Starred review from January 16, 2023
Bessie’s debut graphic memoir of teaching at a community college during the pandemic while undergoing treatment for cancer swells with a determined optimism even while being threaded with dystopian references. Bessie believes in the community college system as a hub of diversity crucial to class mobility. In January 2020, he steps onto his San Francisco Bay Area campus after an eight-month sabbatical; he’s been working on a memoir about his decade-long game of cat and mouse with a brain tumor. He embraces the institution’s smells of “strawberry vape,” buzzy with student’s collective energy. But by March, “We are subjects in ‘The Great Zoom-School Experiment.’ ” He plays amateur IT guy and social worker, and teaches to “little black boxes” with muted mics. His students, many of them already marginalized, drop out or face a litany of crises. Bessie’s suspicious of techie solutions—“Free-market technocrats see this as an opportunity to accelerate their agenda to monetize public education”—and draws parallels to the science fiction literature on his syllabus. Glanting’s drawings are thick with shadow and cyborgian representations of a world isolated by multiple diseases. But as a teacher, Bessie’s idealism holds through, and he ends on an open-ended note—the pandemic still unfurling, his tumor held at bay by an experimental medication. As he writes: “Right now, we’re here,” and that is fragile and poignant enough.
February 1, 2023
On the surface, Going Remote is another addition to the COVID-19 memoir scene, chronicling one community college professor's experiences teaching remotely during the first two years of the pandemic. There is more here, however. From Bessie's ongoing experiences of living with cancer, to making sure his son knows the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement, he and cocreator Glanting use the medium to weave together a complex view of life during the last two years. Life isn't made up of silos and easily separated parts of oneself after all. While the features of remote education play a major role here (Zoom windows are a kind of comic, aren't they?), the annoyances of technology are less important than what going remote does to the ability to build community and to succeed, particularly for students who are fighting against the flow of an inequitable system. For the philosophically inclined, there is much to enjoy here, and end notes are included to aid in that way of reading. For those who enjoy the process of creating comics, an interview with the creators closing out the book will be of great interest.
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December 2, 2023
Professor and graphic essayist Bessie intercuts an account of his decade-long brain tumor with COVID's effects on his community college students. He's returned to campus after a writing sabbatical, eager to teach. But the epidemic hits, and classes switch to Zoom. To his horror, his most vulnerable students, who often lack tech access, disappear from this strange virtual world, where individuals become bounded by small squares of screen. And then his cancer seems to be regrowing. The double trauma pushes him further towards comparisons with SF dystopias as the newly shocking fragility of existence--and evaporating collaborations for the greater good--make social safety nets increasingly elusive. Illustrator/designer Glanting renders these seismic shifts in smudgy gray and black line art, people's faces simplified as if to suggest how these circumstances destroy human nature and reduce human complexity. Some of his backgrounds and imaginary machines, however, appear in near threatening detail as the book contemplates how to adapt "the machine" to human good without destroying humanity in the process. VERDICT A sobering and educational meditation on how medical and educational worlds both benefit and suffer from technological interventions.
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