Welcome to the Thing About Salem podcast.

I'm Josh Hutchinson.

And I'm Sarah Jack.

Welcome to the third and final installment of our interview with Ben Wiki, author of the hot new graphic novel More.

Wait, a Salem story.

Yeah.

I just want to say as a podcaster on the subject of witch hunts, as a descendant, and then just as a enjoyer of literature and comics coming from all those perspectives.

When I got to view your work, the first thing I was so excited because I could see it was going to be a journey that I was going to like go to Salem, like back through time, although you see the layers of time in it.

And right away I was like, I want to be in the space.

I want to see how Ben tells the story.

And you just as you mentioned, it's a big book and it has all of this art and the words from the past and your notes and the input from the historians.

It's all there.

But you go through it a panel at a time, a page at a time.

Plus all of your storytelling with your visuals is so incredible.

It's just really phenomenal.

And it's enjoyable to spend time in more weight.

It's enjoyable to go to the space that is like, it's a raw space.

It's a truthful space.

And yeah, I'm so grateful that you put the work in and give it to the world.

We need it.

We've needed it.

More pieces of history need to be done like this.

But I'm so grateful that it's our ancestors history and it is such a essential part of understanding American history and American present.

Yeah.

I thank.

You so much for that.

It's very, very, very kind of you.

I finished the book.

I didn't know what people were going to think of it.

It's been very gratifying to just look behind my shoulder occasionally and see people behind me.

I got a kick out of that.

It's very rewarding for me, especially after just having this on the back burner as just a 10 year labor of love of just doing other things and then always going back to this book and just taking as much time and effort as I could and to just trying to make it as good as I could and as accurate as I could.

Yeah.

And I think.

Every generation, I think it's a story that should be told with every new generation.

I think every new generation should have some new way of telling the story.

The way I think about it is that it really.

Is America's best example of a what happens to all theocracies?

Ultimately, they will crumble with the very first hint of anything from the invisible world.

You're going to, of course, get demonization and people at each other's throats and who said it, Cotton Mather, mauling each other in the dark.

And it is also, of course, America's best example of what happens when a society can, of course, tear itself apart from the inside with intolerance and blind faith and petty vengeance and hatred.

I think Gore Vidal was right that we do live in the United States of amnesia.

We tend to remember episodes of our history that we're comfortable with, ones that make us look good and Salem wish trails.

This whole pandemic of fear is a blight.

It is not something that is easy to swallow.

19 men and women hanged and one man pressed to death and five people dying in jail, including a newborn baby that's.

Really tough to.

Swallow It's especially really tough when you look around at modern day Salem where all this stuff happened and you say, actually none of the spooky stuff would be going on if there weren't 19 men and women hanged.

And what man pressed about?

Yeah.

It I don't think people are.

Asking enough questions, I think there's a cognitive dissonance.

I think that a vital point has repeatedly been lost, and I think there's a lot of really good opportunities to tell the story, especially in these, as I said, despotic times.

I mean, these times where you've got families being torn apart and people being deported and children being arrested and all that.

I don't see anybody walking around Salem making that connection.

I also don't see many people in Salem talking about how witch hunts are still happening in the world as we're sitting here comfortably in our chairs, in our homes, in our secular democracy, in our post enlightenment times, with our enlightenment values and our secular lives.

We're not really.

Talking about how this is all still going on.

And because of that, we are failing to recognize repeatedly that our brothers and sisters across the Atlantic, their present nightmare used to be ours.

And if we don't understand what witch hunts actually were and meant in America and in Europe, then in the West.

Then we can't really.

Empathize with what's going on in India and Africa.

We sit back and we buy our $80 ones and we think they're.

That's just how they do things over there.

That has nothing to do with what happened in Salem in 6092.

No, it has everything to do.

Witch hunts happened for the same reason.

And it's the kind of boring, human, mundane reasons, as I said, of landlust and jealousy and somebody refuses my sexual advances or I want that guy's land or whatever.

There's always going to be the buttoned push for the invisible world, for witchcraft.

That's how it existed in.

History, the word which it developed through Christianity as a way for Catholics and Protestants to demonize each other and for all of them to demonize Jewish people.

That's how the word which grew over time.

I think we've kind of lost that.

I think a really troubling and to me depressing mixture of pseudoscience and pseudo history has stunted not only Salem's progress towards perfect hindsight, but America's and this book.

Yeah.

It's a little angry at the end.

I didn't expect to do a polemic.

I didn't start this book setting out to go, you know, I'm going to Pierce the magic bubble of modern Salem.

I didn't think my pen was going to be that sharp to Pierce that bubble.

But the more I researched, the more I, of course, empathized with these people from history, the more I drew them.

I mean, drawing them is a completely different war.

Yeah.

I mean, that's an experience.

You know, the more angry I got, the more I had an opinion.

If you.

Set out to draw Giles Corey for a graphic novel, You most people would probably the first thing they would draw is him being pressed to death, or you're going to draw people being hanged or that kind of thing.

I wanted to know who these people were.

I set out to draw these people as they were.

I was putting off for many years of this project any drawings of these people being executed or suffering slowly or the agonies of these people.

Because I didn't feel like I had that range when I started out.

I thought this is going to be something I'll have to draw, but I will take absolutely no pleasure in doing so.

So I started out drawing Giles Corey.

By the time.

I drew Giles Corey being pressed to death on September 19, 6092.

I had been drawing him for nine years and I had.

Drawn his entire.

Life.

I had drawn his baptism.

I had drawn all three of his marriages.

I had drawn all the shenanigans and things that he had gotten up to in Salem.

I had drawn his crossing across the Atlantic.

I had.

Drawn its children.

Growing up and that's different.

And so it.

It meant something more when it finally came time to saying goodbye To him, to Martha, of course, to Mary Eastie, to everybody.

I had tried as much as I could to empathize and humanize these people, to get to know them, to not just look at them as collateral damage or witchcraft fodder or as Saints or martyrs, but to look at them as human beings who senselessly suffered.

I I just really wanted.

To get this right on a human level, on an empathetic, compassionate level, and to convey that to readers of yes, these people may have had buckles on their shoes.

Yes, they may have practiced it to our minds today, a kind of extremist form of faith, but they still had jealousies and they still had love and they still had the fear of death, and they still wanted to avoid pain and to achieve some kind of happiness and fulfillment in life the way that any of us do today.

It's so important to show the humanity to allow the reader to empathize with the subject because that's how you get into understanding somebody is seeing them as a human and you can relate more to the experience and maybe it moves you to change your own behaviors or something of that nature.

Yeah, and also to show the.

Antagonists not as mustache twirling villains, but as people who think they're doing the right thing.

Everyone has their own reason for doing what they're doing.

I mean, OK, my portrayal of Thomas Putnam is the bit mustache twirling Snidely whiplash, I got to admit.

But.

No, it's.

Good to always just remember, because you got to remember why people do these things, because that's your only real insight into understanding how they still happen, how they happened at all.

What happened in Salem wasn't the first witch trial or witch hunts in American history, wasn't the last either.

But they are the biggest.

They are the most documented or well documented.

And because of that, you can really look into people's lives and look into letters and look into writings and trying, just trying to figure out how people were feeling about what they were doing and why they were doing it and what they were doing.

Yeah, How does it feel to know your work will inspire a new generation of artists and storytellers?

Oh my gosh, I haven't.

Really thought of that.

It wasn't really my thought while I was doing it.

I think my process for.

Doing it was so isolated, and so it's just trying to exercise something out of myself, trying to get something off my chest so that I could understand it.

But of course then I finished it and a really estimable guy in Canada has created a whole study guide for the book so it could be syllabilized and taught in schools and things like that.

I really do hope that it is a tool, a learning tool.

My quarrel with the Crucible.

Is not.

The fact that it is fundamentally historically inaccurate, Arthur Miller at the time said.

This is not meant to be a historically accurate play.

My beef with the Crucible is how it is taught in high schools instead of the actual history.

If you're going to be teaching American history in public schools in America, you're going to be talking about what the Pilgrims, you've got the Mayflower, and then you're just jumping to the Revolutionary War.

There's this whole.

Like 70 years between.

That is very fascinating.

You've got not only the witchcraft trials, but you've got Kilton Phillips War, which was one of the catalysts, I would say, for what happened in Salem.

You've got all these events that happened in between and.

My hope is.

That if you're going to be teaching a class and the works of Baker, Oregon Roach are perhaps dense for high school class or something like that.

I hope this can.

Offer something with young people or just anybody who picks up the book.

I I hope that it helps people and that it encourages people to think I am a cartoonist.

It's not my job to convince people of my own convictions and my own opinions.

It's not also my job to BS people or to give people what they want.

It's my job to just.

Be honest about how I feel about things and to just allow people to think differently.

And if the book does that, then I've done my job as a cartoonist.

And it is also my hope to, I guess, make the jobs of historians a little easier to have a book in pop culture that dismisses the ergot theory or puts the Crucible in context with the actual history, just so that historians can go about their days not being asked really weird questions.

If you have this kind of book in pop culture, in the bloodstream of American pop culture, then that can't hurt.

But as to its impact, I have no.

Clue.

What's going to happen?

I hope it'll help.

I think it will, and I think that more weight is a must have for any home of anybody who's interested in Salem to any degree.

It's great for beginners.

It's great for intermediates.

I loved it myself for being taken back visually to see the things that I've been writing about for years to be there.

So I definitely recommend it to everybody.

It's available September 23rd.

September 23rd, yeah.

And I'm going to be starting a book tour on the northeast of different places where I can give talks and sign copy of the books if anybody's interested.

October 18th, I'm going to be at Jabberwocky Books in Newburyport, MA.

October, I think 10th to the 12th, I'm going to be at New York, NY Comic Con, and in November 15th, I'm going to be a keynote speaker at the Festival for Nonfiction Comics in Brattleboro, Vt So far, that's the book tour.

I'm doing a bunch of stuff, embracing myself.

It's going to be a blast.

Yeah.

I'm very looking forward to it and engaging with people.

Yeah, yeah, that'll be a blast.

Thank you so very much.

Oh my gosh, thank you both so much.

Oh my God.

This was so much, this was so great.

I've been a long admirer of everything that you guys do on this podcast and the detail and the commitment that you both have on a day by day basis.

Oh my goodness, you guys are definitely after my own heart and it's been really great manifesting among you today.

Great.

I've enjoyed it so much I could carry on for hours talking about this.

Yeah, thank you.

Me too.

Thank you for joining us for this special three-part interview with author and illustrator Ben Wiki.

Who's more weight?

A Salem Story is available now today at bookshop.org/shop.

Slash and Witch Hunts.

Buy yourself a copy and one for your friend.

You won't be disappointed.

Ben Wiki has given us two books to give away to our listeners.

His new book?

Morawi.

Tell us the story of this fellow right here, Giles Quarry.

To get the details on Ben's book giveaway, go to our podcast, YouTube channels and to our Patreon community.