>> Production supportfor "Journey Indiana" is provided by WTIU members.

Thank you!

>> ASHLEY: Coming up.

>> BRANDON: Behold the Golden Age of Underwater Comics.

>> ASHLEY: Listen to the verses of a noted Hoosier poet.

>> BRANDON: And get a bird's eye view of one of the latest documentaries from WTIU.

>> ASHLEY: That's all on this episode of -- >> TOGETHER: "Journey Indiana"!

♪ >> BRANDON: Welcome to "Journey Indiana."

I'm Brandon Wentz.

>> ASHLEY: And I'm Ashley Chilla.

And today we're coming to you from the Indiana Military Museum in Vincennes.

Displaying military memorabilia from the Revolutionary War to the present day, the Indiana Military Museum is an exhaustive memorial to America's wartime history.

Visitors can explore a wide array of military vehicles, witness in-depth historical reenactments, and even experience the past through elaborate dioramas of life during war.

>> BRANDON: And we'll learn all about this incredible museum in just a bit, but first, we're headed to Monroe County, where producer Nick Deel takes us into The Deep End, an exhibit of Golden Age Underwater Comic Books at Indiana University's Grunwald Gallery.

♪ >> I started collecting comic books around 1979, when I was about 10 years old.

It started as Golden Age Comic Books and esoteric superheroes, but I quickly started just -- I love comics.

So any time I had the opportunity to buy a collection or find more, I would add to that.

>> By day, Malcom Mobutu Smith is a mild-mannered professor of ceramics at Indiana University.

But his alter ego is that of a comic-collecting superhero, and The Deep End, an exhibition at the university's Grunwald Gallery is the culmination of an exhaustive quest.

In tidy rows, all along the gallery's perimeter, sit hundreds of Golden Age Comic Books, collected over the course of 25 years, each one depicting a unique underwater element.

♪ >> 20 years into my collecting, having amassed some of these books, and I bought one called WHIZ Comics Number 19.

This is the book that started my fascination with the underwaters that featured Captain Marvel, otherwise known as Shazam.

This book features everything I love about Golden Age Comics and about the subject matter.

And he happens to be in a situation on the cover in an underwater scenario.

And he's doing this amazing supernatural feat of holding a shark in a headlock under water.

You have a woman that's floating in that kind of ethereal way under water.

And it just struck me as aesthetically beautiful and interesting, and it made me contemplate the possibility of putting together as many of those circumstances as I could find.

♪ It's open to every genre.

So there's funny animal.

There's war.

There's romance books.

There's superhero books, because I wanted to see how all of these artists, and all subject matters, whether they did challenge the idea of putting a character under water, and they did.

Everybody did, whether it's Mickey Mouse or Bob Hope or Captain Marvel, there's a sequence where they put them in an underwater circumstance.

Welcome to my collecting space.

>> As impressive as the underwater comics display is, it's only a fraction of Malcolm's collection, which consists of around 20,000 comic books and a mountain of collectors items stored in his home basement.

>> I've got reference books.

We've books that are reproductions, reprints of classic books that are hard to get.

My exhaustive collection of every known Hulk comic book.

This monster tome about Galactose and the silver surfer and the Fantastic Four.

>> While Malcolm certainly doesn't hesitate to enjoy the fruits of his labor, seeing a specific subset of these comics in a single space at one time has given him a new appreciation for the form.

>> And it's only possible in this kind of a space.

It's only doable because I've decided to align this thematic single theme collection together where you can make this kind of comparison, and then see all the anomalies, and you can compare the graphic structures of comics.

So if you are aboveground, you are superman, you are fighting, you are flying through the air.

You might throw a cloud.

You might show some motion lines to show some action in space, but you don't have the complication of saying, how do I show the space that he's flying in?

And so there's just the inventiveness of the artist to decide to put a conflict under water, and then they have to go through and sort of solve for X, which is how do I represent that liquid terrain, which leads to certain kind of line quality.

It leads to showing or inventing a way to show wave or liquid space in the foreground, middle-ground and background between a figure.

And then there's all kinds of beautiful little notions of, like, do you show water bubbles coming up?

Do you show wave currents that are echoes of a figure?

It means that they have to sort of design the characters to -- in their physicality, represent a weightlessness that's unlike any other thing in comic book art.

There's this gorgeous fixity to things.

♪ >> But while patterns and techniques begin to emerge from the comics, so too does the prejudice of their time.

>> they're a human record of our actual habits as people that we shouldn't forget.

For me personally, I just find it interesting -- I -- you know, in this, it happens that African Americans are, one, not represented anywhere on the covers in any kind of heroic form.

And two, when they are represented on the interiors, it's as buffoonery and lampooning us, and we are drawn in a subhuman way, even compared to the cartoons of the main characters.

There's a kind of dehumanizing structuring of -- of Black people in the spaces.

So we can't turn away from them.

We've got to sort of embrace it.

And that's just a happy side note to collecting comprehensively, you get all of that.

You get the ads that are in here.

And you see the development of advertising for products that go beyond comics.

So there's so much to mine from these things beyond just the artwork and the stories inside.

>> Malcolm hasn't finished mining these comics just yet.

Ultimately, he intends to publish a compendium of all Golden Age underwater covers, so that this aquatic art from a bygone era can continue to be studied and enjoyed.

And while that's still a ways off, Malcolm knows his comic book quest is coming to an end.

>> I have teased my wife, saying, you know, as I was maybe midway through this collection of the under waters.

I'm, like, you know, I think cave illustrations are really cool too.

So underground might be -- she like, now, hang on Malcolm!

So there's always another thing you can choose.

So I don't know when that project is going to see its completion, but it won't be the end of my fascination with comics.

>> ASHLEY: All right, Brandon.

I feel like of all the stories that we've ever done on "Journey Indiana," this one is right up your alley.

>> BRANDON: Yeah, I had an enormous comic book collection for many years, and I ended up selling it because it was such an ordeal every time we moved to move them all, but if I could just pick a section like this, like underwater Golden Age, it would be a much smaller collection.

Probably harder to get, but easier to tote around.

Want to learn more?

Head to the address on your screen.

>> ASHLEY: Earlier we spoke with Jim Osborne, the curator here at the Indiana Military Museum, to learn a little bit more about this remarkable place.

♪ >> The Indiana Military Museum is one of the most comprehensive collections of US military artifacts in the entire country, and we've been in existence since 1984.

The mission is to bring attention and recognition of the soldiers and the men and women who have served our country since our history began, and how they have contributed to our freedoms that we enjoy today, to remind us of that service and that part of our history.

It's a collection of everything from the Revolutionary War to the present day, and the extent of the artifacts are from everything small, like insignia and uniforms, all the way through weapons, vehicles, tanks, Jeeps, half tracks, aircraft, and even a V-1 rocket from World War II.

We have a wide variety of vehicles here.

We've got rare a World War I tank, only 20 or so exist in the whole country.

We have American, British, German, and we have Sherman tanks here.

We have Stuart tanks.

We have British Bren gun carriers.

Approximately half of the vehicles that are here are in operational condition.

You can touch one of these tanks or one of the artillery pieces.

It just helps a student of history or anyone that's interested in these things to bring it to life.

The building that we're in right now, which is -- we call our annex building is where we have the life-sized dioramas, and that ranges from World War I trench to the homefront during World War II.

We have our Higgins boat landing craft that you can walk up and look inside, see the soldiers coming down the side of the ship and loading into the Higgins boat.

We have a Normandy exhibit here that's life sized with the portion of a Normandy-type church here, and you can walk up and experience this as though you were there, and at that actual time and place in history.

The reenactments have been around for a long time.

I mean, we have a lot of folks that show up for those reenactments.

It's referred to as living history.

It's just another step in the appreciation of what our men and women of the armed forces had to do in those time frames.

And to go out in the field and see how they really set up camp to simulate a battle, so to speak, get that impression of what they were up against as well.

It's a way of almost injecting yourself into that particular time frame or that scene.

I think it's important to preserve the military history.

It's an important part of our history.

You know, there's no way to separate it.

We were born from a revolution.

The country was started that way.

We had a Civil War that was either going to divide our country or unite our country.

Everything that military history represents is intertwined with our social and economic history and everything else.

If you ignore it, you are ignoring a significant part of our history.

If someone hasn't been to this museum, they don't know what they're missing.

To see these artifacts, helps you understand and appreciate that part of history.

>> BRANDON: There's so much exciting stuff here as you look through the entirety of this museum.

And, in fact, I have arranged a little surprise for you, Ashley, but we're going to deal with that towards the end of the episode.

>> ASHLEY: Oh, I can't wait.

A Brandon surprise is always a good one.

[ Laughter ] Want to learn more?

Just head to the address on your screen.

>> BRANDON: Up next, producer Todd Gould takes us to Marion County to meet Januarie York, the poet laureate at the Center for Black Literature and Culture at the Indianapolis Public Library.

♪ >> Hi, my name is Januarie York.

I am a poet, author, and writer in Indianapolis, Indiana.

♪ I started writing to make sense out of the senseless.

It kind of signifies how I got my start in poetry, which was because I was losing a lot of friends.

I was about 14 or 15 when my stepbrother got killed.

He was shot and killed, and so it was a big news story, and it was rotating on the -- on all the channels repeatedly.

This was really hard for me to process, because I was a teenager and I didn't even know, like, what to do with that grief.

I always loved poetry, because I always felt like poetry was the one game that did not have any rules.

You could write in run-on sentences.

You didn't have to use capital letters.

You didn't have to use punctuation.

You could just write!

It worked!

It worked!

I mean, did it stop me from grieving?

Of course not.

But did it allow me to take the weight off of my shoulders of feeling like I'm holding it all in and I'm getting ready to burst and I have nobody to talk to?

I have nowhere to go.

Nobody to turn to.

Who understands?

Who wants to listen?

Nobody.

The page listened.

♪ You don't have a clue why I do what I do, but I do what I do just for you.

For your freedom song to sing above the clouds and cruise at altitudes foreign to you.

I want to wipe the dust off your shoulders, move the debris out of your pathway.

May these poems blow southwest winds against the northeast tumbleweeds headed to cloud your dreams.

I write to save the overdrawn from completely checking out, for the Norma Jeanes that get lost in between Monroe ho tactics for the practical and the unpredictable.

For the dancers with no balance, for the five, six, seven, eight hundreds of thousands of dethroned kings cooking up ancestral moans and rocks meant for smoking through broken antennas.

I write to save the future teenaged girls because what if I could change her direction?

Writing with the blood of the neglected, writing through the stifled sinuses of the rejected, I am unprotected like a fertile to a ripened womb tight and pregnant holding capitalized secrets in lowercase print.

It was a cold night in December when I saw a halo.

It was hanging over a ballpoint pen.

Poetry is my walk-in closet.

Kick your feet up in my den of lyrical equity.

I do the opposite of what is expected of me.

I started writing to make sense out of the senseless.

My five senses wouldn't let me miss this, but the ink went blank.

So I put my tongue on the tip, and because I am a poet, I ain't been right ever since.

♪ I always say poetry saves lives.

I wholeheartedly believe that, because I believe that it has saved my life.

It definitely assisted me in my teen years with grieving, and just going through growing pains.

But as a young adult, I really got to a point where I was suicidal.

I had been writing poetry, but I just hated my life.

There's no other way to put it.

I hated my life.

And that night that I contemplated the knife or the pills, I chose my notebook.

I know I picked that pen up, and I wrote exactly what was on my heart.

And I closed the book, and I cried a little bit, and I'm still here today.

♪ Tulips are always excited to welcome the spring.

They push past the final frost, delicately brushing human peripherals with a glimpse of what's to come.

It's the equinox of rebirth.

Just as the precious spring sunshine fills the temperature of the soil, people begin to rejoice on front porches, lining sidewalks with bird feed for those who sing us awake.

Tulip leaves burst through hopeful mid-March grounds, like protective pillars, leaving just enough fragrance to signal their arrival.

They teach us that our turn always comes around.

And when it does, we stand, we smile, and like tulips at the awakening of spring, we bloom.

♪ My inspiration comes from Zora Neale Hurston.

I have an amazing collection of her books.

I love how she wrote because she taught me how to write as I am.

And so I always gravitated to books that I could see, that made me feel like I could experience them.

So I gravitate towards people, writers and beyond, who make me feel like I'm having an experience.

I want to inspire people with my art and with my words, to know that what you feel is okay.

I want everybody to feel like I'm talking to them individually.

And if they can take something from that, that helps bring them closer to what the human experience is and how alike and how different it is for everybody, and how everybody in this room, no matter what our differences are, deserves the respect of having a human experience, and deserves love in the human experience.

So that's what I want for my poetry.

♪ Life is short.

And all of it, from the food we eat, to the days we are here is temporary.

The only permanent is death.

Love as best as you can, and when you think you are great at it, love better.

But know that it starts with yourself.

You will never get someone to love you out of your personal demons, and you will never love anyone well as long as those demons are with you.

But it's all temporary.

Get rid of it.

Seek healing, growth, change, evolution, personal revolution.

And then love the next person or the one who sticks around through it all.

As though you might not be able to love past the next second.

Januarie.

♪ >> ASHLEY: I think it's incredible how art can comfort people in such turmoil, and the fact that she went through such hardship as a teenager and found, you know, writing and found poetry and novels and all of that, as such a comfort.

I think it's really beautiful.

>> BRANDON: Januarie York's latest book of poetry, "nomaD," was published in 2021.

You can learn more about her and her poetry by visiting the address on your screen.

>> ASHLEY: Up next, producer Jason Pear takes us to the skies to preview "Journey Indiana: From Above," one of WTIU's latest documentaries.

Shot entirely with drones, this film shows viewers the Hoosier state as you've never seen it before.

♪ >> Travel around Indiana, from the state capital, to most of the 92 county courthouses, to the campus of Indiana University, and you'll find they have something in common, something formed about 300 million years ago.

>> Salem Limestone, it's unique and special because it's durable.

There's buildings that were put up, you know, hundreds of years ago and still look phenomenal, but it's also soft enough to work with.

Indiana, you know, the belt which runs from basically Stinesville down to Bedford, that's kind of the main limestone belt.

There's limestone throughout the world, but this particular type of limestone, it's really prevalent throughout here, and it's the most accessible, because it's closer to the surface.

So it's easier to get to.

It doesn't mean it's easy to get to.

It's just closer to the surface.

You still got to go through -- you know, some areas the overburden can be, you know, 80 feet deep of waste, essentially, to get down to the usable dimensional stone.

>> The earliest known Indiana limestone quarry was opened southeast of Stinesville around 1827.

Nearly half a century later, John William Hoadley established a mill in the same area, known as the J. Hoadley & Sons Stone Company.

>> Their specialty was, you know, turning these big columns for, like, courthouses and stuff around the country.

That was, like, their forte.

>> In 1926, the Indiana Limestone Company formed, merging several smaller companies, including J. Hoadley & Sons.

The following year, members of the Hoadley and Fell families, who were dissatisfied with the merger, formed B.G.

Hoadley, Incorporated, a quarry and mill near Bloomington.

>> The limestone industry has changed quite a bit.

There's been some mergers and buyouts, and it's kind of neat to say that we are a small family-owned and operated quarrier and fabricator.

We fabricate windowsills, treads, patio stone.

We do mainly standard products.

None of the fancy carving and CNC machines or anything like that.

We're pretty simple.

>> The limestone that feeds the Hoadley mill no longer comes from the original quarry.

That closed when the Indiana 46 Bypass was built.

Today, they manage a leased quarry on the south side of town.

But one thing hasn't changed, even with modern machinery.

Getting limestone from the ground is hard, physical work.

>> Down the bottom of a quarry hole, it's the coldest place in the wintertime, and the hottest place in the summertime.

Especially when you are down, you know, four floors, essentially there's no breeze down there.

And the stone basically acts as, like -- almost like big mirrors, you know?

It's just -- it's hot.

>> It's clearly not the job for everyone, but for a small number of Hoosiers who carry on the tradition, it may just be the best one.

>> That's one of the coolest parts of my job, seeing and knowing the history of the Indiana limestone industry and being a part of that.

And it's really neat that here in Indiana we have this type of stone that's so sought after globally.

I mean, it's world renowned.

That's really neat to me.

And just being able to carry on that, you know, legacy and tradition, and that's probably one of the coolest parts of the job.

>> ASHLEY: Brandon, we have visited a lot of places on this show over the past five years, and I think sometimes as maybe a native Hoosier, I don't always remember or think about how beautiful our state is here.

And really seeing it from above is such a unique perspective, and I think viewers are gonna love it.

Want to see more "From Above"?

Just head to the address on your screen.

>> BRANDON: And as always, we'd like to encourage you to stay connected with us.

>> ASHLEY: Just head over to JourneyIndiana.org.

There you can see full episodes, connect with us on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, and suggest stories from your neck of the woods.

>> BRANDON: We also have a map feature that allows you to see where we've been, and to plan your own Indiana adventures.

>> ASHLEY: Okay.

You have piqued my interest of what we're going to do here.

So I'm ready if you are ready.

>> BRANDON: All right.

Well, we will see you next time on -- >> TOGETHER: "Journey Indiana."

♪ >> ASHLEY: I feel like I hear something.

♪ >> BRANDON: Your chariot awaits!

>> ASHLEY: Yeah!

All right.

Well, I'm just gonna come get on then.

>> BRANDON: Yeah.

>> ASHLEY: All right.

>> BRANDON: All right.

Howard, so what is this exactly?

>> This is an M5 Stuart light tank.

We call it light compared to a heavy tank.

But this one weighs about 20 tons.

>> BRANDON: Well, are you ready to take us outta here?

>> Sure.

Let's -- I'm ready.

Let's go!

>> BRANDON: All right.

♪ >> ASHLEY: It's a very smooth ride, Brandon.

Smooth ride.

♪ >> Production support for "Journey Indiana" is provided by WTIU members.