 Sarah can draw really well. This is how I can tell. She drew me and made it look like my head's normal size. Please welcome Sarah Mayhew. I was scared you were all going to be hung over from donuts and bacon and your beverage of choice, but I'm glad we're all awake here. I am Sarah Mayhew. I am a mangaka, which I always have to explain what that is to people. I write and illustrate manga style graphic novels. Manga being a form of comic book which you're written and generated from Japan and was made popular by its animated counterpart anime with shows popular like Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, Oscar award winning, Spirited Away. And I write and illustrate basically the comic book form of that type of medium. I also teach a arts program in the summer for young children, teaching them how to draw manga. Yes, I also am a manga illustrating instructor and I thought maybe for you folks this morning I might give you just a little quick lesson on how to draw manga that maybe you guys can practice with each other in the Del Mar later. I'm a good teacher. Okay, here we go. Got the blackboard up. Now the key to drawing manga of course is the big eyes. I want to exaggerate the features, little noses, little mouths. A lot of cuteness, cute, cute eyes, cute nose, cute mouth. This is what we refer to more as a chibi style drawing. It means that everything is sort of super deformed to be more childlike in appearance but it's not a child, it's an adult. Now if you add nerd vision and the required science beard you can create Phil Plait, the bad astronomer. Now here is my little version of a magic trick. It's a manga magic trick. You just take your tracing paper, do the same thing over again or even just cross out the name and now you have Richard Wiseman. You didn't even have to change anything. Doubles. You get banged for your buck. Now this is for my more advanced students out there. This one's a little bit trickier but we can modify this again and if we remove the science beard and thicken up the glasses and you got to get the eyebrows tilted, you get George Rock, best in all. So you just, there we go. Yes. Thank you. Science lesson, a manga lesson. Okay, so what we have next here. A life of art and skepticism. I live in two worlds, between two worlds where skepticism inspires my art and art has an influence on my love for skepticism. These two worlds are kind of contrasting. You have skepticism where it involves a lot of being objective while the art world is clearly a lot of subjective material. But in the art world, you still do have to follow rules and know those rules before you know how to be able to bend them or break them. And so to me, I want to talk to you guys today about how my skepticism sort of crosses over and complements my art and vice versa. Now my background is in graphic design, which is the kind of art that's more closely tied to advertising and communication. I come from a small town in Northern Ontario. Insert your Neo... Neo, help me out here, Neo Young. Neo Young, insert Neo Young reference here. I come from a small town in Northern Ontario. And I feel fortunate science in my life, especially technology, can let me enter a field like art and still live up in the North. My family has a long history of living up there. And I can really tell that I get a lot of my creative inclinations from my parents. My mom loves to write. She has a great imagination. She has a love for learning about science just like I do. And my father, he's although very logical. He's interested in the visual arts and filmmaking and music. But when you get married when you're 19 in the 70s in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, you have a limited selection of what fields you can go into. And up north it's mainly resource-based, a lot of mining and forestry. And so I kind of take it seriously that I'm so fortunate that I can work anywhere in the world as long as I have a Wi-Fi connection. I can work with my clients and I can reach out and give content to my readers without having to pick up and move away from family or move to a big city. And that's something that maybe previous generations maybe missed out on people who could have been great writers, great musicians, but just couldn't leave the north. So that's a really big part of my life. That's how a big part of how science has contributed practically to my life is delivering the technologies that allow me to live way up north and still interact with people and work with clients from all over the world and put my work up online for the world to see. And art and skepticism, it's a little bit, as I said, you wouldn't think that two would be easy to mix, but I think they can help one another. And so being an artist in skepticism, I'm the artist and I feel like then I go out into the art world and I'm the skeptic. And so it's this little world that I'm stuck in between, but I love it. And I am always trying to think, even when I'm working in art, which is very subjective, always having the back of my mind, the sort of tools and ideas that we learn in skepticism. So I think it's helped me creatively to sort of think outside the box because as an artist, I think you have sort of an artist's spidey sense, it's almost like in skepticism we know common sense isn't always the way to go. And I think you can get stuck in that in art too, that you just have these feelings of what should be right and you can get stuck. One of my favorite examples of avoiding this is the Star Trek Reboots plot. You'll notice, and this is influenced a lot by the hero's journey that Joseph Campbell made popular, had a real impact on how Hollywood movies flow. And what usually happens is you have the second act low point. And what happens with a character is they start off a certain way and they need to learn a lesson or change something about themselves that they learn through the plot. And the second half low point is when, okay, you have to figure this out and change and come out of this so you can start the third act and complete your quest. And what I love about the reboot is Captain Kirk starts off arrogant and saying, no, I am right and I'm going to win. And he ends up at his second act low point on a frozen moon with no seeming escape. And his first thought is, when I get back on the Enterprise, when I get back on the Enterprise, I am reporting Spock. And there's no thought of, you know, he's not thinking, jeez, maybe I should be more humble or maybe I, you know, maybe I should sit here and think of what's Spock. No, he knows he's going to get off and the story ends with him just as an arrogant son of a bitch that he started out as except now he's captain of the Starship as well. So I love that, you know, that storyline where it's you don't always have to have the character change themselves. You can have the character change the situation around them instead. Another issue I have because the whole hero's journey way of telling a story, to me it's starting to get a little old. To me, you can get inside these traps of these plots, especially in anything that has to do with fantasy. And if you're familiar with Harry Potter, you might have heard a lot, you know, like Harry Potter follows the hero's journey, the mythology, you know, like his story is just like Jesus. He goes through the same, you know, is it here and there, and you know, the resurrection and Harry Potter is not Jesus, okay? Harry Potter is not Jesus and here's why. The hero's journey without the very most important part of the hero's journey is the sort of spiritual revelation that the character will have where they change spiritually to become the whole Masters of the Two Worlds thing at the end. And Harry Potter does not do that. Harry Potter starts off, he grows physically, he gets taller and older, but he's still the same Harry, still brave and loyal, and he has a certain point of view that doesn't change all throughout the series. He grows a bit as a person, but his actual character never makes a shift where he changes sort of his spirit and becomes a different person. I think without that, looking at that with a critical eye, is if you take that away from the hero's journey, you just have a bunch of things that usually have to show up in an adventure story. You know, there's gonna be some sort of father figure, you know, wizard to help you along. There's going to be magic artifacts. There's going to be, you know, trials to pass. And these are just, you know, you can fall into this pattern-seeking and almost anything with a beginning, a middle, and an end in fantasy can look like the hero's journey if you don't care about the spiritual transformation at the end. This year in my talk, I did a little bit of twilight bashing. I felt a little bad for that. I may have done the old thing where you refer to the twilight characters as cardboard and that being an insult to an otherwise sturdy packaging material. But sort of explaining that in art, the key is connecting to people on an emotional level. And my point is, it's too easy to twilight bash. I felt bad about it, but I did have a point that you can take something that is technically not very high quality writing in itself and not high quality characters but it's immensely popular because the author knows even how to just cheaply push the emotional buttons and people love it because it has that really strong emotional connection to people. And I wanted to point out that the character Bella gets a real bad rap too. There are tons of memes where it's like, yeah, I'm Hermione and I did all, you know, my boyfriend left me and I did this and I did this spell and defeated this thing. And Katniss, she's a strong character and there's poor Bella, she does nothing ever. She just sits around and she adjusts her hair and mumbles all the time and thinks of Twilight the Vampire Man, whatever his name is. But to be fair to the people who really love this character Bella, again, my sort of critical thinking, my interest in skepticism got me thinking more about poor Bella and I thought, you know, you come across these strong female characters. Two of my favorite are Hermione and Katniss because they're very active, you know, they take a role, the other two boys in Harry Potter, Harry and Ron, you know, they would be screwed without Hermione, like nothing would have happened. They would have died in the first book without her. But she's also, you know, she's also quite feminine as well. And then you have Katniss as an incredibly strong female character as well, who's a fighter, you know, going into a battle royale. And then you have poor Bella stuck being passive and she does a lot of sitting around and thinking of her feelings and having other people do things for her. But what you have to realize is people don't say, well, Bella's a poor role model for people. People don't typically pick up a book because they're looking for a role model. Bella's being enjoyed because there are great many teenagers who like to sit around and think about their feelings and be passive and they have a lot of emotion. And Bella sort of fulfills this fantasy as here is finally a main character of a book who is like me. They're not like, I don't have a bow and arrow. I suck at archery and I can't do magic. And, you know, Bella is a more, even though the writing, you know, isn't top notch. The idea of this type of character being the main focus of a story is very, I think, very important. If you look at it as something that isn't being delivered to obviously a bunch of young people who are looking for that, the only problem being is you can make a character with these more passive, more introvert characteristics and still have them be the hero of the story in a better and make her a better role model to young people. When I first started getting interested in anime, I came across a series called Bushiki Yugi. And before that, I was kind of a tomboy. I didn't like girly things. And I think it was because I had a lot of my Western role models in Western media and film. If you're a strong woman, you lack a certain femininity about you. They may be dressed up sexy, but rarely would you come across a strong female character who is girly, you know, who cares about boys and hair and shoes and makeup and pretty things. And then came along this anime from Japan with the most girly schoolgirl main character in what they call a reverse harem anime where it's a girl and a bunch of hot guys that all focus their attention on her. And what I realized was even though she was really girly and she needed to get saved a lot from things and she had ribbons in her hair and she was always thinking about boys and being in love. When it came to what her character needed to do to be the hero of the story, she could be that hero in her own way. And so what I came back from all of this later when I was a skeptic and sort of trying to turn this skeptical eye towards my field was that a strong character doesn't mean necessarily that you're a badass archer in a battle royale and it doesn't necessarily mean that you're a wizard or a warrior. What a strong character means is that the writer focuses on your point of view and trying to get the reader to empathize with how that character operates and lives in the world that you've created. So you can, you could have a character like Bella. You could argue that technically she is a strong character because you're getting to see her point of view where she's not active, she's a passive girl. But the thing about having, you know, the thing about freedom is it's all about choice and to show that this is, you know, this is the difference between you can make these choices and it's okay. And so that's what I came back from seeing a series like Fushiyugi with a character that maybe people at first glance would say is weak that to me it really changed me in saying, okay, well, I can put on these freely outfits and do my hair and my nails and be all girly and giggle and it doesn't mean that I can't be still, you know, a hero of the story. So that had a big impact on me. Otherwise you're left with sometimes strong female characters basically just being male characters in a female body. And so, I think I'm going to materialize again. There we go. Oh, did we miss the materialization again here? I love it. And so what this translates to me as an artist in skepticism is realizing that being aware of who your audience is and what you want to say to them and how do you take that message and connect to people emotionally with it. Because when people can identify when you can have them empathize with a character who perhaps has a different point of view from them that's a really strong way of having people think or get attached to an idea. I mean we all know this from the other side. We can all see this from how emotionally seductive sort of woo stuff can be. And I don't think there's any reason why you can't in a better way do this for science and skepticism. There's a clear reason why people love Carl Sagan's Cosmos and it's because you feel his amazement and wonder and appreciation and beauty for what he's showing to you. You connect emotionally with the story he's telling about the universe. There's a reason why we all love seeing Neil deGrasse Tyson come up here because he's full of character and emotion and he's getting you laughing and you're connecting emotionally with what he's saying not just absorbing the content of what he's speaking about. And so what my work involves is creating stories, creating sci-fi fantasy stories that have characters that I'm trying to remember not to fall into the easy stereotypes of what is a strong character and who is not. But also trying to take advantage of the fact that when you read fiction you're taking your reader into a different world, a different scenario and being able to get them to see to view this through other people's eyes. And so you can get people to empathize and almost trick them into empathizing with people that maybe they might not in real life if that person was just trying to debate directly with them. You can sort of go on this journey with them and come out the other side and have a better understanding of the idea that's trying to be conveyed in the story. So with my own titles that I'm writing, my recent book is Legend of the Star, which is available in all retail stores. It's a digital publication. The main hero she's skeptically minded is operating in this sort of sword and sandals sci-fi fantasy world with a lot of other characters that just aren't really aware of that type of thinking, very alien to them, and how she goes through this journey of affecting the characters around her. And this way it's an alternative to simply sitting in a conference center listening to lectures, which is great and we all love that, but reading books is a different experience where you can teach people, you can deliver messages to people, and they might not even be consciously aware of what they're receiving. It's almost like inception. You plant the seed of the idea and then it grows on its own and people feel like they came to that idea more themselves and are more likely to be attached and understand that idea through that method. So what I'd like to end with is the idea that you can use art to communicate a message and really, because it's the psychics and the reiki masters and the conspiracy theorists are so good at getting people, getting them right in the heart of like, yeah, conspiracy theory or oh yeah, the energies. It's so seductive and to me, science is seductive too. There's so much beauty in science and I feel there's so much beauty and skepticism too as a tool to be able to distinguish what is true from what we simply want to be true. And I think it's really important to be able to do that. So please check out my work. I have some books here in the library signing at one. And also I need to remind you that you can sign up to play poker against me and several other of my fellow speakers at the Skeptics Poker tonight. Sign up and take all my money. Thank you very much.