"People like to understand. It makes us feel good. That's the main reason for my success in the funny papers." --Jok Church
Providing the answers, and corresponding do-it-yourself experiments, to such questions as how microwaves and cameras work, or airplanes fly and paper is recycled, has been artist Jok Church's mission since he created the nationally syndicated Beakman and Jax cartoon strip feature four years ago. You Can with Beakman and Jax now appears in many Bay Area newspapers and about 250 papers nationwide.
You Can with Beakman and Jax is an outgrowth of a project Jok Church once envisioned while working for movie producer George Lucas as editor of his Star Wars Fan Club Magazine. He had planned to develop an educational TV show, "Here's How," using the Star Wars characters R2-D2 and C-3PO to tell kids how things work. When the project fell through, Church decided to pursue a comic strip version, starring characters of his own creation, Beakman and his sister Jax. The cartoon strip has now spawned a very popular children's TV series, Beakman's World on CBS (shown locally on KPIX TV) as well as a book.
Jok Church, 45, is a native of Akron, Ohio. He moved to California to attend graduate school at California State University, Sacramento. Without the funds to attend, he began to drop in on such a regular basis that he soon became news director of the campus radio station, even though he wasn't enrolled. That experience led to a paying job in radio and eventually, a move north to Marin County to start up a radio station there. His next job was publishing that pivotal Star Wars fan magazine and beginning to think of an educational series that explained how the physical world worked.
Ideas for You Can with Beakman and Jax strip were inspired by frequent visits to San Francisco's Exploratorium, where how the world works is made exciting yet obvious with the use of one part self-discovery, one part experimentation and three parts fun. Says Church, "I wanted to get a job there. Instead, I translated the essence of the place into another medium."
You Can with Beakman and Jax got its start at the Marin Independent Journal, Church's local paper. The rest is history.