Josh Elder Talks Comics Uniting Nations, the United Nations and Reading With Pictures' Project

Comics-literacy nonprofit Reading With Pictures is working with advisement from the United Nations to create Comics Uniting Nations, a new project aimed at bringing their work to classrooms all over the world.

They're funding it via Kickstarter, and you can see the video below.

Reading With Pictures chief Josh Elder joined ComicBook.com to discuss the project.

This is a project that has generated a ton of buzz and a lot of conversation. Where did it originate?

An utterly chance meeting at least year's New York Comic Con between myself and Natabara Rollosson, a producer who develops high-profile projects for the United Nations. He was at the show trying to figure out a way to bring the world of comics together with the UN's Global Goals for Sustainable Development, and he just happened upon the Reading With Pictures booth. He told me all about the plan to share the Global Goals with the entire world, and I told him that comics are a universal language (or as close to one as we've got). After that, we pretty much started plotting this whole thing right there on the show floor.

Obviously the creators involved are top-notch. Are these people who approached you to work with Reading With Pictures or did you put the project together with them in mind?

A little bit of both. We had a plan in mind for what the final product would look like, but it all depended on finding the right talent. Thankfully we had a team consisting of veteran editors like Ron Perazza, Carol Burrell, Tracy Edmunds and Jesse Post to help us find incredible talent from all over the world in an incredibly short time. They're the true heroes in all of this. And creators like Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba coming onboard was just amazing.

What's the plan if the Kickstarter doesn't succeed?

It was a pretty big gamble to bring this project to Kickstarter. Because of our timeline, we had to launch without having all our teams in place, or being able to announce our distribution deal with Project Everyone. Plus we're giving all our content away under a Creative Commons license. But we felt it was the best option, so we went as big as possible in the hope that the comic community would respond and help us create free educational comics resource for the children of the world.

If the Kickstarter doesn't succeed, then we have a number of creators and publishers donating single-page comics that address the Globals Goals as well as publishers donating entire stories. So we WILL have content to share via The World's Largest Lesson with millions and millions of students all across the planet. The Kickstarter will just help us create a lot more and help a lot more people in the process.

This seems like the next obvious step for Reading With Pictures, not least of all because on a global scale you're promising to help bring comics and literacy to millions of kids. Is the scope of this project daunting?

To be honest, it's terrifying. We could potentially be reaching hundreds of millions of people around the world. There's no precedent for something like this, but we have an amazing team in place at Reading With Pictures, some incredible partners with The World's Largest Lesson and PCI Media Impact and an incredible cast of creators and publishers onboard. Together we can most certainly do this.

What's the difference between putting a project like this together and, say, The Graphic Textbook?

The Graphic Textbook was incredibly ambitious, but vastly less complicated than Comics Uniting Nations. A lot fewer moving parts, a lot more lead time and a more DIY process - none of which is true here. A lot of the same lessons we had learned still applied, but Comics Uniting Nations is so unique that there was still a lot we had to figure out as we went.

What's the most important thing you want the audience to know about this campaign, and the book behind it?

If we succeed on Kickstarter, we'll be bringing comics to some of the most impoverished places on Earth. We'll be using comics to teach them about the importance of things like personal sanitation and showing them how they can make a real difference in their own communities. These comics will definitely change lives and maybe even save lives too. But only if we have the funds to actually make them, and that only happens if we succeed on Kickstarter.