Crash Course with Woodrow Phoenix
The War on Cars
The War on Cars, LLC
4.9 • 937 Ratings
🗓️ 20 July 2020
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"I wrote this book to make you mad." So declares British writer and artist Woodrow Phoenix in the afterward of his new graphic novel Crash Course. Subtitled, "If You Want To Get Away With Murder, Buy a Car," the book explores the powerful and toxic relationship between people and automobiles. With its stark and beautifully hand-drawn images of roads, traffic symbols, cities and highways, Crash Course takes aim at the ways in which cars have shaped the built environment, politics, and even the human psyche, largely for the worse. Crash Course unpacks the term "road rage," explains why traffic accidents are anything but, and dispels the notion that people can be neatly separated into categories such as motorist, cyclist or pedestrian. It also examines the dangers of SUVs, the perils of driverless cars and the recent and growing trend of vehicles being used as weapons against demonstrators in places such as Charlottesville, Virginia. In this one-on-one conversation, Woodrow Phoenix talks to Doug about the unique combination of artistry and journalism that makes Crash Course an effective polemic, one that will hopefully persuade people to think carefully about their responsibility when they get behind the wheel of a car.
This episode was sponsored by Sidewalk Weekly, the new podcast from Sidewalk Labs.
Support The War on Cars on Patreon and get nifty rewards like stickers, t-shirts, and even a copy of Crash Course.
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SHOW NOTES:
Purchase Crash Course and other books featured on The War on Cars via our official Bookshop.org page.
More about Woodrow Phoenix at Street Noise Books.
Superman battles reckless drivers in Action Comics No. 12, May 1939. (The War on Cars on Twitter)
The Solo Cup Bike Lane (BrookynSpoke) and the #RedCupProject (Bicycling Magazine).
This episode was produced and recorded by Doug Gordon and edited by Ali Lemer.
Find us on Twitter: @TheWarOnCars, Aaron Naparstek @Naparstek, Doug Gordon @BrooklynSpoke, Sarah Goodyear @buttermilk1.
Questions, comments or suggestions? Shoot us an email: thewaroncars@gmail.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you like us are using these quarantine times to catch up on some |
| 0:06.6 | podcast listening then we have a great new show to recommend that we think |
| 0:10.1 | you'll be into it's called the Sidewalk Weekly. The hosts are Eric Jaffey and Vanessa |
| 0:15.4 | Quirk, career journalists now working for an urban tech company called Sidewalk Labs. |
| 0:21.0 | They break down the week's top stories, interview experts, and they do it all in about 25 minutes. |
| 0:27.0 | You should subscribe to the Sidewalk Weekly wherever you listen to podcasts. |
| 0:31.0 | Or visit Sidewalk Labs.com |
| 0:34.0 | slash podcast. |
| 0:37.0 | A lot of what we do, socally is based on us not thinking about it too deeply. |
| 0:47.0 | If we thought about what it took to drive a car at 80 miles an hour and how likely it is we could crash. |
| 0:54.3 | Would you really want to do that? |
| 0:56.3 | You probably think, okay that's a bit risky. |
| 0:59.0 | We just tune all that stuff out and that way we can do it. This is the War on Cars. |
| 1:07.0 | I'm Doug Gordon. |
| 1:09.0 | You might have missed it, but back in April we tweeted a thread about Action Comics number 12 from 1939, in which |
| 1:16.8 | Superman takes on reckless driving. It's a remarkable historical artifact from early in the automobile age when cars were seen as |
| 1:24.8 | dangerous invaders in cities and a real threat to public safety, the kind only the |
| 1:30.3 | man of steel himself could defeat. |
| 1:32.8 | After posting that, I was curious to see if other comic books had ever taken on the subject |
| 1:37.8 | of cars. |
| 1:39.3 | That led me down an internet rabbit hole where I eventually landed on a new graphic novel by a British writer and |
| 1:45.1 | artist named Woodrow Phoenix. The book is called Crash Course. The subtitle, |
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