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Julia Powles

PHD comics' Jorge Cham on misery, hope and academia

Jorge Cham, creator of the cult comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper , or PHD, is probably the most gut-achingly funny/tragic counsellor you could recommend to a PhD student -- or to any confounded friend, lover, or parent trying to understand what he terms, with some flourish, the "global misery phenomenon" of graduate school.

Cham is a full-time cartoonist, but the deep scars wrought by a PhD programme (in robotic engineering) remain his constant muse.

His webcomic has been running since he started grad school in 1997, is syndicated worldwide, and attracts a loyal following among that peculiar breed of poorly-paid, slightly masochistic overachievers, bravely hunting the frontiers of knowledge, free food, most random societies on campus, and unrequited supervisor approval.

PHD follows the travails of four main characters in grad school: the nameless, hapless hero that bears considerable resemblance to Jorge; Cecilia, the reluctant geek constantly frustrated by undergraduates; Tajel, the free-living social sciences student always willing to rally for a cause; and Mike Slackenerny, that person -- every research group has one -- who has been there longer than anyone can remember. The students' harried encounters with the demanding, loveless Professor Smith and absent-minded Professor Jones form the foundation for many priceless recurring gags, poking fun at the lows of grad student life.

Recently, Jorge was in the UK on an academic world tour , talking about 'The power of procrastination'. His thesis has something for all of us -- grad students and otherwise.

The power of procrastination

"The first thing to note", says Cham, "is that procrastination is not the same thing as laziness. Laziness is when you don't want to do anything. Procrastination, its close but distinct cousin, is when you don't want to do the one thing you really ought to be doing, right now. It's not that you don't want to do it, it's just that you find doing everything else possible, from some completely obscure hobby to categorising the entire internet, like the Yahoo dudes did when their supervisor was on summer break, more appealing."

How much time do you spend on a given comic?

I doodle and brainstorm on a notebook I always carry with me. It can take anywhere from five minutes to eight hours to work out a comic. Drawing it on the computer (using a Cintiq) usually only takes one hour.

Simon Singh has written a whole book about mathematics and The Simpsons . Have you got some examples of deep-coded nerd gags in your comics?

I always try to generalise things because my audience spans so many disciplines, but I do have a running gag that pi/2 is always the answer, and I've lost count how many times I've hidden 1.57 into my comics over the years.

Can you give away anything about your characters?

Increasing the ratio of female professors is a big topic I hope to address in the future. The nameless grad student was given a name in The PHD Movie (the film adaptation of the comics), but it's not clear yet whether that's canon or not.

The comics will eventually follow the characters to the completion of their time in grad school. One graduated several years ago (and is now a Post-doc), and I think another will graduate in the next year or two.

Kate O'Flaherty

You mentioned The PHD Movie . I've heard there's a sequel in the pipeline. Tell us about it.

Yes, we're trying to make a sequel to The PHD Movie ! A few years ago we made what I think is the first independent movie adaptation of a webcomic, and it was a great success in the academic world. It screened at over 500 universities and research centres worldwide (including Antarctica) and got great reviews.

Recently, I've gotten a lot of inquiries whether we're going to make a follow-up so I decided to give the fans a chance to make it happen by launching a Kickstarter . What's different about these movies is that they involve real scientists, researchers and staff members at a real top university (Caltech) in the acting and producing roles.

Part of the message we want to convey is that people in academia are not robots, that they have different passions, talents and even a sense of humour. So, the movie is in the hands of the internet to make it a reality.

Do you have a favourite PHD series?

I started listing out some of my favourite series, but then I realised another reason it's great to be a creator online is that it sort of doesn't matter how many people appreciate any particular piece of work you do. As long as you create something that has meaning to you, you will most likely find others who also connect with it, and the connection will probably be deeper than if you tried to create something that you think everyone would like. It's also easier to take risks because if people didn't particularly like something you did, you have your whole archive there for people to also sample and find something they like.

Is there one comic that stands out as particularly special to you?

One particular comic I've done that comes to mind is a version of Alice in Wonderland where Cecilia gets pulled through her monitor into Thesisland, as a metaphor for her feeling lost on her research. It's a series of comics I feel that works on different levels (character, arc, story, artwork, punch-lines). I also wrote and drew them during the first few weeks my son was born, so it's special also because I was somewhat inspired by that. It's not one I'm particularly famous for, but every once in a while someone will come up to me to say it's their favourite too.

You can see the 11 part series online, starting here and ending here .

The PHD Movie is available to watch for free all this month . You can fund the sequel through this Kickstarter campaign

This article was originally published by WIRED UK

Jennifer M. Wood

Angela Watercutter

Nena Farrell

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PHD Comics 20th Anniversary Book: The 6th Piled Higher and Deeper Comic Strip Collection Paperback – September 29, 2018

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• Print length 200 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Piled Higher and Deeper Publishing, LLC
• Publication date September 29, 2018
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Piled Higher and Deeper Publishing, LLC; Anniversary edition (September 29, 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 200 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0972169563
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0972169561
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9 x 0.5 x 7.25 inches
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What grad students are saying " Seriously, your comic is the only thing that keeps the Daily worth reading. I worship at your shrine of academic hilarity ." -A reader from Stanford U.

" To the creators of the amazing phenomenon known as P.H.D.--I am enthralled! You have captured the life SO perfectly! " -A reader from U. of Delaware

" Thank you so much for Piled Higher and Deeper. Bluntly, it is hilarious! I am sure that generations of undergrads will appreciate their newfound understanding of both their TAs and those even more mysterious RAs. " -A reader from the U. of Washington

" I really enjoy P.H.D.--the observations about life in grad school are right on, and I often laugh out loud when reading the strip. Thanks for making grad school a little easier. " -A reader from U. Michigan

" This is one of the best things I've seen in a long time! Thanks for giving my graduate studies' lack of purpose a bright side ." -A reader from U. of Florida

" Oh God, it hurts! It's all so true, and so evil! I can't tell whether I should be laughing or crying in sympathy ." -A reader from Caltech

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Bri Lee: ‘Writing about getting molested is why I now enjoy artistic freedom. That’s cooked’

In the lead-up to the release of her first novel, the author talks about art, cynicism and the human fascination with pain

B ri Lee is always working. It is obvious in the deeply confessional books she has written: using her law degree and story of being molested as a child to explore how the law handles sexual crimes (2018’s Eggshell Skull); her own eating disorder to examine body image (2019’s Beauty); and her anxieties about her own intelligence driving an investigation into the sexist, racist, classist history of education (2021’s Who Gets to Be Smart?).

But there is also the mini empire she has built in a startlingly short time: the Walkley-nominated investigative journalism, the keynote speeches, the newsletter, the podcast, the PhD in law she is completing while also lecturing. She’s the sort of cool girl author who can campaign for reforms to defamation law and sex education while also featuring in campaigns for Mimco and Camilla and Marc . She runs writing workshops for those keen enough to spend thousands on learning just how Lee does it; when we speak, she has just held one in Egypt and another in Sydney (no spots left for Sri Lanka in September – $5,000 a pop, flights not included). Oh, and last year she went to Antarctica for a month to research her next book.

When people heard I was interviewing Lee, they all asked me variations of the same question: how did she do all of this, in less than a decade? And after meeting her it’s clear: hard work, powered by a deeply deliberate (some would say cynical) drive to do what is needed to get exactly where she is.

“I think work will probably define my entire life,” Lee tells me. “When your art is so informed by your life, everything is potential material. When I’m on holiday, I see or hear things that would be great to write about and I have to actually visualise letting them go. It is both my greatest asset and my greatest weakness that I almost never switch off.”

Rather fittingly, her latest book is titled The Work. Her first novel, it follows two young people whose lives are dominated by the crossovers in money, power and sex. There is Lally, a gallery owner in New York who is flush with cash and praise when one of her artists dies suddenly, making him very collectible. And across the world in Sydney is Pat, an art auctioneer struggling to pay his rent, who begins blurring lines with a rich client. It could all be ripped from today’s headlines – the vagaries of the art world, #MeToo, cancel culture, millennials in the property market and deep fake pornography – though Lee began working on it five years ago. It will most likely storm bestseller lists.

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The Work was always going to be a novel for Lee, who has only written nonfiction previously. Part of the inspiration came from her own social circles: watching brilliant young people move from their 20s to their 30s, from bad share houses into bad one-bedroom apartments, and how their ability to make art was determined by “whether they had family money – or whether their debut was an unexpected success”, she says drily.

Neither Pat nor Lally are artists themselves, but they shape how art is seen, which is what Lee is most interested in. “It’s how the sausage gets made: all the people whose jobs exist in between the artist and the person who steps into a gallery space to look at art or buys a book,” she says. “All those people who invisibly shape the perception of how that art is received, priced, documented, collected, archived, remembered, elevated or lost to obscurity. And so much of that has little to do with the work.

“One of the driving questions for me over the years is how to be very cynical and very clear-eyed about the creative industries, whilst staying very romantic about the art itself. And I realised, from the beginning, that what is required of me to actually make the work, versus what is required of me to sell the work, are two entirely different versions of Bri Lee.”

Certainly, part of Lee’s success comes from her willingness to – to use her analogy – be the sausage meat. But that doesn’t mean there is no personal cost to being put through the meat grinder, of getting up at festivals and on television and talking about the deepest darkest parts of oneself that she has, admittedly, chosen to sell and that the publishing industry so loves selling.

“I cried in front of crowds as I talked about what I’d survived, and the messages started pouring in,” she wrote in Beauty of her time promoting Eggshell Skull. “My inbox was screaming at me to read and reply to people’s outpourings of pain. In the signing line I was asked for advice, unloaded on, praised, and questioned. There was minimal sleep, maximum drinking, and a growing feeling of being permanently on display.”

“It is not lost on me that the success of the book I wrote about getting molested is the reason I now enjoy artistic freedom,” she says now, bluntly. “That’s cooked. I have thought about it a lot, as you can imagine. And there’s no way to make it make sense.

“The only closure I could come to is that I really think that our human fascination with each other’s pain is the best thing, and the worst thing, about us. We are moved to action and altruism, we are moved to help and change, by other people’s stories. But we also have this 21st century media churn of trauma narratives and if you have some identity that has made your life more difficult, that is more appealing to the media.”

Does she feel that she has complete agency? “I have control over the words I write,” she says, carefully. “I do not have control over the words other people write. I was forced to come to terms with the fact I can’t control other people’s perception of me.”

She stopped reading reviews “a long time ago”, as well as the “nasty comments on Instagram, on Goodreads”. She has a small group of people “whose opinions I value very, very highly”, though she is keen to stress that she values criticism: “Hand on heart, it’s A-OK if people don’t like my work. What is much harder to stomach is the people who deliberately misrepresent my work.”

Lee’s repeated use of her personal experience, to pick over the invisible societal and political forces that shaped that experience, rankles some as solipsistic. “Perhaps Lee’s true subject is self-worth,” one critic wrote of Who Gets to Be Smart, in which Lee examines enormous topics like eugenics and also recalls crying after a dinner party in Oxford because she felt stupider than everyone there. It wasn’t an unfair observation. But, aside from her obvious smarts, Lee’s awareness that what she does can be bought, packaged and sold goes some way to explain how she arrived where she is.

It may sound strange, given how much of her life has been pored over by readers, but Lee considers herself a private person. She sees a lot of parallels between artists and writers when it comes to public personas: “The thing that makes you a good artist is your ability to sit for five years at a time in your studio by yourself and just do your fucking work. And the thing that makes you good at selling that work is being the complete opposite, being someone who loves being in the limelight.”

“I love my job,” she adds. “I want to write until I die. But if you want to be able to pay your rent in the 21st century as an artist, you have to be a cynic about the industry.”

While she always feels nervous before her books are published, this is the first time she feels no dread: “With the others, I had this sinking feeling in my stomach that is just not there any more.”

Is that because she doesn’t have a traumatic subject? “Yeah. People will find things to complain about but it is just not the same. You know, the last time I went on talkback radio to talk about Who Gets to Be Smart, some woman phoned in and she’d pulled over to the side of the road just to yell at me. There’s just no way this book can be as much of a fucking exhausting grind of constant personal disclosure, or make people yell at me.”

She wonders if it will still be a problem for her fiction, which has less “her” in it: “I believe it is impossible to make great art that everybody likes. I would rather some people adore my books and some people loathe them, than everyone go ‘meh’ – that’s the nightmare.

“The people being shitty on the internet about me – what they don’t see are the 20 versions of this manuscript and what it took to make what is in your hand now. That is years of work.

“I love doing it. But it is work.”

The Work by Bri Lee is available from 3 April

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