by Hélène Tison
Leela Corman is a painter, educator, and graphic novel
creator, working in the realm of diaspora Ashkenazi culture and
third-generation restorative work. Her books include Unterzakhn
(Schocken/Pantheon, 2012), which was nominated for the Eisner, the L.A.
Times Book Award, and Le Prix Artemisia, and won the ROMICS Prize for Best
Anglo-American Comic and the MoCCA Award of Excellence; the short comics
collections You Are Not A Guest (Field Mouse
Press, 2023) and We All Wish For Deadly Force (Retrofit/Big Planet,
2016).
Her graphic novel Victory
Parade, a story about WWII, women's wrestling, and the astral plane
over Buchenwald, will be published by Schocken/Pantheon in April 2024. Her
short comics have appeared in The Believer Magazine, Tablet Magazine,
Nautilus, and The Nib. She is a founding instructor at Sequential
Artists Workshop, and an instructor at Rhode Island School of Design. She is a
Yaddo Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and the recipient of the Xeric Grant, the
Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant, the Helix Fellowship, and the Koyama
Provides Grant.
Her contact information is:
http://www.leelacorman.com (currently down as of 12/30/2023)
Bluesky: @leelacorman.bsky.social
Instagram: @leelacorman
This videoconference interview with Leela Corman took
place on Nov. 28, 2023. It has been edited for clarity. All artwork is copyright by Leela Corman.
Portrait of the Artist
Hélène Tison: Thank
you so much for your books, and also for agreeing to this interview. So today
we'll talk about your new book Victory Parade [April 2024; reviewed
here: http://ijoca.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-look-of-ghost-with-ashes-in-her.html],
but maybe also about your other work, if that's ok with you. I was really happy
to see that you were able to republish some of the work from We All Wish For
Deadly Force, which you were a bit frustrated with I think.
Leela Corman: Yeah,
it didn't print well for a variety of reasons. So it was really important to me
to reprint at least my favorite work from that.
HT: The
first question I wanted to ask is about your art, because your work and your
style I think are rather unique and beautiful, very poetic, very painterly. And
it probably takes you a very long time to make, so can you tell me a little bit
about how you work, your technique, your tools, et cetera?
LC: It
does take a really long time to make a project like Victory Parade. I
will say it also took a long time to make Unterzakhn, which was just in
ink, in part because the writing aspect of my long form work is really
important. And I spend a lot of time, especially with the longer books, really…
First of all, I do a ton of research and that takes a lot of time and there are
a lot of stages to the research and there's a lot of stages to the note-taking
that goes along with that, before there's even anything written down, that
becomes the story.
 |
| “Wilderness” in You Are Not A Guest, 71 |
Then it takes a long time to thumbnail the story,
which is where the actual writing of the story itself happens. The dialogue and
the action happens while I'm drawing. I don't write a script in advance because
I can't think without the pictures, the characters don't come to life, they
don't even exist until I start thumbnailing, sketching.
And then when I started painting my comics in
watercolor, it instantly made my work better and it completely changed my
career. It also meant that the work took a lot longer and in a lot of ways I
think that that was something I was searching for. I'm not sure I really knew I
was looking for that exactly, but I always had this feeling that my work wasn't
getting to the depth that I wanted it to, and I had been trained… Uh, well, if
you really want to go back, I thought I was going to be a painter, and then I
got kind of heartbroken by a very cruel teacher, my first painting instructor
actually who just wanted to make sure I didn't become a painter, basically. And
she almost succeeded; and I learned from her how not to teach, but it took me
20 years to come back to a place where I could pick up a paintbrush again. And
in the intervening years, I became an illustrator, which felt a bit like a
diminished path for me because it was not where my heart really lay as an
artist. But I had a lot of fun doing it. What it meant, and this brings it back
to your question, what it meant was that I had to train myself to work very
quickly. So I started working with line a lot and flat color, digital color -- the
line was always hand inked, but everything else was digital to try to get
things out quickly. You know when you're an illustrator, everything is very
fast turnaround and I developed a style that was sort of easy to do that in,
but I got really tired of it after a while and when I hit that turning point in
2015, when I started watercolor-painting my comics, that took me out of that
completely. The pages in Victory Parade are definitely the most labor-intensive
work that I've ever done.
HT: What
format do you originally work in? I imagine your page initially is bigger than
the book format, right?
LC: Yeah,
a little bit. I initially had wanted to print it at the size that the art was
painted, 11 by 14 inches; the printing is not that much smaller, only a couple
of inches. With Unterzakhn, the pages were gigantic, they were 19 by 24
inches, because I wanted to make something that felt like gesture drawing. With
Victory Parade, I was really working like a miniaturist, with a tiny
little brush. Now I'm starting to make large paintings again. There's one
behind me almost as tall as me; I’m not very tall, but I'm taller than a book. [laughs]
HT: What
tools do you use? Do you do everything manually, or do you use a light box, a
computer?
LC: You
know, I never used a light box. I'm not sure why I never tried it and maybe
it's just never really been necessary for me, but no, I do everything manually
until the scanning and production. The lettering is digital, but it's a font of
my own hand-lettering. I hand-lettered Unterzakhn and I will never do
that again. I'm just not good at lettering and I don't enjoy it, so it's nice
to have that part be digital, but everything else is by hand because that's how
I think.
HT: You
talked about switching to color after Unterzakhn which was in black and
white, was that because you had more time to devote to the to the art?
LC: No,
it was aesthetic. I've always loved working with watercolor, and I didn't like
doing it as an illustrator. It's funny, I have opposite points of view for
color with illustration and with comics. I will say also I no longer take
illustration commissions -- unless they're really special, like a musician that
I'm friends with wants me to do a poster for them or something. But when I was
still doing illustration, once in a while I would try to do it in watercolor
and I didn't enjoy that. It just didn't feel sharp to me.
 |
| You Are Not A Guest, cover © Leela Corman 2023 |
The opposite is true with comics. I can't stand
coloring comics digitally. It makes me crazy. It doesn't feel like art to me.
I'm not saying it's not art for other people, but for me I need to be working
with chaos, the controlled chaos of paint. So, I always really loved working
with watercolor, but I didn't do it for a long time between my adolescence and
adulthood, and for some reason I just put it aside. And then one day I just
experimentally started playing around with it in in a sequential way and it was
kind of a shock like -- what is this, what is happening here? And so I decided
to do a piece that was really like the turning point in my career, which was
the one about PTSD that I did for a science magazine called Nautilus. [“The
Wound That Never Heals” reprinted in You Are Not A Guest] I thought,
well, what would happen if I did that in watercolor? and it completely changed
my life.
I guess it's funny, I've never thought of this before,
but this is a really obvious comparison: The Wizard of Oz, where the
world goes from black and white to color [laughs]. And no, I don't have more
time; having said that, the last seven years or so I had a perfectly fine
amount of time. I have no time now, which is good because I'm done with the
book, I can take a break.
HT: In
your non-fiction, (You Are Not A Guest, We All Wish for Deadly Force)
there is a lot of accompanying text, a sort of narrative voice, contrary to
your fiction, Unterzakhn and Victory Parade, which are told
through images and dialogue exclusively. Why is that?
LC: Good
question. You know, it's not a thing I planned, but when I work in short
nonfiction, my voice is in there just by the nature of the piece. It's more
like a graphic essay, and when I'm working in fiction, I'm not interested in an
omniscient narrator. I want things to unfold -- I was going to say in a
cinematic way, but there's certainly plenty of cinema storytelling that has a
narrator in it. And now I'm racking my brain to think are there any films that
influenced me that have an omniscient narrator?
The reason I'm mentioning film is because film and
episodic storytelling is the closest thing to what I do and it's the kind of
storytelling I've learned the most from, that comes into my own work. I think
about film all the time. And when I think about the films and the filmmakers
that are the biggest influences on me, they mostly don't use omniscient
narrators. It's almost entirely dialogue- and image-driven and action-driven,
although there are some exceptions -- Wings of Desire, if you remember
that film, sometimes there's some narration and it’s a little bit oblique
because it's not really a person narrating it. It's this kind of exterior,
higher being observing. It's a poetic kind of narration. It's not like a noir
film, where the narration is somebody reminiscing about their life or
something. That would be an interesting experiment, to make fiction that has
that. What would happen if I did that?
HT: That
would make it very different; I was thinking, for instance of Fun Home
that is completely dialogic, with narrating voice and dialogue.
LC: Well,
that's a work of memoir, which lends itself to that in comics very well. Now
I'm trying to remember I don't have Maus right in front of me… That's a
testimony that's being illustrated, in a lot of places, the places where there
is the narration of the father's voice, but then there are places where they're
interacting, and that's entirely dialogue-driven. I find that very interesting
too.
But in terms of fiction, Jaime Hernandez sometimes
brings in an omniscient narrator. Well, it's not an omniscient narrator. It's a
character talking about their life. But he's Jaime Hernandez -- he's God, you
know. Whatever he does, it's like up there somewhere.
HT: Language
is obviously really important in your work. Can you talk a little bit about
that? Did you grow up in a surrounding that was multilingual for instance?
LC: I
did, I grew up in Manhattan in the 80s, and so my neighborhood was
multilingual. There were a lot of Spanish-speaking and Haitian Creole-speaking
people, and then my family spoke Yiddish and Polish and English. They almost
never spoke Polish. They would argue in Polish if they didn't want my mother or
my aunt to understand them. If they were trying to keep something really
between them, I never really understood Yiddish beyond the very basic -- like
endearments: how are you doing? What are you doing? I love you. Eat something.
Why aren't you eating? You know a lot of stuff about food, curses; but I grew
up around a lot of Yinglish, which is a really specific way of speaking English
with a Yiddish syntax and accent. The generations that are familiar with that
are probably my age and older. And I worry that that feeling, that that
particular slang is going to be lost, you know? It’s a voice.
It also is a voice that people are very familiar with,
at least in the United States, through comedy, and comedic writing like Mel
Brooks, a lot of his work is in Yinglish. But again, this is a generational
thing. And I feel like, if you didn't grow up with family members who talked
like that, you don't know what it is and I've seen people try to write it who
don't come from my particular ethnic background and they don't get it right. You
have to have grown up with it -- like this is just how we had to communicate in
my family with my grandparents who spoke five or six languages. But English was
the last one, and the one that they spoke the least fluently.
I love Yinglish. I love it so much. There’s a great,
old, old episode of the New Yorker fiction podcast, where Nathan
Englander reads the Isaac Bashevis Singer story Disguised. It's so great
and he talks a little bit, in the little interview with him either before or
after he reads the story, he talks about how he had gone to yeshiva as a kid
and how long it took him to stop using that kind of syntax in his own writing. And
I thought listening to that why? Why would you give it up? But I get it. You
know, like you're not going to write an academic paper in it, but… and vy not?
Vy you don’t? [laughs]
HT: Going
back to drawing, how important in your experience is the haptic or the sensual
nature of drawing and painting? In particular, when you're representing
characters, whether in fiction or in nonfiction, how important is the process
of spending time on drawing, redrawing, creating human figures, in your
practice?
 |
| Victory Parade 29 |
LC: It's
the most important thing. It's absolutely the most important thing. I love that
you use the word haptic. I'm going to have to steal that and start using it
myself, because I almost feel like I have to defend the practice as a teacher,
trying to explain to students: Well, I'm not against you making comics
digitally. I think they're beautiful, but I want you to have a particular
physical sensory experience. I'm a figure drawer and figure painter; to me
figure drawing and working with the human body is endlessly compelling and
extremely important. So working with paint and texture and viscosity became
such an important part of constructing Victory Parade especially.
HT: I
was struck by Thi Bui who, in an interview about The Best We Could Do,
said that having to repeatedly draw her mother as a child actually reconciled
her with her mother, with whom she had sort of a distant relationship, and
having to draw her repeatedly was important emotionally for her.
LC: That's
amazing. That is really incredible. I love her book.
 |
| Unterzakhn 10 |
HT: Yes,
it’s an amazing book. All right, completely different topic. The US has changed
a lot since Unterzakhn came out, in 2012. By the way, I’m not sure how
to pronounce it.
LC: Well,
you know, that word is not dialect. I think maybe someone's going to read this
interview and they're going to write me, and they're going to take me to task
for saying that, but I believe that word is academic Yiddish. The person who I
got it from I was a sort of Yiddish consultant on the book who was like a Yivo-trained
Yiddish speaker, and I think she grew up speaking in her family too, but she
also had some formal academic training in the United States, learning academic
Yiddish. My mother was like, what is this word? And I had this nightmare experience
at Miami Book Fair: this lady who looked just like one of my tantes, she had,
like the butterscotch-colored kind of big hair and the coral fingernails, and
she says: “I grew up speaking Yiddish and I've never heard this word Unterzakhn”,
and I was like, oh, it's academic. [laughs] Anyway, I don't put a vowel between
the K and the N, but you could say it in the way you want.
Comics and Politics
 |
| Unterzakhn 11 |
HT: Ok,
thank you. So, the US has changed a lot since Unterzakhn came out, in
2012, and in that book you discussed, and illustrated, the vital need for
access to birth control, and I was wondering if it (or any of your other work)
has been banned anywhere.
LC: Well,
I think because no one's gay in that book, at least visibly, the neo-Nazi
cultural crusaders haven't found it yet. I do remember reading that it was on a
banned list in some prisons -- I guess they don't want incarcerated men having
abortions. Or maybe because there's boobs in it.
I was making a very dark joke last year that not
enough people in Congress have read my abortion book. But yes, things have
changed a lot, but at the same time, it's more like who gets to say, who gets
to be in control. The forces that are in control right now have always been
here. They're not new and we've always been a country that tends more towards
the fascistic.
HT: The
same thing is happening in Europe currently, it's pretty scary. Being French,
we've been under the threat of the Le Pen family for 30-40 years now.
LC: Incredible
to think of it right, this one family that looms over this one country's
politics. And when will that stop?
[…]
HT: I
didn't want to talk too much about current politics, but…
 |
Victory Parade, cover © Leela Corman 2023 |
LC: But
I think it's not irrelevant to my work, and we need to look at fascism as a
force that rises and falls globally. It has characteristics specific to each
country that it shows up in, but maybe if we can look at it as a global force,
we can find solidarity against it globally. I don't know, and I'm just an
artist, you know? But Victory Parade -- I felt when I was at the
beginning of making it that it was my antifascist work. Like this is what I can
do right now. Now it feels like events have completely overtaken me.
[…]
HT: Reading
your work from the beginning, you seem to approach some of the very central and
very tough themes in your books with a certain reluctance. For instance, in an
interview, I think in 2008, you said that you didn't want to talk about WWII
and Poland, that you were wary of the topic. And in 2012, you said that you
didn't see yourself as a feminist; yet these two things are so central to your
work.
LC: Oh,
my God, no, I what the hell is wrong with me? I mean, of course I do. I think
also 2012 was the worst year of my life. And there are probably a lot of things
I said then, the context would have to be there. But I used to have a lot of
the same issues with the word “feminism” that I think a lot of women of my
generation had in the 90s and early 2000s. Second wave feminism had come to
feel restrictive, sometimes; we were tired of getting lectured, in ways that
felt puritanical, about sex and about porn and about eroticism and all these
things. There were some real hard doctrines around that stuff for some second wave
feminists that I encountered personally and in media, but god! there's no way I
could say that about myself.
HT: But
I wondered also if it had to do with something that's obvious in your fiction
and in your nonfiction: the problem with silence, not talking about tough
situations, history, etcetera. There’s an anecdote that you tell in your
nonfiction and your fiction, which is the metaphor of the carp that is
going to be put to death, but we don't talk about it. I thought maybe that was
sort of a clue -- there are certain topics that are so important and so central
and painful that perhaps in your family there was some reluctance to tackle them.
 |
| You Are Not a Guest 66 |
LC: Well,
in 2008 I didn't feel like I could [talk about World War Two]. I had gone
through a period of being very obsessed with certain aspects of World War Two
and then needing a break. I wanted to do work that was not related to it. And
then when I had the idea for Victory Parade, it wasn't initially about
anything that happened in Europe. It was very New York focused. Then I realized
well, if I'm going to tell a story that takes place in the 1940s, of course it
has to engage with World War Two.
The initial idea was about women working in war
industries. That was the first image; I had to engage with it. And then in
2015, I started to see the turn towards fascism and the language about
immigrants coming to the United States being exactly the same language that was
used about us in the 1930s, exactly the same. All you have to do is take out
the words Jewish and put in the word Syrian or Iraqi. And there was this idea
in 2015 that ISIS infiltrators might sneak in among Syrian refugees in the US. It's
a stupid, racist construction, right? In the 1930s, there was this fear that
Nazis would infiltrate among the Jews. Like, really? Come on, that is not going
to happen.
But here I am meeting a bad faith argument with a good
faith concern. The people who are saying those things don't really believe that
either, it's propaganda, but it was very obvious to me in 2015 that we were
going in a really dark direction, and I felt like I was seeing and hearing this
stuff on the horizon, that a lot of people were not. And I'm not trying to give
myself credit for it, just like I have Jewish radar, you know? I was really
horrified by the inhumanity of it.
And then when I started working on Victory Parade
the following year, it was right after Donald Trump was elected. And everybody
was scrambling to understand what was happening. And some of us were sitting
there going, “We fucking told you. This is the obvious direction of
things.” There's even now this constant, irritating discourse in the US, where
people will ask themselves and you'll hear people in the media posing the
question, “is it time to use the fascism word?” My God, it's been time to say
that since at least 2015. And you know, if you want to look at the actual
history of the United States -- and I'm sorry, this is not relevant to my book
exactly -- but the entire history of the United States is a history of racial
fascism.
HT: But
I think it is relevant because in Victory Parade, I picked up certain
clues that you were also talking about America when you were talking about the
concentration camp, for instance.
LC: Absolutely.
HT: One
of the first images when Sam arrives at Buchenwald, you draw the camp and the victims,
and the word America appears, spoken by one of the prisoners, but it appears in
the middle of the panel. It's superimposed on the concentration camp. Also, I
thought that although you’re not talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I sensed
it in there somewhere; and then at the end of the book, you have this quote by
Shōmei Tōmatsu, the Japanese photographer who's famous for having photographed the
aftermath of WWII and the bombs in Japan.
LC: Yeah,
that was his quote, after spending his career photographing hibakusha [atomic
bomb survivors]. It's funny that you mention that “America” quote. I'm really
glad that you had that double read on it. I didn’t intend it, but that’s my
favorite thing in art, and it’s something that I'm trying to figure out a
better pedagogical way to transmit to students, when the truth comes out
unintentionally or without being overdetermined and shaped consciously by the
artist.
So, what's happening in that set of panels where the
prisoners are saying “America, America” is actually what happened when allied
soldiers stepped through the barbed wire at Buchenwald, people started to say, “America,
American” and cheering for them. And other camps too, according to liberators'
testimonies. So that is just historical documentation, but the double reading
is really important, and accurate.
You asked about the carp and about not talking about
things -- I think most people who grow up in families where there has been some
kind of historical trauma, certainly Holocaust survivor families, but
definitely not limited to them, there's a lot of not talking. There's a lot of
silence and in American culture, especially among a certain class of white
people, there's so much not talking about things, and that's outside of
my own culture -- with Super American people, like my husband [laughs]. And on
a broader societal level, we still can't really talk about the indigenous
genocide our country is created on, or the hundreds of years of chattel slavery
and the barely better conditions now racially in this country. First of all,
just the brutality of slavery in this country, what that actually meant, you
can look at a history book and be upset that there was slavery, right? But when
you actually read about what the day-to-day life of enslaved people was, what
it was like to be captured, transported, what life was like on plantations,
what happened to people, to their children, to their bodies -- we don't talk
about that. And when people do try to talk about it, they're viciously censored
and punished for it. While there's this official kind of observance of, you
know, “things are better now,” and every year they trot out the Martin Luther
King quotes without really engaging with what his really serious work was, and what
is still happening now. There's this maddening silence around horror and
suffering in this country. Sometimes I feel like I live in a slaughterhouse
with a little window box full of sweet-smelling flowers in front of it.
[…]
Comics and Trauma
HT: Trauma
and its transmission from one generation to the next are also very central
themes in your fiction and nonfiction, and certain traumatic events create a
network that links your stories together. I was talking about the carp. I was
also struck by the scene in Victory Parade when the dead talk to Sam and
say: “we are teeth,” “we are bones,” “I'm with someone who knows you,” that
resonated with We All Wish For Deadly Force and with “Life Is An Ambush”
-- it creates a link with the story of your first daughter. Can you talk about
how you conceive of the relation between trauma and comics, and the usefulness
or the appropriateness of comics in narrating traumatic experiences.
LC: Well,
I think comics is an art form that lends itself to any kind of storytelling,
and one of my favorite things about it, and the thing that initially drew me to
it as a younger person, was that you can say and do anything in comics. And I
think you could make the argument that that's true of all art forms, right? It's
true of film. It's true of writing. But comics felt uniquely like an art form
that lent itself to the wildest explorations of any human experience, and I had
really great examples of this early on, especially Phoebe Gloeckner, Renee
French, Julie Doucet, artists like that, all of the RAW artists.
And maybe it's because comics is also such a global
art form and cultural product at this point. So many people in the world read
comics in some form -- comics come from all corners of the globe, it's an easy language
for people to learn visually. You just kind of grow up with it. It's
instinctual, so when you start putting heavier content, bigger content into it,
it naturally expands to include it, if that makes sense.
In terms of its use as a container for trauma
storytelling, I think it's really useful for that, in part because there's so
much malleability between text and image. Also, I have to say this connects to
your earlier question about the carp and about not talking about things -- I
hate evasiveness, it makes me so angry; I want to talk about things. This is a
maladaptive trait of mine, to want to talk about everything, and of course I
have my limits on that. There's definitely things I shut down about and don't
want to talk about. That's fine too; but pretending that there's not a carp
with a knife through it in a pool of blood on the counter, metaphorically
speaking, is something I really loathe. It feels like gaslighting to me. But to
be a little bit more gentle and compassionate, in families that have been
through the Holocaust, I can only speak for my own culture here, I won't speak
for other historical traumas, but I want to get to that in a second. In my
family, there were good reasons why people did not want to talk about what had
happened to them. It was too painful and the gulf of trying to reach someone
like me, for my grandparents, across the barriers of language and culture and
experience, to tell me, a privileged kid in New York City in the 80s and 90s, about
living in a hole in the ground in the forest. There's no way they could tell
me. Even trying to say the first thing about it is exhausting, so I understand,
I understand.
And in my grandmother's case, when she told me one
really terrible thing, she started having what I now recognize as the trauma
reaction, and I backed away immediately. I didn't want to make an old woman
have that kind of reaction, and I was afraid she was going to have a heart
attack. She was shaking, she was telling me about witnessing the liquidation of
her entire ghetto, from a hiding place. She was hiding in the attic of the
synagogue or a barn, I can't remember which, and they shot 950 people, basically
under her nose, and many of them were her family. So I never asked her to tell
me again. Consequently, a lot of stories get lost.
In terms of the links between other historical
experiences that you mentioned in this book, if you don't mind me going back to
that, that's really important. I think that there are two major ways that I see
descendants of the Holocaust, second and third generation, how we carry it in
the world, there are some people who respond to it in a way that is insular. This
is about us and only us, and we have to take land, and narrative and make it
only our own. No one else has ever experienced anything like this. Then there's
another group of people who say, this is a genocide connected to other
genocides. All atrocities are connected, and we find solidarity with each other
because our own people have been through something so terrible. I'm putting
this in terms that are so simplistic, I'm sorry. But for obvious political
reasons, I'm thinking about this a lot right now because I'm feeling like the
lessons of the Holocaust are being profaned every day in my name to justify the
murder of thousands of innocent people right now. So, I obviously count myself
in the second group. To me, it's really important to connect with and have
solidarity with everybody else on the planet in this huge mass grave of human
suffering that is this planet.
HT: And
as you said, it's important that the second and third generations talk about
these things because so much of the time, the first generation couldn't. In
France, a lot of people who had experienced arrests, the camps, were told not
to discuss it, also because the French police were so involved. Most of the
arrests were made by the French, not by the Germans. So the French did not want
to hear about it. And now most of the witnesses are dead, or very old. So the
next generations need to pick up those stories and tell them.
LC: Yes,
but everyone suffered also in France under occupation. And Poland gets accused
of collaborating with the Nazis a lot, but no one ever talks about the Western
European countries that collaborated really enthusiastically with them. I will
defend Poland here -- I know there was plenty of anti-Semitism to go around
there, and everywhere else. But Poland didn't even have a government during
World War Two, the government was a German Nazi government. And there are
countries that don't have that excuse. They were really happy to collaborate.
I have to say that the second generation here -- my
own family being a really good example of this -- usually can't talk about it
either, or when they do, it's really different. I mean, for one thing, that's
how I think a lot of hard-right Zionism became institutionalized in American
Jewish organizations. But my mother, for example, her generation, they really
have a lot of shame and their own trauma about it. It's very traumatizing to be
that generation too.
 |
You Are Not a Guest 5
|
So I categorize my work very firmly in third
generation descendant work and there are a lot of other people like me making
work in all kinds of mediums and I've been finding them lately. It's really
nice to connect with them. But also, the people that I am associated with in
Poland are also doing third generation work; and this is work that the previous
generations really couldn't do because they were suffering the Soviet
occupation and its aftermath, they were just trying to survive in the Communist
era. And then as Poland became a capitalist country, that's a whole other part
of the story.
It falls to people my generation and younger to start
dealing with it, and also there's so much shame and so much trauma around
everything that happened during the Second World War and afterwards in Poland. I
don't want to speak out of turn, I'm not an expert, but just from my own
experience there and talking to people, people really suffered horribly.
[…]
Comics and History
HT: Going
back to Victory Parade, you said that you thought of the story of women
working in the war industry and then you moved on to Europe and to the
concentration camp. So how did that switch occur in your mind, and how do you
think the two topics inform one another?
LC: Well,
it's interesting when I think about the mechanics of writing this story -- I don't
remember the moment when I realized I could do both of those things in the same
book. But I've always been obsessed with concentration camp liberation stories.
I went through this period where I read them constantly, and I returned to that
when I started working on Victory Parade. And it just made sense that if
there is a woman who is working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard making warships, that
her husband would be serving overseas. And there are so many accounts of
American Jewish soldiers being part of the battalions that liberated
concentration camps and what they experienced. So there was already a lot of
material there for me to draw on. Lots of stories of people speaking Yiddish to
the prisoners; a completely different level of understanding what had happened.
Because we receive these stories about concentration camps, about World War Two,
kind of packaged. There are a lot of things that we already know, and it means
we don't always question “what are the things we don't know, what's not in the
package, where are the complications?”
This is really important to me as a storyteller in
general -- there are whole other layers to all of these stories, it's a really
vast topic. Imagine coming across one of those camps at the time, you don't
have the package -- you don't know what happened, it's totally incomprehensible,
you can't get your mind around what you're seeing. I was trying to put myself
in the mind of a person who had no idea what they were stumbling on, which is
one reason, and I'm sorry this might feel like a digression. Because now I'm
talking about the book itself, but one reason why I didn't feel the need to
show the gate of the camp, for example, is because I was trying to be a bit
nonspecific about it. It's very clearly Buchenwald, if you know the imagery of
that camp. But if you don't, it could be almost any concentration camp.
I'm frustrated with the tidying of the story of the
Holocaust and I want to stay very complicated and messy. It's not pretty, and
it's not redemptive, and people, at least in the US, keep trying to make it
those things. I don't know if that’s the case in France or anywhere else in
Europe.
HT: Yes,
but I was thinking about what you were saying -- in the early 40s, if you
wanted to know what was happening, you could. There were reports, including in
the US. But I guess a lot of the population did not know; was there a lot of
censorship, were people just too busy living day to day, and perhaps trying to not
know what was happening… France is a good example because we collaborated, but
we also resisted -- resistance is a great story to tell. Collaboration -- not
so good.
LC: You
know, it's funny the first time I went to France, one of the people I was there
with, a French comics person said: “everyone, every older person here is going
to tell you they were in the resistance. It's bullshit.” Which I feel is
probably a really incendiary thing to say, and I don't think it's entirely true
either: there was a lot of collaboration and a lot of resistance everywhere.
HT: And
a lot of in between. For instance, some of the German artists you mention in Victory
Parade (such as Oscar Schlemmer and other Bauhaus people, or what you say
in “Blood Road” about Franz Erlich) had an ambiguous relationship to the Nazi
regime, probably like most people who lived under this regime. Even if you
disagree with it, you're also thinking of your own survival, which I can
understand -- if I put myself in their place, would I have been up in arms
immediately? I thought of that also when I saw your quote on the SAW [Sequential
Artists Workshop] website, where you say you’re interested in breaking down, in
destroying the neat narrative of history.
LC: Schlemmer,
I actually don't remember what his story was. I think most of them probably…
you know, we have the benefit of hindsight -- they didn't entirely know. When
you read about Otto Dix, you read that he went into internal exile, which I
think sounds like what a lot of us are doing in the US -- in some way you could
say that about us. George Grosz, left, and he writes, in his journal A
Little Yes and a Big No, about leaving Germany when he knew he had to
leave. It's a really interesting passage, but my feeling during the Trump years
was, we're all good Germans now.
So I think I understand because we know -- we knew
that there were camps on the US/Mexico border full of asylum seekers, with
separated families, people who were being left without shower or blankets in
ice-cold cells, children separated from their families for indefinite periods
of time and sometimes lost! Knowing what's happening in your own borders, right?
Let's bring it even closer to home. I keep saying we live in a racial fascism
here, that's been ongoing for hundreds of years. We're all just living our
lives in this kind of in-between knowing that these terrible things are being
done and that some of us are living on the safer end of those terrible things. It's
hard to make binary judgments when you know that you're doing the same thing. I
think then it requires… I don't know what it requires, but it's something other
than how we've been thinking about these things.
Then there are people who I think were ideological
Nazis. Unfortunately, I think Christian Schad joined the party and I love his
work. I really can't engage with it anymore or show it to my students because
I'm not going to excuse that in a person.
HT: In
a sort of related question, your main character, Rose, and her occupation, of
course, recalls Rosie the Riveter.
LC: That
was an accident. [laughs]
HT: It
was an accident? That's very funny. So, I thought that was interesting because
it also put me in mind of Unterzakhn and your reclaiming a lot of
American history as not just WASP, and as also belonging to minorities. The USA
you depict in Victory Parade and in Unterzakhn contribute to a
sort of rewriting of the country's past and origins, to include the very people
who have always made up the country and yet are still perceived as on the lower
end of the hierarchy. So you’re not just showing multiculturalism, but
reclaiming American history as multicultural.
LC: I
love that and I'm honored that you see my work that way because I would not
have put it in those terms. But it's absolutely something that I love to hear,
and I do feel strongly about. I think it came naturally because I'm from New
York, I write about New York, and New York is different from the rest of the
country in a lot of ways, it’s a resolutely multicultural place. It's not
exempt from any of the racial hierarchy or class power structures of the country,
if anything, it reproduces them in an amplified way in some cases, but when I
go to other parts of the country, I can feel the cultural difference. And also,
being a Jewish woman, an Ashkenazi woman, it's a really particular way of
behaving and looking at the world, and how we're socialized is not like a lot
of other American women are socialized. I don't want to make overly broad
generalizations, but it’s something I struggle with a lot. So maybe it comes
through in my work, obliquely: living in a Christian hegemony as a minority, I’ve
resented it all my life since I was a small child during the Reagan
administration. He was the Christian right’s president. He was the guy who brought
them into power. So my entire life, I've basically lived under their cultural
control and it is actually quite relevant to my work in that I'm pushing
against it so much -- in Unterzakhn very explicitly and in Victory Parade,
talking about something else, centering someone else.
Comics and Bodies
 |
| Victory Parade 22 |
HT: Another
important topic in in Victory Parade is sexual harassment, which makes
the character of Ruth furious, and she's encouraged in her fury by this sort of
other-worldly being. I wondered if that reflected your own anger. Also, about the
scene where she beats up the guy on the street who's been following and
harassing her and her friend, I thought there was a sort of superhero dimension
to it: we have her origin story, her superpower, and then her very impassive
attitude after she's meted out justice.
LC: Stroking
the man’s teeth on the handkerchief, enjoying her prize? I think that passage
is pure wish-fulfillment for me and a lot of other people. Who among us has not
wanted to do that? I set out wanting to talk about sexual harassment a lot more
than I actually accomplished. It's in there and it's pretty constant, but it's
barely scratching the surface. I'm going to have to keep engaging with it in my
future work. But it was such a constant in my life from the time I was twelve
years old, you know, I couldn't leave my apartment building without
experiencing groping and horrible comments. No one prepared me for that as a
kid, and no one supported me or gave me any kind of help when it was happening,
including my mother.
[…]
HT: In
Victory Parade, more than in your other work I think, you de-idealize
the bodies. They're not sexy, and even Ruth, who is young and strong ends up
dying at a very early age, so her body lets her down as well. Can you talk a
little bit about that and maybe also come back to Oscar Schlemmer, whom you
reference a lot and whose approach to bodies is so at odds with yours.
LC: Yes,
it is. I think the primary Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] artist that gets
referenced in Victory Parade is Otto Dix -- talk about de-idealizing the
body! No one makes a body less sexy than him, right? So Dix and his compatriots,
and maybe also H.R. Giger, there is absolutely nothing sexy about his work,
even when he's drawing a giant penis, it's like the ugliest thing you've ever
seen. I love Giger, anyway, so, with respect.
But Schlemmer, the way that he depicts bodies, they're
not flesh, the way he paints people, they look like pegs and carvings of wood
or they're these incredible theatrical costumes where the body is the axis
around which the costumes revolve. But the costumes aren't made to enhance the
body, they're coming off of the body in these really interesting ways. I love
his theatrical costumes, but if you watch any of the recreated footage of the Triadic
Ballet, it's not a loose flowing dance; the dancers aren't allowed to actually
use their limbs in ways that ballet dancers tend to. They're wearing these
really hard costumes that dictate the movement.
I like that you said de-idealize the body -- maybe
it's a side effect of living in a body that's getting older and hurting a lot
more. [laughs] No, but it didn't start out that way, I started this book six
years ago, so I didn't hurt as badly as I do now, but I find all kinds of
bodies really interesting and I guess I'm trying to get away from constantly
drawing conventionally beautiful people because it's really easy and fun to do
that.
HT: And
it's still dominant in comics; non idealized, realistic bodies in comics are
not that common.
LC: I
guess it depends what comics you read. I'm thinking about the Hernandez
brothers, constantly drawing very realistic bodies, and drawing them as bodies
that have every bit of a sex life and a sensual life as an idealized young
body. Chelo or Luba in Gilbert Hernandez’s stories have round stomachs and
stretch marks from childbirth, women have lovers and they are moms -- they're
fully fleshed out people. No pun intended.
HT: I
was thinking of mainstream comics, not so much independent comics such as yours.
LC: I
don't really read mainstream comics; and the artists that informed me tend to
be painters more than cartoonists. A couple of years ago I met this amazing
painter named Clarity Haynes at a residency and I've been really fascinated
with her paintings ever since. At the time, she was working on these monumental
torso portraits of people, and they were amazing. There would be aged bodies,
or bodies that had had top surgery, or bodies that had had heart surgery,
wearing a beautiful belt and necklace, or beautiful tattoo and scars, just so
lovingly painted and huge -- monumental. And I thought about those paintings a
lot. I'm not saying they're an influence on my work, just that I think there
are other ways to love and appreciate bodies, that are not mainstream comics or
fashion photography.
I had this experience last year: I went to the
Brooklyn Museum and there were two different exhibitions running at the same
time. There was a retrospective of Thierry Mugler, the couturier, it’s
beautiful work, right? But right before I saw that, I went to the exhibition of
the photographer Jimmy De Sana. It really blew my mind, it was really sexy and
really central in these ways that were, like, gritty, very queer. Also he took
a lot of photos of No Wave bands, which is a music and art scene that I'm
really fascinated by and I love a lot of that music. But also these really
beautifully lit, beautifully posed figurative photos that were so strange and
so… They felt like they were really about what sex actually is. It's body
fluids and flesh and smells and sounds and colors.
And then I went upstairs to this very idealized, you
know, everybody's super skinny. And like, it's about sex, but it's not really. It
gestures at the fact that you're supposed to find this sexy, but really
everything is very hard and regimented and skinny and there's no access to the
body in any kind of meaningful way. I wrote a much more articulate response when
I initially saw it, pairing the two.
 |
| Victory Parade 148 |
HT: On
another topic -- Victory Parade is full of ghosts, or the undead. Is it
mainly narrative and/ or aesthetic? Does it have anything to do with your own
beliefs?
LC: It
was really important to me in this book to situate a lot of the action in the
world of the dead and the place where the worlds of the dead and the worlds of
the living intersect. I was thinking a lot about what happens in a place where
a mass death has occurred. It seems to me like the air would be disturbed by
the deceased, that they would be very present.
I've become a much more skeptical person than I've
ever been in my life in the last few years, and so I I'm much less interested
in the supernatural than I used to be. I was more interested in that when I was
working on the book; the dream state and the death state were things that I was
really interested in exploring. And I tend to feel very haunted, especially
back then when I started working on it. It’s things I think about and respond
to a lot.
HT: It's
just a detail, but in the scene where Sam finds the women’s hair in the
concentration camp, you draw him standing in front of the hair and dozens of
pink ghosts behind him, and I thought that the one that's just above him, who
is not as emaciated and who looks much angrier than the others, that it looked
like a much more specific ghost; I thought maybe it was even yourself that you
were putting in that drawing.
LC: I
was just looking at that drawing this morning actually. No, it's not me, but in
a sense everyone in the comic is the cartoonist, or everyone in a novel is the
novelist. A lot of the time, from the very beginning, when I was drawing the
scenes with ghosts, I was thinking about putting faces to names, putting faces
and names on the dead. Somewhere in there I realized this book is in dialogue
with Maus in that way because in Maus, Spiegelman made a very
deliberate choice not to do that. And I think it was a really wise choice for
the time and the audience, making everybody an animal. And thus not
expressionistic in any way, even though his line quality is very
expressionistic, capital E expressionistic. It's like a pill pocket, you know,
when you have to give medicine to a dog or a cat and there's a little treat
that has a hole in it and you stick the medicine in there and you shove it in
their mouths. It's like that: get the story past people's disgust or fear
reaction.
In my case, I felt like I wanted to do something else.
These are individual human beings with faces, and there's another running theme
in Victory Parade that was really important to me, which was to show
lots of different kinds of massed bodies. You'll notice there's a couple of
scenes that are recreations of Busby Berkeley numbers also. I love Busby
Berkeley, I'm totally fascinated by those films, but I was thinking about the
connections between masses of dancers and masses of soldiers. And then there's
these mass graves full of full of bodies. Or prisoners in the concentration
camps, full of the barely alive. All of these kind of massive collections of
people. I was thinking about that a lot, and I was also thinking, yeah, these
women are pissed. They're really mad. Those pink ghosts above him? They're fucking
furious.
HT: Talking
about names, there is also a scene where Sam is visited by ghosts who give him
their names, are these specific or are they random?
LC: They're
random -- although there's names of friends and writers I like; but they're
mixed up, they're randomized, the first and last names.
HT: You
were talking about Busby Berkeley -- can you talk about the final gruesome
ballet in the book?
LC: It's
probably the most transgressive thing I've ever drawn in my life. And I use the
word transgressive really carefully because I came of age as an artist in a
time when that was of great value, to make things that were transgressive and
everyone was trying to do that, and I think very few people actually made
anything that was that.
OK, so I take notes on index cards when I'm working
and it'll be like one idea, one beat, one statement per card, and then the
result of that is that I'll have a stack of index cards going back a few years,
sometimes with projects, and then sometimes I'll forget ideas that I had. This
is why I take them down on cards. So I found a card I had forgotten about where
I wrote “Busby Berkeley death scene.” And this is two years later and I was
like, “thank you past me!” I was very grateful to 2017 Leela because this was
such a good idea and it just made sense to me that this would be the scene you
would find at the end.
HT: So
bringing together these differently “massed bodies” as you were saying. It also
made me think of the film by Roberto Benigni Life is beautiful. When I
first saw this comedy about the concentration camps, I was really uncomfortable,
I didn't know how to react; but I think it was brave. And I thought this was
also not just transgressive, but an act of bravery on your part because you're taking
a big risk, bringing those two worlds together to say something about those
ghosts that you're bringing to life, and about your vision.
[…]
LC: There's
another Busby Berkeley movie that shows up in the beginning and at the end, The
Gang’s All Here, which he made during World War Two. So maybe I'm taking a
risk, but you could make the argument that at the same time that all of these
people were suffering and dying, starving, people in the United States were
going to see The Gang’s All Here, going to the movies and seeing these
massed bodies dancing. So it feels like there's a connection there. I was
thinking a lot about the experience of being here in the United States while
all of this stuff is happening there in Europe, especially if your family came
from there and you still have connections there, this is the thing you read
about all the time. There were Jews in New York who knew that their families
were being slaughtered, and the guilt and the pain that they were carrying, and
the helplessness of knowing that this is happening. I think this is replicated
across time and all over the world in the refugee and asylum-seeking
experiences, once somebody gets out, they're always thinking about who's left
behind.
But I was thinking a lot in this book about how people
process collective trauma, and I think that that also comes back to the massed
bodies. There's a lot of stuff in this book about the collective and the
individual. So much of what's going on with Rose is the processing of how an
individual carries a group trauma, and she's not the only one.
To come back to that final scene, there's humor in it
too, and I think maybe that's where some of the risk lies. I'm interested in
your mentioning Life is Beautiful, I love that movie. I haven't seen it
since it came out, so I wonder how I'd feel about it now, but I remember in the
US people were so angry at that movie. I think actually this is something that
was in the DNA of the book, this image of Roberto Benigni holding his child,
you know, where he starts walking with his kid on his shoulder and then he
comes across a pile of bodies, a giant mountain of corpses, and he starts
walking backwards. He doesn't turn around because he doesn't want his kid to
see it. And he doesn't survive, you know, at the end Nicoletta Braschi's
character, the mother, is reunited with her child, but the father is gone, and
that scene almost broke me, because so many parents were not reunited
with their children.
HT: All
right, I have to let you go back to your real life, so two quick questions
about Victory Parade: how did you become interested in wrestling; and
why did you decide to recycle Meyer Birnbaum, a character from Unterzakhn.
LC: First
question: in 2015, John Darnielle from the band The Mountain Goats asked me to
illustrate his wrestling-themed album, “Beat the Champ” and I was really
flattered that he asked me instead of somebody who's known for drawing wrestlers.
I had never drawn a wrestler at that point -- he could have called Jaime
Hernandez who draws the best women wrestlers, but he called me. I had a really
good time and I realized I love drawing, sweaty, muscular bodies in motion. And
I loved -- talk about drawing de-idealized bodies -- the theme of that album
wasn't just wrestling, it was early 80s local territory wrestling, which is
before wrestling became this shiny, glitzy thing. If you watch video footage
from that era, they don't look like glamorous muscle men, they're grittier.
I think there's also a connection, in the United
States anyway, between immigrant grandmothers and wrestling -- my best friend’s
Irish great-grandmother was obsessed with wrestling, my Yiddish grandmother
loved wrestling. She loved Hulk Hogan, I think because his character was the
anti-Communist Cold War wrestler. There's a lot of funny stories about people
going to wrestling matches with their grandmas and stuff like that.
I also have a background in martial arts and dance, so
I really liked drawing the physicality -- and it made sense that this character
[Ruth] would be a wrestler and that that would be her kind of trauma coping
mechanism and that it would be the thing that kills her.
Now the thing about Meyer Birnbaum is he wrote himself
into Unterzakhn -- I don't feel like I created him. I feel like he
showed up one day, just started talking. So it just made sense that he would
come back and be a wrestling promoter. But I will say it was a little more
conscious in this case, I'm paying tribute to a Gilbert Hernandez character
with him -- he's sort of the Gorgo of my book. He may even show up in the third
book -- this is part of a trilogy, so he might even show up again, and maybe even
somehow Meyer Birnbaum never dies. [laughs]
HT: Well
now I have to ask you about the trilogy…
LC: Ok,
so halfway through working on Victory Parade, I was in a café in Berlin,
sketching, and I was just looking around and I was thinking about being a child
during the late Cold War and all of the terror, you know, being absolutely sure
we're going to die in a nuclear holocaust because the leaders of the US and the
Soviet Union were selfish and stupid -- and then how shocking it was when the
Berlin Wall came down. And I was just trying to question -- what was it like to
grow up on the other side of that wall, and all of this stuff… And then I
thought ohh shit, this has to be a book, doesn't it? So I started thinking
about my own childhood in the 80s in New York and thinking about all the things
that were cool about it, too. And I was like, God dammit, I just had a book
idea, didn't I.
So the third book in the trilogy is set partially in
the 1980s in Manhattan and partially in the forests of Poland during the 1940s,
and the way that I have been conceiving this book lately as I've worked through
the ideas more is that I want it to be kind of a tribute to the Yiddish women that
raised me, the war generation. Who are almost entirely gone now, but I've been
painting and drawing them and thinking about them and… but it's about a lot of
other things. I'm also not ready to work on another book yet. My arm is tired,
it needs a break.
HT: So
there will be a trilogy, but I shouldn’t hold my breath, right?
LC: No,
it'll come. Yeah, my New York trilogy. [laughs]
HT: You
need to make one too! Ok, now just two or three questions about You Are Not
A Guest. I have a silly question, but it's inspired by the title of the
story, “The Fuck You Forest.” I thought that this was both painful reminiscing and
also sort of distancing, perhaps mocking yourself for the recurrent metaphor of
the forest as a place of trauma and refuge. Does this also have something to do
with the fact that Buchenwald means the beech forest?
LC: No,
no. “The Fuck You Forest” was made long before the comic about Poland, where I
said that thing about trauma and refuge. No, I'm not mocking myself at all. That
comic is the only comic I have ever in my adult professional life as a
cartoonist, improvised. I improvised an entire book when I was in college. My
senior illustration project was a comic that I totally made up as I went along,
but I hadn't done that since I was in school and I did that with “The Fuck You
Forest.” I'm not mocking myself at all, I was just in the rage part of grief.
HT: Mocking
was the wrong word, I’m sorry, but I thought distancing perhaps, because
there's a lot of images of trees, forests, mountains, rivers, a lot of nature
in your stories, and I thought perhaps, the forest as refuge turned out to not
work.
LC: I
think I was looking for solace in nature imagery, a place to hide. You know
when someone dies in a hospital, it's the least natural place in the world,
surrounded by the machines, and plastic, and chemicals.
HT: So
it's sort of an echo to the story “Wilderness” perhaps?
LC: Yeah.
And also well, “Wilderness” was so much about feeling like… that was done at an
inflection point in my life. A friend of mine had just committed suicide right
before I did that piece, and this was the friend who had taken us in after my
first daughter died also. So I was feeling a lot of just really feral emotions.
And I think also grief makes you feel like you live outside, it puts you
outside of society for a while, and I think that piece is about that a lot.
HT: OK,
I have a question which is maybe anecdotal, about “Life is an Ambush.” The end
of it felt like two worlds colliding almost. There's a beautiful, painful and
very personal story that I as a reader experienced in solitude but that also
created a sense of intimacy. And then on the last page you have this image of a
snake, and you address your readers about their potential online comments about
their birth beliefs. Have you had a lot of negative reactions to your stories
online? […]
LC: No,
it's because -- I did that story in 2016 and it was impossible to talk about whatever
your own birth experience was without a lot of other people piling on and
giving their opinions about it. And there was so much ideology and positioning
around it; and I used to have a lot of misinformed beliefs too, before I
had kids, about how you should give birth and what's good and what's bad. And I
had my mind completely changed by the experience. But also that was done in a
time when I was still grieving pretty hard and very angry. There was a lot of anger
in that piece.
HT: Alright,
concluding questions, for real this time. How have your books been received in
general? What kind of feedback do you get?
LC: Mostly
really good. I'll see what happens with Victory Parade. I'm feeling a
little strange about Victory Parade right now because it feels like, what
am I doing telling a story about the Holocaust? It made sense a few years ago
and now it feels like… I don't know, those thoughts are kind of unformed and
hard to articulate... And I haven't seen a lot of feedback yet to You Are Not
A Guest, so I'm not sure. It's been a while since I've put out a book. Yeah,
but mostly good.
HT: Do
you think that it's still harder today to be a female than a male cartoonist,
or has the cartooning world evolved enough that there isn't much difference now
in terms of publishing, readership, reception, etc.
LC: Well,
I think that there is probably some data science answers to that that I can't
give, that would really answer very clearly how much money people are being
paid, percentages of male to female, or male and everybody else in publishing.
I would say I think my career is going pretty well. But I think a woman who
works in the mainstream comics industry might have a really different answer,
or a woman in manga. I don't know what they would say. I am a little frustrated
that a lot of the same kind of old white men are still in power in some
publishing houses specifically. It just feels like it's never going to end. It's
been women who've really helped my career along, and I think that white men
still have unfair advantages everywhere, so publishing is probably no
exception.
But having said that, I think the problem and the
solution are related. The table keeps getting bigger; there are more voices in
comics now. So my feeling is: bring more chairs, right? This is happening in
some places like the Small Press Expo here in the United States. I had a twenty-year
gap between times that I attended: I stopped going in 2002, and I went again in
2022 and they were totally different because they had made a very conscientious
effort to make it a much more queer, female and nonwhite friendly space, I
think. And also, there's just more people making comics, there are more
education programs for comics, there's more opportunities to study it, and
consequently the art form is so much better because there are more people
making them and they're more diverse. Also, there's more examples of comics
from other countries in the US now; not enough stuff gets translated, but maybe
more than used to.
Anyway, I think you'd get a really different and maybe
more clear answer from someone working in the more traditionally male-dominated
areas of comics. I mean, women have always been an important part of every
sector of comics, but especially in art comics, we've really always been here.
HT: Do
you still belly dance?
LC: No,
I quit in 2017, quite happily.
HT: Ok,
well thank you so much, you've been amazing and very generous with your time
and your answers, it's been a pleasure talking to you.
LC: Likewise.
It was a pleasure for me too.
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