Picture Book

Writer Michael Goodwin wanted a basic primer on economics – something that would explain the discipline in ordinary language.

“I was a history nut, and I got frustrated because a lot of the history I read kept coming back to economic patterns, and I didn’t understand them,” says Goodwin. “I was looking for a book that gave an easy-to-read overview, and I couldn’t find it. Eventually I did enough research to where I realized I could write it myself.”

Dan Burr, self portrait

What Goodwin, based in New York City, produced isn’t a standard textbook or even a variation on Economics for Dummies. Instead, it’s a 304-page comic book: Economix: How Our Economy Works (And Doesn’t Work) in Words and Pictures (Harry N. Abrams).

Economix is illustrated by award-winning Milwaukee artist Dan E. Burr. (Full disclosure: Burr is a personal acquaintance whom I have known and been friendly with for more than two decades.)

Both Burr’s pictures and Goodwin’s writing have already helped Economix garner extensive praise – in Wired, Publisher’s Weekly, Mother Jones and other publications. Andrew Smith, reviewing it for Scripps-Howard News Service, writes:

“Michael Goodwin hasn’t just written a great graphic novel – he’s written one that should be required for every school, newsroom and library in the United States.”

But why write it as a comic? Goodwin has long been a fan of the genre. Growing up with National Lampoon cartoonist Rick Meyerowitz for a stepfather, “comics were taken seriously in the household.”

And for him, there’s nothing like a comic to communicate. “I retain information better when it’s presented in comic form,” Goodwin says. “My bookshelves are full of history books. I have maybe half-a-dozen Holocaust memoirs. The only one I take off the shelves regularly and leaf through is Maus” – Art Spiegelman’s tour de force recounting his father’s experience of the horrors of Hitler’s Germany, with the Jews depicted as mice and the Nazis as cats.

Writing in comic form “also kept me from going on for 20 volumes,” Goodwin adds. “There’s a very strict discipline in comics. You have to think in images and write tightly.”

Goodwin isn’t an economist, and he was very conscious of his limitations while working on the project. “I did not know for a very long time whether I was just writing my own sequel to the Unabomber Manifesto,” he admits. He emailed a raft of economists at major universities asking them to review a draft. Most never replied, a few declined, and one – Yale University’s Timothy Guinnane, an economic historian, agreed to take it on.

“He gave it a really close read,” Goodwin says, and helped him correct some errors. A blurb from Guinnane now adorns the back cover of the book, calling Economix “a lively, cheerfully opinionated romp.”

Goodwin chose Burr to illustrate the work after an agent that both men employ put them in touch with each other, albeit by long distance. (After three years of working together, the two have never met in person, although they talk on the phone in their collaboration.)

Several artists had submitted samples. “The other samples were good,” says Goodwin. “Dan was just spot-on. I didn’t really have to explain very much what my vision for the book was – the mix of accuracy and clarity and humor I wanted. Dan just got that.”

For Burr, Economix is his biggest project since he illustrated the much-praised 1988 serial graphic novel Kings in Disguise, written by James Vance. In between he’s contributed to a variety of other projects, ranging from Grateful Dead Comix to DC’s The Big Book of… history series.

“Historical projects interest me,” says Burr. And Goodwin’s writing sold him. “He had a very good, funny approach to a difficult subject. Our senses of humor really click – he has a dry, flat sense of humor that to me is really funny.”

Whimsy suffuses the book in both the text and the pictures. So does a strong point of view. Goodwin is critical of unbridled corporate power, for example, and argues that government regulation, properly implemented, plays a necessary role in protecting consumers, workers, and even democracy itself.

But his critique is nuanced. He readily acknowledges the benefits of freer markets, while also pointing out their hazards. “Democrats and Republicans are equally skewered for their bad decisions,” observes reviewer James Floyd Kelly at wired.com. “And the book does an excellent job of explaining those bad decisions.”

At the same time, Goodwin says, he’s strived to be historically accurate. And that’s where Burr and he clicked as well. “If he draws a 1930s worker, it just looks different than a 1970s worker,” says the writer. “If he draws a 1960s Russian, he’s got the right kind of haircut. There’s a panel with a 1930s Chinese communist who’s just shot a landlord – his smoking pistol is the right kind of pistol!”

That kind of precision has long been a signature of Burr’s artwork, going back to Kings – a Depression-era coming-of-age tale. “Research and getting things right are pretty important to me,” Burr says. He admits to finding it annoying to watch a TV show or movie and spot a character wearing clothes or using props from the wrong era. “I seem to have a good memory for these kinds of details.”

Before online access made images from all over so readily available, Burr would spend hours in libraries poring over historical books and photographs to research his art. “It’s much easier to bring the library into your own living room now with the Internet,” he says.

His wife and art partner, Debbie Freiberg, also helps with the work. “She will find images and then I will check them for authenticity,” Burr explains. Freiberg also assisted with lettering and layout design for Economix.

The continued success of the graphic novel as a genre is among the brighter spots in publishing today.

“Comics are a natural fit for what’s already happening,” notes Burr. “People have become more and more visually oriented as far as their media goes. This is one of the ways books are staying alive, is the merging of imagery and text in increasingly diverse ways. It isn’t all just Archie and Superman anymore.”

And while Maus, now a quarter-century old, may have been a commercial breakthrough for serious comics, Burr says the real credit goes to Will Eisner, considered by many to be a pioneer in the graphic novel field.

Next on Burr’s dance card is a sequel to the Kings: On the Ropes, to be published in March of next year by W.W. Norton, which also reissued Kings in 2006.

Meanwhile, Economix has already surpassed its creators’ expectations.

In one panel, making a point about advertising, Burr and Goodwin show a bookstore promoting a bestseller: Economix. “I put that in as a joke,” says Goodwin – never imagining that a wonky book about economics, even if it was a comic, would do more than a modest business. “I loved doing this project. I told myself if it sells 1,000 copies and dies, I gave it my best shot.”

But on Sunday, Sept. 23, the book debuted at No. 5 on the New York Times list of best-selling graphic books/paperbacks.

“I’m still having trouble processing that,” Goodwin says. “This is better. I like this more.”

Pages from Economix, courtesy of Abrams ComicArts …