September 17, 2025 • 44 mins
With his highly anticipated debut graphic novel "More Weight: A Salem Story" releasing, Massachusetts-born author Ben Wickey joins us for an exclusive pre-launch interview about this Alan Moore-praised "appalling masterpiece." The Edward Gorey Award-winning artist's first solo work tells the harrowing tale of Giles Corey, the only person pressed to death under stones during the infamous 1692 Salem Witch Trials.
What makes this upcoming graphic novel release extraordinary? Beyond Wickey's stunning and unmatched visual storytelling that brings historical horror to visceral life, he is a descendant of Salem Witch Trial victim Mary Easty, bringing deeply personal perspective to this decade-long project that Publishers Weekly compared to "From Hell."
We explore the pre-release excitement, Wickey's meticulous research using historical documents, and his innovative dual-timeline narrative featuring Nathaniel Hawthorne interludes. Using the graphic novel format, Wickey cuts through pop culture mythology to restore the genuine horror and humanity of Salem's history.
Discover how Corey transformed from testifying against his wife Martha to defiantly uttering his final words "more weight," and why this Salem witch hunt story will captivate readers everywhere.
#SalemWitchTrials #BenWickey #MoreWeight #GraphicNovel #HistoricalHorror
Buy the Graphic Novel "More Weight"
Read the Alan Moore World Blog: Ben Wickey An Extraordinary Enchanter
More Weight Preview Page on TopShelfComix.com
Sign the Petition: MA Witch Hunt Justice Project
www.massachusettswitchtrials.org
The Thing About Salem Patreon
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Josh Hutchinson (00:00):
Welcome to The Thing About Witch Hunts.
(00:02):
I'm Josh Hutchinson. Sarah Jack: And I am Sarah Jack.
Today, we speak with author and illustrator Ben Wickey about his
amazing new graphic novel, More Weight: a Salem Story, which
focuses on the story of Giles Cory, the only victim of the
Salem Witch trials to be pressedto death under large stones.
Let's welcome Ben to the podcast.
Sarah Jack (00:24):
Welcome to The Thing About Witch Hunts podcast, Ben
Wickey. Today, we get to talk with you
about your new graphic novel, More Weight.
Please tell us a little bit about you and your work.
Ben Wickey (00:36):
Thank you. I'm a Massachusetts-born
illustrator and comic book artist and animator.
I'm originally from Cape Ann of Rockport and Gloucester, about
30 minutes north of Salem, but all my friends live in Salem, so
I grew up, you know, going thereconstantly and soaking up slowly
over my whole life the history of that place.
(01:00):
I am a graduate of CalArts. I did a stop motion animated
version of the House of the Seven Gables by Hawthorne as a
short, 30 minute short film. That premiered at the Gables in
2018. I have been an illustrator.
I worked on a book called The Illustrated Vivian Stanshal,
(01:22):
book with Ki Longfellow in 2017.I'm a contributing artist of
Alan Moore's and Steve Moore's grimoire The Moon and Serpent
Bumper Book of Magic and for 10 years I've been working on this
depressing behemoth, More Weight, which is finally out and
I'm very relieved. Thank you for having me.
Josh Hutchinson (01:44):
So I understand that we're actually all cousins
through Mary Easty. Is that true?
Ben Wickey (01:52):
Yes, and I didn't actually know that I was a dis
descendant of Mary Esty until I was halfway through the book
doing this. It was 2018 or something like
that. My cousin Holly in Michigan
messaged me out of the blue and said, oh, did you know that
we're related to to somebody, somebody from the Salem Witch
(02:12):
Trials? She didn't even know that I was
doing this book. It was under my hat for so long.
It was just this little thing I had on the back burner, little
passion project. And so I think that really
changed my attitude towards whatI was doing.
It heightened my convictions in what I was doing.
And then we talked a little bit more, and then she provided the
(02:33):
genealogy. I guess I'm her 10th
great-grandson. Josh Hutchinson: Sounds right.
On the Ellis side. So yeah.
Josh Hutchinson (02:42):
Cool. Ben Wickey
very moving, very moving revelation.
Sarah Jack (02:47):
Yeah. I had known that I descended
from Rebecca Nurse since I was ateenager, but then about six
years ago or seven years ago, I discovered that Mary and Rebecca
had grandchildren that married, and then that's the line.
It's all these Russells out of Massachusetts that ended up in
(03:08):
Iowa when I was born. There's something about Mary,
because of her petition. It was such a proclamation and
such, you know? So I can imagine since she was
the one that you found yourself tied to, and you're giving such
a message with your project, howthat must have struck you.
Yeah. Ben Wickey: It really struck me.
(03:30):
I mean, I hadn't drawn, thankfully, I hadn't drawn her
scenes until I found that out. So it really infused a lot of
emotion and yeah, I really felt like I was portraying a family
member, you know. It's kind of, it might seem
silly to some people, 330 years on, but no, I really identified
(03:53):
with her, and, yes, the book is about Giles and Martha Corey,
and I still think they're such an interesting duo to focus on
when you consider Giles' obviousflaws and his sort of arc, semi
path to redemption, and his death, which I still think is
one of the first documented protests in American history.
(04:15):
I think that's very important to, to to look at.
Just drawing Mary Esty, I kind of based her a little bit off
photographs of my great-grandmother, Bessie, who I
never met, but I gave her her nose and her cheeks and I based
Mary Esty off of Bessie. Sarah Jack: That's awesome.
Ben Wickey (04:34):
Yeah. Sarah Jack
And her petition never fails to make me very
emotional and teary eyed. Sarah Jack: Yeah.
And it's very similar to, I mean, in the book
I do have quotes side by side ofMary Bradbury's petition with
her descendant, Ray Bradbury's, message to the Republican party
(04:58):
that he put in a, he paid a for a page in Variety in the 1950s
at the height of the McCarthy years, where he said let's send
McCarthy and his goons back to Salem in the 17th century.
The ripples in time of generations trying to say the
same thing, of let's not accuse the innocent, let's protect
(05:19):
people. Let's not give into fear and
hysteria and paranoia. Yeah.
Sarah Jack (05:25):
Yeah. What do we need to know about
the early life of Giles Gory or about him?
Ben Wickey (05:34):
That was fun. That was very fascinating.
It's only really Upham's book that kind of touches on the
records of Giles' 50 years in Salem before the witch trials.
I went into the now digitized quarterly court records of Essex
County, and I just went through the index.
(05:56):
I found all the references to Giles Corey, and I just made
lists of all the shenanigans that he was getting into.
And I am pretty much convinced that he did murder a guy 1670s.
Like this isn't a sugarcoated version of Giles in my portrayal
of him. But there is a character
composite, a kind of character profile that I created over time
(06:18):
of, oh God, this is a guy that got away with practically
everything except for the one thing that he didn't do, which
was sorcery. Very colorful, fascinating guy.
You look at his times as a watchman in Salem Town, which is
now the city of Salem, above theSalem Town meeting house, which
(06:38):
I think would probably be where Rockafella's is, the restaurant
is, now in in Salem. And he's part of a firewood
heist on the South River and allthis crazy stuff.
Stealing from George Corwin, Jonathan Corwin's father, the
sacks loads of household goods and owing people and just debt
and just all these sort of things that really create a,
(07:04):
colorful, entertaining rogue, a roguish figure and then
obviously, a murderer, obviouslysomebody who had a very
dangerous and checkered past that sort of, it all came to a
head by the time he was accused of witchcraft.
It was almost as if it was the one thing that they could
(07:26):
finally use to dispose of him, because, and this is the same in
where witch hunts still exist, India and Africa the moment, as
we're sitting here talking. Accusations of witchcraft have
been easiest way to dispose people for the petty, not for
supernatural reasons, not for sorcery, not for anything, for
(07:47):
the petty, mundane human reasonsof jealousy, land lust, petty
vengeance. It always happens in times of
socioeconomic pressures and bad economy and things like that.
It was sort of, you know, matterof time for all that to come
biting Giles in the bum. My own version of Giles Corey.
(08:09):
The whole beginning of this bookwas just simply a kind of
graphic novel adaption of this play that I found by Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow called Giles Corey of the Salem Farms,
in which he gives a portrayal ofthis man, this Giles Corey is
very, very unlike any character that you see anything from
(08:30):
Longfellow. Even his version of Miles
Standish is more, you know, Miles Standish, who impaled the
heads of indigenous people on pikes, is less grim and angry
than this version of Giles Corey.
Part of what the book became wasan examination into why did this
(08:51):
character of Giles Corey speak to Longfellow and this very
tumultuous decade of the 1860s, which had not only the horrific
death of Longfellow's wife, but also the Civil War, which his
son had enlisted in and barely survived, and the social issues
of slavery that he was very, very publicly immersed in.
(09:16):
And so the book became over, at the beginning, it was sort of me
going, oh, well, I'll just do a historically accurate version of
Longfellow's play, because as I was looking at it, I was
thinking, oh, well, I have access to all sorts of
historical material that Longfellow didn't have in the
(09:36):
1860s, when all he had was Upham's book, Witchcraft by
Charles Wentworth Upham. And so I I was going through and
I thought, well, Giles didn't live on the Ipswich River.
Well, I'll just change that. And then over time, the
Longfellow bits got smaller and smaller.
My own bits got bigger and bigger, thanks in no small part
(09:56):
to realizing that Mary Esty was my ancestor.
And the more you research, the more you have an opinion of the
facts, which are extremely troubling and relevant and
infuriating. You read the facts, and you're
infuriated the basic human level, the injustice and the
(10:17):
atrocity of it all, and the waysin which it's still still
extremely politically relevant to these despotic times.
That's my rambling answer to very simple question.
Josh Hutchinson (10:31):
Thank Sarah Jack
rambling, so thanks. Ben Wickey: I've been working on
this book without talking about it, so it's kind of weird
talking about it, but Sarah Jack: Yeah, I bet.
I bet. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, Ben
Wickey (10:43):
A lot of fun. Josh Hutchinson
what you did with time in the book, how you handled, just
weaving back and forth from one period to another, and I just
loved that you included the Salem history at the end.
I love Salem, so it's good to see all that history in there.
(11:05):
And it's just so fun time traveling with you.
Ben Wickey (11:10):
Yeah. And I think that was a, that was
really something that I wanted to do because part of the, I I
think a big message of the book is that history doesn't happen
in a vacuum. There is such a disconnect, I
think, between 1692 and the modern city of Salem that you'll
(11:31):
walk through. So I wanted to, I have a kind of
psychogeographical sense of place, wanting to really show
that no, everything happens. History doesn't happen in a
vacuum. It happens in our backyard, and
all you need to do is dig, and you need to do the necessary
donkey work of getting your pickand shovel and researching and
(11:53):
finding all sorts of things, beneath all the hype and beneath
all the sort of glittering distractions and the spooky
wallpaper and everything. No.
Beneath that is something reallyreal and human and relevant.
But I did really wanna include these scenes between Longfellow
(12:13):
and Hawthorne walking through 1860s era Salem, just not
violently thrown back and forth between modern 2025 Salem and
1692 Salem. There is some midpoint where you
can recognize the street corner,recognize how the street layout
has remained the same, recognizebuildings that still exist from
(12:37):
the 17th century, but buildings that still exist from the 19th
century and see really see? itself, how the landscape has
changed. see how the Jonathan Corwin House, now known branded
as the Witch House, how that haschanged, how that looks
completely different in the 19thcentury and how it was brought
back, and understanding people to understand when they visit
(13:01):
that city, why they're seeing what they're seeing, why why
they look, looks, the way it looks. because I don't really
think there's not enough plaquesin the city to tell you.
People are obliged to do their own research, and not everybody
has the time or interest to do that.
I wanted to do the book that I looked for in that city but
(13:23):
couldn't find, a book that was honest about, oh no, no, this is
why this is the way it is, this is why this is the way it is,
this changed, this didn't, and you can use it as a guidebook.
You can walk around not only thecity of Salem, the whole area of
the whole geography of Danvers and Topsfield and places like
that to see where these things happened and the traces still
(13:43):
left behind, the echoes, the ghosts, the shadows.
Sarah Jack (13:47):
And that's something that you can do with your style
of art. Graphic novels allow for that
type of storytelling where a regular piece of literature
isn't gonna do that. Ben Wickey: Yeah.
You can do anything in comics. I mean, it really allows you a
huge canvas of time and space. You can have as many characters
(14:09):
as you want. You can have as many locations
as you want. A thing that always bothered me,
even with very high budget, pristine movie or TV adaptions
of the Salem Witch trials, what happened?
Everything happens in the same building.
All of the examinations happen in Salem Village meeting house.
(14:32):
All the trials seem to happen inthe Salem Village meeting house.
They never have another locationchange.
You never see how things get bigger.
You never, once the court of Oyer and Terminer gets put in
place, everything moves to SalemTown.
You're moving from the very rustic, rural Salem Village to
(14:53):
the more cosmopolitan, opulent, mercantile Salem town.
It's a bigger room, and it's themost sophisticated court.
It's not a kangaroo court. It's not a, it's not a New
Yorker cartoon, where everyone'sgot buckles on their hats and
pitchforks and torches. No, it is the most sophisticated
court that you could be standingin front, albeit an emergency
(15:15):
court after return of the charter and a kind of return,
because of course, the Massachusetts government had
been languishing in legal limbo for a few years.
William Phips comes in, and May of 1692, okay, we have a
government now. We have a new charter.
We're not gonna wait for the general court to assemble.
We're gonna create an emergency court of Oyer and Terminer,
(15:38):
let's get these very prestigious, wealthy,
land-owning, albeit, but Harvardeducated people to stand in
judgment of these people that have been accused of witchcraft
and to have it in Salem town, the kind of ground zero, if Tad
Baker is correct, and I think heis, the ground zero of the
(16:01):
Puritan hegemony itself. It may very, very well may be
the place where John Winthrop first made his city upon a hill
speech. It is the first town.
It really was, Salem really was this, a kind of sentimental
place for the Puritan hegemony, which was in, by the 1690s, in
(16:21):
this kind of visible decline. And so you see this kind of idea
of, okay, not only has Satan obviously declared war upon us,
but he's done it, he's really hit it at the heart of, he
hasn't done it in Boston. He's done it at the heart of the
Massachusetts Bay colony, in Salem, the first town, the
beating heart of the colony. We can't have the mother country
(16:42):
knowing about this. We've gotta really nip this in
the bud. And so the, not to get too
conspiratorial, but of course the priorities shift.
It's less about finding out who is guilty and who is innocent
and more about preserving the Puritan hegemony, which was
already in a perceived decline, when you consider this new
(17:05):
charter, which recognized Baptists, Quakers.
Quakers, we've been boring holesin the tongues of Quakers for
generations, and now they are recognized in this new charter.
What next, the antichrist? What next, atheists and
Catholics. This was a real outrage.
They were just happy to have anycharter at all, but of course,
(17:28):
Puritanism in New England was perceived to be on tender hooks.
And so this, there's this idea of, okay, if Satan has declared
war on us, on New England, then Puritanism has to be visibly
winning that war, visibly on topof things.
(17:48):
Of course, William Phips, an illiterate treasure hunter, who
has now become governor of Massachusetts, scampers off to
Maine to fight the French and indigenous combatants.
And he leaves the government in charge of William Stoughton, not
only the Lieutenant Governor, but the chief justice of this
(18:10):
new court. You don't often see this in pop
culture portrayals. You don't often see this in
miniseries or movies or things like that.
The whole political catalyst forhow this thing was able to reach
the heights that it did. We're always focusing on the
afflicted girls. We're always just trying to
figure out why did they, what was their fits about?
(18:33):
Was it Ergotism? Was it actual fraud?
Was it actual possession? I'm less interested in that,
because I don't really think that the girls are that, I mean,
obviously they allowed, they kept this up, but they only had
so much agency. They're little girls in 17th
century New England. They can't admit that this has
(18:53):
all been for attention or fraud or whatever, or post-traumatic
stress disorder in the cases of some.
You consider some of them were war refugees from King Phillips
War. I'm mostly focusing on the
adults in the room, these Harvard-educated people who
allowed it to go the lengths that it did.
And no one's talking about that,at least in pop culture.
(19:15):
You see it often, of course, yousee the truth in the works of
Emerson Baker and Marilynne Roach and Daniel Gagnon and all
these amazing people. Richard Trask.
These are the giants upon which I'm perched as a little vulture
with my little pen and ink, drying and scribbling my little
drawings. My hope was to do something that
(19:36):
at least in pop culture, which is, comics is a pop culture
medium, to do something that washonest about at least the
sociopolitical catalysts for everything and how it was all
able to happen and how that's still relevant to today, whether
in America or whether in places in, as I said, India and Africa,
(19:59):
where witch hunts are, actual witch hunts, are still
happening. Yeah.
Josh Hutchinson (20:05):
In More Weight, I love in the scenes, in the
examination scenes, the courtroom scenes at the Salem
Village meeting house, you have the characters speak in words
that are actually documented in the records that survive.
And I just love that they're speaking in their, basically
(20:27):
their own voices. So thank you for facilitating
that. It really adds something to the
story. Ben Wickey: That for me was one
of the most, I hasten the word to say, use the word fun, but it
was always a wonderful, challenge and way of working,
'cause I would just go through all the transcripts and
(20:48):
highlight the bits that I thought really brought home the
gravity of every situation. And I focused mostly on the
examinations of people who had become the victims.
Some non executed people, as well, like Tituba or Mary Black
or or Abigail Hobbs or people like that, people that weren't
(21:09):
executed, but what they had to say in court is still very
interesting. You read those documents, and
they do read like a play. You wonder why Arthur Miller
made up as much as he did. It's all, the material is itself
more riveting than anything he could make up or invent, you
know? And I thought, well, I'm not
gonna make anything up. Why should I?
(21:31):
The truth is here and it's speaking to you.
You read any of the documents, I've, I've been to Rowley, I've
handled some of the documents myself.
I handled Martha Corey's examination, which is this
giant, parchment folded six ways, and, you really do get
very emotional holding it. This was in the room, and it's
(21:52):
thanks to amazing people like Margo Burns.
I mean, they're an amazing, not only an amazing historian, but a
linguist. They were able to study the
handwriting and figure out who was in the room and who wrote
what, and gave so much more information and insight into
what was going on in that room. It helps people like me who has
(22:13):
to draw everything, and I was constantly redrawing so many
things. I started drawing everything in
2017. I constantly had to go back and
redraw things. Oh, no, no, no, John Hale
wouldn't have been in this room or so-and-so wouldn't have come
to Salem until this month. I got to redraw this, or I'm
(22:34):
going to replace this person with Nicholas Noyse or whatever.
A ton of redrawing went into this, really because I
researched as I went along, which I thought was the wrong
way of doing it until I read an interview with David McCullough,
who wrote the John Adams biography, lots of great history
(22:55):
books about the American Revolution and the Wright
Brothers. And he said, no, no, no.
It's always good to research as you write, because that means
that you are working from a perspective of curiosity.
You're asking questions as you go, and so therefore, you are
encouraging your reader to also ask, be asking questions,
different from doing all of yourresearch and going, this
(23:18):
happened because I said so, because I've spent all these
years research you know? So part of the thing that, the
effect that I like about what I did is that it does have a
Maysles brother inquiring eye documentarian effect, because
I'm also looking around the roomtrying to figure out what's
going on and who's in the room and what's happening, as much as
(23:42):
anybody else. And I didn't think that I was in
any way an expert on what I was doing.
Even after I finished the book, I thought, I, God, I still
barely understand this, it's so confusing.
It's such a insane episode of our history.
Until I had dinner with Margo Burns and they patted me on the
shoulder and they were like, no,no, no, no, no, you're one of
(24:04):
us. No, no, you're not a historian.
I tell people, I'm not a historian.
I'm just a cartoonist who cares.If I've gained any expertise in
this subject, I, I'd be very happy to say so, but I'm glad I
left it up to someone else to say that.
It's one of those bits of history where there's still so
(24:24):
much that we don't, not so much that we don't know in, in terms
of the innocence of people accused is not, it's not as if
there's still room for doubt as to whether there was actual
witchcraft or blah, blah, blah. That's very well established
that no such thing happened. But it's still a thing where
you, you do a whole, you do a 500 page book like this, and
(24:46):
you're still rubbing your chin going, oh God, I still wanna
know. I still have questions, but
thankfully, the thing about thisbook that I am proud of is that
there are about, at least like 30 pages at the end of research
notes that say exactly what I invented, what comes from
primary source documents, what comes from Longfellow, what
(25:09):
comes from, you know, who said what, what is a theory from such
and such a historian, where thisbuilding is now, what happened
to this, what this person later went on to do, when did this
person die? It's a book in and of itself.
He just sat, I sat in this chairwriting out all these research
notes. I wish I took notes while I was
(25:32):
researching so I wouldn't have to go through all the research
books in the shelf behind me andgoing through the index, trying
to figure out where I got all the things that I got, but just
to show, just to be, what's the word, upfront and transparent
with people. There's some things that happen
behind closed doors that I can'tprove, but I'm going to at least
(25:54):
tell you that, this bit is something that I wrote this bit
is something that somebody else wrote this bit is, this bit
comes from actual documents because the truth is so much
crazier than fiction. There's some bits, what is it,
the death of Daniel Wilkins? You read that and you're like,
no, I, there's no way that that could have actually happened.
It did. And, yeah. it's a bizarre
(26:16):
episode of our history that you need to back up with some
sources. Sarah Jack: Yeah, I just wanna
say as a podcaster on the subject of witch hunts, as a
descendant, and then just as a enjoyer of literature and
comics, coming from all those perspectives, when I got to view
(26:39):
your work, the first thing, I was so excited because I could
see it was gonna be a journey that I was gonna like go to
Salem, like back through time, although you see the layers of
time in it, and right away I waslike, I wanna be in the space.
I wanna see how Ben tells the story.
And you just, as you mentioned, it's a big book and it has all
(27:05):
of this art and the words from the past and your notes and the
input from the historians. It's all there, but you go
through it a panel at a time, a page at a time.
Plus all of your storytelling with your visuals is so
incredible. It's just really phenomenal.
And it's enjoyable to spend timein More Weight.
(27:29):
It's enjoyable to go to this space that is like, it's a raw
space, it's a truthful space. And, yeah, I'm so grateful that
you put the work in and gave it to the world.
We need it. We've needed it.
More pieces of history need to be done like this and, but I'm
so grateful that it's our ancestors' history, and it is
(27:53):
such a essential part of understanding American history
and American present. Ben Wickey: Yeah.
I thank you so much for that. It's very, very, very kind of
you. I finished the book.
I didn't know what people were going to think of it.
It's been very gratifying to just look behind my shoulder
occasionally and see people behind me.
(28:15):
I get a kick outta that. It's very rewarding for me,
especially after just having this on the back burner as just
a 10-year labor of love of, justdoing other things and then
always going back to this book and just taking as much time and
effort as I could into just trying to make it as good as I
could and as accurate as I could.
(28:36):
Yeah. And I think every generation, I
think it's a story that should be told with every new
generation. I think every new generation
should have some new way of telling the story.
The way I think about it is thatit really is America's best
example of a, what happens to all theocracies, ultimately they
(28:57):
will crumble. With the very first hint of
anything from the invisible world, you're going to of course
get demonization and people at each other's throats, and who
said it? Cotton Mather, mauling each
other in the dark. And it is also, of course,
America's best example of what happens when a society can of
(29:19):
course, tear itself apart from the inside with intolerance and
blind faith and petty vengeance and hatred.
I think Gore Vidal was right, that we do live in the United
States of Amnesia. We tend to remember episodes of
our history that we're comfortable with, ones that make
(29:41):
us look good. And the Salem Witch Trails, this
whole pandemic of fear is a blight.
It is not something that is easyto swallow. 19 men and women
hanged and one man pressed to death and five people dying in
jail, including a newborn baby. That's really tough to swallow.
(30:02):
It's especially really tough when you look around at modern
day Salem, where all this stuff happened, and you say, actually
none of this spooky stuff would be going on if there weren't 19
men and women hanged and one manpress to death.
Sarah Jack (30:16):
Yeah. Ben Wickey
people are asking enough questions.
I think there's a cognitive dissonance.
I think that a vital point has repeatedly been lost, and I
think there's a lot of really good opportunities to tell the
(30:39):
story, especially in these, as Isaid, despotic times.
I mean, these times where you'vegot families being torn apart
and people being deported and children being arrested and all
that. I don't see anybody walking
around Salem making that connection.
I also don't see many people in Salem talking about how witch
(31:00):
hunts are still happening in theworld as we're sitting here
comfortably in our chairs, in our homes, in our secular
democracy, in our post enlightenment times with our
enlightenment values and our secular laws.
We're not really talking about how this is all still going on.
And because of that, we are failing to recognize repeatedly
(31:24):
that our brothers and sisters across the Atlantic, their
present nightmare used to be ours.
And if we don't understand what witch hunts actually were and
meant in America and in Europe, then, in the West, then we can't
really empathize with what's going on in India and Africa.
(31:48):
We sit back and we buy our $80 wands, and we think, they're,
that's just how they do things over there.
That has nothing to do with whathappened in Salem in 1692.
No, it has everything to do. Witch hunts happen for the same
reason. And it's the kind of boring,
human, mundane reasons, as I said, of land lust and jealousy
(32:08):
and somebody refuses my sexual advances, or I want that guy's
land, or whatever. There's always going to be the
button to push for the invisibleworld, for witchcraft.
That's how it existed in history.
The word witch, it developed through Christianity as a way
for Catholics and Protestants todemonize each other and for all
(32:31):
of them to demonize Jewish people.
That's how the word witch grew over time.
I think we've kind of lost that.I think a really, troubling and,
to me, depressing mixture of pseudoscience and pseudo-history
has stunted not only Salem's progress towards perfect
(32:53):
hindsight, but America's. And this book, yeah, it's a
little angry at, at the end. I didn't expect to do a polemic.
I didn't start this book settingout to do, you know, I'm going
to pierce the magic bubble of modern Salem.
I didn't think my pen was going to be that sharp to pierce that
(33:14):
bubble, but the more I researched, the more I, of
course, empathized with these people from history.
The more I drew them, mean, drawing them is a completely
different wor, I mean, that's anexperience, you know.
The more angry I got. The more I had an opinion.
(33:35):
If you set out to draw a Giles Corey for a graphic novel,
you're, most people would probably, the first thing they
would draw is him being pressed to death, or you're gonna draw
people being hanged or that kindof thing.
I wanted to know who these people were.
I set out to draw these people as they were.
I was putting off for many yearsof this project any drawings of
(33:57):
these people being executed or suffering slowly or the agonies
of these people because I didn'tfeel like I had that range when
I started out. I thought this is gonna be
something I'll have to draw, butI will take absolutely no
pleasure in doing so. So I started out drawing Giles
Corey. By the time I drew Giles Corey
(34:21):
being pressed to death on September 19, 1692, I had been
drawing him for nine years, and I had drawn his entire life.
I had drawn his baptism. I had drawn all three of his
marriages. I had drawn all the shenanigans
and things that he had gotten upto in Salem.
I had drawn his crossing across the Atlantic.
(34:42):
I had drawn his children growingup, and that's different, and so
it, it meant something more, when it finally came time to
saying goodbye to him, to Martha, of course, to Mary
(35:03):
Easty, to everybody. I had tried as much as I could
to empathize and humanize these people, to get to know them, to
not just look at them as collateral damage or witchcraft
fodder or as saints or martyrs, but to look at them as human
beings who senselessly suffered.I just really wanted to get this
(35:29):
right on a human level, on an empathetic, compassionate level,
and to convey that to readers ofyes, these people may have had
buckles on their shoes. Yes, they may have practiced, to
our minds today, a kind of extremist form of faith.
(35:49):
But they still had jealousies and they still had love and they
still had the fear of death and they still wanted to avoid pain
and to achieve some kind of happiness and fulfillment in
life the way that any of us do today.
Josh Hutchinson (36:09):
It's so important to show the humanity,
to allow the reader to empathizewith the subject, because that's
how you get into understanding somebody is seeing them as a
human, and you can relate more to the experience, and maybe it
(36:34):
moves you to change your own behaviors or something of that
nature. Ben Wickey: Yeah.
And also to show the antagonistsnot as mustache-twirling
villains, but as people who think they're doing the right
thing. Everyone has their own reason
(36:55):
for doing what they're doing. I mean, okay, my portrayal of
Thomas Putnam is a bit mustache-twirling Snidely
Whiplash, I gotta admit. But, no, it's good to always
just remember be, you gotta remember why people do these
things, because that's your onlyreal insight into understanding
how they still happen, how they happen at all, what happened in
(37:19):
Salem wasn't the first witch trial or witch hunts in American
history, wasn't the last either,but they are the biggest, they
are the most documented or well-documented.
And, because of that, you can really look into people's lives
and look into letters and look into writings and trying, just
trying to figure out how people were feeling about what they
(37:42):
were doing and why they were doing it and what they were
doing. Yeah.
Sarah Jack (37:46):
How does it feel to know your work will inspire a
new generation of artists and storytellers?
Ben Wickey (37:52):
Oh my gosh. I haven't really thought of
that. It wasn't really my thought
while I was doing it. I think my process for doing it
was so isolated, and so it's just trying to exercise
something out of myself, trying to get something off my chest so
that I could understand it. But of course then I finished
(38:14):
it, and a really estimable guy in Canada has created a whole
study guide for the book. So it could be syllabilized and
taught in schools and things like that.
I really do hope that it is a tool, a learning tool.
My quarrel with the Crucible is not the fact that it is
(38:36):
fundamentally historically inaccurate.
Arthur Miller at the time said, this is not meant to be a
historically accurate play. My beef with the Crucible is how
it is taught in high schools instead of the actual history.
If you're gonna be teaching American history in public
schools in America, you're gonnabe talking about what the
(39:01):
Pilgrims, you've got the Mayflower, and then you're just
jumping to the Revolutionary Warthere's this whole, like 70
years between, that is very fascinating.
You've got not only the witchcraft trials, but you've
got King Philip's War, which wasone of the catalysts, I would
(39:22):
say, for what happened in Salem.You've got all these events that
happened in between, and my hopeis that, if you're gonna be
teaching a class and the works of Baker or Roach are perhaps
dense for a high school class orsomething like that, I hope this
can offer something, some, with young people or just anybody who
(39:46):
picks up the book. I, I hope that it helps people
and that it encourages people tothink.
I am a cartoonist. It's not my job to convince
people of my own convictions andmy own opinions.
It's not also my job to BS people or to give people what
(40:08):
they want. It's my job to just be honest
about how I feel about things and to just allow people to
think differently. And if the book does that, then
I've done my job as a cartoonist.
And it is also my hope to, I guess, make the jobs of
historians a little easier, to have a book in pop culture that
(40:31):
dismisses the ergot theory or puts The Crucible in context
with the actual history, just sothat historians can go about
their days not being asked really weird questions.
If you have this kind of book inpop culture, in the bloodstream
of American pop culture, then that can't hurt.
But as to its impact, I have no clue what's gonna happen.
(40:53):
I hope it'll help. Josh Hutchinson: I think it
will. And I think that More Weight is
a must have for any home of anybody who's interested in
Salem to any degree. It's great for beginners.
It's great for intermediates. I loved it myself for being
(41:16):
taken back visually to see the things that I've been reading
about for years, to be there. So I definitely recommend it to
everybody. It's available September 23rd?
September 23rd. Yep.
And I'm gonna be starting a booktour on the Northeast of
(41:37):
different places, where I can give talks and sign a copy of
the books if anybody's interested.
Oh, September 26th, I'm going tobe at the Sawyer Free Library in
collaboration with the Bookstoreof Gloucester.
I'll be in Gloucester, Massachusetts that day kicking
off the Massachusetts book tour.October 4th, I'm going to be
(42:00):
doing a talk at the House of theSeven Gables in Salem.
So far, it's the only place in Salem where I will be doing this
book, as a tour and q and a and book signing.
October 18th, I'm gonna be at Jabberwocky Books in
Newburyport, Massachusetts. October, I think 10th to the
(42:21):
12th, I'm gonna be at New York, New York, ComicCon.
And in November 15th, I'm going to be a keynote speaker at the
Festival for Nonfiction Comics in Brattleboro, Vermont.
So far that's the book tour. I'm doing a bunch of stuff.
I'm bracing myself for, Sarah Jack: gonna be a blast.
(42:42):
Yeah, I'm very looking forward to it and
engaging with people when, yeah.Sarah Jack: Yeah, that'll be a
blast. When you're at the House of the
Seven Gables, take a look at their little walkway brick
project. We haven't been there ourselves
to see, but we, were able to have a brick placed for Tituba
that says In memory of Tituba. Ben Wickey: Ah.
Sarah Jack (43:02):
And so that, that's there, I believe, behind the
facility, near the parking lot, but Ben Wickey: Yay.
I have a brick for my friend David Frankham there, who was
the voice of the, the narrator for the House of the Seven
Gables that my, my short film got a, he's got a brick there,
and he's gonna be 100 years old this February and still going
(43:26):
strong. Sarah Jack: Awesome.
Great. Ben Wickey: Yeah.
Josh Hutchinson (43:31):
Great. Thank you so very much.
Ben Wickey (43:34):
Oh my gosh. Thank you both so much.
Oh my God, this was so much, this was so great.
I've been a long admirer of everything that you guys do on
this podcast and the detail and the commitment that you both
have on a day by day basis. Oh my goodness.
You guys are definitely after myown heart, and it's been really
great manifesting among you today.
Josh Hutchinson (43:57):
Great. I've enjoyed it so much.
I could carry on for hours talking about this, so thank
you. Ben Wickey: Me too.
Sarah Jack (44:04):
Thank you for joining us.
Josh Hutchinson (44:07):
This interview is also available in three parts
at The Thing About Salem podcast, and More Weight is
available for pre-order now. Sarah Jack: Order your copies
today at bookshop.org/shop/endwitchhunts.
More Weight is intended for mature audiences.
Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
Welcome to The Thing About Witch Hunts.
(00:02):
I'm Josh Hutchinson. Sarah Jack: And I am Sarah Jack.
Today, we speak with author and illustrator Ben Wickey about his
amazing new graphic novel, More Weight: a Salem Story, which
focuses on the story of Giles Cory, the only victim of the
Salem Witch trials to be pressedto death under large stones.
Let's welcome Ben to the podcast.
Sarah Jack (00:24):
Welcome to The Thing About Witch Hunts podcast, Ben
Wickey. Today, we get to talk with you
about your new graphic novel, More Weight.
Please tell us a little bit about you and your work.
Ben Wickey (00:36):
Thank you. I'm a Massachusetts-born
illustrator and comic book artist and animator.
I'm originally from Cape Ann of Rockport and Gloucester, about
30 minutes north of Salem, but all my friends live in Salem, so
I grew up, you know, going thereconstantly and soaking up slowly
over my whole life the history of that place.
(01:00):
I am a graduate of CalArts. I did a stop motion animated
version of the House of the Seven Gables by Hawthorne as a
short, 30 minute short film. That premiered at the Gables in
2018. I have been an illustrator.
I worked on a book called The Illustrated Vivian Stanshal,
(01:22):
book with Ki Longfellow in 2017.I'm a contributing artist of
Alan Moore's and Steve Moore's grimoire The Moon and Serpent
Bumper Book of Magic and for 10 years I've been working on this
depressing behemoth, More Weight, which is finally out and
I'm very relieved. Thank you for having me.
Josh Hutchinson (01:44):
So I understand that we're actually all cousins
through Mary Easty. Is that true?
Ben Wickey (01:52):
Yes, and I didn't actually know that I was a dis
descendant of Mary Esty until I was halfway through the book
doing this. It was 2018 or something like
that. My cousin Holly in Michigan
messaged me out of the blue and said, oh, did you know that
we're related to to somebody, somebody from the Salem Witch
(02:12):
Trials? She didn't even know that I was
doing this book. It was under my hat for so long.
It was just this little thing I had on the back burner, little
passion project. And so I think that really
changed my attitude towards whatI was doing.
It heightened my convictions in what I was doing.
And then we talked a little bit more, and then she provided the
(02:33):
genealogy. I guess I'm her 10th
great-grandson. Josh Hutchinson: Sounds right.
On the Ellis side. So yeah.
Josh Hutchinson (02:42):
Cool. Ben Wickey
very moving, very moving revelation.
Sarah Jack (02:47):
Yeah. I had known that I descended
from Rebecca Nurse since I was ateenager, but then about six
years ago or seven years ago, I discovered that Mary and Rebecca
had grandchildren that married, and then that's the line.
It's all these Russells out of Massachusetts that ended up in
(03:08):
Iowa when I was born. There's something about Mary,
because of her petition. It was such a proclamation and
such, you know? So I can imagine since she was
the one that you found yourself tied to, and you're giving such
a message with your project, howthat must have struck you.
Yeah. Ben Wickey: It really struck me.
(03:30):
I mean, I hadn't drawn, thankfully, I hadn't drawn her
scenes until I found that out. So it really infused a lot of
emotion and yeah, I really felt like I was portraying a family
member, you know. It's kind of, it might seem
silly to some people, 330 years on, but no, I really identified
(03:53):
with her, and, yes, the book is about Giles and Martha Corey,
and I still think they're such an interesting duo to focus on
when you consider Giles' obviousflaws and his sort of arc, semi
path to redemption, and his death, which I still think is
one of the first documented protests in American history.
(04:15):
I think that's very important to, to to look at.
Just drawing Mary Esty, I kind of based her a little bit off
photographs of my great-grandmother, Bessie, who I
never met, but I gave her her nose and her cheeks and I based
Mary Esty off of Bessie. Sarah Jack: That's awesome.
Ben Wickey (04:34):
Yeah. Sarah Jack
And her petition never fails to make me very
emotional and teary eyed. Sarah Jack: Yeah.
And it's very similar to, I mean, in the book
I do have quotes side by side ofMary Bradbury's petition with
her descendant, Ray Bradbury's, message to the Republican party
(04:58):
that he put in a, he paid a for a page in Variety in the 1950s
at the height of the McCarthy years, where he said let's send
McCarthy and his goons back to Salem in the 17th century.
The ripples in time of generations trying to say the
same thing, of let's not accuse the innocent, let's protect
(05:19):
people. Let's not give into fear and
hysteria and paranoia. Yeah.
Sarah Jack (05:25):
Yeah. What do we need to know about
the early life of Giles Gory or about him?
Ben Wickey (05:34):
That was fun. That was very fascinating.
It's only really Upham's book that kind of touches on the
records of Giles' 50 years in Salem before the witch trials.
I went into the now digitized quarterly court records of Essex
County, and I just went through the index.
(05:56):
I found all the references to Giles Corey, and I just made
lists of all the shenanigans that he was getting into.
And I am pretty much convinced that he did murder a guy 1670s.
Like this isn't a sugarcoated version of Giles in my portrayal
of him. But there is a character
composite, a kind of character profile that I created over time
(06:18):
of, oh God, this is a guy that got away with practically
everything except for the one thing that he didn't do, which
was sorcery. Very colorful, fascinating guy.
You look at his times as a watchman in Salem Town, which is
now the city of Salem, above theSalem Town meeting house, which
(06:38):
I think would probably be where Rockafella's is, the restaurant
is, now in in Salem. And he's part of a firewood
heist on the South River and allthis crazy stuff.
Stealing from George Corwin, Jonathan Corwin's father, the
sacks loads of household goods and owing people and just debt
and just all these sort of things that really create a,
(07:04):
colorful, entertaining rogue, a roguish figure and then
obviously, a murderer, obviouslysomebody who had a very
dangerous and checkered past that sort of, it all came to a
head by the time he was accused of witchcraft.
It was almost as if it was the one thing that they could
(07:26):
finally use to dispose of him, because, and this is the same in
where witch hunts still exist, India and Africa the moment, as
we're sitting here talking. Accusations of witchcraft have
been easiest way to dispose people for the petty, not for
supernatural reasons, not for sorcery, not for anything, for
(07:47):
the petty, mundane human reasonsof jealousy, land lust, petty
vengeance. It always happens in times of
socioeconomic pressures and bad economy and things like that.
It was sort of, you know, matterof time for all that to come
biting Giles in the bum. My own version of Giles Corey.
(08:09):
The whole beginning of this bookwas just simply a kind of
graphic novel adaption of this play that I found by Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow called Giles Corey of the Salem Farms,
in which he gives a portrayal ofthis man, this Giles Corey is
very, very unlike any character that you see anything from
(08:30):
Longfellow. Even his version of Miles
Standish is more, you know, Miles Standish, who impaled the
heads of indigenous people on pikes, is less grim and angry
than this version of Giles Corey.
Part of what the book became wasan examination into why did this
(08:51):
character of Giles Corey speak to Longfellow and this very
tumultuous decade of the 1860s, which had not only the horrific
death of Longfellow's wife, but also the Civil War, which his
son had enlisted in and barely survived, and the social issues
of slavery that he was very, very publicly immersed in.
(09:16):
And so the book became over, at the beginning, it was sort of me
going, oh, well, I'll just do a historically accurate version of
Longfellow's play, because as I was looking at it, I was
thinking, oh, well, I have access to all sorts of
historical material that Longfellow didn't have in the
(09:36):
1860s, when all he had was Upham's book, Witchcraft by
Charles Wentworth Upham. And so I I was going through and
I thought, well, Giles didn't live on the Ipswich River.
Well, I'll just change that. And then over time, the
Longfellow bits got smaller and smaller.
My own bits got bigger and bigger, thanks in no small part
(09:56):
to realizing that Mary Esty was my ancestor.
And the more you research, the more you have an opinion of the
facts, which are extremely troubling and relevant and
infuriating. You read the facts, and you're
infuriated the basic human level, the injustice and the
(10:17):
atrocity of it all, and the waysin which it's still still
extremely politically relevant to these despotic times.
That's my rambling answer to very simple question.
Josh Hutchinson (10:31):
Thank Sarah Jack
rambling, so thanks. Ben Wickey: I've been working on
this book without talking about it, so it's kind of weird
talking about it, but Sarah Jack: Yeah, I bet.
I bet. Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, Ben
Wickey (10:43):
A lot of fun. Josh Hutchinson
what you did with time in the book, how you handled, just
weaving back and forth from one period to another, and I just
loved that you included the Salem history at the end.
I love Salem, so it's good to see all that history in there.
(11:05):
And it's just so fun time traveling with you.
Ben Wickey (11:10):
Yeah. And I think that was a, that was
really something that I wanted to do because part of the, I I
think a big message of the book is that history doesn't happen
in a vacuum. There is such a disconnect, I
think, between 1692 and the modern city of Salem that you'll
(11:31):
walk through. So I wanted to, I have a kind of
psychogeographical sense of place, wanting to really show
that no, everything happens. History doesn't happen in a
vacuum. It happens in our backyard, and
all you need to do is dig, and you need to do the necessary
donkey work of getting your pickand shovel and researching and
(11:53):
finding all sorts of things, beneath all the hype and beneath
all the sort of glittering distractions and the spooky
wallpaper and everything. No.
Beneath that is something reallyreal and human and relevant.
But I did really wanna include these scenes between Longfellow
(12:13):
and Hawthorne walking through 1860s era Salem, just not
violently thrown back and forth between modern 2025 Salem and
1692 Salem. There is some midpoint where you
can recognize the street corner,recognize how the street layout
has remained the same, recognizebuildings that still exist from
(12:37):
the 17th century, but buildings that still exist from the 19th
century and see really see? itself, how the landscape has
changed. see how the Jonathan Corwin House, now known branded
as the Witch House, how that haschanged, how that looks
completely different in the 19thcentury and how it was brought
back, and understanding people to understand when they visit
(13:01):
that city, why they're seeing what they're seeing, why why
they look, looks, the way it looks. because I don't really
think there's not enough plaquesin the city to tell you.
People are obliged to do their own research, and not everybody
has the time or interest to do that.
I wanted to do the book that I looked for in that city but
(13:23):
couldn't find, a book that was honest about, oh no, no, this is
why this is the way it is, this is why this is the way it is,
this changed, this didn't, and you can use it as a guidebook.
You can walk around not only thecity of Salem, the whole area of
the whole geography of Danvers and Topsfield and places like
that to see where these things happened and the traces still
(13:43):
left behind, the echoes, the ghosts, the shadows.
Sarah Jack (13:47):
And that's something that you can do with your style
of art. Graphic novels allow for that
type of storytelling where a regular piece of literature
isn't gonna do that. Ben Wickey: Yeah.
You can do anything in comics. I mean, it really allows you a
huge canvas of time and space. You can have as many characters
(14:09):
as you want. You can have as many locations
as you want. A thing that always bothered me,
even with very high budget, pristine movie or TV adaptions
of the Salem Witch trials, what happened?
Everything happens in the same building.
All of the examinations happen in Salem Village meeting house.
(14:32):
All the trials seem to happen inthe Salem Village meeting house.
They never have another locationchange.
You never see how things get bigger.
You never, once the court of Oyer and Terminer gets put in
place, everything moves to SalemTown.
You're moving from the very rustic, rural Salem Village to
(14:53):
the more cosmopolitan, opulent, mercantile Salem town.
It's a bigger room, and it's themost sophisticated court.
It's not a kangaroo court. It's not a, it's not a New
Yorker cartoon, where everyone'sgot buckles on their hats and
pitchforks and torches. No, it is the most sophisticated
court that you could be standingin front, albeit an emergency
(15:15):
court after return of the charter and a kind of return,
because of course, the Massachusetts government had
been languishing in legal limbo for a few years.
William Phips comes in, and May of 1692, okay, we have a
government now. We have a new charter.
We're not gonna wait for the general court to assemble.
We're gonna create an emergency court of Oyer and Terminer,
(15:38):
let's get these very prestigious, wealthy,
land-owning, albeit, but Harvardeducated people to stand in
judgment of these people that have been accused of witchcraft
and to have it in Salem town, the kind of ground zero, if Tad
Baker is correct, and I think heis, the ground zero of the
(16:01):
Puritan hegemony itself. It may very, very well may be
the place where John Winthrop first made his city upon a hill
speech. It is the first town.
It really was, Salem really was this, a kind of sentimental
place for the Puritan hegemony, which was in, by the 1690s, in
(16:21):
this kind of visible decline. And so you see this kind of idea
of, okay, not only has Satan obviously declared war upon us,
but he's done it, he's really hit it at the heart of, he
hasn't done it in Boston. He's done it at the heart of the
Massachusetts Bay colony, in Salem, the first town, the
beating heart of the colony. We can't have the mother country
(16:42):
knowing about this. We've gotta really nip this in
the bud. And so the, not to get too
conspiratorial, but of course the priorities shift.
It's less about finding out who is guilty and who is innocent
and more about preserving the Puritan hegemony, which was
already in a perceived decline, when you consider this new
(17:05):
charter, which recognized Baptists, Quakers.
Quakers, we've been boring holesin the tongues of Quakers for
generations, and now they are recognized in this new charter.
What next, the antichrist? What next, atheists and
Catholics. This was a real outrage.
They were just happy to have anycharter at all, but of course,
(17:28):
Puritanism in New England was perceived to be on tender hooks.
And so this, there's this idea of, okay, if Satan has declared
war on us, on New England, then Puritanism has to be visibly
winning that war, visibly on topof things.
(17:48):
Of course, William Phips, an illiterate treasure hunter, who
has now become governor of Massachusetts, scampers off to
Maine to fight the French and indigenous combatants.
And he leaves the government in charge of William Stoughton, not
only the Lieutenant Governor, but the chief justice of this
(18:10):
new court. You don't often see this in pop
culture portrayals. You don't often see this in
miniseries or movies or things like that.
The whole political catalyst forhow this thing was able to reach
the heights that it did. We're always focusing on the
afflicted girls. We're always just trying to
figure out why did they, what was their fits about?
(18:33):
Was it Ergotism? Was it actual fraud?
Was it actual possession? I'm less interested in that,
because I don't really think that the girls are that, I mean,
obviously they allowed, they kept this up, but they only had
so much agency. They're little girls in 17th
century New England. They can't admit that this has
(18:53):
all been for attention or fraud or whatever, or post-traumatic
stress disorder in the cases of some.
You consider some of them were war refugees from King Phillips
War. I'm mostly focusing on the
adults in the room, these Harvard-educated people who
allowed it to go the lengths that it did.
And no one's talking about that,at least in pop culture.
(19:15):
You see it often, of course, yousee the truth in the works of
Emerson Baker and Marilynne Roach and Daniel Gagnon and all
these amazing people. Richard Trask.
These are the giants upon which I'm perched as a little vulture
with my little pen and ink, drying and scribbling my little
drawings. My hope was to do something that
(19:36):
at least in pop culture, which is, comics is a pop culture
medium, to do something that washonest about at least the
sociopolitical catalysts for everything and how it was all
able to happen and how that's still relevant to today, whether
in America or whether in places in, as I said, India and Africa,
(19:59):
where witch hunts are, actual witch hunts, are still
happening. Yeah.
Josh Hutchinson (20:05):
In More Weight, I love in the scenes, in the
examination scenes, the courtroom scenes at the Salem
Village meeting house, you have the characters speak in words
that are actually documented in the records that survive.
And I just love that they're speaking in their, basically
(20:27):
their own voices. So thank you for facilitating
that. It really adds something to the
story. Ben Wickey: That for me was one
of the most, I hasten the word to say, use the word fun, but it
was always a wonderful, challenge and way of working,
'cause I would just go through all the transcripts and
(20:48):
highlight the bits that I thought really brought home the
gravity of every situation. And I focused mostly on the
examinations of people who had become the victims.
Some non executed people, as well, like Tituba or Mary Black
or or Abigail Hobbs or people like that, people that weren't
(21:09):
executed, but what they had to say in court is still very
interesting. You read those documents, and
they do read like a play. You wonder why Arthur Miller
made up as much as he did. It's all, the material is itself
more riveting than anything he could make up or invent, you
know? And I thought, well, I'm not
gonna make anything up. Why should I?
(21:31):
The truth is here and it's speaking to you.
You read any of the documents, I've, I've been to Rowley, I've
handled some of the documents myself.
I handled Martha Corey's examination, which is this
giant, parchment folded six ways, and, you really do get
very emotional holding it. This was in the room, and it's
(21:52):
thanks to amazing people like Margo Burns.
I mean, they're an amazing, not only an amazing historian, but a
linguist. They were able to study the
handwriting and figure out who was in the room and who wrote
what, and gave so much more information and insight into
what was going on in that room. It helps people like me who has
(22:13):
to draw everything, and I was constantly redrawing so many
things. I started drawing everything in
2017. I constantly had to go back and
redraw things. Oh, no, no, no, John Hale
wouldn't have been in this room or so-and-so wouldn't have come
to Salem until this month. I got to redraw this, or I'm
(22:34):
going to replace this person with Nicholas Noyse or whatever.
A ton of redrawing went into this, really because I
researched as I went along, which I thought was the wrong
way of doing it until I read an interview with David McCullough,
who wrote the John Adams biography, lots of great history
(22:55):
books about the American Revolution and the Wright
Brothers. And he said, no, no, no.
It's always good to research as you write, because that means
that you are working from a perspective of curiosity.
You're asking questions as you go, and so therefore, you are
encouraging your reader to also ask, be asking questions,
different from doing all of yourresearch and going, this
(23:18):
happened because I said so, because I've spent all these
years research you know? So part of the thing that, the
effect that I like about what I did is that it does have a
Maysles brother inquiring eye documentarian effect, because
I'm also looking around the roomtrying to figure out what's
going on and who's in the room and what's happening, as much as
(23:42):
anybody else. And I didn't think that I was in
any way an expert on what I was doing.
Even after I finished the book, I thought, I, God, I still
barely understand this, it's so confusing.
It's such a insane episode of our history.
Until I had dinner with Margo Burns and they patted me on the
shoulder and they were like, no,no, no, no, no, you're one of
(24:04):
us. No, no, you're not a historian.
I tell people, I'm not a historian.
I'm just a cartoonist who cares.If I've gained any expertise in
this subject, I, I'd be very happy to say so, but I'm glad I
left it up to someone else to say that.
It's one of those bits of history where there's still so
(24:24):
much that we don't, not so much that we don't know in, in terms
of the innocence of people accused is not, it's not as if
there's still room for doubt as to whether there was actual
witchcraft or blah, blah, blah. That's very well established
that no such thing happened. But it's still a thing where
you, you do a whole, you do a 500 page book like this, and
(24:46):
you're still rubbing your chin going, oh God, I still wanna
know. I still have questions, but
thankfully, the thing about thisbook that I am proud of is that
there are about, at least like 30 pages at the end of research
notes that say exactly what I invented, what comes from
primary source documents, what comes from Longfellow, what
(25:09):
comes from, you know, who said what, what is a theory from such
and such a historian, where thisbuilding is now, what happened
to this, what this person later went on to do, when did this
person die? It's a book in and of itself.
He just sat, I sat in this chairwriting out all these research
notes. I wish I took notes while I was
(25:32):
researching so I wouldn't have to go through all the research
books in the shelf behind me andgoing through the index, trying
to figure out where I got all the things that I got, but just
to show, just to be, what's the word, upfront and transparent
with people. There's some things that happen
behind closed doors that I can'tprove, but I'm going to at least
(25:54):
tell you that, this bit is something that I wrote this bit
is something that somebody else wrote this bit is, this bit
comes from actual documents because the truth is so much
crazier than fiction. There's some bits, what is it,
the death of Daniel Wilkins? You read that and you're like,
no, I, there's no way that that could have actually happened.
It did. And, yeah. it's a bizarre
(26:16):
episode of our history that you need to back up with some
sources. Sarah Jack: Yeah, I just wanna
say as a podcaster on the subject of witch hunts, as a
descendant, and then just as a enjoyer of literature and
comics, coming from all those perspectives, when I got to view
(26:39):
your work, the first thing, I was so excited because I could
see it was gonna be a journey that I was gonna like go to
Salem, like back through time, although you see the layers of
time in it, and right away I waslike, I wanna be in the space.
I wanna see how Ben tells the story.
And you just, as you mentioned, it's a big book and it has all
(27:05):
of this art and the words from the past and your notes and the
input from the historians. It's all there, but you go
through it a panel at a time, a page at a time.
Plus all of your storytelling with your visuals is so
incredible. It's just really phenomenal.
And it's enjoyable to spend timein More Weight.
(27:29):
It's enjoyable to go to this space that is like, it's a raw
space, it's a truthful space. And, yeah, I'm so grateful that
you put the work in and gave it to the world.
We need it. We've needed it.
More pieces of history need to be done like this and, but I'm
so grateful that it's our ancestors' history, and it is
(27:53):
such a essential part of understanding American history
and American present. Ben Wickey: Yeah.
I thank you so much for that. It's very, very, very kind of
you. I finished the book.
I didn't know what people were going to think of it.
It's been very gratifying to just look behind my shoulder
occasionally and see people behind me.
(28:15):
I get a kick outta that. It's very rewarding for me,
especially after just having this on the back burner as just
a 10-year labor of love of, justdoing other things and then
always going back to this book and just taking as much time and
effort as I could into just trying to make it as good as I
could and as accurate as I could.
(28:36):
Yeah. And I think every generation, I
think it's a story that should be told with every new
generation. I think every new generation
should have some new way of telling the story.
The way I think about it is thatit really is America's best
example of a, what happens to all theocracies, ultimately they
(28:57):
will crumble. With the very first hint of
anything from the invisible world, you're going to of course
get demonization and people at each other's throats, and who
said it? Cotton Mather, mauling each
other in the dark. And it is also, of course,
America's best example of what happens when a society can of
(29:19):
course, tear itself apart from the inside with intolerance and
blind faith and petty vengeance and hatred.
I think Gore Vidal was right, that we do live in the United
States of Amnesia. We tend to remember episodes of
our history that we're comfortable with, ones that make
(29:41):
us look good. And the Salem Witch Trails, this
whole pandemic of fear is a blight.
It is not something that is easyto swallow. 19 men and women
hanged and one man pressed to death and five people dying in
jail, including a newborn baby. That's really tough to swallow.
(30:02):
It's especially really tough when you look around at modern
day Salem, where all this stuff happened, and you say, actually
none of this spooky stuff would be going on if there weren't 19
men and women hanged and one manpress to death.
Sarah Jack (30:16):
Yeah. Ben Wickey
people are asking enough questions.
I think there's a cognitive dissonance.
I think that a vital point has repeatedly been lost, and I
think there's a lot of really good opportunities to tell the
(30:39):
story, especially in these, as Isaid, despotic times.
I mean, these times where you'vegot families being torn apart
and people being deported and children being arrested and all
that. I don't see anybody walking
around Salem making that connection.
I also don't see many people in Salem talking about how witch
(31:00):
hunts are still happening in theworld as we're sitting here
comfortably in our chairs, in our homes, in our secular
democracy, in our post enlightenment times with our
enlightenment values and our secular laws.
We're not really talking about how this is all still going on.
And because of that, we are failing to recognize repeatedly
(31:24):
that our brothers and sisters across the Atlantic, their
present nightmare used to be ours.
And if we don't understand what witch hunts actually were and
meant in America and in Europe, then, in the West, then we can't
really empathize with what's going on in India and Africa.
(31:48):
We sit back and we buy our $80 wands, and we think, they're,
that's just how they do things over there.
That has nothing to do with whathappened in Salem in 1692.
No, it has everything to do. Witch hunts happen for the same
reason. And it's the kind of boring,
human, mundane reasons, as I said, of land lust and jealousy
(32:08):
and somebody refuses my sexual advances, or I want that guy's
land, or whatever. There's always going to be the
button to push for the invisibleworld, for witchcraft.
That's how it existed in history.
The word witch, it developed through Christianity as a way
for Catholics and Protestants todemonize each other and for all
(32:31):
of them to demonize Jewish people.
That's how the word witch grew over time.
I think we've kind of lost that.I think a really, troubling and,
to me, depressing mixture of pseudoscience and pseudo-history
has stunted not only Salem's progress towards perfect
(32:53):
hindsight, but America's. And this book, yeah, it's a
little angry at, at the end. I didn't expect to do a polemic.
I didn't start this book settingout to do, you know, I'm going
to pierce the magic bubble of modern Salem.
I didn't think my pen was going to be that sharp to pierce that
(33:14):
bubble, but the more I researched, the more I, of
course, empathized with these people from history.
The more I drew them, mean, drawing them is a completely
different wor, I mean, that's anexperience, you know.
The more angry I got. The more I had an opinion.
(33:35):
If you set out to draw a Giles Corey for a graphic novel,
you're, most people would probably, the first thing they
would draw is him being pressed to death, or you're gonna draw
people being hanged or that kindof thing.
I wanted to know who these people were.
I set out to draw these people as they were.
I was putting off for many yearsof this project any drawings of
(33:57):
these people being executed or suffering slowly or the agonies
of these people because I didn'tfeel like I had that range when
I started out. I thought this is gonna be
something I'll have to draw, butI will take absolutely no
pleasure in doing so. So I started out drawing Giles
Corey. By the time I drew Giles Corey
(34:21):
being pressed to death on September 19, 1692, I had been
drawing him for nine years, and I had drawn his entire life.
I had drawn his baptism. I had drawn all three of his
marriages. I had drawn all the shenanigans
and things that he had gotten upto in Salem.
I had drawn his crossing across the Atlantic.
(34:42):
I had drawn his children growingup, and that's different, and so
it, it meant something more, when it finally came time to
saying goodbye to him, to Martha, of course, to Mary
(35:03):
Easty, to everybody. I had tried as much as I could
to empathize and humanize these people, to get to know them, to
not just look at them as collateral damage or witchcraft
fodder or as saints or martyrs, but to look at them as human
beings who senselessly suffered.I just really wanted to get this
(35:29):
right on a human level, on an empathetic, compassionate level,
and to convey that to readers ofyes, these people may have had
buckles on their shoes. Yes, they may have practiced, to
our minds today, a kind of extremist form of faith.
(35:49):
But they still had jealousies and they still had love and they
still had the fear of death and they still wanted to avoid pain
and to achieve some kind of happiness and fulfillment in
life the way that any of us do today.
Josh Hutchinson (36:09):
It's so important to show the humanity,
to allow the reader to empathizewith the subject, because that's
how you get into understanding somebody is seeing them as a
human, and you can relate more to the experience, and maybe it
(36:34):
moves you to change your own behaviors or something of that
nature. Ben Wickey: Yeah.
And also to show the antagonistsnot as mustache-twirling
villains, but as people who think they're doing the right
thing. Everyone has their own reason
(36:55):
for doing what they're doing. I mean, okay, my portrayal of
Thomas Putnam is a bit mustache-twirling Snidely
Whiplash, I gotta admit. But, no, it's good to always
just remember be, you gotta remember why people do these
things, because that's your onlyreal insight into understanding
how they still happen, how they happen at all, what happened in
(37:19):
Salem wasn't the first witch trial or witch hunts in American
history, wasn't the last either,but they are the biggest, they
are the most documented or well-documented.
And, because of that, you can really look into people's lives
and look into letters and look into writings and trying, just
trying to figure out how people were feeling about what they
(37:42):
were doing and why they were doing it and what they were
doing. Yeah.
Sarah Jack (37:46):
How does it feel to know your work will inspire a
new generation of artists and storytellers?
Ben Wickey (37:52):
Oh my gosh. I haven't really thought of
that. It wasn't really my thought
while I was doing it. I think my process for doing it
was so isolated, and so it's just trying to exercise
something out of myself, trying to get something off my chest so
that I could understand it. But of course then I finished
(38:14):
it, and a really estimable guy in Canada has created a whole
study guide for the book. So it could be syllabilized and
taught in schools and things like that.
I really do hope that it is a tool, a learning tool.
My quarrel with the Crucible is not the fact that it is
(38:36):
fundamentally historically inaccurate.
Arthur Miller at the time said, this is not meant to be a
historically accurate play. My beef with the Crucible is how
it is taught in high schools instead of the actual history.
If you're gonna be teaching American history in public
schools in America, you're gonnabe talking about what the
(39:01):
Pilgrims, you've got the Mayflower, and then you're just
jumping to the Revolutionary Warthere's this whole, like 70
years between, that is very fascinating.
You've got not only the witchcraft trials, but you've
got King Philip's War, which wasone of the catalysts, I would
(39:22):
say, for what happened in Salem.You've got all these events that
happened in between, and my hopeis that, if you're gonna be
teaching a class and the works of Baker or Roach are perhaps
dense for a high school class orsomething like that, I hope this
can offer something, some, with young people or just anybody who
(39:46):
picks up the book. I, I hope that it helps people
and that it encourages people tothink.
I am a cartoonist. It's not my job to convince
people of my own convictions andmy own opinions.
It's not also my job to BS people or to give people what
(40:08):
they want. It's my job to just be honest
about how I feel about things and to just allow people to
think differently. And if the book does that, then
I've done my job as a cartoonist.
And it is also my hope to, I guess, make the jobs of
historians a little easier, to have a book in pop culture that
(40:31):
dismisses the ergot theory or puts The Crucible in context
with the actual history, just sothat historians can go about
their days not being asked really weird questions.
If you have this kind of book inpop culture, in the bloodstream
of American pop culture, then that can't hurt.
But as to its impact, I have no clue what's gonna happen.
(40:53):
I hope it'll help. Josh Hutchinson: I think it
will. And I think that More Weight is
a must have for any home of anybody who's interested in
Salem to any degree. It's great for beginners.
It's great for intermediates. I loved it myself for being
(41:16):
taken back visually to see the things that I've been reading
about for years, to be there. So I definitely recommend it to
everybody. It's available September 23rd?
September 23rd. Yep.
And I'm gonna be starting a booktour on the Northeast of
(41:37):
different places, where I can give talks and sign a copy of
the books if anybody's interested.
Oh, September 26th, I'm going tobe at the Sawyer Free Library in
collaboration with the Bookstoreof Gloucester.
I'll be in Gloucester, Massachusetts that day kicking
off the Massachusetts book tour.October 4th, I'm going to be
(42:00):
doing a talk at the House of theSeven Gables in Salem.
So far, it's the only place in Salem where I will be doing this
book, as a tour and q and a and book signing.
October 18th, I'm gonna be at Jabberwocky Books in
Newburyport, Massachusetts. October, I think 10th to the
(42:21):
12th, I'm gonna be at New York, New York, ComicCon.
And in November 15th, I'm going to be a keynote speaker at the
Festival for Nonfiction Comics in Brattleboro, Vermont.
So far that's the book tour. I'm doing a bunch of stuff.
I'm bracing myself for, Sarah Jack: gonna be a blast.
(42:42):
Yeah, I'm very looking forward to it and
engaging with people when, yeah.Sarah Jack: Yeah, that'll be a
blast. When you're at the House of the
Seven Gables, take a look at their little walkway brick
project. We haven't been there ourselves
to see, but we, were able to have a brick placed for Tituba
that says In memory of Tituba. Ben Wickey: Ah.
Sarah Jack (43:02):
And so that, that's there, I believe, behind the
facility, near the parking lot, but Ben Wickey: Yay.
I have a brick for my friend David Frankham there, who was
the voice of the, the narrator for the House of the Seven
Gables that my, my short film got a, he's got a brick there,
and he's gonna be 100 years old this February and still going
(43:26):
strong. Sarah Jack: Awesome.
Great. Ben Wickey: Yeah.
Josh Hutchinson (43:31):
Great. Thank you so very much.
Ben Wickey (43:34):
Oh my gosh. Thank you both so much.
Oh my God, this was so much, this was so great.
I've been a long admirer of everything that you guys do on
this podcast and the detail and the commitment that you both
have on a day by day basis. Oh my goodness.
You guys are definitely after myown heart, and it's been really
great manifesting among you today.
Josh Hutchinson (43:57):
Great. I've enjoyed it so much.
I could carry on for hours talking about this, so thank
you. Ben Wickey: Me too.
Sarah Jack (44:04):
Thank you for joining us.
Josh Hutchinson (44:07):
This interview is also available in three parts
at The Thing About Salem podcast, and More Weight is
available for pre-order now. Sarah Jack: Order your copies
today at bookshop.org/shop/endwitchhunts.
More Weight is intended for mature audiences.
Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
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