NBSV 233: Drawing by hand in an AI world: Vegan cartoonist Julian Lawrence on comics and compassion

"The cartoonist makes people see things." Cartoonist, educator, and comics researcher Julian Lawrence has been proving that for decades. We met during a virtual coffee chat, and I knew right away he had to come on the show. Julian has been vegan since 2000 and is a senior lecturer in comics and graphic novels at Teesside University in the UK. He created the Green Kid educational comic series and Drippy the Newsboy, a teardrop who, in middle age, has swapped reading newspapers for doom-scrolling. We talk about why his students are rejecting AI, and why comics might hold up better than other creative fields. We dig into what to say when a non-vegan asks, "Do you respect my dietary choice?" We also cover his students' graphic-novel reimagining of the Bayeux Tapestry, the French roots of words like "beef" and "mutton," and his Vancouver band July Fourth Toilet, which had more than 50 members and never played the same show twice. And a first in the history of the show: Julian plays ukulele live in our session. Yes, really.