April 28 is probably most recognized in the world of comics as National Superhero Day, but it also happens to be Workers’ Memorial Day, honoring a special kind of superhero, and World Day for Safety and Health at Work. This post looks at two NIOSH comic books—one real, one fictional; one about safety, one about a safety superhero.
NIOSH’s First Comic Book
In 2013 the Center for Disease Control’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) published their first comic book, Straight Talk About Nail-Gun Safety (also available in Spanish as Plática directa sobre seguridad con pistolas de clavos). The comic book was adapted from a handbook called Nail Gun Safety: A Guide for Construction Contractors.
NIOSH and OSHA prepared this handbook to provide builders and contractors with the latest information on nail gun hazards and practical advice on the steps they can take to minimize injuries on construction sites. It packs a lot of information in its 20 pages, but in spite of the lurid cover and some hair-raising anecdotes, the text can come across as technical and dry. The comic book adaptation is not as detailed, but its presentation is much more engaging, making the material easier to understand and to remember, especially for workers who may not be fluent readers. According to its introduction, the comic book was developed by cartoonist and author (and musician) Nick Thorkelson with input from residential builders and subcontractors who allowed NIOSH access to residential building sites, as well as focus group discussions with residential building subcontractors, safety specialists, and workers.
Nick Thorkelson
Author and illustrator Nick Thorkelson is a freelance cartoon and comic book artist who has created many works promoting social and economic justice and worker’s rights. His informal, sketchy, loose style of drawing and interest in social issues reflect his background in the underground comix movement. Little in the comic book or the handbook it is based on could be described as overtly political, but there is one discussion common to both books that touches on the issue of company interests vs. workers’ rights. The Nail Gun Safety handbook mentions certain unsafe practices and polices contractors use to finish a project more quickly. The handbook then cites studies demonstrating that safe practices may result in a job taking a little longer, but the difference is negligible and not worth the danger to workers. The comic book reduces this issue to one brief comment that comes at the very end of the story:
In 2009, before working on the NIOSH comic, Thorkelson collaborated on a series of graphic novels that were used to train residential construction workers in how to protect themselves from falls from roofs, ladders, and scaffolds. In a 2015 article for the journal Composition Studies, Molly Scanlon describes some of the principles learned from this experience that were later applied to the NIOSH comic:
- Encourage participatory design, incorporating input from construction workers to create engaging education materials that would allow workers to more effectively learn safety standards and OSHA regulations by acknowledging language limitations and workplace culture.
- Recreate vicarious learning, in which workers learn more from the advice and anecdotes of their coworkers than from technical manuals and formal training.
- Collaborate with other artists in multiple disciplines to create a synergistic work in which each discipline complements and illuminates the others.
Techniques
Several other comic book techniques work together to make Straight Talk About Nail-Gun Safety much more engaging and memorable than its source material:
Dramatization: Basic safety principles are relayed in a conversation between a new employee and his supervisor rather than stated in a list; anecdotes that were merely narrated in the source material are fully staged in the comic book.
Comical situations, colloquial language, and quips maintain a light tone that keeps the reader entertained even though a very serious subject is being discussed.
Anthropomorphism: talking knot-holes and nail guns with faces encourage the reader to form an emotional attachment with his tools and work environment, a technique that was used earlier by Will Eisner in PS Magazine and other preventive maintenance handbooks he created for the Army.
Reception
The feedback regarding NIOSH’s first comic book was generally positive. For instance, the safety manager of a major home builder made the following comment:
I handed out [the documents] in Spanish and English after a couple of our safety meetings with our framers. The guys then took their lunch and started reading them. They were smiling and laughing and stated that it was fun to read. The feedback was positive.
At least one reader found the comic not to be entirely accurate. According to an article in NIOSH Science Bulletin entitled “First NIOSH Comic Helps Dispel Internet ‘Myth,’” a fact stated in the comic came up for dispute. A character in the comic claims that a pneumatic nail gun (PNG) can shoot a nail as high as 150 feet per second.
A reader wrote in, claiming that this is an understatement and that the guns can in fact shoot a nail at a velocity of 1400 feet per second. The NIOSH staff investigated and found that sources cited were confusing two types of nail guns—a power activated tool (PAT) that uses an explosive charge to fire the nail into concrete or metal, and the more common nail gun that uses compressed air to propel a piston to drive the nail into lumber. The authors cite an unscientific experiment on the TV show “Mythbusters” in which a pneumatic nail gun was shown not to have the equivalent muzzle velocity of a hand gun or a PAT, thus exonerating NIOSH of the accusation of inaccuracy in their comic book.
Another NIOSH Comic Book?
In 2019, when Avengers: Endgame was all the rage at the box office, NIOSH employee Stephen R. Leonard speculated in an article in NIOSH Science Bulletin entitled “The Secret Identity of OSH” on how superheroes’ secret identities often involve jobs that could benefit from NIOSH occupational safety and health (OSH) information. The article features a cover of a fake comic book about a superhero named “The OSH.”
After discussing occupational safety and health issues likely to creep up in the lives of Peter Parker, Bruce Banner, Bruce Wayne, and others, the author points out that the real superheroes in our lives are firefighters and other first responders. NIOSH provides practical guidance in how to train these responders and their employers to achieve the goal of worker safety and health even while responding to the most hazardous situations. So far this title remains in the realm of fiction, and NIOSH has yet to publish another comic book.
Resources
“First NIOSH Comic Helps Dispel Internet ‘Myth.’” NIOSH Science Bulletin (July 16, 2013).
Leonard, Stephen R. “The Secret Identity of OSH.” NIOSH Science Bulletin (May 3, 2019).
Scanlon, Molly J. “The Work of Comics Collaborations: Considerations of Multimodal Composition for Writing Scholarship and Pedagogy.” Composition Studies 43, no. 1 (2015). [Access restricted to members of the UNT community]
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Straight Talk About Nail-Gun Safety. [Cincinnati, OH]: NIOSH, 2013.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Nail Gun Safety: A Guide for Construction Contractors. [Washington, DC]: NIOSH and OSHA, 2011.
Article by Bobby Griffith.
Related
After discussing occupational safety and health issues likely to creep up in the lives of Peter Parker, Bruce Banner, Bruce Wayne, and others, the author points out that the real superheroes in our lives are firefighters and other first responders. NIOSH provides practical guidance in how to train these responders and their employers to achieve the goal of worker safety and health even while responding to the most hazardous situations. So far this title remains in the realm of fiction, and NIOSH has yet to publish another comic book.
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