they, it's not been easy and they've had to learn, we've all had to adapt everything from technology to work environments to work spaces within our homes, all of the stuff. But the reality is it's isn't just going to be a snap of the fingers and we're all back to sitting in our cubicles. I mean, the changes to our structural part of workforce is phenomenal. It's phenomenal. And so I think Mary, why it's so interesting to have you on today is that we've got to get a grip on this because this is not just a stop gap situation. You know, it's not. And I think the differences and the dichotomies in our days as employees of the same organization are different.  And so it's not just that they're out there anymore, it's that there is a real extra threat that they are having to face. You know, there is a lot of stress with wearing a face mask all day long. My children all work in settings where they have to wear masks all day long and said there are times when it's just so hot or things just aren't right or you know and and it's really stressful. If you are at all hearing impaired and people have their mouth covered up, that's a great stressor to wear is before you were relying perhaps more on expression and maybe even lip reading to get you through. So we're not all having the same day. That is so true. I went to the bank the other day and not only are we wearing masks, but there's that plexiglass in front of us. So not only could I and I'm a lip reader, right? I'm a huge lip reader thanks to my mom. I swear I got it from her hereditary and genetics. And so then it's also muffled and I find myself like pressing to the to the you know plexiglass and it still doesn't help but all of that plays a role in our stress, our demeanor, how we're showing up and I'm imagining that's coming through by way of either being cohesive or a lack of cohesion within our workplace. And I'm let's talk about how we can build or rebuild this culture within our teams because I also hope you will address for me, Mary. This isn't just about working remotely but perhaps teams that have multi geographic locations. And so how do we build a cohesive culture with these dynamics in play? Yeah, and I hope I can say some things that are all of those elements. But I think the bottom line is relationships have always been important. Now they are absolutely the icon of what we have to strive for.  That makes sense. Wow, you know, I never I never thought of it that way. But yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, that's smart. We're in different locations. I might be snowed in and you might be having a heat wave. We're dealing with different things. And if I'm snowed in and I have kids in school, that means I have a very busy household, right? I mean, so just allowing for differences, you don't necessarily have to be experiencing them. You don't even have to have ever experienced them. I think my big thing is when people tell you what's happening for them, believe them. If it ends up not being true down the road, it's different, but believe them. Give them some wiggle room. Allow them to be accurate reporters of their own reality. Build in time for real communication one on one with your team members whenever possible. Practice active listening. And that's really very basic. It's listen, repeat, and then reply. So I'm listening to you. I hear, I say back to you, if I heard you correctly, here's what you said. Now I'm going to respond. And it's a lovely thing to model because you will find people will do that back. If they've been heard, they will listen to you too. That's not anything new, but sometimes a helpful reminder. My friend's husband leads the team at Microsoft and he has a 3-H approach. It's heard. You want to be heard? Do you want to be helped? Or do you want to be handled? So you just want to tell me something. Do you want help accomplishing something, which is the collaborative approach? Or do you want somebody else to do this instead? You want it to be handled for you. So if you can be really clear about what it is you're asking of your manager or your colleague, that would be really helpful. Not just whining, not just complaining, but communicating with a purpose. It would really help me if I could just walk through this out loud with somebody or I'm not sure here what I'm asking for. Maybe I need some help, whatever it is, or I just can't handle one more thing. But being really clear about what it is you want from the person that you're talking to. I want to interject. I love the 3-Hs. I wrote that down and I have to be honest. I do that in my personal life. If it's a close friend or family member and I'll say, how would you like for me to show up in this conversation? Do you want me to listen? Are you asking for suggestion? But I don't necessarily do that in the work environment, Mary. So I find exactly what you just said. I do it somewhat naturally in my personal space and it's like as soon as that hat comes on with work, I don't think about, is that empathy? Is that being a little bit more empathetic than in the workplace? Yes, and empathy is where all of this is leading. Let me just make a couple more points before we get there if I can. More time for managing each person is really what we're talking about here and I want to be clear. I'm not talking about a therapy session. I'm not talking about having to accommodate the fact that your co-worker's mother isn't feeling well and they had to put their pet down this morning stuff like that. That's good information for you to hear because otherwise you might hear it as resistance to work rather than saying, how would you feel if you took a couple hours and then let's come back and have that conversation? I mean, that's just plain being human being and we are really shifting in this world being more human centered. We were there for a while, then we went to information, then we went to bottom line and we found it really works best when it's more heart centered and we actually deal with humans that are involved. One thing I would like to tell people and I used to tell this to my employees all the time is how much I value manage upward and this can be seen as resistance if it's not handled well but I loved it when people don't assume I remember everything that's on your desk. I don't. I probably remember the latest thing I gave you. That's about it. So you can respectfully say here are all the things I'm working on which is the priority for you. Manage upward. Here are all the things I'm working on. Is this one still real? That sort of thing. That is so helpful when you manage upward. Then again, it's just recognizing that even if everybody is working from home or working remotely, they're not in the same setting. They are at the kitchen table or maybe they have their home office or maybe they're at Starbucks because they don't have Wi-Fi, whatever it is. Just remembering it's different. So I think empathy takes us right into steps to keep the team moving forward. I like that you're saying really let's get back to let's let them have their reality. Let's stay human centered. I'm curious. I'm going to throw the curve ball or put the elephant in the room. This is non-gender specific, correct? This is and I'm curious if you've seen that's a good question, right? Very typically the men that are like, no, that's not how I work. I'm not emotionally driven, but this is really the core values and beliefs of all people. How have you seen that navigated through this time, Mary? I would say that emotional intelligence is not reserved to a gender. It's a responsibility for all of us, especially if you're managing people. If you're managing people and you don't think emotions count, you are in the wrong line of work because that's the big piece that makes us human, right? So I would say nobody's off the hook from developing empathy and from gaining emotional intelligence and I would say none of us have thrived at incredibly emotionally intelligent. We've all got learning and work to do and each person can teach us something about that. We let them. I love that answer. I really think it's important for us to keep in mind. Now tell us about these steps because I'm sure many of our listeners, including myself, are like, okay, we need to rebuild that cohesion within our team, but how the heck do we do it? Okay, no problem. Take notes. I've got all the answers. Actually, I've got some suggestions and what I would say is, and this is what I said in my newsletter, which is you will go a long way to build productive remote games if you can understand how empathy works. And you do that by increasing your intuition or intuitive relationship skills. And that just means being in tune with what's happening for other people. And I found this great quote by the son, the man who founded Motorola. He said, Ed once looked down an assembly line of women employees and thought, these are like my own mom. They have kids homes to take care of people who need them. And it motivated him to work hard to give them a better life because he saw his mom and all of them. And that's how it begins with fundamental respect. And I just thought that is perfect. You have to respect people that you're managing and you have to respect their perspectives are as true as yours. I love that. Yeah. I mean, how many of us have cookie cutter job descriptions, right? They're out there. We're filling them with individuals who bring different things to that position. And that's the next layer that we're talking about. And this other quote, I'll just throw out there that I loved it says, depending on the circumstances, you should be hard as a diamond, flexible as a willow, smooth flowing like water or as empty as space. So one size management is not fit all never has, it really doesn't now. What does the situation call for? Does it call for you to step in and be the boss? This is the way we're going to do it. Does it call for you to step in and say, okay, I understand it's hard over here and it's easier over here. And how can we hold the timeline to accommodate some of these things that are happening, you know, that flexibility, smooth flowing like water, like, you know, let's just keep it going and see how this works for a little while longer. Everybody's doing good. Maybe I don't need to manage right now. Maybe I need to get out of the way. Or as empty as space, you know, and that can mean so many things. But the idea being, not everything needs you to touch it. Sometimes you just need to let things work themselves out and takes great intuition, know when to do those things.  Well, I think it's fascinating because I'm sitting here thinking to myself, you know, we have to be, we have to be empathetic, but we have to change the way we're viewing that. And it used to be we could walk through from the parking lot to the lobby to the lunch room and pick up a lot of these social cues and see people and make a judgment and then make a judgment on ourselves of how we're going to engage.  But now when we don't have that and we have to glean that from maybe a Zoom call or an email or a tone in a communication, it's really changing not only the concept of how we have to be more empathetic, but how we pull these messages in. That's pretty daunting. It is daunting and it's the only way. It's the only way. So, I love what you're saying. We are missing the cues that we used to rely on. Yeah. And so this is where it goes from the aggregate and the congregate to the individual. And it's a much more demanding way of managing a team or an organization or being a member of a team. It's doable. You just have to build in that time. And I think that's the biggest thing is we are on timelines all the time. We have to span those timelines to allow for the human interaction because without it we're sunk. And we think there's a resistance to the goal when in fact, you know, other things are happening for people that line between home and work has been permanently blurred. And you had mentioned that in our green room chatter a little bit about how, you know, some employees are saying you can have my early mornings, my late evenings, but there's this, you know, window of, I'm going to call it chaos because I live that as well. And it's particularly when I pick up my child and then it's that middle, middle of the day chaos. And then it gets back to some normalcy. Talk to us about how you're seeing that in this workflow of remote and having, you know, I'm thinking now of the water, maybe we just need to flip to the flow. How do, how should we manage our teams like that? You know, I think it's looking less at when they're doing the work. And are they doing the work? Is it getting done? Is it getting done well? Is it getting done on time? Then leave it alone.  What's happening for you? You know, there's a lot of people who would go to work and they didn't say boo about what was happening at home. And now they can't ignore it. There's a lot of people who are working from home who miss to the office and having that distinct line that's been blurred. So, you know, I had one manager who said, I never knew that my employee to teenage disabled children. And I saw that on a Zoom call once and I was shocked and I thought, well, no wonder they have to be somewhere every day at a certain time. I thought that they were just drawing acceptable boundaries when in fact that's what their home life required. So it was easier for her to build in a little more flexibility, let this person who was otherwise very good at their job to do it when they could. It's a fascinating thing because in some ways, I'm thinking back to this misconception that we had. And I know that I've been guilty of that myself is if you see somebody at their desk and they're in their chair, you think, okay, they're working here. But that's not really the case. And we have to rediscover what productivity is because our teams have not all been working to their best ability when they were in their cubicle. What we thought was the environment that would make them achieve what they need to achieve. Absolutely. Excuse me. And many of us work better from home. I work better from home where it's an undistracted environment. I started this long time ago as a grant writer for a nonprofit where I needed the time to sit and write the proposal. And there were times that I would close the office, I closed the door to my office and put it in the book that said, writing, please don't disturb. But now I have that ability to find my groove in my workflow and to know really what are those hours of efficiency. Mary, all of this has been fantastic. And I know you have many more resources for us. As we begin to end out today's episode, I really would like to share where people can find more about you and the resources that you have, services that you provide. Thank you. My website, marygleasonconsulting.com, I have a tab on there called blogs and such. And there's kind of all kinds of white papers to download. And please help yourself. That's what they're there for. A lot of them talk about how to build your intuition. That will help you lead to greater empathy. And I want to just take a second to say empathy doesn't mean you take on their problems. That's a different thing. So there's lots there. You are also very welcome to schedule a 30 minute call with me and ask me more questions. I love nothing more than talking about all this stuff. It's been great. Yeah, the website really is amazing. Your content is great, Mary. Check that out because it's a really fascinating look at something that is here to stay, moving forward. And those of us that jump in on it more quickly are going to be a lot more successful and be better people for it. Again, this has been another great episode. We have more than 450 episodes. You can find us on Roku, YouTube TV or YouTube, excuse me, Amazon Fire TV and Vimeo. And so there's a lot of content, especially as we navigate these different things. Again, we want to thank all of our presenting sponsors who've been with us on this journey who continue to help us have the nation's only daily broadcast dedicated solely to the nonprofit sector. It's truly an amazing thing. Okay, Jared, I'm ready to be a better leader. What about you? Well, I'm definitely going to do more of who I am in my personal space, into my workspace. Again, my big takeaway, Mary, and I'm a bit woo-woo as well, but truly is this 3-H approach and to see how I can implement that more into my professional conversations. Such a joy to have you back on. I appreciate all that you do. When you and I first connected, my intuition took over and I was like, okay, I'm resonating with this woman. I feel like it's reciprocal and I want to know more about you and your services. So thank you for joining us again to share with us some more tips on building a cohesive.  That's what I am and I love others to join me. I love it. Hey, that's great and it's been a remarkable way to start the week. We have a lot of exciting things ahead of us in the new year and we have a lot of challenges because we like to end every episode of the nonprofit show. We want to remind you to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow, everyone.


An Eboni-based civil society organization is accusing Governor Dave Umahi of misappropriating 4.5 billion Naira belonging to the state. At a press briefing in Abuja, the executive director of Igu-South Africa, Dalentin Ongwe, also alleges threats to his life for exposing massive fraud in the state. Ongwe says Umahi has a history of lacking in due process, transparency and accountability. Now, more than ever, we are highly concerned about the sincerity of the state government in the disbursement of the 3 billion Naira Ensa Youth Fund and also what had happened to the 1.5 billion Naira Eboni State Autonomous Community Development Fund of 2019. As a civil society organization that is committed to the promotion of accountable democratic governance, we have been asking, and yes, we are still asking the state government to account for the fund totaling 4.5 billion. That is the 3 billion Youth Semi Fund and 1.5 billion Naira.


In this paper, the authors present an approach called PrismEXP for improving gene annotation predictions based on RNA-seq gene-gene co-expression data. They demonstrate its utility in multiple use cases and show how it can be used to enhance unsupervised machine learning methods to better understand the roles of understudied genes and proteins. PrismEXP is available as a web-based application, a Python package, and in a PyTor notebook. This article was authored by Alexander Lachman, Kaley A. Rizzo, Alon Bartow, and others.


There we are We have one order at the Royal Apache buffet rule 46 West out of looking Jersey Mongolian barbecue Look at all that shrimp low-main Broccoli, and he's putting I think a believe of garlic Look at that beautiful vapors of life Jeff Zambal Wonderful aroma the garlic Apache look at the Mongolian barbecue at its best Over here. We have some really nice hardcore sushi calamari beautiful salmon Shashimi and raw shrimp sashimi Let me see what what's in store for me over here. Oh Lamb ribs are bad. Look at that. I'm sure they're gonna bring out more. What do we got here? I? Think that's the tilapia Shrimp wrapped in flounder I think I'm gonna Definitely got to get some some of these lamb ribs here So I can establish my surf and turf Or is it turf and serve? Rambunctious here. I'm not getting everything down Better bring out more lamb ribs. You know, don't mind me. I'm not talking to myself So I do tilapia, but then that wouldn't be surf Because tilapia is a freshwater fish.  It's going on here. It's a set. It's a conspiracy is what it is just like those people those shabronis on the International Brotherhood of Paul of uncle causing trouble Yeah, let me get some let me get some clams here Maybe they're from Ipswich Maybe they're Ipswich clams probably local Ipswich I Like that word Ipswich little necks. They're not cherry stones. They're a little They're kind of small to be cherry stones. They're a little necks or as they say in Japan ridder neck ridder neck We got a muscle meat there. We got some good surf and turf All right, that's enough I got no choice. Here we go serpent turf mid. It is mid January 2019. I believe the second post New Year's Day 2019 buffet Next I will get my lemons And there is the finished product From the Mongolian barbecue More souls back to doing sushi the other guy must be on break and I hope he's hope they didn't cut back on the personnel. Oh Look at it. We got here. Oh Look what's back bless their hearts Peter bread with a gyros, but is there gyro meat inside that is the question No, I don't know what's going on. I got shreds of gyro meat scattered here and there Like it when they had the gyro meat separate and then you make you make your own gyro, you know Because I like a lot of meat in my gyro In my Peter bread, you know, you know, you know what I mean jelly bean Okay, yeah, we got the grilled squash squish otherwise known as squish squash And hopefully the lemons are the lemons that air bless bless their hearts. They remember the limits Look at that. Look at that Look at it. Look at it. What are we fish ice ice cream Hard ice cream Ice cream ice cream I don't see any fatty our buckles any little miniature Chris Christie's diving in you Jeff Sam bellow Letting all the refrigeration out Hello, how are you somebody else? Yeah, why you want to be on YouTube I Always say that Okay, here's my first sit-down James P. Madonna mega life 21 progressive discussions. I got the surf and turf of lamb ribs and Seafood medley kind of in a Zupa de Peche tomato based broth and as my lemons for Be the seafood and My lemon water, which I will make now Okay Here's a shot of the hard ice cream station the sushi Bar section about a royal hibachi. I mean the Mongolian barbecue. There we go. It's all there and It's a lovely Friday afternoon So I'll catch you on the second round round to okay. I'm going to try some Mongolian barbecue take shrimp with Very thin rice noodle chow mein phone Let's see. We got some mushrooms Maybe some broccoli They're gonna cook it over there. All right Okay, here's my plate I Have the baby corns mushroom shrimp Chow mein fun rice noodle Maybe I get some bean sprouts Okay, that's before it's cooked Okay, let me see Get some Mung bean sprouts Mung bean and just have to wait for the king of Mongolian barbecue to show Okay Commodore Jeff same fellow look at the Vapors of life He's commencing to make my Mongolian barbecue You saw the size of it in the raw before I handed it to him he put lots of a hot red pepper and lots of garlic that I requested and That will of course shrink down Beautiful aroma vapors of life now it is Cooking what a beautiful site that is Royal Hibachi buffet move 46 West out of book, New Jersey Truly a culinary Landmark in northeastern, New Jersey actually all of northern, New Jersey It is probably the best bang for the buck the very best value Plus high quality in northern, New Jersey in as far as all Foremost at least restaurants go I Mean the lunch is only ten dollars or you can eat only ten dollars or you can eat and before the official Mongolian barbecue chef returns This poor guy. He's the expert. He's the sushi king sushi and sashimi king The other guy what happened to the other guy he take lunch break He's in the kitchen.  Making the Maki rolls Over there making the sushi rolls sashimi and he's doing the Mongolian barbecue Yeah That's why I said I said Chengdu Szechuan right You know, it's hard to find over here. He can duck kicking duck It's not easy one guy came he brings it in May with one one Asian market brings it in Hard to get and I like a mooncake, you know the mooncake There you go, beautiful The official James P. Madonna post New Year's Day Mongolian barbecue with a lot of shrimp Angel hair rice noodles baby corns Bean sprouts Mushrooms because I'm a fun guy I think it's just about almost ready Don't crimp the shrimp. Hey, don't crimp that don't crimp that shrimp beautiful beautiful Don't the perfection. Thank you very much There he is Okay, there is my post New Year's Day 2019 About mid-January now Mongolian barbecue with lemon water Beautiful sight truly a work of art here at the Royal Hibachi buffet Roo 46 West Saddlebook New Jersey Okay Before I get some succulent papaya Followed by ice cream. I'm going to Partake in some crab soup. That's right. You heard it, right? crab soup Looks good. This has been a mega live 21 production


Hey friends! Today I am hanging out at Disney's Polynesian Resort and Ohana is officially reopening today. I am so excited. This is one of my all-time favorite restaurants and we did not get a reservation. They went like that so I decided to come out and the restaurant opens in two hours and just see if we're here for the opening that maybe we can get in. Anywho's, let's go do this. One thing we got going for us though, if we can't get into Ohana we can actually sit at Tambu Lounge and still get some of our favorite noodles and appetizers that they would serve in there. Ultimately I would love to be able to get into Ohana but if that doesn't happen at least we still can get the noodles. You know what I mean? But it's a whole new menu, a completely different dining experience and I'm excited to try it all. I mean like I said this is one of my all-time favorite restaurants before I've ever even come here. My buddy Evan is actually going to get something to eat at Ohana. Are you excited? Yeah. Yeah? Do you like Stitch? Yeah. Yeah? Oh look at that! You got a hidden stitch. I love it. Well enjoy your food buddy. I hope you have fun. I am with Jackie, super enthused and we're gonna just sit here at the Tambu Lounge and drink some beers and hopefully get on the waitlist if it's possible. Kevin's got the first guest there. First guest in Ohana.  Enjoy them. Yeah cheers. Cheers. And holy moly we are gonna be eating at Ohana. I don't even know how this happened but a nice family came over and they have two extra spots and they asked us to join them and I think we just kindly accepted so it's happening. It's happening. And now we officially get to walk in to Ohana. I am so happy. Oh look at, look at the skewers on the grill. Hi friends. Oh it all looks so good. Look at this. The atmosphere is so amazing. Everyone is excited to be back. The cast members. Unbelievable. Oh thank you. Look at this. Appetizers are here. We've got the cheddar bacon biscuits, the salad and thank you guys so much for having us join you. I feel really honored so I hope you guys are you know I hope we're gonna enjoy the food. Oh yeah definitely.  I'm gonna get Ohana coconut papaya scones and then cheddar bacon biscuits. I have the menu pulled up. I always feel like it's easier to tell you guys instead of show you on the phone. They don't have like paper menus. Everything's still online but I'm excited. I'm excited to try the coconut scones because they look phenomenal. Like when you walked into Ohana you actually came and you got your own bread. Like didn't they start it off that way? So like when you walked into Ohana you first picked up your bread and then the bread was taken to you to the table. Yeah so this is the coconut pineapple scone and it looks phenomenal. So I'm trying the coconut and papaya, not pineapple, papaya scone and a little honey butter too. You know I'm all about the bread service so this is gonna probably be good. This legitimately tastes like a dessert bread. Honestly like this is something I would expect to get for like breakfast. Look at that. Unbelievable. Mahalo. That is awesome. Now I'm gonna try the Cheddar Bay bacon biscuits and I did add the butter to it and I think these are gonna be more of a savory biscuit compared to the coconut papaya ones. But we'll see. They're good right? I definitely think I like the scones better but this is more of a bread service. I don't taste much cheese in there. But the good stuff's coming. There's the pot stickers. That's what we've been looking for right there. What else she got in that magical tray up there? There's more coming around the other side. The wings. Oh boy. Me, Tommy, me want wingy. Look at this. Oh beautiful. We gotta make some space in here. I like how they give us these little handy things that grab the wings. I like flats. I'm all about the flats, you know? And then also gonna grab a pot sticker. I'm shaking. Look at those wings right there. And I think I'm gonna start with the pot stickers. These were my favorite.  Same thing with those noodles. The first ones I've ever eaten. I've always been a picky eater before I came to Disney World and discovered this world of food.  And now I'm glad to say I love pot stickers and it's all because of here or so. Here we go. I'm gonna try them. Revisiting my first pot sticker. Look at that. Nice and crunchy and perfect. I'm gonna try that like weird and hack when it comes to wings. You know, I don't know how they do it.  Yeah, I don't know if this is gonna work like the way I thought it would. I don't know how they do it, but I tried.  I don't know. I'll just try it here, huh? Oh my god! Oh my god! You did it! It worked! I can't believe that worked, but these are so good. And it's a honey quarter sauce instead of like a buffalo sauce. Oh, I still have a little bit of meat in there. And also, I'm not sure if I mentioned, but the dumplings are pork. So it's pork dumplings and they're tossed inside of a garlic chili sauce. So that's probably what that little broth flavor you were tasting. You know? Like it actually is tossed in sauce and they were phenomenal. And we can get as many as we want so we'll get more. We'll get more. There we go, more wings, more pot stickers. That's the way.  Holy moly! Look at this feast! And we're not even at the main course. The thing that I noticed is now the pot stickers and the wings come out separate. Used to be pot stickers, wings, veggies and noodles. So I guess they're using the noodles with the main course. So like honestly the noodles used to be the appetizer, but I think it made big enough wave that it's actually like that's the big thing, you know what I mean? What can we handle here? We can handle a lot. Oh, that's beautiful. Look at that. The same ramen noodles we have before, okay? Oh yeah. 8-way chicken cooked with teriyaki sauce and kebasa sausage and baklini. The garnish is fried rice noodles. So this isn't even everything. This is still just a little bit like we still have more food coming. Wow! Holy moly! You've got the roasted 8-way chicken with Polynesian inspired chimichurri and then the baklini and then also the Ohana noodles, which you know everyone loves the Ohana noodles and then kabasi and then we're gonna get the actual wood-fired grilled teriyaki beef. This is amazing. Oh yeah, the bread pudding is the last. Oh here comes the steak now. We need a bigger table. We're gonna need a bigger boat. This is amazing. Look at that. So it is all cooked on the kababs and then they just take it off. Yeah, I saw them. Holy moly! Look at that. Oh my lord. I think I'm gonna get the meat sweats. This is gonna be hard to finish all this. So we're actually sitting with a party of six and they brought out so much food at the end here. I think we're gonna get more though. I think we can do it. Like I know I could probably, I could put a dent in probably one of those skillets. Let's dive in right? Holy moly! We got multiple little tongs here. Wanna share a tong? Here you go. Or do you want the shrimp casserole? You just want to put it over there? No. Alright, we're gonna build a plate here. I'm gonna build a plate. I'm gonna start off. I'm gonna grab some of the teriyaki beef. No, that's not the tong. But a bing butter boom. This I think is for this. Excellent. The spoon is for this. Here we go. I'm gonna grab some chicken. This feels like Thanksgiving. Right? It's like a family meal, you guys. Oh, look at that noodle pole. There we go. Shake it off. There we go. Oh boy. Scoop sea potato. They also add noodles and sausage on that one too. So this is kind of like a bigger portion and that's a smaller one. Oh, I gotta take a little, a little sausage, a little kabasa, a little broccolini. Yep. And I think that's it. I think I got everything. Oh wait, I do need to get a little bit of the shrimp casserole. That's the way. I've got my plate all together. A little bit of everything. That's the way. And we're diving right in to the noodles. No fuss at all. But as I spoke earlier about the dumplings, the same goes for these noodles. My first time like having teriyaki or soy-glazed noodles. I've never really experimented before with like, like, food outside my comfort zone except for when I came here. And now I've been finding places that duplicate these noodles and no one does. So long awaited here. Oh boy. I'm gonna bite this all right now. Oh boy. Amazing. I am just so happy, honestly. And I'm also happy that they sell these over at the Tamboo Lounge. So just in case I can't get my reservations here, like today I was gonna get these noodles regardless. Like, regardless, I was walking out of here with these noodles. And here I am. Okay, so I just had the noodles and the cast members, they asked anybody want any more noodles as soon as they dropped the plate down. Like, they dropped down all of the different dishes and they said anybody want more noodles. And of course we said yes. And they brought over a gigantic skillet just of noodles. And it is so amazing. Oh my gosh. Look at this. Isn't that just giant? It's huge, right? Yeah, but we're gonna eat it all. Did we combine this skillet already? Yes. Yeah. Oh boy. It's going down. So one thing that I immediately noticed is the chicken is different and it's actually not on the skewer. This is actually bone-in chicken. It's, I guess, the way they're making an eight-way chicken. So I'm gonna try it now. But I'm pretty sure I'm gonna like the old chicken better because I loved it. I love getting that char taste. So we'll see. This is more of a seasoned chicken itself. Oh yeah. I think I definitely like the old chicken better just because of the char. But this is still very good chicken. It's like chicken that you would get like with good seasoning on it. Like rotisserie. Now even though the steak or the beef is actually cooked on the skewer, it isn't the same either. But it does have that char to it. And I do appreciate that. And it also has a teriyaki glaze to it. And I'm excited to try it because it looks good. And it's the way I like it. But I wonder if you can get it cooked a little less because it seems like a little bit on the well done side. So I don't know if they take preferences or not. I'm gonna try it the way it is right now. I'm gonna like it though because of the char. And even though it's not like the way that I would eat it in general, you can still taste the flavor. But here we go. Very good. I actually like the steak more than I like the chicken. And I also tried the kabase. And that is actually decent. I wasn't expecting the kabase to be good here. But it is actually a really, really good. So we just asked and you can ask for like a specific temperature. So we're gonna switch and we're gonna get one that's mid rare and sauce on the side because I'd like to try it on its own. But I'll delete this because this is like actually really decent. Even though it's set to like mid well, I mean, I think that's just the generic like 10th that they cook it through. And yeah, I mean, we're doing a lot of damage here. We eat a lot of food. I'm gonna try the shrimp now. I'm so excited to try the shrimp, but I'm also a little bit nervous because it's not gonna live up to the expectations of the old shrimp. But I'm gonna give it a go. My first instinct was to kind of take the casserole off the shrimp and just eat the shrimp on its own. I'm gonna try it with the casserole first. But like I'm very hesitant. I'm going for it though here. It's not bad. It's not great. I mean, it's not at all the shrimp that they wouldn't sell here. But I mean, I think they need to bring the shrimp back. They do. I mean, hands down. In the center of our dining room, ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for the chefs of the evening. Thank you. And our hosts and hostesses were brought to enjoy dining room together. Please put your hands together. Up front for the host and the hostesses. Now we have a young lady in our audience. These are Cedar for the evening. Please put your hands together for my sister, Ika Pahia. Regardless though, I think this is still a very good meal. Like honestly, for the price value compared to other price values, this is the best you're gonna get. Hands down. One thing I didn't show before, but take a look at that view. Look at that view. We've got the castle right back there. Absolutely amazing. I know it's a little bright, but you can see it just a little bit. Kind of looks like a little bitty castle at this angle, doesn't it? An itty bitty castle. I'm gonna get myself some more noodles though. Look at this. Gotta get them while they're hot. Get them while they're hot. Oh yeah. Also take a look at this. We got some chicken nuggets and french fries and mac and cheese. This is the kid offerings. Yeah, just look at all the food though. Holy moly. I was talking a big game like I was gonna eat a lot. I do feel like I did eat a lot, but I probably could have done a lot more. Like I could have eaten a lot more, I feel like but it's kind of it's still earlier in the day. I have to say that all of the originals are my favorite. I love the noodles. I love the wings, but the kibasi was probably my favorite out of all the meats and the steak without the teriyaki glaze on its own is actually really decent. So overall, look, I would I would definitely think this is a great family style meal. It's probably the one that has the most offerings, like I said, so it's definitely worth the price. I can do the noodles. I could do another round. Oh boy, not that much. That's just enough plettie. It's got to shake it off. Shake it off. Now it's time for the best part of the meal, the bread pudding. Now, I've had the bread pudding for a while now because they were still serving it at the Tambou Lounge and inside Kona. You could even get the bread pudding to go. There it comes. Oh, look at that. Oh, double skillets. Oh, wow. Oh, that's actually the perfect thing. Oh, look at how pretty that is. Macaroons and everything. It is amazing. Sauce on it. Sauce on it. Yep. Give us that poor. Oh, that is the way. Oh, that's the stuff. Oh, extra sauce. Thank you. That is absolutely amazing. I love when they pour the caramel sauce on. I am so excited to dive into this and it's so good because it's bread pudding that like holds together. You know what I mean? Ain't no soggy bread pudding here. This is my first time having Ohana bread pudding. I know they do serve this at Kona also. I thought I got it with you. Yeah, maybe we got it at Kona, but is it the same? Yeah. Okay. There it is. There it is. Still the best bread pudding I've ever had. Absolutely love it. Now, I am completely full and I need to move along. It was such an amazing dining experience. We were in there for like two and a half hours. No joke and it was so good every single part of it. Still without having the favorites, I still think it's an incredible value for the price. Like I said, in the experience, I do miss the shrimp and I miss the chicken and the steak the way that it was, but I'm all on board for the new things to at least give them a try. Do you know what I mean? It's still worth it for the price. Before I head out though, I did want to show you the Tambu lounge is selling the noodles for Ohana and it has all of the barstools back. So no longer the tables and it is first come first serve. So definitely a spot if you want to come get the noodles, this is where you can be and say hi to Francisco. Since we're here in the Polynesian and we are here for dinner, I think we might stick around and watch happily ever after walk around the resort a little bit and just enjoy this place because it is beautiful.  I'm happy with that. One thing I have to say about the Polynesian, it has the coolest looking furniture out of any resort. Look at this. Look at those kids chairs. Look at that couch and look at the chairs. Like they're huge.  It's a fancy chair and of course we got to take a look at the fancy for doors here. I actually own this one but I didn't get it in time to bring today and I'm kind of a little upset that I didn't because I love it. I keep big stash of hats at home that I like to switch out for occasions but that one I forgot and I thought it was in my car and oh well next time I guess. Sadly I'm not too sure if we're going to be able to get happily ever after. Looks like we might get rained out. It's like a light sprinkle now but we'll check it out. We'll scope out the scenario always. One of my favorite things is when they put out the fresh towels so you can wipe yourself in case it does rain but like I said just little sprinkles. Rain drops falling on the glass. It's like a little sun shower not too shabby and also I noticed they have the fire torches going. I love when they light the fire torches. Look at that isn't that so nice. So fun and I like hearing them too. Well you can see the rain drops falling in the fire. I don't think we're going to make it to happily ever after guys. I am too full and it's definitely going to look like it's going to rain. Honestly if I show you the the skies right now it's going to happen big time and I think we should duck out where we can at the moment. Super super gray skies and we have just about an hour and 20 minutes so it's probably going to be an all out downpour but it's okay. I enjoyed my oh I think it's actually going to start raining now. You can see that I can feel it in the feel it in the air and can you feel the love tonight. So thank you Christie and Katrina for inviting us to your table. We probably wouldn't have been able to get into Ohana. If you plan on coming um they're not doing walk-ups like I thought that they would but I mean it's just too popular. It is that good. It is that popular and like I said if you do want to just get the noodles go to the bar. Tambu bar. They've got it. They even have the bread pudding too. So you can get kind of like a little bit of a dessert and an appetizer but not the main courses sadly or else I probably would be hanging out the Tambu bar with Francisco for hours on hours on end. Anywho's like I said that's going to do it for me tonight. I hope you guys enjoyed the video. Let me know what you thought of Polynesian uh Ohana and let me know what you think of it if you've eaten there before. I still think it's a great value but I do like the old one a little bit better. So we'll see you next time. Bye. Look at this. I ran into someone that has the same exact tattoo and not just like the same like design but like the same way like we have the elder wand in the middle. We did it the right way. Oh yeah you see like that's the traditional one. Oh wow. How crazy is that? I love it. Thanks guys. Have fun.


Cancer formation is a complex process involving multiple intracellular and extracellular stimuli, regulated by specific treatments adapted to each type of tumor and highly dependent on the tumor environment, intracellular molecules, and pathways. Reactive oxygen species, ROS, and autophagy levels play a regulatory role during cancer development from cellular transformation to metastasis, which may serve as potential future therapeutic targets. This article was authored by Laura Poilaporez, Gillis de Spouy, Regis Delage-Maru, and others.