Interview Brooke Gladstone

At this point, the “graphic novel” doesn’t really need any more legitimizing. Though some purists may writhe at the aspirational pretension of the term itself, graphic novels (or “comic books”) have emerged as a completely valid, and vivid, narrative format. They have also become a reasonable way to tell something other than fictional stories, from biographies (Chester Brown’s Louis Riel) to historical anthropology (Zach Worton’s The Klondike) to even more ambitious intellectual histories (Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou’s dense account of Bertrand Russell’s career, Logicomix). But there’s never really been anything like The Influencing Machine.

Written by Brooke Gladstone, co-host of NPR’s weekly On The Media program, and illustrated by Josh Neufeld, The Influencing Machine is more a graphic discourse than a graphic novel. Skipping across continents, and weaving threads through historical events separated at times by centuries, The Influencing Machine provides a debrief on the history and operations of media. Gladstone looks at the emergence of the press, the importance of the First Amendment (she refers to it as “America’s greatest contribution to civilization”), and role of bias in contemporary cable news, to name just a few of the book’s bundle of talking points.

Gladstone herself serves as the guide and central character in The Influencing Machine, guiding the reader through her argument like a Dickensian ghost. Along the way, she puts her own ideas in conversation with Richard Nixon, Bill O’Reilly, W.B. Yeats, John Hersey, Prince Albert, Morpheus from The Matrix, and dozens of others. Exhaustively researched, elegantly argued, and stylishly illustrated by Neufeld in a way that gives a guiding simplicity to even its headiest ideas, The Influencing Machine is a singular piece of contemporary media criticism.

Gladstone will be in Toronto on Saturday speaking and reading at the Studio Theatre as part of the International Festival Of Authors. Given The Influencing Machine’s unique formal approach to contemporary matters of media, it’s probably no surprise that the reading is falling under the McLuhan 100 banner, commemorating the 100th anniversary of media prophet Marshall McLuhan’s birth. We spoke with Gladstone about making a comic, “hyperactive attention,” the influence of McLuhan on her work, and what it’s like to be a cartoon dog.

The A.V. Club: You mention in the acknowledgements that you’ve long wanted to write a graphic novel or a comic, but the decision to do a book like The Influencing Machine seems a bit odd. As you note, there isn’t really anything comparable.

Brooke Gladstone: It’s true. There are few “comparables,” as they say in the book biz. I took as my model Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. In that brilliant book, he explains the potential for the conveying of information through that medium. It really demands an incredible discipline and economy. I was interested in the challenge. I’m in an aural medium, so I wanted to try a visual one. And I wanted to stay with my original medium, which is radio. Radio is so intimate. I thought that if I could look the reader in the eye and speak in balloons, it would be able to maintain the same conversational quality that I’ve used over a couple of decades of radio. So it was partly for those reasons.

AVC: How did you go about actually constructing the book and the relationship between your ideas and the images?

BG: I didn’t realize how hard it would be. I’m very grateful to Josh Neufeld, who is a brilliant and versatile cartoonist and was able to take all my visual ideas and make them work. Sometimes I had ridiculously high expectations for what could be squeezed into a panel. He functioned kind of as the brilliant, experienced director of photography for a newbie director. He told me what was possible. I would send him very detailed descriptions for every single panel—I sort of storyboarded the thing in words and used visual references from the Internet. He’d figure out how to fit all that stuff in or have a conversation with me about what would be left out.

AVC: Near the end, you talk about this idea of “deep attention” versus “hyper-attention” or “hyperactive attention.” The graphic format of The Influencing Machine seems conducive to both. You sustain a developed argument through the book, but at the same time, it has this quality where you’re bopping around from person-to-person and showing a few different arguments on one page. Was the idea to merge these two forms of attention, these ways of engaging with media?

BG: Wow, I wish I’d thought of that! [Laughs.] I think that’s right. I think that’s the way that I think. Personally, I’m someone with a hyper-attention issue, which works well for a short form such as radio. But this book is the longest thing that I’ve ever written. It is one sustained argument that’s created in vibrating bits of info-nuggets that fly around without a necessarily clear chronology. You have stuff from the Stone Age and stuff from the year 2045. So yeah, there is this vibrating quality. I do think you can convey complex information with these nuggets and create a kind of unified theory. It doesn’t have to be a continuous line in its presentation. It can hop and jump like a bunch of digital dots and still form a big picture.

AVC: You clearly seem very sold on the graphic novel being the right form for this book. But there are so many other people whose words are used, and who are rendered as cartoons, in The Influencing Machine. Was there any resistance from those people, who either may not have wanted to be physically caricatured, or who may not have wanted to see their ideas framed by speech bubbles?

BG: Hmm… well, here’s an interesting little fact. Most of the material that I have in the book is either from interviews that I’ve done over many years in the past, material I’ve taken out of their own writings, or material published elsewhere. There’s a very long section of notes at the back where you can see where it all comes from. So, I actually told no one that they would be appearing in my book! [Laughs.] I have heard from people since. Everybody seems uniformly thrilled.

I think there’s a kind of immortality that’s created when you appear in a comic book. Some friends of mine from NPR once appeared, under their own names, in an X-Men comic book. And I thought, “Now that is something to truly strive for!” And although that won’t happen for me, I expect, at least in my book I got to be a dog, I got to be Medea, I got to wonder through the Matrix, and appear in a Tarot card deck, and be a semi-robot and the Bride of Frankenstein. I got to indulge some of that fantasy urge that I have. I really am a bit of a science-fiction lunatic, so this was the closest I could come.

AVC: It must have been an interesting process, not only being drawn as a cartoon, but the process of going from you—yourself, Brooke Gladstone, a person—to being a character of sorts. In the book, you’re as much Brooke Gladstone, the voice that people associate with you and your radio show, as you are this fictional character version of yourself.

BG: Well, who’s to say that I’m not a fictional character of myself on the radio? I mean, there are certain qualities that come out on the radio that I don’t really engage in the rest of my real life: There’s a clarity, there’s an engagement. It’s myself, super-focused. I think it’s the radio person, with just a few more flourishes that I tried to put on the page, with Josh’s help.

There are certain qualities [similar] to the way I am in the world. For example, whenever I’m anxious or excited, my eyebrows tend to smoosh and go up. This is something that my co-host calls the “brow-ulator,” where you can judge my level of anxiety by how high my eyebrows go. I didn’t have eyebrows in the book, but Josh did that with my glasses. Sometimes they would fold upwards as if they were my eyebrows. I think in many ways, it’s just a stop-motion version of the person I generally present.

AVC: And now people have this handy, cartoon version of your face to associate with you when they listen to your show.

BG: “As simple as possible” is a lesson of Scott McCloud’s that’s worked so well for anime. The fewer details you include, the more likely you are to create a universal character that people can identify with. The more details you fill in, the more likely you are to give people reason to not identify with you.

AVC: At the International Festival Of Authors, you’re speaking as part of the Marshall McLuhan centenary celebrations. In the book, you refer to McLuhan as “the sage.” When people say stuff like that about McLuhan, it’s kind of hard to gauge how cheeky and how 100 percent reverent it is. What influence has Marshall McLuhan had on your work as a reporter and a broadcaster?

BG: Well, Marshall McLuhan invented a bunch of ideas and categories that have informed everybody’s perception of this media world, just the way Freud did for the landscapes of the mind. Just like Freud, there are a number of conceptual baskets that McLuhan has come up with that may not be adequate in this most modern of ages. But there are still phrases that he’s coined that will never go away, like “The Global Village.” His influence kind of ebbs and flows for all of us who look at the business. Even if you’ve never read a page of McLuhan—and believe me, McLuhan is not the easiest read in the world; he’s often very befuddling—but reading him almost doesn’t matter because his influence is everywhere in how people look at the business. A lot of time is spent challenging his categories. But regardless, it has an impact.

AVC: Now this event you’re reading at is part of CBC Day, which is of course our public broadcaster here in Canada. And you’re with NPR and WNYC, which are also public broadcasters, though a bit differently configured. Do you see that public broadcasting, especially against corporate-owned media, faces any unique challenges or offers any unique liberties for you as a reporter?

BG: I have a feeling the CBC is doing pretty well in Canada, right now.

AVC: Well, it depends who you ask. Some would say it’s backsliding a bit. It’s one of those things where if you’re in the government’s pocket, it seems like you can’t get access unless you tow the line. But they still produce a handful of good radio and television programs.

BG: Well public broadcasting in America, especially public radio, is very different. Its government subsidy averages at only about 10 percent. It is a really mixed bag of funders. There are corporations, there are foundations, there’s that 10 percent or so from the government, and then there’s the listenership, the begging that we do tri-annually to get people to send in money. That accounts, in most places, for at least half. So what you’ve got is a much closer relationship with the community and a much more diverse pool of funders, so no particular one can have too much influence.

What was once considered to be the most ludicrous and unlikely of funding structures has made public broadcasting here not only uniquely independent but, strangely, on a more solid footing than many of its commercial competitors. Public radio used to be a joke. Now public radio’s morning show, Morning Edition, is the top-rated morning show in the country. At one time, the idea of competing with television was a joke. Now, many, many public radio shows have audiences that far exceed anything that’s on cable TV. And while network TV still gathers the largest audience, it’s largely ignored. This says something about our culture: The aging nature of that audience makes it easy for advertisers to ignore them.