 |
| Kuper
in his New York Studio. Photo by José Alaniz. |
‘My
Running is Drawing’: A Peter Kuper Interview
José
Alaniz
Peter Kuper is
the award-winning author of several books, including the
environmentalist-themed graphic novel Ruins (2015) and the graphic
non-fiction Insectopolis: A Natural History (2025), art from which is on
exhibit at New York’s Society of Illustrators (see review).
This interview
took place at Kuper’s studio in New York City on June 12, 2025. Remarks have
been condensed and edited for clarity.
JA: I wanted to start by talking about Ruins
(2015), particularly the sequence in the monarch butterfly preserve in which
you switch to a gatefold, as a way (one could argue) to get at the emotional
impact of environmental precarity. Artists often go with big images for that. Yours
is a great example, because you actually expand the established parameters of
the work itself. Can you tell me a little bit about what went into that
decision?
PK: I was trying to capture something as grand as the monarch
habitat. I thought, “I won’t capture it anyway, because nothing can.” Not even
a photo will do the job, or film. Being in that environment, which happily I
was, it’s a 360-degree experience. Wherever you’re looking, there they are. And
it’s a tactile experience; the butterflies brush by your face. And you look
down at the ground, and you see a river of shadows from them passing over and
just all of the different aspects of that, which is just mind-blowing. So I was
trying to figure out a way to approximate it, and a gatefold seemed like a way
to do it. And the publisher was open to all the different things that I wanted
to do.
 |
Fig. 1 — The gatefold
(detail) from Ruins (2015). |
JA: That moment when you come upon the gatefold, it’s
almost like a pop-up book.
PK: I’m sure the publisher was like, oh, well, who
knows if we’re going to make any profit on this book. But they were very good
about it. And I suppose it’s like, IMAX or techniques you see in other media. Like
in John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), he has that character speak
IN UPPERCASE. And so it’s that idea of playing with form, seeing what you can
do with it. Somebody like [book designer] Chip Kidd is so good at looking at a
project and thinking, “What can I do to make this a different kind of book?” I’m
very interested in those possibilities as well.
 |
Fig. 2 — Cover of Insectopolis:
A Natural History (2025) |
JA: I’d love to talk more about that in terms of the
ancillary products you’re releasing with your new book Insectopolis (2025).
You also have coloring books, plus the exhibit at the New York Public Library,
the new exhibit at the Society of Illustrators [in New York], and the use of QR
codes in both the exhibits and in the book. In short, you’re one of those
artists who’s so versatile. I’ve taught Ruins and The System (1997),
which uses stencil art. You really go beyond just pen and ink. (Not that
there’s anything wrong with pen and ink!)
PK: Well, some of it has to do with me getting bored,
actually. If I’m doing something that takes too long, it becomes tiresome. But
another factor is trying to be responsive to the text and what feels best for
the story. So with the Kafka adaptations [e.g., The Metamorphosis
(2004)], some of those I did on scratch board, which sort of approximated
woodcut. That felt like Kafka to me. I don’t even think or worry about my
style. What is my style? As an illustrator, which I was for many years,
it was difficult, because if you get hired for a job, they’re looking for a
style, they’ve hired you for that style, and you do not change mid-job. Whereas
with a graphic novel I can shift around. In the case of both Ruins and Insectopolis,
I can stylistically move around throughout the book. A chapter or a section can
be done in one style, then we can have, say, a dream sequence. So I can switch
to watercolor here, or just for the background. Change it up. For my adaptation
of Heart of Darkness (2019), I did the present-day conversation on the boat
in pen and ink and digitally added halftone gray, but the story being told by
Marlowe was done in a sketchbook style. So I had that back and forth, like in Ruins’
monarch section, which is pen and ink and digital and a lot of the other
section is done with colored pencils, some pen and ink, watercolor. We start
out in New York with pen and ink and digital, and then when they get to Mexico,
we make a transition. I wanted it to feel the way my sketchbook felt, that
stylistic shift, which makes you feel a change in the environment; “Oh, it’s
warmer here.” One thing I didn’t consciously do in Ruins that I realized
later comes from a book that was very important to me: The Grapes of
Wrath by John Steinbeck. I realized that in his storytelling, he describes
the main action in some chapters, and every other chapter is more poetic,
descriptive. And I realized that that was the same metronomic beat that I was
using in Ruins by occasionally going into the butterfly’s world: more lyrical,
wordless and all that. But I didn’t do it consciously. It was only later that I
saw I had structured it like The Grapes of Wrath.
JA: What’s fascinating to me is just how well it all
works. Because you would think some of these things might not hang together.
Also, thematically, this variety of styles and subtle differences play into the
notion of an ecosystem. Form mirroring content!
 |
Fig. 3 — QR code used in Insectopolis. |
PK: With Insectopolis, there is some challenging
storytelling. I go into manga style and a lot of other stylistic shifts. My hope,
I guess, is that someone will read it through once, read all the word balloons
and see all the action and have a very nice experience, but then go back say, “Oh,
wait, there’s QR codes in here. What else did I miss?” I mean, I cannot tell
you the number of people that had not noticed that there are QR codes. Including
the copy editor, who asked me at the very end of the process, where are the QR
codes? And then I was like, really? I mean, you’ve been looking at the book all
this time. But there’s this QR blindness. I had the exhibition at the New York
Public Library [“INterSECTS,” 2022], where those QR codes were developed. They
link to interviews with entomologists, some of the top people in their fields.
It was a fantastic experience talking to them. But when the show was going on I
thought that maybe not that many people are looking at the QR codes, because it’s
sort of a young person’s thing. And also, we’re just hit with QR codes all the
time. So, yeah, you get blind to them. But then I had an “aha” moment and
thought, “I can put those in the book, they’ll still work.” So, yeah, you could
call QR codes another “stylistic shift!”
 |
Fig. 4 — A
“post-apocalyptic” page from Insectopolis. |
As for the content of Insectopolis, that was
another “aha” moment in the library. Because we had COVID going on and all
that, it led to the idea of making it a post-apocalyptic narrative, where all
the people are killed and hordes of insects invade the library. That suggested
the framing sequence that opens the book. I had gotten this fellowship [the
2020-2021 Jean Strouse Fellowship at the NYPL’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman
Center for Scholars and Writers] based on the idea that I was going to do
a history of insects and the people who study them. But the circumstances, what
was going on around me, pretty much handed me this framing device.
JA: And I guess with a non-fiction work, unlike Ruins,
you can have even more of that free-flow in terms of styles and content. You
have different parts of the book and exhibit dealing with various entomologist or figures related to
different insects. You can mix those around at will, I suppose.
PK: And I did. I knew what the front end and the back
end were going to be, but everything in-between was pretty wide open. And then,
you start working on it, and realize you need a transitional panel here so that
it leads into the next chapter. Or I’m just going to add a flying cicada, and
now it’s flown on to the next page, which begins another chapter, and so on. Yeah,
it was real free-form — or, you know, more like jumping without a parachute! But
it was the subject matter being so engaging that made that happen. And I
completely stumbled on Tezuka meeting Nabokov. I was just thinking, “I want to
do Nabokov, but how?” I didn’t want to draw a full figure. I didn’t have enough
reference for that, and I didn’t think a full figure would work. Then I was
looking at one of my photos of a room in the library, and there were these
busts there. And I thought, “He’ll be a bust!” So then it would have his name
on it all the time. Also, I kept finding ways to use everything that I had,
even my mistakes. There was a hilarious moment when I was doing the portion on the
lac bug. I found a reference photo for a lac bug on Google, and I used it. Then
I showed it to an entomologist, and they said, “That’s not a lac bug.” So in
the book I just have the insect itself say, “Yeah, I’m constantly mistaken for
the lac bug.” Stuff like that also helped move the story along. Because I had
drawn it up and I didn’t want to have to change it, right?
 |
Fig. 5 — Cover of Wish
We Weren’t Here: Postcards From the Apocalypse (forthcoming 2025). |
My next book, Wish We Weren’t Here: Postcards
From the Apocalypse (forthcoming 2025) is on a similar theme. It collects
my weekly environmental comics that appeared in Charlie Hebdo, that I’ve
been doing for five years now.
JA: It’s really key to your productivity that you seem
to have endless stores of energy, that you can just crank this stuff out so
fast. Is this theme of the environmental crisis somehow related to a sense of
urgency for you?
PK: A lot of it is you just do what you know. Depression
can make some people be frozen in place. My way of fighting depression is to
keep myself busy. I’ve been dealing with the environmentalist theme for a long
time, like in It’s Only a Matter of Life and Death (1988). But way
before that, when I was a kid, we had science fiction that was always touching
on that topic, with pollution and the bomb and all that. It was a big piece of
my education. When I got older, I read underground comics, like Slow Death
(1970), that dealt with it head-on. I read those as early as I possibly could,
and they had a big effect on my consciousness about the environment. And you
know, there was the first Earth Day too [in 1970]. And I grew up in Cleveland.
We had the Cuyahoga River that caught fire. So there was a lot. And being
interested in insects from a young age, it all got me thinking about nature,
just generally. At a certain point I just thought everything is connected to
the environment. You can talk about politicians and all the minutia and wars
and all that. But breathable air and potable water trumps everything. So, yeah,
it’s not a recent theme for me at all. It’s just gotten even more pronounced
with time.
JA: I was just reading a Guardian piece[i]
in which they interviewed several entomologists working in Central America.
Some of these people had been there for 50 years, so they’ve seen a lot of
changes. And they’re basically all depressed. They were talking about how 50
years ago they would put out these light boxes to capture insects at night and
count them. But today they almost don’t want to put them out anymore, because
it just makes them feel terrible about how few moths and other insects are
left. They see their task as scientists now is less in researching the lives of
these animals and more in cataloguing their extinction. I’ve talked to other artists
who tell me they feel that the collapse of the environment is too big of a
topic for them. Too overwhelming. Sure, they can do comics about defending abortion
rights, fighting Trump or something like that. But biodiversity loss, the
climate crisis, when they confront things like that some part of them seems to click
off; they feel their art can’t really address that meaningfully. Clearly that’s
not a problem for you!
PK: I know it’s insufficient, but every time I do a
cartoon, there’s a period of joy. I think, “I’ve got this idea, I’m saying something
that people are going to see, it’ll alert somebody.” But it’s also just the joy
of drawing and figuring it out. I am driven by the fact that I have this job,
that it couldn’t be a better fit. The people who publish me want environmentalist
content. I can do all the different angles on it, so I’m just reading
environmental news constantly. I’m steeped in it. That article you read was
about Costa Rica, right? And I’m in deep denial too, really. I’m able to
function based on what I’m looking at in front of me in the moment. I could
just run screaming, or drink myself to death, or try to numb myself to how bad
things are, right? But the drawing is my activity, my action. It makes me feel like
at least I’m doing something. But the more I do comics about this, the more I
feel the absurdity of it.
Like I’m attacking the fact that the people at COP
[the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change] say that by 2030, well, blah, blah, blah. Say whatever kicks
the can down the road, and it’s just all complete bullshit. Or British Petroleum
reversing their decision to move away from fossil fuels because “our shareholders,”
blah, blah, blah. So we’ve completely abandoned any real climate strategy. And now
with Trump in there, everybody’s abandoning it. And digging into those Exxon
studies going back 50 years, you can see they absolutely knew where we were
going. And they were, like, “Full speed ahead!” They and their lawyers are a
lot more concerned with finding ways they can’t be sued by the public. “It’s
our fault, but don’t sue us!” So they get laws in place so you can’t touch
them, and they get regulations removed. I’m steeped in that. And maybe in the
same way that the bomb motivated me when I was younger, like “I gotta get my
book published before they drop the bomb,” now it’s the environmental crisis. I
feel like I’m running, with a tsunami right on my heels. My running is drawing.
JA: This is so illuminating, because you’re saying that
you’re not necessarily mentally healthy. Who is, really, in the Anthropocene? It’s
just that your particular version of managing your anxieties or issues is to
channel them into your work.
PK: Well, I have limits. There’s still certain people
that I can’t handle listening to. I see them on the news or whatever, they’re
even more into the “We’re fucked” narrative than I am. It’s a little too much.
I don’t want to just sound like a doom-and-gloom preacher. So I use humor in
there. I try to give things a twist. That’s going to give you some … not
necessarily an exit, but maybe it has some weird lift in the torque of it. Humor
is definitely a part of that. I’m not angry with people for getting overwhelmed.
I completely understand how they feel. But we should all still be doing
something. Don’t bury your head in the sand. Give money, do something. Don’t just
be like, “I don’t want to think about it, so I’m just going to pretend that
everything is fine.” That’s usually somebody wealthy that says that.
JA: One more quick question about Insectopolis
in particular. I did see the show at the Society of Illustrators, and I got a clear
sense that the physical environment of that gallery is a big part of how you
are presenting the art, like the art’s inhabiting the space, sort of. Please talk
a bit about the show and about what you wanted to do with it.
PK: It’s like another stage to me. Like when I do a
graphic novel, I’m trying to make some of that stuff leap off the page. I’m
still thinking in sequential terms, like, when the butterfly is “flying” up the
stairs, animating it. I’m trying to give a sense of the stages; as you’re walking
up the stairs, you’re going from Canada to Mexico. When you’re coming down the
stairs, there’s birth imagery, and then you look up, and there’s, you know, a
butterfly up here. And your last image as you leave is this migrant worker
looking up at the butterfly. Seeing the show you’re going through time, through
different periods of natural history: the dinosaurs, the Middle Ages, etc. It’s
taking the content from the book and putting it into a wider space. Like a
giant diorama.
I take something from murals, too. A Diego Rivera
mural is a comic! It has a narrative to it. Your eyes can move around to follow
recurring characters, and in the space of the exhibit you physically move
around. I enjoy the different forms this material can take. I drew those ants
on the wall, on my hands and knees! I can see myself going more in this
direction.
JA: Again, those cartoon insects really inhabit that
space. It’s like a pop-up book. In fact, it makes me think what more you could
do with a dedicated space, like the Museum of Natural History, where the art
would be constantly all around you.
PK: Well, about the Museum of Natural History, stay
tuned …
JA: Beautiful. That’s the ultimate pop-up book, right?
José
Alaniz (University of Washington) is author of Comics of the Anthropocene:
Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature (2025).
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