Leela Corman: On Comics and VICTORY PARADE

I can’t thank Leela enough for taking the time to do this interview. Believe me, I know as an artist myself, that sometimes the hardest thing is simply to begin to talk about one’s own work. It’s only after that door has been opened, after one has settled into a conversation, that a little bit of magic can occur. Over the course of our talk, Leela shares at length about her process, distinctions between short and long-form comics, and gives a sense of what it’s like to not give up and aspire to the highest levels of excellence in the comics medium.

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What is Victory Parade about?

Victory Parade takes place in a couple of time periods and places. It is set partially in 1943, in the Brooklyn Naval Yard and Brooklyn in general. This is during the Second World War. There’s a second part that is set during the liberation of Buchenwald, which takes place in April of 1945. It’s about women working in the naval yard. It’s about the ways that individuals process collective trauma. It’s about the meeting ground between the living and the dead. There are a lot of parts that take place in a dream state or death state. It’s also intended to be an anti-fascist work of art. I started it back in 2o16 so it’s been quite a ride.

What can you tell us about your new graphic novel in terms of the previous one and the next work? How much of a plan is in place?

That’s not how the creation of art works. I finished Unterzakhn and there was a long period and, if you know me and my story, then you know what happened and I needed time to recover. I had left New York City and was teaching a lot in and around the Gainesville, Florida area. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next and was casting around for ideas. I had a long conversation with (artist-cartoonist) Vanessa Davis. And she told me that I had just given her three great stories that could easily be pitched. So, I have her to thank for encouraging me that my stories are “pitchable.” That is what happened starting around 2013 and going into the current time frame. That started a long process of short comics that allowed me to experiment with mark making, bringing color, and other kinds of media. To get to a place where I could understand what my style was evolving into. The pivotal time for me was when I did a piece for Nautilus magazine about post-traumatic stress, the neurobiology of trauma. I decided to start working on it in watercolor. And as soon as I started introducing watercolor into my comics it was like the portal between life and death had opened, and all of this stuff poured out. It also put me on the path that I had thought was closed off to me, that of being a painter. So, I hadn’t really been thinking about Victory Parade although I did have it in the back of my mind.  I had the initial image that sparked the idea back in 2013 when I was pregnant with my daughter, Molly Rose. The reliable pattern for me is that I’ll have the key image and I’ll make a note of it. I’ve gotten to where I recognize when a key image shows up. But I also know that, if I’m too close to when one project has ended, I don’t know how to go about pursuing the next project. It’s not time. By 2015, I was ready to think about the next project. My short comics are nonfictional and the long comics are fiction so far. By 2016, I knew what Victory Parade was going to be about and what the pitch would be for it.

It’s interesting that the previous work, Unterzakhn, and Victory Parade each have a lead male character who is an amputee, a war veteran and in an extramarital affair. Is that just an example of the organic process?

Yes! It was funny. I had to laugh after I had written it all out to find that I had written that story twice.

But so well, so deliciously well.

Thank you. Well, clearly, there’s something there. The best thing about making art in any medium is that you’re creating mysteries for yourself. You create more questions than answers in your work. I think a lot of us are doing that, you know.

What can you tell us about the mysterious promoter, Meyer Birnbaum? He seems to be magical. He appears in both books but doesn’t age from one book to the next, in the span of some thirty years.

I tried to age him a bit with some white hair. But you’re definitely onto something there. In Unterzakhn, I didn’t write Meyer Birnbaum. He appeared and he wrote himself. In this book, I had to push him a little more. I don’t recall the moment I decided to bring him back. I think it was pretty early. It made complete sense that he’d be a wrestling promoter by the 1940s. And he’s still a sideshow guy. That’s what he’s always going to be. What I realized in bringing him back was that he’s my tribute to a Gilbert Hernandez character, Gorgo, from the Palomar stories. Gorgo is the old man who protects the family of Maria and Luba, Maria’s daughter. And he never dies. No matter how badly beaten or shot he is, or if he’s thrown off  a bridge. He does age but he does seem to age more slowly than other characters.  He seems to always be an old man. Meyer Birnbaum and Gorgo. There’s a lot of homages to the Hernandez brothers in my work, throughout. A lot of it happens unconsciously but that one was conscious.

The story in your book focuses on two strong women, Rose and Ruth, along with a more modest yet still significant character, Eleanor. Rose is the protagonist but so is Ruth. Would you talk about the all-woman dynamic at play here?

In practical terms, it’s the Second World War so there aren’t a lot of men around of a certain age. Most of the men of a certain age bracket are overseas in the military. Women are working in factories. This was the beginning of a lot of work experience for women. And not having childcare, which was not in the scope of this book to talk about but came up in my research. It was a very organic outgrow of telling stories about human beings. Another pattern is that I’ll have a main character and a secondary character and then the secondary character becomes more interesting to me. In Unterzakhn, it was Esther’s story that got a lot more focus and I had thought it was going to be Fania. In Victory Parade, it’s Ruth when I thought it was going to be Rose. It’s Ruth who I think is at the heart of this book.

There’s all this dark and absurd humor as Ruth emerges as
“Ruthless Ruby,” the woman wrestler. Talk to us about Ruth’s journey, as she becomes the infamous Nazi wrestler.

Well, she’s never called a Nazi outright.

That’s true, although it feels like it.

Yeah, Ruth, the Kraut, fresh off the German U-boat. What’s sad is that she isn’t even German. She’s a Polish Jew. This was a history that had been hidden from me. Polish Jews coming into Germany during the inter-war period, to escape war with the Soviet Union, sometimes called,
the “Bolshevik War.”  It’s a period I don’t know that much about. There was a lot of unrest on that side of the world. There was a huge Polish Jewish community in Berlin in the 1920s. And that is the origin of Ruth.

I was also thinking of the pro wrestling that we grew up with, during the late Cold War, of my childhood, the heel character was always either Iranian or Soviet. Hulk Hogan was the cold warrior hero. Consequently, my Yiddish grandmother loved Hulk Hogan since he was the great anti-Communist. Of course, it’s kayfabe, it’s not real. But I was thinking a bit about that too. The characters that need to be developed in wrestling in order for the wrestling story to play out.

Share with us about your recontextualizing painting into your comics art. Aren’t you deconstructing that famous Otto Dix painting of the severed limbs, The Trench (1923), in your book? (Editor’s Note: Corman wanted to make clear to me later that she is the sole creator of the nightmare scenes we are chatting about.)

The painting is actually, Der Krieg (War), 1929-31. There’s the scene (which you’re pointing to) in the book of Rose’s lover, George, having a nightmare about severed limbs being planted in a victory garden. I actually wasn’t thinking about that painting when I created that scene. But I did have a print of that painting on my desk the entire time I was working on this book. There are a pair of inverted bullet-ridden legs sticking out of the ground in the center panel to that Otto Dix painting, which I’ve copied again and again in my comics. It shows up in some nonfiction of mine and it shows up later in this book in the Buchenwald part.

There’s another Otto Dix painting that I copied entirely, The Skat Players (1920). Otto Dix informs a lot of my work, as well as many of his contemporaries. The Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) artists are who I consider my direct ancestors artistically.

We could talk a bit about your homage to The Skat Players.

It’s in the Berlin flashback section. In this version of mine, the woman is not in the original painting. She is an import from a common subject of that time period. Dix, and other painters of that era, painted war widows who had turned to sex work in order to support themselves in the terrible economy of Wiemar Germany. That’s who she is. That’s Ruth’s mother. It was a perfect opportunity to pay homage to those women and those paintings of those women. It was sort of a magical moment which happened when I realized I could put her into this painting.

Do you consider yourself a trailblazer or are you too close to it all to really say? I also think of the whole issue still being refined, and hammered out, about the status of comics as an art form.

Whether or not I’m a trailblazer will have to be left to others to decide. Are there trail blazers in every generation of our little corner of comics? I think of Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Diane Noomin. Phoebe Gloeckner. People like that blazed the trail that I consider myself to be on in comics. Also the RAW people. The Hernandez Brothers. So many others. I spent a lot of time in my youth trying to legitimize comics. And then it became a thing that every university wanted to teach. I think scholars can decide if I’m a trail blazer. I’m not even sure if I’m blazing any trails.

Someone pointed out to me the other day that, even when you’re working digitally, you’re still working by hand. Perhaps non-digital art-making, for lack of a better term, is “hands-on.”

The term I use with my students is “physical,” since you are working with physical media that does unpredictable things like drip, bleed, stain, spread, bloom, crackle and create viscosity. These are things that digital brushes will never do. Digital brushes will do their own beautiful things. The terminology that I object to is “traditional” since it’s all tradition. If you’re drawing, whether it’s analog or digital, it’s already part of a tradition.

What can you tell us about your artistic influences, particularly your connection to underground comix. There’s a mix of the somber with such dark humor to your work. I think of, for instance, the impact of Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead, that kind of off-the-wall humor.

I love that you mention Zippy the Pinhead since that was the first underground comic I ever saw. I was fifteen and I had a friend who had a copy of Are We Having Fun Yet? and it completely changed my life. It was the first time I’d read comics since I was maybe nine or ten years-old. I had put away my stacks of Archie comics and had moved on and then Zippy appeared. That particular brand of absurdity went to my gut and my intellect at the very same time.

The dark humor you’re picking up on is very cultural. It’s Polish Jewish humor, broadly speaking, Ashkenazi. My Polish Jewish culture is very scrappy. It is absolutely pitch black humor in the worst of situations. There’s also a tremendous influence on me from vaudeville. That humor is one of the best qualities of the Ashkenazi as a people. Generationally speaking, I came of age in the early ‘90s. The art that was of the highest value was very confrontational: comics, music and film. Lydia Lunch was ubiquitous in the subculture up until recently. I love very intense music, film and visual art and that’s what I set out to make.

I’m looking at these amazing pages of Ruth surrounded by these limbs, very disquieting.

That’s from Ruth’s death vision. As she’s dying, she’s back in that Busby Berkeley movie, The Gang’s All Here, that she went to see earlier in the story. You asked about my influences. Film is a big influence, as is episodic TV writing. The aesthetics of Busby Berkeley, and of technicolor films in general, are really important to me. The storytelling and aesthetics of Pedro Almodóvar’s films is probably the biggest influence on me. And the Turkish-German director Fatih Akin is another big influence on me, specifically his film, Head-On. That was a big influence on Unterzakn but here as well.

And now we reach the end of the book and that final page with that soldier who is now a civilian working as a cab driver in New York City. The person in the back of the cab asks him what he did during the war and he can only say, “Nothing special.” Outside, billowing out of the cab’s exhaust pipe you see countless souls who perished in the camps. What a haunting page.

Thank you. One thing that I came across, again and again, in my research on soldiers who had liberated the concentration camps is that most of them did not talk about it afterwards. There’s a great book that I used as primary source material for this book. It’s a collection of oral histories by Studs Terkel called, The Good War. There’s one soldier in that book who said, “The husbands never told; and the wives never asked.” I recall another moment, an American GI interviewed in 1985 who said, “This is the first time in forty years that I’m talking about this.” I suspect that is true for people who have survived things like that: the bombing of Hiroshima, or the Cambodian genocide, or what is happening now in Gaza. The number of people who talk about it is probably very small.

We need to mention the new collection of your short-form comics that recently came out, You Are Not A Guest, published by Fieldmouse Press, and edited by Rob Clough. Of course, the title says it all, referring to the fact you’re not just a guest, you are a part of what is going on in Poland.

The person who said that to me was the man who picked me up from the airport the first time I went to Poland. And it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It was in the middle of a profound conversation we were having. I’m so grateful to that person.

You never know when you’ll have one of those meaningful conversations, no matter how brief with a total stranger.

I’ll never forget that conversation.

You’ve already spoken to it. But maybe there’s a little more that could be said about the process of creating graphic novels. One time honored approach is, as I like to tell other aspiring cartoonists, is to create a small version of your vision first and then, maybe, it evolves into something bigger, perhaps a graphic novel.

I think you’re referring to “The Blood Road” in this collection, about going to Buchenwald. I’d been teaching at The Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark (comics program) and I decided to visit a friend in Berlin. I knew I wanted to research Buchenwald for Victory Parade. I was already working on it. I had chosen Buchenwald because it was easy to find English language writing about it. American soldiers had been the first ones to cross into it. I knew that it would be easy to get to it from Berlin. I did not go in planning to do a nonfiction comics piece. I wouldn’t say that this was a rehearsal for Victory Parade. But, you’re right, it’s true that you take small bites before you go into a bigger project. That would come later in some pieces I did for The Believer where I got to explore some of the characters.

When you think about your younger students, how do you approach subjects that no longer have an easy common thread, things you can’t assume your audience shares with you?

I think that’s a very important question as we get significantly older than our students. I teach students from around the world. I don’t know their world or the artists and cartoonists that they like. What happens in the course of working with people, once I get to know them and what they like, is that then I can draw on past experiences and suggest things to them, whether a book or film. I have, by the way, given the RE/Search: Angry Women book to a lot of younger women.

It’s really hard to know some things. There’s plenty that I don’t know. I wonder about this or that innovation, which actually goes on back in 1920 or 1950.

It’s important to keep the memory of a lot of artists and work alive. But I also feel equally strong about being open and curious as an older artist. That’s how artists keep making amazing work. I think Meredith Monk is in her eighties and making fresh beautiful amazing work. I think of John Cale also. All of these artists, as they get older, they get deeper and make more interesting work. And I think that happens when people are curious.

That’s a perfect place to end our chat. Thank you, Leela.

Thank you, Henry.

VICTORY PARADE is published by Penguin Random House and is available as of April 2, 2024. You can pre-order before this date.