We’ve had quite a number of comics chats here at Comics Grinder and we will press forward with more! In that spirit, I present to you Todd Webb, a perfect ambassador to the world of comics and a great person to chat with. This time around, we focus on Todd’s new collection, The Poet, Volume 2. You can find it via Todd’s website and various platforms, including Barnes & Noble. Todd is on a roll with one of the most consistently funny and engaging comic strips. Keep in mind, as we discussed in our previous chat, Todd is an old-fashioned cartoonist creating a daily comic strip. You must hop aboard and see what he’s up to. Join him on his Substack right here. Consider the following example:
In the above example, the bird gets the better of the poet yet again. But, I’m sure, the bird is only trying to help the poet reach his “A” game.
The Charlie in the Rye, the Schulz-Salinger mashup mini comic.
Todd is always coming up with new ideas. Recently, he wondered about how much Charles Schulz (1922-2000) and J.D. Salinger (1919-2010) might have in common considering they were contemporaries: both going off to war; both sharing in the same culture; both creatives working at the top of their profession. Well, you get the drift. The upshot to this is . . . very funny. What if you took lines from The Catcher in the Rye and inserted them into Peanuts comic strips? Todd was pleasantly surprised with the results and you will be too. Here is one example:
Well, pretty uncanny, don’t you think? This Schulz-Salinger mashup is priceless.
I try something a little different for our deep dive into Volume 2. It occurs to me that the back-of-the-book Notes are all too often overlooked or taken for granted. But people appreciate them when they read what’s there. With that mind, I begin with the notes and work by way back to the contents. Makes for some interesting discoveries.
Patrick McDonnell’s favorite comic strip from The Poet.
I encourage you to pick up a copy of The Poet, Volume 2. This 410-page book makes a perfect gift for a friend, a loved one, or yourself! I leave you with one more sample. This is the one that cartoonist Patrick McDonnell (Mutts) cited as one of his favorite The Poet comics strips in the foreword to this collection. If you’re a Mutts fan, then you appreciate the interest. Both McDonnell and Webb have a way with paring down to the essentials.
Be sure to check out our conversation and, if you have the time, please LIKE and COMMENT over at the YouTube Comics Grinder channel. Your support keeps us going.
And be sure to check out Todd’s Etsy store where he’s a Star Seller!
A-T WALKER (Issues 1 and 2). by Micah Liesenfeld. Micah Nova. 48 pages total. $8 each or $12 for both.
Summoning the strength to move forward.
When a comics artist enters into a life crisis and decides to document it as a graphic narrative, that person has made the transition from just being a cartoonist to being a comics journalist. That’s how I see what Micah Liesenfeld is doing. His daughter, Eva, has a rare disease, Ataxia Telangiectasi, also known simply as “A-T.” This condition goes all the way back to five years ago, at the time of Eva’s birth. Little by little, after some false starts, the A-T diagnosis emerged: a degenerative condition that eats away at the patient, with the risk of cancer and a short lifespan. There is an ongoing search for a cure and the focus now is on management and quality of life.
Navigating the medical world.
This comic provides something of a medical record and an essential window on how one family and the medical community are responding to one child’s condition. This work is being made available as single issue comic books with the goal of it being collected into a graphic narrative book. Liesenfeld would like to see the book become a success and have proceeds go to the A-T Children’s Project, an organization currently funding research like gene therapy that could cure the disease in the near future.
“She has an ear infection.”
Graphic medicine comics provide a unique opportunity for the reader to gain some essential grounding. Many of life’s challenges do not come with a manual or some tutorial. Even YouTube videos don’t always fill in the gaps. With an excellent comic like what Micah Liesenfeld provides, it is as if you’re there. A-T Walker is a personal essay, field notes and an immersive medical record experience wrapped into one. For instance, you need to be ready when this or that doctor is not exactly responsive or providing ideal service. Doctors are not gods. Liesendfeld keeps track. One doctor lectured Micah and his wife, Aicha, on not relying on antibiotics but then neglected to catch the fact that Eva’s white blood cell count was zero, even though this was already an unusual situation that required carefully looking over every detail. Patients, and their loved ones, have rights and essential insight and information that must be paid attention to by the medical team. All things made clear in this comic.
Micah Liesenfeld has been making comics since 1989 when he was in the fifth grade. His efforts over the years have honed his skills to a direct and impactful style. He can truly communicate with words and pictures in a way that is both memorable and to the point.
If you are compelled to do so, you create a work of graphic medicine.
This is a storytelling style that grabs the reader from the very start. The way that Micah draws his people and situations is very palpable. The way he tells his story is putting it on the line and telling it like it is. Like I’ve said before regarding graphic medicine work, it’s not for everyone. Many people will feel too overwhelmed but, given time, will want to sort through a crisis and express what happened in one form or another. If it comes naturally to you, and you are compelled to do so, then you create a work of graphic medicine.
The most important factor needed in pursuing a successful work is a purpose. Clearly, Liesenfeld is compelled to see this series, and ultimately a book, to completion. I can just feel it on every page: the steady pace; the desire to be clear and convey the facts to the reader; the need to reach out to the reader. Every figure gets to be heard, especially Eva and her parents, Aicha and Micah. I know that Liesenfeld is creating the best work of his life right now and all of us in the comics community wish him and his family the very best.
A-T Children’s Project (atcp.org) is an organization currently funding research like gene therapy that could cure the disease in the near future. The bold audacious goal of the project is to raise enough awareness in the world to prompt attention to help fund the research and speed up the hope for therapies that make their lives more manageable and even a cure … even for Eva and the kids currently living with this disease in her lifetime.
Hanging On by a Thread. Noémie Naoumi. Black Panel Press. 2025. 240pp. $14.99 PDF, $34.99 hardcover.
Noémie Naoumi is a Lebanese artist, now based in Paris, who has created quite a remarkable graphic memoir. It is about being young, full of life and determined and falls within the category of graphic medicine. Our story begins with Noémie, an 18-year-old art student in Beirut, with a sense of adventure and humor. And then she is diagnosed with a form of cancer. All she knows is that her life has taken an abrupt change. It’s not the same life anymore. She thinks of herself as a whole other person and doesn’t blame her boyfriend if he wants to break up but he’s steadfast in being committed to her. What follows is Noémie’s journey, as she learns about what is happening to her, the treatment process and life beyond it.
As I’ve been reading more and more graphic medicine works, I’m always humbled and intrigued by what I read. These are often auto-bio with the main character confronting a life crisis and following a certain path: depicting one’s self; learning about the challenge ahead; and some kind of conclusion.
“The best oncologist. The best PET scan. The best cancer.”
What happens is that the comics creator becomes a comics journalist, out in trenches, providing dispatches for the reader and perhaps for themselves to help make sense of it all. This is not a task for everyone. I can only imagine that most readers have at least one life crisis that they would just prefer to leave private. However, it is these very kind of life events that cry out for discussion and analysis. Going back to Noémie‘s first impulse, you have been forever changed and you will never quite go back to what it was like before. Well, you can fight like hell to regain your life, that is for sure.
Noémie Naoumi is, no doubt, a powerful artist. Her attitude is to tell it like it is in her paintings and illustration and, most certainly, in her comics. Her art has the energy of a live wire with a worldly-wise sensibility. It is clear to me, and it will be to the reader, that cancer is not going to stop her.
Hanging On by a Thread, in the end, is a story of hope and courage. Going back to Noémie‘s initial thoughts that, indeed, she was now a different person since her cancer diagnosis, this graphic memoir attests to a strong spirit that retains strength, good humor and self-autonomy.
Introverts Illustrated. Issue 1. Scott Finch. 2025. Available at various venues, like Partners and Son. Can be purchased in bundles of five for $25.
Scott Finch, an artist based out of Baton Rouge, has a new comics creation out in the world and I thought I’d tackle it from one of its multitudinous aspects. Given that, as a whole sum, this is a 21-issue bundle package (which you can purchase in smaller bundles!), I wanted to walk through the very first issue with you. Pretend that you and I are wandering about inside a dream. We are free to fly in the air, if we please. We can be naked too. It simply doesn’t matter. It’s a dream, you dig?
Each issue to this series runs for as long as it needs to run, varying from, say, 14 pages to 50 pages. As an artist, I find this zany unbridled presentation utterly fascinating. But you don’t have to be an artist to enjoy it, relate to it. This is all about free-form uninhibited freedom. You’re in a dream, right? If you can’t do as you please inside your own mind, where else can you go to seek refuge from the madding crowd? And the crowds these days are quite madding, aren’t they?
I’ve had a chance to get to know the artist and his work. You could call me something of a Scott Finch scholar, or a budding scholar. Not that anyone would notice or care. As much in life, all that really matters is if I care. And, if I care enough, then perhaps that will move you to care as well.
It is in this who-gives-a-hoot spirit that Scott Finch revels–and, believe me, you will find something here that sets you free. Part of the magic and charm about Finch’s work is that it is both highly enigmatic and highly accessible. It is what it is but so much more. You simply don’t need to overthink it and give yourself over to it, just as you would any painting, or music, what have you.
Anyway, this first issue sets the tone for much that follows, although it hardly gives away the whole game. You are just getting your feet wet here, touching the tip of the iceberg. Plenty more to immerse yourself in, believe me. With Scott Finch, I have found a kindred spirit and perhaps, on some level all your own, you will too.
Peter Kuper is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation and MAD magazine where he has written and illustrated SPY vs. SPY every issue since 1997. Kuper is also the co-founder and editor of World War 3 Illustrated, a political graphics magazine that has given a forum to political artists for over 40 years. Well, that gives you some sense of his impressive career, one that finds his latest graphic narrative a most notable addition. Insectopolis, published by W.W. Norton, is about the insect world and how it interacts with us humans and is truly one of those great all-ages works that will equally appeal to kids and adults. Insectopolis makes you all the more aware of your existence and how it is shared with a multitude of other beings, some with wings, antennae or multiple eyes and legs.
Insectopolis is published by W.W. Norton. The publication date is May 13, 2025 and is available for pre-order. Visit W.W. Norton here.
All great works of graphic narrative always involve a process with numerous factors in play: the research, the timing, the pacing, the work environment, and so on. It was an amazing and fascinating conversation I had with Peter Kuper. In terms of getting a window into the creative process, Kuper shares a multitude of observations on how his new book was created, and under some very unusual circumstances. As he explained, it all began when he was awarded a fellowship with The New York Public Library. Oh, it did just so happen to coincide with the Covid pandemic. This perfect storm or, let’s say, most unusual set of circumstances provided Kuper with quite a unique vantage point. Suddenly, here he was working on his new book with a world-class library practically all to himself.
“Roses?”
The Rose Room!
Suddenly, the famous Rose Room, a favorite of library visitors and usually filled with hushed activity, was empty and there for Kuper, and Kuper alone, to draw inspiration from. Well, he must have been in heaven, a heaven filled with butterflies, beetles, and even cockroaches! All insects are welcome here!
Under the library!
So, Kuper set about making the most of this situation he was in, where time had seemed to stand still. He was able to linger longer than ever before and explore places that normally would have gone unnoticed, like the library’s vast underground corridor. And, bit by bit, a book being created during a pandemic led to a book set in a post-apocalyptic future, post-human, where insects must assess the relationship between humans and insects. Fortunately for us, we can read the results. Without a doubt, this is a book that is a must-read for any human seeking a better connection with the vast array of potential insect friends.
A paperback talisman.
A little over ten years ago, Kuper published a wonderful graphic novel, Ruins, which follows two parallel stories: one of a troubled relationship between a husband and wife; and the other, the struggles of migration for a Monarch butterfly. Well, there are plenty of Monarch butterflies in Kuper’s latest book. Is there a connection? Oh, sure, but the deepest one goes back to a four-year-old Peter Kuper. As he states, it was picking up a paperback on insects at such an early stage that sparked a lifelong interest in insects. Peter even held up a copy of that very same beloved paperback. He keeps it handy, as a friendly reminder.
And then a gnat flew by.
I must say, there was something in the air on the day of our interview. This has never ever happened before to me but, just as I was reciting my introductory remarks, a gnat emerged out of nowhere and darted across the screen. You can see it for yourself. Was that a sign? Yes, of it was! That little gnat needed to be known!
Ants as Horror Movie Monsters.
As you will see in the video, our conversation is easygoing as well as at a steady pace. There are a lot of dots to connect. I did my best to imagine, beforehand, what it must have been like for Peter to find himself gathering one compelling set of facts after another and seeing how this element might fit in with another. For example, there is a good bit of unpacking on how insects have been demonized by humans. Dragonflies were once deemed spawned from hell itself. And ants get grilled over the coals and become monsters for Hollywood’s answer to the atomic bomb and the threat of nuclear war. But it’s humans who ultimately cause the most destruction to insects, the planet and to themselves.
One favorite moment for me is when Peter and I discuss what a cicada and a tree might chat about over the course of many years. That happened after we had discussed the various shifts in tone and style found in the book. The cicada sequence proves to be a refreshing shift from the previous sequence of pages–and a great example of how Kuper deftly balances the pace of things.
I greatly encourage you to view the video and, while you’re at it, give it a Comment and Like. I’m often good at getting people to stop by for a brief view and now I’m doing what I can to have more and more folks take it a step further and engage with my YouTube channel. Your engagement helps to secure more videos in the future and we all want to see me continue to do that, don’t we? Ah, well, that’s my pitch.
That said, by all means, seek this book out and, if you’re in New York City, be sure to catch a show of original art from the book at the Society of Illustrators. Details on the show follow:
Society of Illustrators Presents Insectopolis: A Natural History
Insectopolis: A Natural History will be on view at the Society of Illustrators from May 14 – September 20, 2025 in the second floor gallery. It will feature original artworks by Peter Kuper.
Exhibit Details:
On display in the 2nd Floor Gallery.
Join us on Thursday, May 22, from 5–9pm for a Museum Mixer celebrating the opening of Insectopolis: A Natural History.
The evening will kick off with a special pre-tour at 4pm & 4:30pm, led by artist Peter Kuper, with guest entomologist Louis Sorkin — who will be bringing live insects for visitors to observe and interact with up close! Space for the pre-tour is limited, so be sure to RSVP.
Craig Thompson is a cartoonist and the author of the award-winning books Blankets; Good-bye, Chunky Rice; and Habibi. He was born in Michigan in 1975, and grew up in a rural farming community in central Wisconsin. His graphic novel Blankets won numerous industry awards and has been published in nearly twenty languages. Thompson lives in Portland, Oregon. In this interview, Craig Thomspon discusses his new book, Ginseng Roots, published by Pantheon. Publication release date is April 29, 2025 and it is available for pre-order.
You could count on buying it cheap from China.
Ginseng Roots explores class divide, agriculture, holistic healing, the 300-year-long trade relationship between China and North America, childhood labor, and the bond between two brothers.
From ages 10 to 20, Craig Thompson (the author of Blankets) and his little brother Phil, toiled in Wisconsin farms. Weeding and harvesting ginseng—an exotic medicinal herb that fetched huge profits in China—and funded Craig’s youthful obsession with comic books. Comics in turn, allowed him to escape his rural, working class trappings.
Working in the fields and loyal to the family.
This new book is the result of Thompson having worked in serial form, creating a bimonthly comic book series, the first time he’s done this in his career. Ginseng Roots is part memoir, part travelogue, part essay and all comic book. In this conversation, we chat about the book, and life as a cartoonist, from as many angles as possible.
Panax Ginseng dating back 3,000 years.
Henry Chamberlain:Craig, would you kick things off with an elevator pitch for folks who are new to Ginseng Roots?
Craig Thompson: Sure. This is my new book. It is half memoir and it is half documentary. When I was a little kid, starting when I was 10 years-old, during my summer vacations, I would get up at the crack of dawn, and load up in the car with my little brother and mother. We’re driving on gravel roads and muddy fields, in the middle of nowhere, in rural Wisconsin, to giant ginseng gardens. Ginseng is a medicinal herb prized in Chinese medicine. We worked eight hour days and forty hour weeks, throughout the summer, weeding this delicate medicinal plant.
It was the first job of my life. It spanned from age 10 to 20. When I started, I was being paid one dollar an hour, which translated to one comic book an hour. So, it was ginseng that first fueled my obsession with comic books and kind of led me to where I am today.
This book is about myself and my childhood but also about that herb and all those labyrinthian tangles that it weaves around the world.
Considering your other long-form work, what can you tell us about how you built up your new book?
So, this is the first project that I serialized in comic book form. A 32-page, twelve issue series through Uncivilized Books, based out of Minneapolis, the amazing cartoonist Tom Kacyniski’s publishing house. At this point in my career, this was the first time that I’d worked in the comic book format unless you count mini-comics and zines. That was my introduction to everything: going to Kinko’s and photocopying and hand-stapling my own zines. So, I sort of had missed out on the whole ’90s indie comics thing. I serialized the book first as twelve issues. But the book and the series are different beasts because, once I finished the series, it was missing some key components, some glue to hold it together, to help me transform it into a book. It went through an overhaul: I added some 70 new pages. I moved the order of things around a bit.
The final Pantheon edition, this new book, is twelve chapters. As you say, there are things you have refined or expanded on.
Yes, for example, the series has twelve issues and the book has twelve chapters but the ninth chapter in the new book does not exist in the series. That one focuses a lot of my personal health crisis–it was part of the glue that was needed to hold the whole book together: to be vulnerable about my own health and how ginseng related to that too.
How did it feel returning to the subject of childhood and growing up, which you covered so beautifully in Blankets–what did it feel like to go back to that in Ginseng Roots?
Quite different. Because of my age. When I started Blankets, I was 23 years-old. I worked on that book from ages 23 to 27. I was only about five years away from the events that took place in the book. So, it was pretty raw and I was still a kid. I was still living those experiences and trauma.
Now, I’m turning 50 and I’m the age my parents were when Blankets was published. So, it’s definitely a mid-life sort of perspective that I have now. The dynamic with my parents has shifted. They are in a much more vulnerable position than they were back then. It’s now a more nuanced and empathetic view that I have of my parents. It’s a whole different view of my childhood. I grew up in rural Wisconsin and I hated growing up there and always wanted to get as far away from there as possible from this suffocating small town, this rural farming community. That led me to the West Coast and Portland, one of the most liberal cities in America, with its artistic circles.
Ginseng Roots was an opportunity to go back to where I grew up and to reconcile a lot of things. And to feel differently about that place that I grew up in discomfort as a child.
Ginseng Baptism.
I picked up on that. You are more tolerant about certain things. There are layers of wisdom as we get older. As we go through the book, I’m on a page where you daydream about what it might be like to live the life of a cartoonist. Maybe, someday, you too can be Bob Hope or Jack Lemmon, in silk pajamas at the cartoonist drafting table.
Yeah, growing up working class, you know. My dad was a plumber. And everyone around me were either farmers, truck drivers, carpenters or electricians. I didn’t know adults who had university educations. It wasn’t my class. My first job was outdoors, working an agriculture job, dealing with all the elements of the outdoors and all the discomforts. Besides the fact that I loved comics, working as a cartoonist sure did seem like a very cushy lifestyle, hiding from all the physical elements of weather and get to make-believe and draw.
Younger people can totally relate to wishing for their lives to just get on with it. Older people can relate to looking back at the good things. Maybe someone learned how to fish or paddle a canoe because of a parent.
Yeah, now I miss being outside. Maybe it seemed like a bad thing as a kid but, after twenty-five years creating graphic novels, it sounds nice to get out of the house a bit more often. And this book brought me out of the house. It wasn’t something just created from my imagination. It was documentary work so I had to get out in the field. And interview people. I interviewed nearly 80 people for the project. Generally, any dialogue in a word balloon is from some recorded conversation I had with someone I interviewed.
You do this so smoothly. You just do it. In the spirit of the best comics journalism, like Joe Sacco.
My biggest inspiration of all is Joe Sacco. Certainly for this project since I wanted to deliberately work in comics journalism. Also, thinking more broadly. Joe is a friend of mine, full disclosure. You know, he’s a mentor, a great role model or artists. I always wanted to do comics journalism like he does but I don’t have his background, or his intellect. I don’t know if I quite have that sense of adventure that Joe has, going to war zones and whatnot and being embedded in places of conflict.
But then with my book, I had this very organic subject matter that was kind of unique to me and so I had my entry point. I had wanted to write a book about plants. That’s sort of my tagline. I was really influenced by Michael Pollan, the food and plant writer. He’s known for The Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind. The book that really influenced me is The Botany of Desire, and it’s about four plants that shaped human civilization as much as we manipulated them as a species. After that, I really wanted to do a book about plants. Again, I’m not a botanist, I don’t have that background like Michael Pollan. And so I just meditated on what I knew and ginseng surfaced right away. I started researching and I knew there was a lot to work with.
One thing I wanted to emphasize to readers of my review of your book is what prose novels and graphic novels have in common. Each begins as something small and then mushrooms into something much bigger as you add to it. I’ve done my fair share of graphic narratives and I know that once you have a compelling subject, you find yourself having to read this or that book. It just keeps growing.
Sometimes I’d read an entire book just to inform one panel. There are certain chapters that are a little more dense; and some areas that I didn’t know at all. I’d have to get through a pile of books just to write that one 32-page chapter.
This is a monumental book, on the same scale with Blankets and Habibi. Can you share with something about the freedom that you have when you have such a big canvas to work on?
I guess I’ve always tended towards this longer format. Blankets was 580 pages, at a time when that was pretty novel, so to speak. I like books that are fully immersive, you just kind of get lost in them, get disoriented, have this opportunity to sort of wander labrynthian routes and work you way back to the main narrative. In the case of this book, I serialized it first. The twelve issues was arbitrary, it just seemed like the right amount for the series. I liked the numerology. I work from an outline and then I focused on one issue at a time. I’d write, pencil, ink it and color it–and publish it–before really digging into the next section. Each issue was self-contained when I was putting it out as a series. The goal was to have each issue stand alone along with having the momentum to have the reader want to seek out the next issue but not like cliffhangers.
I was thinking about how to get a handle on the book and I thought we could focus on one of the chapters, “Make America Ginseng Great Again.” It’s a very timely chapter. I enjoyed viewing a talk given by Will Hsu, of Hsu’s Ginseng Enterprises, one of the leading growers of ginseng in Wisconsin who you profile in your book. This gives us an opportunity to cover ginseng from many angles.
Yeah, this is Chapter 5 in the book and Issue 9 in the series and it focused on the Hsu family. Paul is the father and Will is the son who took over the family business. Paul Hsu emigrated from Taiwan with a degree in Social Work but ended up becoming a ginseng farmer, and growing the business into a mega-growing operation, partly because they diversified, developing all these other products. They also have strong family connections in Taiwan that provided advantages in trade routes and all kinds of leverage and knowledge that the typical white ginseng business would not have.
Make America Ginseng Great Again!
“Make America Ginseng Great Again” was a tagline that Will Hsu used in 2018. The Hsu family has a lot of political ties. They’ve had ties to the Bush administration, and tangential ties to the Trump administration and local government. They’re a big business and big business ends up tangled with politics. When I traveled in Asia, I was in China, South Korea and Taiwan. In Taiwan, I met with my publisher’s foreign rights agent, Joann Yang, and she talked about what she’d heard about Wisconsin ginseng, and that was connected to the Taiwanese version of Trump, Terry Gou, who has ties with President Trump and they’re both getting involved with Wisconsin ginseng.
Trump and the Rust Belt strategy.
It’s a bit of a convoluted story. So, people are now hearing more about Pres. Trump trying to get more industry and factories in the U.S. Well, he made a deal with Terry Gou, who is the CEO of Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer. They employ more people than anyone in China. That’s where iPhones come from, and Xboxes and most of the electronics and they wanted to start a company in Wisconsin and they were able to score the biggest state subsidies in U.S. history, something like 4 billion dollars. They were going to bring all these jobs to the area and none of that quite materialized. They have only about a tenth of the staff they have promised. Back to the ginseng, Gou teamed up with the Hsu family to develop a high-end version of ginseng products. So, a lot of the business and science behind all of this is covered in this chapter. A lot of the future of ginseng focuses on breaking down the compounds of ginseng, and synthesizing it for pharmaceuticals.
What can you tell us about misconceptions that the general public has about ginseng?
There’s a lot. Either people have never heard of it or don’t know what it is. Often, people will call it, “ginger roots,” since they’re familiar with ginger, which is also a medicinal root. People will also associate it with these power energy drinks that you might get at a gas station. Those are derived from Asian ginseng which is a stimulant, like caffeine. American ginseng has the opposite properties. It is more of a cooling adaptogenic herb which is better for long-term use for overall health. It’s the American ginseng that is more prized in Asia.
Working on your comics and loyal to your dreams.
You begin your book talking about your love for comics. Could you share with us a bit more about what it is that attracts you to the comics medium?
I’m like a lot of people, more of a visual learner, visually oriented. Unlike other content, like film, video games, other digital content, it just washes over you, bombards you, is moving over you. Comics is much more intimate, something a reader can take in at their own pace. I love prose but it has a sort of arms-length technology of being typeset. So, you’re looking at a font that has been typed. Whereas with comics, you’re actually seeing the handwriting of the author. There’s a great intimacy in that. You’re seeing the handwriting in the lettering and in the drawing itself. I’ve always been into the calligraphy of cartooning. And the sort of strange time travel of comics: you can exist in different times on the same page. I don’t know of any other medium that can do that so effortlessly. It takes skills for us as readers of comics. It’s also something we’re sort of indoctrinated with and so we know how to read them. Once you do, there’s a lot of potential.
It becomes intoxicating!
Yes! I love that!
It’s happening instantaneously and simultaneously. You look in every direction and something is happening.
I just got back from several months of touring in Europe. The A.I. question always comes up. If I feel threatened by A.I., my general response to that is: while I think all jobs are threatened and even human life could be threatened, I don’t think that comics is specifically threatened. I think because A.I. can do a lot of things “better” than humans, the things that people will value more in the arts is the humanity, the fragility, the flaws, the vulnerability. That’s why I like paper and ink. Because it can transmit those things. I don’t want to draw digitally because of the perfection and the cleanness of the line. I want to see the humanity in the line. I think that’s going to become more common. As A.I. takes over all of illustration and the images we see, we’re going to be seeking out images feel more human in their flaws.
I don’t see A.I. replacing you or Kate Beaton or any other cartoonist. For one thing, comics is too idiosyncratic. Where I see A.I. having clearly taken over is hyper-realistic illustration. Basically, A.I. is regurgitating human content–spewing out generic results.
A.I. will just make it easier to get generic but the more personal content will require humans.
Let’s talk about hand-lettering. You still do all your own hand-drawn lettering, right?
Yes. It’s all hand-drawn.
I hesitated to ask since I felt I knew that. It’s something that always comes up, the pros and cons of hand-drawn and using a font. If you’re an auteur cartoonist, you do everything, including the lettering–and it’s hand-drawn. There’s no getting around the fact that hand-drawn lettering is part of the art.
Yeah, I like it being embedded in the art. It might make it more difficult to work on the foreign editions. But, for those, we have a font. There’s a digital font created from my hand-lettering for the foreign editions. I want the lettering to be on the page. I start with the word balloons first to see how many words I can fit. I want the balloons to be kind of minimal, not too dense and wordy. I use a sort of felt tip pen that’s archival, a Micron, which is loose enough to keep the character of my handwriting. It’s not as stiff as using a more traditional tool to slowly letter. I want to retain the looseness of my hand-lettering.
As I get older, I keep looking at other options. I prefer using a Speedball. It does have that resistance but, if you like it, then you can’t help but want to use it. And, if you prefer a Micron, then you use that. One person once told me that it’s no use overthinking it. And I’ve concluded that you’re best served by using what keeps you wanting to draw, what keeps you productive.
That’s great advice. I agree with that for sure. Although, I do admire you for using the more traditional Speedball style. I was never patient enough. And, I guess if it takes a bit longer, it’s giving you more time to think about how the words fit in the balloon and other decisions on the page so there’s a benefit to slowing things down.
It’s going to be a tough nut to crack. I tell folks that it’s going to be time-consuming not matter what you do. It’s going to take time whether it’s all analog or digital so pick whatever method works best for you.
Yeah. Agreed. That’s solid advice.
I have a high concept question for you. Looking at the issues that you cover in your new book, what do you think it will take for better economic outcomes for folks in rural areas?
Wow, that’s a great and broad question. In my hometown, population 1,200 people, this town that I’d found suffocating as a child, now I have a nostalgia for it because it was all these home-grown businesses. The grocery store, the diners, the general store and the pharmacy that had the spinner rack where we bought our comics–all of those were local businesses owned by families in town. And now all of those have been gutted. There’s no real businesses there except for just on the outskirts of town and that’s only corporate things like MacDonald’s. It makes me very sad to see the loss of all those local businesses.
And the ginseng industry has dried up, even in the course of working on this project. Part of that is due to climate change. The growing region has started nudging north–and I saw that happen in the span of the six years I was working on this project. The gardens migrated north because it was too warm to grow south of my parent’s house.
As a kid, I felt my hometown was sheltered from everything else going on culturally. I have some fondness for that reality now. Because, now, everybody is online–so culture has become pretty homogeneous and global. Instagram has made interior design generic for wherever you go in the world.
I was just in a cafe the other day in Portland and we were commenting on how all cafes look exactly the same now. We’ve been spoon-fed this specific aesthetic via Instagram algorithms. Whether you’re in Portland, Iowa City, Barcelona or Beijing, all the cafes look exactly the same. I miss the strange cultural isolation of where I grew up now.
One of my favorite things in life, for many years, has been spending time in coffee shops in Seattle. I’ll just mildly correct you in saying that Seattle still has its fare share of independent coffee shops, in all its neighborhoods, and they can all be a bit different, have some well-worn homey/comfy vibe to them.
Maybe Seattle has managed to keep the integrity of that. Portland use to be like that too but I wouldn’t say that about Portland now. They all look the same: that minimalist inoffensive hipster style.
The minimalist style you see world-wide, for sure. All tones of gray and beige.
Yes! Beige! The neutral, muted and inoffensive tones of gray and beige. Of course, as we scroll through the book, we’re seeing gray and beige tones too! Everything in the book is made up of just two inks, a black and a red ink–and then gradations of those colors to get a whole palette of sepia tones. I really nerded out of the process, you know, trying to add just the right amount of red to this gray to get this earth tone.
Did you end up tweaking things in Photoshop to any great extent?
Yes. So, everything is drawn on paper with ink, the line art. A lot of the second color I would use bond paper that I would lay over the line art. So, tracing paper for that second color. Then it’s all scanned and composited in Photoshop. To get separate tones, that’s all Photoshop manipulation of many layers of reds and grays.
Speaking of digital vs. analog, Photoshop has been around forever so it has a cred all its own.
I last real job, before becoming a cartoonist, was being a graphic designer back in the ’90s. My first graphic design job was at a newspaper, around 1995. And in 1996, I was at a small town advertising agency. In 1998, I joined Dark Horse Comics as a graphic designer. So, I came from that background of production. Before I was doing comics or illustration, I was helping out Top Shelf with book design, production work. My ’90s training in Photoshop has been what’s carried me through my whole career.
A lot of people would envy your skill set. I mean, with such an intimate knowledge of Photoshop. The new generation seems to be relying more on Procreate and perhaps not being quite as familiar with Photoshop.
What I’m grateful for is having been around, in the ’90s, when there was still so much paste-up and analog work being done. I still think of making a color page as more like making a screenprint: thinking about trapping, how the colors print out on the plates. There was a printing press in the building so you need see each plate. You would see the cyan, magenta, yellow and black plates printed. How things would come alive.
When I try to tinker with something like Procreate on the iPad, I think it defaults to RGB since most people are using it for online stuff. Right away, that’s jarring to me. I’m so trained in CMYK, the way things are printed. Old school print technology is an obsession of mine. Maybe not on the level of someone like Jordan Crane. He’s the excerpt of those things but we’re of that generation.
Ginseng Baptism.
What we’re looking at now, a page about the ginseng baptism, speaks to the attention to detail, the beauty on the page, you’re talking about. Any final thoughts on what people can expect from this Pantheon edition of your book?
The book comes out at the end of the month, on April 29th. There’s around 70 additional pages since the series. I changed things around. I changed the beginning. I changed the end. And I added a lot in the middle. The series has its own unique features, art created by my brother and an old-fashioned letters page in each issue. The book is a hardcover edition, 448 pages. When I sat down and read all twelve of the original comic book issues, I felt it wasn’t cohesive enough. So, it went through quite an overhaul.
Let me ask you one last question as we close out. How do you tackle a visual metaphor? Maybe how you used the ginseng root?
Every new project starts with a visual metaphor, or symbol or scene. It’s hard to know how I break it down. That’s one of the unique strengths of comics, that you can illustrate ideas visually with metaphors. It just sort of happens organically. I think my religious instruction also informs that. Because Jesus’ teachings were all in parables and they’re all a little bit abstract and so you have to decipher the meaning from them. Some cartoonist are far better than I at working the magic of having the words say one thing and the images they another and from that dissonance a whole other meaning emerges.
As for the ginseng root, I was drawn to the physicality of a plant root. But it was also the perfect metaphor for this process that I needed to engage in of going back to where I came from: tilling through that soil, the aeration of that soil. One thing that is confounding and disturbing about ginseng is that it can never be grown on the same plot of land more than once. You can imagine how frustrating that is for farmers. And we are running out of land for growing in places like Wisconsin. A hundred years can go by and you still wouldn’t be able to grow ginseng in the same soil and that has to do with ginseng depositing a form of toxin in the soil particular to the plant. So, on a personal level, as an author, best known for a memoir, Blankets, I was very wary of that fact. If you have a plant that won’t grow again in the same soil, is it dangerous for me to go back to Wisconsin, revisiting memoir, and try to plant there again which is what I did with this project.
Wow. Well, that’s a perfect place to end it. Thank you so much, Craig.
A few weeks ago, I was speaking with Comics Grinder’s Henry Chamberlain about comic anthologies. I told him about Ivan Brunetti’s An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories (Volumes 1 & 2), published in 2006 and 2008 by Yale University Press. When I described the books to him, he remarked that they sounded like an encyclopedia—an apt description, though they are perhaps a hybrid of anthology and reference guide. Given the intrigue, he asked me to write a review piece for his blog.
Over the weekend, I picked up both volumes and began rereading them. These books now have a permanent place in my lounge, perfect for dipping in and out whenever time allows, especially between other books. I’m grateful to Chamberlain for prompting me to revisit them.
One of the highlights of both volumes is the collection of essays. Volume 1 includes a written reflection by Charles Schulz on the art of the comic strip, along with graphic essays and tributes scattered throughout. Volume 2 features an essay on Harvey Kurtzman by Adam Gopnik, as well as tribute comic essays by Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman. My only criticism is that I would have loved more essays—Daniel Raeburn’s piece on Daniel Clowes’s short story Gynecology is another standout, but more analytical content would have been welcome.
Prior to the first volume, Brunetti curated The Cartoonist’s Eye, an exhibit of 75 artists’ work, for the A+D Gallery of Columbia College Chicago. Given his expertise in comics, the task must have been immense. His prologue, though brief, offers valuable insights. He describes comics as a “peculiar art form” and cites Chris Ware’s description of cartooning as “the convergence of seeing and reading” and Spiegelman’s characterization of comics as “writing with pictures.” Brunetti firmly believes that doodling is the fundamental essence of cartooning.
Notably, the anthology is deliberately unstructured—Brunetti eschewed chronology and explanations, preferring the cartoons to speak for themselves. He even apologizes for the title Graphic Fiction, acknowledging that it serves as an umbrella term for memoir, essay, fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, and journalism.
The selections span a wide range, from excerpts of 10–12 pages to single-page works. Many are drawn from serialized pieces, and I realized I already owned several of the featured classics: Maus, Black Hole, Clyde Fans, Berlin, and Building Stories. Seeing Richard McGuire’s Here in its original form was particularly exciting.
Some notable works include:
Riot of the Insane by George Grosz (1915)
Nancy by Ernie Bushmiller
Personal favorites from the collection:
Jack London by Jessica Abel
An untitled work by Ivan Brunetti (page 87 of Volume 1)
Cheap Novelties by Ben Katchor
Griffith’s Observatory by Bill Griffith
Hawaiian Getaway by Adrian Tomine
Patton and A History of America by Crumb
How I Quit Collecting Records by Robert Crumb & Harvey Pekar
Is There Life After Levittown? (from Lemme Outta Here!, 1978)
The Ethel Catherwood Story by David Collier
While writing this article, I watched Married to Comics, the documentary about Justin Green and Carol Tyler. It featured Green’s groundbreaking work Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary—a piece I had never read but immediately wanted to. I thought to myself, I’m sure this is in Brunetti’s anthology—and of course, it was, which only underscores the lasting value of these volumes. Phoebe Gloeckner was also interviewed in the documentary, which piqued my interest in her work. I was then able to dip into an excerpt from Diary of a Teenage Girl included in the anthology. There’s always something more to discover, even years later. That’s the magic of a truly great collection.
Other contributors include David Mazzucchelli, Lynda Barry, Gary Panter, Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez, and more. In fact, there are too many to mention. Of course, not every piece resonated with me, but that’s the point. Some styles didn’t connect, and certain artworks—like King-Cat by John Porcellino and Joe Matt’s work—can be challenging to read due to how much they try to fit onto each page. This reminded me of something Scott McCloud once said: how comics were once constrained by limited space—artists would cram as much as possible onto a page—but now, they have the freedom to stretch out. The key takeaway is that there are so many different ways to draw comics, and this anthology showcases the eclecticism and variety of this wonderful art form.
It’s also worth noting that these volumes are nearly 20 years old. In a 2013 interview with Gil Roth, Brunetti mentioned the proliferation of graphic novelists, noting that he couldn’t keep up. Now 20 years on—as readers, we are spoiled for choice. That said, the works and the artists in these two volumes still stand the test of time.
Other details worth noting: The books were co-edited by Chris Ware and Laura Mizicko. Volume 1’s dust jacket was designed by Seth, while Daniel Clowes provided the cover for Volume 2. The anthologies draw from essential art-house comics publishers, including Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Pantheon, Top Shelf, and Smithsonian Collections. Both volumes also feature illustrations by Saul Steinberg.
A few years ago, if someone had asked me about comics, I might have (ignorantly) thought only of superheroes, horror comics, or children’s books. But over time, I’ve immersed myself in the world of art-house comics, particularly those by North American cartoonists. Brunetti’s two volumes of Graphic Fiction are magisterial. Every art-house comics fan should have them on their bookshelf. These aren’t books you read from start to finish—they are books to explore, revisit, and savor over time.
About Ivan Brunetti: Ivan Brunetti was born in Italy and moved to the South Side of Chicago when he was eight. He is an Associate Professor of Illustration in the Design Department at Columbia College Chicago, where he teaches courses on illustration, cartooning, graphic novels, and visual narrative. He has also taught at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice and Aesthetics: A Memoir, as well as the editor of both volumes of An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories.
Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy: The Graphic Adaptation. By Paul Karasik. Lorenzo Mattotti. David Mazzucchelli. 400 pp. New York: Pantheon. 2025. $35.
From City of Glass.
In the case of world-renown writer Paul Auster (1947-2024), one preternatural talent deserves another. That is what happened when his post-modern noir novella, City of Glass was adapted into a graphic novel and published in 1994. The original prose novel is part of a series, The New York Trilogy: published sequentially as City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986).
Neon Lit edition, 1994.
When the graphic novel of City of Glass came out in 1994, by Avon imprint, Neon Lit, the comics adaptation by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli became a word-of-mouth sensation. It was many years in the making with many years leading up to it. A lot of the leading-up-work involved comics artist Art Spiegelman (Maus, 1986) and his attempts to get out in front of the emerging “graphic novel” market. Surely there was a way for serious prose novelists to be involved with serious graphic novels. As series designer for Neon Lit, Spiegelman fought the good fight. Fast forward to 2025, we are collectively more than ready for “serious graphic novels,” and now we have a new book that includes the original City of Glass comics adaptation and completes the trilogy with new adaptations of the other two books. That is quite an undertaking to say the least and the results are impressive.
Excerpt from City of Glass.
Any really great comics adaptation will not attempt to directly compete with the source material but bring in something new, something that only the comics medium can offer. What’s fascinating in this case is that Paul Karasik, the mastermind behind this work, not only found a distinctive comics path from the Auster source material back when he was art director and David Mazzucchelli was the comics artist. But then, decades later, Karasik would have to strike a chord, but not be overwhelmed by his previous accomplishment, the comics adaptation of City of Glass, such an iconic landmark work. Is that even possible? Yes, absolutely. Paul Karasik did it again as art director to Lorenzo Mattotti’s comics artist; and, ultimately, when in charge of his own adaptation of the final story.
From City of Glass.
You can enjoy a comics adaptation on its own. However, keep in mind, that if you read the original work, you get that much more out of the experience. At least, you should know a few things. We’re dealing here with a funhouse of ideas about storytelling: narrators and unreliable narrators; the role of a story; the very nature of words. These comics are adapting the work of Paul Auster, a masterful writer with a keen talent and temperament for Magical Realism and Post-Modern experimentation. Let’s first take a look back at the City of Glass comics adaptation and how it tapped into this peculiar and surreal terrain.
Post-Modern Paul Auster: The author inside his own novel.
City of Glass, the comics version, jumps right out of the gate. There are so many ideas bubbling around and perhaps the most compelling is the existential quandary of having to be inside one’s head, needing and desiring to be there, while also wishing to run as far away from one’s self as possible. And how does one fully express this most bizarre, contradictory and human condition? Visual metaphors will get us part of the way but then it’s up to the comics artist to take it further which certainly happens in all three of these stories. Just keep in mind that all of this is an exercise in subverting the classic detective story. These are mysteries that go well beyond mysteries, asking more questions than ever providing answers.
Page from City of Glass.
There’s a scene in City of Glass that you can argue is quintessential to the story’s concerns: it is in the second chapter and is condensed into a set of pages in the comics version that evoke the struggle to tell any story, to form any thought. The character is a young man who has been abused and can barely articulate anything. The tails to the word balloons he emits are jabbed down his throat, powerfully evoking his struggles. Those same word balloon tails navigate their way through human history and humanity’s collective struggle to communicate.
From Ghosts.
That same energy, with a distinctive twist, can be found in the next story, Ghosts. Lorenzo Mattotti leans towards his strengths as an illustrator and painter of full-throated dramatic images. So, the rhythm tends to be one of powerful image balanced with powerful prose, back and forth, at an intoxicating pace. So, yeah, it works. I mean, where does one go after David Mazzucchelli? Karasik goes with Mattotti to tap into all the dark urban angst in a thoroughly different way.
From The Locked Room.
And, finally, we come to the last story, The Locked Room. Paul Karasik has placed himself in the very best company and he delivers. Known for his light pencil work (The New Yorker, The New York Times), Karasik’s more subdued approach can still cut to the quick in depicting any given character’s foibles. One particularly poignant moment has the main character feeling rather smothered by his flirtatious hostess and finds himself surrounded by all the word balloons she creates from her excessive chatter. It’s enough for him to nearly float away on all the hot air packed away.
Post-Modern Diner: as gritty as a Modern Diner.
The New York Trilogy is many things, none the least of which is a highly stimulating look at who we are and/or who we claim to be. This new comics adaptation of all three stories is definitely the big treat of the year for anyone who loves great fiction and great comics. Comics scholar Bill Kartalopoulos once said at a symposium many years ago: “City of Glass more than most of the graphic novels that have been published over the last dozen years or so is a book that makes all the right choices.” Well, that can certainly be said of this remarkable collection.
And it came to be known, far and wide, as Signalgate! Look, ma, I’m usin’ me noggin. Enjoy my latest comic. What do you think of Signalgate?
On Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe were evasive during a Senate hearing that focused on their roles in the Trump administration’s scandal involving sensitive military information that was inadvertently shared with The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.
Democrats were most apoplectic over Gabbard’s and Ratcliffe’s insistence that no classified information had been shared in the group chat on the Signal app, which Goldberg said had involved “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing” and had included Gabbard and Ratcliffe, along with Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and national security adviser Mike Waltz.
While Republicans largely avoided the disturbing report in their questioning, Democrats leaped at what was the first opportunity to question Trump officials at length about the scandal. And it was clarifying because it showed Trump officials’ eagerness to evade questions in the face of accountability.
And, if you’re interested in working with me on any form of illustration or related stuff, just drop me a line in the Contact form. You can find some more of my work here.
Anders Nilsen is on a quest as a comics artist to deliver his vision as well as he can to the reader. That’s saying a lot when it comes to Nilsen as anyone who is familiar with his work can attest. The new collection of his work is Tongues, Volume 1, published by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House, pub date is Mar 11, 2025 and you can pre-order. My review here. Once you enter this book, from the first page onward, you are transported to a sort of netherworld that leads you from one realm to the next, the worlds of gods and humans. Questions regarding existence and divinity are asked and answered as a common exchange.
We ran into a bit of technical difficulty and naturally opted to pursue an email interview. Basically, this is one of those interviews that allows for so much latitude in regards to approach given all the material that can potentially be covered. For this one, I thought it might make sense to do a bit of comparison between the two big books in Nilsen’s career with greatest overlap. And so we came up with what could have been over an hour of chat, perhaps over a couple of cups of coffee, distilled down to what you read below. I don’t take anything for granted and I’m very grateful for the time and care involved in Anders’s thoughtful responses.
Page excerpt from Tongues.
HENRY CHAMBERLAIN: Thank you, Anders, for doing this interview. I can only imagine things remain chaotic, one way or another, for everyone in Los Angeles.
ANDERS NILSEN: Yeah, it’s been a weird time. My wife and I did actually evacuate briefly. We lost power and internet on the second day of the fires, and then a new blaze popped up that evening in the Hollywood Hills, which is only a couple of miles away from us. So we went to stay with a friend in the far south end of the city for three nights until the power came on again. In the grand scheme of things it was a small disruption, but it’s definitely a weird feeling to have to decide in an hour or two what stuff you value most in the world. And our cats were very grumpy about it.
Page excerpt from Big Questions.
At the time of this interview, we’re about a month before the release of Tongues, Volume 1 (03/11/2024). Looking back at the time of the release of your other work of comparable size and scope, the collected Big Questions (08/16/11), how would you compare these two milestones in your career?
They are very different moments for me. Big Questions wasn’t the first book I published, but it was the project that got me started being serious about making comics, and I think of it as being my, like, 12 year graduate school in comics. That’s how I learned how the medium worked, basically, and how I figured out how I wanted to approach it. You can see it in the book itself – the early pages are sort of roughly drawn – partly on purpose, but not entirely. I was figuring things out as I went. Tongues on the other hand felt like “okay, now I know what I’m doing, more or less, here’s a chance to start out with something like command of my medium. I’ve still learned a ton working on this book, but I was a much more capable artist from the start of it.
Tongues is also a culmination for me. Every other book I’ve done has grown out of small experiments and messing around in my sketchbooks. Tongues didn’t. It grew out of those other finished works. There’s a way in which it feels like everything I’ve done in comics to this point has led me to this project. Everything has built up to this. So that’s also very different.
Poor Prometheus.
Prometheus is a titan in Greek mythology who commited the sin of helping (or creating) humanity with the gift of fire (knowledge). This provides a jumping off point for Tongues as you have a Prometheus story that continues and branches off from the original. You explicitly have humanity gain the gift of language; and you have a Prometheus moving beyond his imprisonment from the gods. Would you share with us a bit about how you play and interact with the story of Prometheus?
Sure. I love that story. I know the basic version from reading that mythology as a kid, pouring over it. So the basic outline is sort of burned into my head. I did a short story several years back (in Rage of Poseidon) playing with the idea of his ‘eternal’ punishment extending into the present, as it reasonably would. And it touched on his relationship with the eagle that is sent every day to eat his liver. The eagle is his tormentor, but it’s also his only friend, the only other mind he interacts with. And in my work birds usually talk. So I was interested in that relationship. What would it be like? What a weird tension, right? Full of possibilities. And his traditional role as creator of humanity also allows me to get into human nature and evolution which I have a longstanding interest in. And then when I actually read more deeply, Prometheus’ story only got more interesting. Our basic conception of the story comes from the playwright Aeschylus in 480 BCE (or thereabouts). But his play, Prometheus Bound is only one of a trilogy – the other two are lost, we don’t even know if Prometheus Bound is the first or the last in the series. They are very sketchily understood from other contemporary writing, but again, what a great sandbox to get to play in, and to get to fill in the blanks with my own bastardized version. And then, lastly, there’s a tension with Zeus, the king of the gods, who arranges the punishment. Prometheus literally translates as “forethought” – he can see into the future, at least some parts of it. And so he knows which of Zeus’s offspring will come to overthrow him, and when – as happened to his father and grandfather before him. But he hates Zeus, and refuses to tell him, despite being tortured for eternity. So… yeah. Great material to muck around with.
If I tried to give a brief explanation/comparison of Big Questions (658 pages) and Tongues (368 pages), I would say that one book has the creatures of the gods looking up, trying to make sense of the gods; and the latter book has the gods looking down, trying to make sense of the creatures. Did things just work out that way or do you think your ongoing storytelling was leading in that direction?
Wow, that’s great, I actually hadn’t thought about that inversion in that way, but yes, that completely makes sense. Although in a way in Tongues, by the present, the humans have, in a way, surpassed the gods. Though only in a way. But yes, I think both books are trying to play with, to conceptualize a relationship to divinity, to the universe, to the very strange fact of being alive in the world. And it only makes sense to come at it from both directions, eventually. And I guess in Tongues, one of my favorite characters is the Eagle. And she’s trying to understand both.
Of course, Tongues has been brewing and evolving, in one form or another, over many years, back to, in small part, Dogs and Water (2005) and, more explicitly in Rage of Poseidon (2013). Would you share with us a bit on the building blocks that you were working with back then and how they proved to be part of something bigger?
The connection with Dogs and Water is a good story. So D+W was my first published book, and out of everything I’ve done, for some reason it has had the most random interest in the film rights. For several years after it was published I would get random emails from rock stars or people in film about turning it into a movie. Usually it would be one or two emails and then they would disappear and the idea wouldn’t go anywhere. But in 2009 or so a Canadian production company got in touch and it got far enough that I agreed to write a script for a feature. The book is honestly not that substantial, so it involved adding some new material. There’s one scene in the book where the main character, a young man with a teddy bear strapped to his back, lost in the middle of nowhere, is passed on the road by a sort of military caravan. These Canadian filmmakers suggested expanding that scene, maybe having one truck stop and having some sort of interaction. Which I was interested in. So I wrote that scene into the script. Well, the movie went nowhere, but that scene stuck in my head. I really liked it. And disliked that it would never see the light of day. So years later when I was beginning to think about a new long-form graphic novel I decided to incorporate that scene. It’s the first thing in Tongues that I actually drew. It’s funny, though, it’s the same character, but in a sort of alternate world. And the bear on his back is not the same bear.
Part of assembling the elements of Tongues was very much a process of throwing obstacles down in my path to just see what would happen. I was specifically interested in dumping this D+W thing in with Prometheus, and human nature and the tensions of the middle east, etc etc. They didn’t really make sense together, but it felt like something interesting might arise out of that tension.
Incidentally a short film was eventually made from the final quarter or so of Dogs and Water by a director named Randy Krallman. But again, basically no one has ever seen it. It’s beautifully shot. But will probably never be seen, sadly.
Reading Tongues is such a pleasure. It is an understatement to say that it brings together all of your strengths in comics art. Looking over pages, I want to point out a few like the two-page spread (p116-117) which depicts Astrid and her father walking around the mall and engaged in a very serious conversation. Recently, I stumbled upon the comics term, the De Luca Effect. Is that familiar to you? I’ve discovered that some of the greatest cartoonists using this technique are not familiar with the term. Basically, it’s a way to have one (or more) characters inhabiting different moments in the same space. My guess is that this is simply something that emerged during your process. In fact, your use of it includes “panels,” which technically would not be used in this technique. All very theoretical stuff!
Oh, that’s cool, no I don’t think I’ve ever heard that term before. But I love doing that in certain places. It feels like it breaks up time in a slightly different way than normal panelling. Slows it down, or makes it slightly quieter, or more meditative, potentially. Although I’ve probably used it in other, more kinetic ways, too.
That brings me to your own very distinctive use of panels. Heck, I would call them the Nilsen Effect! Would you share with us a bit about your use of polygons and the like?
Sure, yeah, panelling was something I was very much interested in playing with in Tongues. I’m interested in panels in comics as ‘frames of experience’. So, like, the structure and arrangement of panels influences the way a reader reads a scene. And how the scene feels This is obvious in a way, but it’s not really exploited that much. Regular squares or rectangles are an easy way to break up action, but they also have an effect on the reader. In Big Questions I found that regular, repetition of evenly spaced square panels helped create a regular rhythm which was useful for, say, conversations between two birds, where there wasn’t a lot of action. They were great for that. In D+W I did the whole book without any panel borders. And that had a very different, very particular effect on the feel of the story. It emphasized the open blankness of that landscape, and it had an effect of making it feel (I think) a little less like your focus was being dictated by the author. It felt more open. For Tongues I wanted to try some other stuff. In particular I wanted it to feel like the structure of each page was almost an object unto itself. And to echo the unfolding feel of the ‘magic cube’ in the story. This becomes more explicitly about the structure of reality when Astrid has her ‘audience’ in the underground pit and the dream/hallucination that follows. And then there’s the Prisoner’s Dream sequence at the beginning of the book. One reviewer described it as the ritual reading of entrails. Which I love. I hadn’t thought of that, but I wanted it to feel like a kind of magical ritual state. And also like a dream. The framing of panels with animal forms, or the plant forms of Prometheus’ ‘garden’ feels to me a little like framing lyrics with music in a song. It’s a literal marrying of two different sides of the brain in that context. Which automatically is going to deepen things and give it texture and tone and weirdness. It’s a tool.
If you will bear with me, I also wanted to point out the fascinating progression of your comics art in Big Questions. You reach a point, where you start to make use of the two-page spread and never look back. I hope that makes sense. I’m just saying that, at some point in your evolving as a comics artist, you saw the full potential of the two-page canvas and made it your own. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
That’s cool, yeah, I like to throw in a good two-page spread now and then. I feel like I should be more conscious than I am of the spread as a unit, rather than the single page. Because that is the visual whole that the reader encounters when they turna page, really. But it’s also good to be able to have the two-page spreads break up the rhythm of the sequence of pages. To establish rhythms and then occasionally break them. Just one more thing to play with.
Also, it appears that you made use of an original page size format that was about twice or less bigger than the printed page. Your originals are (or were) on 11″x14″ bristol. Do you still use that size or have you bumped up to something bigger? I noticed that, as you evolved, your lettering got a little smaller while the compositions and characters appear to take up more space than can easily accommodate your original page size unless, of course, you simply refined your process.
That’s incredibly perceptive. Yeah, my originals are bigger now. The first issue of Tongues was a little all over the place, but at this point my original pages are 12.5″ x 17″. So about 150% of the printed page. Roughly. Sometimes the page has to get expanded a bit. As for the lettering… don’t look too closely. The size changes a bit here and there. There are some things I could probably be more systematic about. But… maybe some day.
Another process question I must ask is all the production upgrades you made in Tongues, compared with Big Questions. That said, once you catch your stride in Big Questions, the improvement is apparent. Just the inclusion of those amazing geometric patterns alone indicates more and more dazzling art up ahead. And then you take things further with your own distinctive use of color. Not only is it a sophisticated color palette but you push boundaries, as on page 133, daring to have black text rest on such a dark purple background–and still be fully readable. I can only imagine that your own fine arts background compelled you to take on the role of a colorist, and at such a high level of complexity. What can you tell us about your coloring and production work?
Yeah, when I was getting started I had friends ask why I wanted to use color. Like, what’s the point? And… I don’t know, partly I just wanted to do something I hadn’t done before. And I did go to school for painting once upon a time, like you say. And color can convey a lot (obviously). I love doing the color, but it is also a TON of work. I’ve had folks helping out for most of the book, but that can get very expensive. It’s part of the reason I have only been able to do like 50 pages a year. But yes, I love the way I can suggest light and atmosphere, darkness and backlighting. It adds so much. And some of the artists that I admire most have been great colorists. Moebius, Herge, Chris Ware, CF, Sarah Glidden. After Tongues is done I might never do a full-color comic again. But I’m in it for now, more or less happily.
You have said that you had to make a choice between “artist” and “cartoonist” and you chose the latter. That said, I wonder if you’ve come around to accepting yourself simply as an artist. Whatever the case, your work is extraordinary and you have every right to embrace the role of artist.
Thanks. Yeah, I do think of myself as both. I probably use the words depending on the context and who I’m talking to. Or who I’m trying to get paid by, maybe. I definitely see what I do as wider than just comics, but it’s the comics world that embraced my work early on, and I’m very happy with that label, and being connected to that tradition. But I also think of myself as a storyteller and a book designer and a drawer and… probably a few other things.
I would add that I understand the hesitancy in calling oneself an artist. I also come from a fine arts background and I also reached a point where I needed to seriously pursue comics. And yet I still love to draw and paint, as I’m sure you do. We are both of a certain vintage where a fine arts major was the only game in town, no comics diplomas, and I think that’s all just fine. Who knows, perhaps younger art students will be secretly creating paintings outside of their comics curriculum! I believe things have sort of come full circle with the comics medium elevated well into the “art-academic complex,” as I sometimes call it.
Yeah, comics had definitely not penetrated academia when I was a student. I had to push upstream a bit to do them. Then when I taught for a couple of years I sometimes wished that my students weren’t quite so focussed on a single medium. And I feel the same way about the publishing industry at times, too, or maybe the market. But the world is what it is, and I’m happy to have found a place in it from which to occasionally push against boundaries.
I will ask just a couple of more questions and please feel free to add anything I might have missed. Essentially, what I get from Tongues is that the gods usually are not concerned with the humans unless the humans make themselves an inconvenience or outright danger. For me, the whole book is operating in this sort of timeless god-time. Of course, the “present time” rears its head, as in the mention of smartphones and social media.
Figuring out how to deal with the passage of deep time has been one of the really fun problems to play with in this book, for sure, specifically Prometheus’ long sleep. There’s definitely a certain suspension of disbelief I am asking of my readers in that regard. Our brains aren’t really built for geologic time, of course, or even the sweep of human history, which is a tiny fraction of it. Its almost a kind of absurdity to try and make a graphic novel about such things. But it’s been fun to try.
I realize that the evolution of the whole Tongues narrative has been years in the making. Are you satisfied with it so far and can see pursuing it further? There are certainly numerous reasons to continue, and at the pace you’ve been going too. That opens a whole discussion on creating work as a series. Basically, it seems the stage is set for you to do whatever works best for you.
Yeah, the story is only half done. Volume 2 is underway. So I’m committed to another few years, at least. Thankfully Pantheon has been very open to me self-publishing the individual issues as I go, which is a huge help. It’s such a lot of work, its good to break the deadlines up.
Lastly, as we embark on this year and beyond, with its many challenges, I find that seeking out the transcendent is a path that will recharge one with clarity and strength for the struggles ahead. If you would like to share any spiritual reflections, please feel free to do so.
Yeah, the next few years are going to be a lot. I don’t know that I have any special wisdom, but I’ve been paying attention to my breathing lately. Which is sometimes tremendously helpful. And I am very lucky to live near Griffith Park in Los Angeles. It’s a big semi-wilderness in the middle of the city. You can lose yourself there and cross paths with coyotes and deer and owls and crows. It’s a gift as far as I’m concerned. It has been a huge positive in my life, creative and otherwise. Watching the changes in light and weather and vegetation between day and night and season to season, feeling the deep quiet of the place… it helps make this insane world bearable for me. It’s finally been raining a bit here lately, after the fires. I’m excited to get to watch the park bloom and turn green again in the next week or so. I was up there last week after a difficult day and spent about 15 minutes watching two crows circle and chase one another in formation, continuously looping and surfing the updrafts. It was so beautiful to watch, and looked like such fun. I’m very grateful I have that.
