Note: This is an excerpt from the upcoming The Comics Journal #310. We will be running more excerpts from that issue in the coming weeks.
In the early 2010s, both Aidan Koch (b. 1988) and Lale Westvind (b. 1987) emerged as singular and sophisticated cartoonists, coming to define certain modes of comics-making during their relatively new careers. Although, superficially, their visual movements are at odds, both make art that resonates deeply with readers across the globe. Westvind, in works like her recent Grip collection, draws a world where images seem ready to physically confront the reader. Her pages burst but maintain structural integrity long enough to transmit messages about the active body and the potential of human labor. In works like Impressions and Heavenly Seas, Koch might seem, stylistically, a foil, as she withdraws detail and action in her minimal theater constructs. Her narratives involve multiple perspectives — at first, obscurely, hinted and then illuminated with detail — hindering and building upon each other.
The contrast in their aesthetic styles speaks to, I believe, the impossibility of summarizing what progressive comics might be today. Although they use the art form’s tools from the past, Koch and Westvind discard any attendant cumbersome conservatism. Unlike cartoonists who look to earlier generations for answers as to how to use the comics medium for self-expression, they provide the answers themselves. This conversation was arranged not to present different ends of the art comics spectrum but to see what two deeply creative artists with a shared purpose had to say in conversation. It was conducted in January 2023, and copyedited by Aidan Koch and Lale Westvind.
— Austin English
DEVELOPING A FOLLOWING
AUSTIN ENGLISH: Both of you have built a large following for your work while not working all that much with traditional publishers. I’d like to start off by asking you both how you’ve built your connection with people who read your comics.
AIDAN KOCH: I definitely credit a lot of momentum and audience from having an internet platform. I’ve been showing my art there since I was 18, 19. And there are people who will come up [to me at events] and be like, “Oh, my God, I have this zine from you from like 2007.” It’s really impressive to have had people stick around for that long. The products I’ve made, they’ve moved through so many different publishers and platforms, but I’ve represented myself consistently. I think that’s been how people have followed me this far.
I noticed with the Koyama book: that definitely did open up new channels of people finding my work, and I’m seeing how that is existing in a different way. For me, [that book is] all really old work. But it’s been cool to see it brought back to life. I think it’s shown up in a lot more unique and diverse places because of the distribution.
Lale, a lot of the work that built your following was self-published, and you continue to self-publish.
LALE WESTVIND: Feedback is fine, of course, but I don’t want to overthink anything at all. And if I can just make something and then print it immediately, that’s great. And then it’s over. If you can afford to print a very small edition of something, that’s the best way. I’m getting tired of the mailing, but I don’t know. A lot of publishers, they want a big book. It’s going to retail for $30 on the low end to $50 or something. I like that I can make something that could potentially sell for $5 to $10 so that someone could purchase it without being totally sold on it. They might try it on; [there’s] an accessibility to it.
Do you think if you had, at the beginning, waited for Hot Dog Beach to be collected by someone — rather than just put it out — do you think there would’ve been a different way your work would’ve gotten out to people?
WESTVIND: Yeah. I think my concern is more about the effect it would have on me and my creating, right? I think that would stress me out and it wouldn’t be fun anymore. And I wouldn’t want to. I couldn’t do it. If I thought about it, it just puts like a little crown on it and it’s too much. I don’t want that [laughs]. There’s weird pressures at work there that I’d rather avoid if possible. It stresses me out. [Laughs.]
The first work I saw by you was around 2011, with your Titus book and Hyperspeed to Nowhere. And the first work I saw by Aidan was in 2008 with Warmer. Could you both talk about where you were at, thinking about your involvement in making comics, at that point. For you, Lale, how you went about the process of making Titus from sitting down to drawing it and then printing it.
WESTVIND: I made Titus in college at art school for an independent project. You could just say, “I’m going to do this for the semester.” We had to print it for the class. I don’t know that I would’ve printed out comics if it weren’t for that class, actually. I went to my first comics show and people bought my work and were like, “Oh, wow.”
Until that moment, I really didn’t understand why you would print out your comics [laughs]. I had no desire to.
Had you seen examples of people printing their own comics before that?
WESTVIND: I didn’t know anything about any kind of contemporary indie comics scene until after college. Well, [cartoonist] Jesse McManus: I went to school with him and he seemed tapped into all of this stuff that I had never heard of before. Alternative comics, alternative music scenes, stuff that I had no idea about. And he’d be like, “Oh, you don’t know this guy?”
It was this whole world that I had no idea existed: 2009 to 2015 was this whole time of me discovering alternative comics for the first time, through shows and stuff. But the fact that people wanted to buy it was encouraging.
Aidan, you’d printed a few comics prior to Warmer, correct?
KOCH: I’d done a few, a zine or two in high school. It was fun, give it to your friends. And then, when I moved to Portland for school, there was the IPRC [Independent Printing Resource Center]. There was the shop that was below it, Reading Frenzy. Nearby there was Floating World Comics and this place, Grass Hut. And I was studying illustration and very into what I was seeing at all those places. And thought, “Oh wow, this is also a way to introduce myself and to get to know people in this scene.”
So, I saw reproducing works as a way to get into that scene in this new city and being young and curious about it all. And then, like Lale was saying, “Oh, whoa, someone actually paid me $5 for this.” And I was using all the school’s materials. I was stealing all the copies, that’s a $5 profit balance, that’s inspiration as an 18-year-old, 19-year-old. “If I sell 10 zines at a little fair, that actually means something.” It means something more in 2008 than it does now. But still, that helped me see that it was a road that wasn’t just time and attention and money but had other types of rewards socially. It funded itself.
MULTI-IMAGE NARRATIVE
Was there, apart from those rewards, an interest in storytelling, an interest in images and sequence in some kind of way? Because out of the gate, both of you are doing things that aren’t simply a sketchbook collection as an excuse to make a zine. The early work from both of you is very story-based.
KOCH: With illustration, when I started, I was younger amid a bunch of transfer students, mostly in my department. And I feel like a lot of those people were comics-influenced. And so, they were already making books and zines and had projects they were involved in, casts of characters. And they had started a collective. I ended up joining that and they would represent the collective at Portland comics fairs. And that pushed the straightforward single-image storytelling into comics, just seeing other people do it. And then starting to go to Floating World all the time, and buying books and reading them, or the ones in my school library. Single image was really challenging for me — and still is, when I do illustration versus letting something play out. Even if it’s not a super concrete story, you at least get this room to develop ideas and to have moods shift around. So, it’s all narrative, but I think the multi-image narrative just gave me so much more freedom and was so much more exciting to work on.
If there’s another image somewhere on the page or there’s another image coming up, it puts less pressure on a single image, and then you can express a different side of yourself in the next image?
KOCH: I think in terms of this idea of subtlety, the next image can contradict the first right, or it can add to it or it can balance it in some way. It just creates a more dynamic space.
WESTVIND: There’s something so alluring about the potential for relationships when you start putting images together. It is very enticing. It encourages you not to write things and really just to put things down and see what happens. You end up with ideas that you wouldn’t get otherwise. Instead of a very conscious action of narrative-making it’s probably more like interpreting tarot cards. You’re like, woooo [laughs], crystal-balling it a little. “There’s a message in here.”
For both of you, in your earlier work, you’re almost asking the reader to get whipped through this narrative so that they can experience the imagery. That’s a feeling I had looking back at your work. But I’m wondering how much that would seem true to both of you.
WESTVIND: That’s definitely true from when I started. I hope that’s still the case now, trying to create sensory images in terms of whipping the reader through it. The images work in service to that experience.
Maybe this is crumbling down, but I still feel that the dominant view of comics-making is: “I need to make this drawing and it needs to communicate exactly what’s happening in this drawing. And then it needs to relate to the communication in the next panel. And it needs to be digested very quickly. And maybe there’ll be some novelistic kind of ambiguity here, but what you get from the images themselves, I want these symbols to communicate.” And I’m wondering if you felt yourself countering this or you didn’t even think about that. You were familiar with comics before, so I’m wondering how organically that came out of the way you were working.
WESTVIND: I just didn’t know how other people worked, really. I was blissfully unaware for the most part. And that’s why I like those early comics so much. I was drawing something that I was feeling and I wanted the reader to feel, you know? I’m trying to communicate real stuff. It’s not just random detail work. It looks like it could be, though. I don’t know. Everything felt very extreme all the time for me at that point. I felt like I was overly stimulated much of the time.
“WATCHING IT HAPPEN AS I DO IT”
KOCH: I was wondering if you scripted things, or at least had a layout in mind of seeing certain things happening before you were drawing them.
WESTVIND: [Laughs.] It’s pretty loose stuff. [Laughs], I made thumbnails. Sometimes they’re thumbnails. [Laughs.] In preparation for this, I read a lot of Aidan’s work and I also read as many interviews as I could find, and I watched some videos as well. I know you could pit this talk as “maximalism and minimalism.” Although I don’t really think of your work as minimalism: Aidan works with eliminating information and letting the space decorate the action. And I’m on the opposite end, almost [laughs]. They’re both interesting. But there is something opposed in both of our work, opposing forces.
KOCH: I like the excitement of what’s coming next and that kind of momentum while drawing and building things out as you’re going. I never do thumbnails, but I do really loose outlines: “This happens at some point. This happens later, that happens at the end,” and just trying to get there. But the fun part is watching it happen as I do it. There’s so much mystery.
WESTVIND: You have this page before you. And maybe you think and sit there for a little while, looking at the blank page [laughs]. And then you slowly make one line and you’re like, “OK, is that it?” [Laughs.] And the answer is no. It’s a very cautious process, almost like stalking?
KOCH: Lots of sitting, staring.
WESTVIND: You’re stalking this barren landscape and you just want to see a bit of the bird or something. And then you think, “That’s enough. I’m going to the next page. I don’t want to put too much down.” Or “Oh, I put too much. I gotta take it out.” After reading a lot of Aidan’s work (this is not a critique — but you could read it as a critique), I almost felt like I had been inside a barrel covered in blankets around my head. I’m looking through a little crack in the barrel, so I’m seeing, for instance, a part of somebody’s hand. I don’t hear anything. And then I hear like a few words and I’m trying to piece this thing together. I think the other extreme of that is one of my pages where it’s just, “Oh, I can’t — there’s too much stuff everywhere.” It’s probably exhausting [laughs].
KOCH: It was so nice to read Grip as a book, compared to other work of yours that I’ve only read online. Looking at the full images at once and everything going on, your compositions, how they connect and how the sequences move. Just the energy, having it page by page. There’s more of a containment to that, which like was really beautiful to move through rather than scrolling your work on a PDF. There wasn’t that break in turning a page.
When you were working on things like The Blonde Woman, Aidan, did you have any expectations for how the readers would interact with it, or if you were just working through things and seeing what would happen.
KOCH: I think I was working through things just for me. I was more connected to and had a more specific idea of what the story was than what my readers maybe took away. Things felt very present and emotional, especially the earlier stuff where it’s kind of emo. That’s just how I felt all the time. And I think the work was reflective of processing those experiences and that time of my life. It’s hard to remove yourself from what you already know. So, I didn’t know what the audience’s experience was. Luckily, there were reviews and I would get a little taste of experiences.
It’s been cool, over time, to get impressions from people and learn from those. Now the more recent work of mine is more straightforward in some ways. I used to say the earlier comics were like poetry. And now I kind of see it more as film or play. And there is a big difference in what I’m expecting from the interpretations between those things.
DIALOGUES
In Reflections, there’s this feeling of a solitary person closing themselves herself off. In After Nothing Comes, that came up in story after story. In the work since then, there’s more interaction, there’s this central use of dialogues. But a lot of times there’s repeating phrases of people waiting for someone — maybe missing a meeting or simple communication between two people but completely different motives of communication. Some kind of miscommunication. With Lale’s work, I see this consistency, which really comes through in Grip the most explicitly, this belief in humans’ capabilities or this appreciation for what people are capable of doing. And these themes remain consistent for both of you throughout this 10–15 year period of your work. If someone was to phrase your work as being about either of these things, what might that miss? Or what are your intentions along those lines?
WESTVIND: I think that’s true for me, how you said it. That’s pretty good. [Laughs.] It’s like something from superhero comics actually, but it’s being done in a way that is — maybe not necessarily more realistic, but maybe more real, more to do with the truth of it. I think, more to do with human potential — I don’t know. That’s the kind of story I like. I like stories that make me think the world is more fantastic and more mysterious than I have been thinking it is. That’s the feeling that I want. I don’t want to be convinced that life is boring and the world is boring. Anything that alludes to the possibility of something miraculous happening, I like that. That’s what I go for.
In your work, there’s phrases like, “I Ate of Cosmic Pain Without Understanding.” There’s this concept of the Moral Murderer. There’s a lot of anger and violence, but the violence is often viewed negatively. And I think superficially people might flip through one of your books and think it’s all fighting and fun action. But I see an anger toward violence in your stories. Movement is a big theme but it’s not just movement for movement’s sake. There’s some kind of belief in people moving around and being active. “Lose your faith in being, lose your faith in life.” You’re talking about your stories as being concerned primarily with exciting worlds, but there’s also this un-escapable moral statement in a lot of the stories.
WESTVIND: Well, that’s what it is. That’s what I’m concerned with. I feel to be an artist is to be always losing my faith and having to convince myself of it again. And when I say faith, that could be with a capital F, but mine has no religious connotations. It’s about wanting to still be here. You know?
KOCH: Does that relate to the inspiration to make things?
WESTVIND: That too. The inspiration to make things, the inspiration to wake up every day to breathe.
KOCH: How does it feel? When you’re in between drawing stories, are you always working on something?
WESTVIND: I try to be, but I do get quite exhausted. I have been feeling quite tired lately [laughs]. But I’m always trying to get the motor running again. You gotta. Sometimes it’s like a cold start in the morning and it takes a long time to get it running.
Comics can be self-directed. So, for that kind of desire to make things, it’s like you were talking about not waiting — not even for a publisher. This thing that you’ve set yourself in motion, it really syncs up with the ideals you’re expressing.
WESTVIND: That’s so exciting to me. [Laughs.] I wish everybody could and would make a book, make something, you know? I think just the circumstances of collecting things and putting it together to make it available in a physical form is such a rewarding process — you could do it thoughtlessly, but you could also do it with a lot of positive intention. And it could be really cool.
I see that in Grip. Just any kind of creativity, people making something or people preparing a meal or people serving a meal.
WESTVIND: Energy to create something is, for me, a holy thing. It’s something sacred [laughs], dare I say.
The post Lale Westvind and Aidan Koch in Conversation: ‘Creative Energy Is a Holy Thing’ – The Comics Journal #310 Preview appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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