‘I love the idea about this naturalization of magic around us’: an interview with Sole Otero

In 2017, Sole Otero burst onto the comics scene with the release of Poncho Fue, a graphic novel chronicling an intense, psychologically manipulative love affair. This debut showcased vivid coloring, playful page layouts, bittersweet subject matter, and autobio touches that would characterize her many works to come. Wildly prolific, she has since created Intensa (2019), a satirical look at dating and love from an alien’s perspective; Naftalina (2020), a.k.a. Mothballs (Full disclosure, I am Otero’s US editor, and have championed this project since the Spanish edition first caught my attention in 2022.); Walicho (2023), a story of colonialism, feminine power, and witchcraft; and an upcoming project she teases as “like a rom com at the end of the world.”

Hailing from Buenos Aires, Otero lives a nomadic life, bouncing between Argentina and Angoulême, France, among other places — including Berlin, where she recorded her end for this interview. Mothballs is a kaleidoscopic narrative, at its heart, the fraught relationship between a grandmother and her granddaughter, and the trauma that ripples through a family tree. In it, Otero brings to life four generations of a family, balances heaviness and heartbreak with tenderness and joy, dazzles with kinetic page staging. I’m utterly entranced by Otero’s command of the medium, and sincerely hope that this masterful work gains her the English readership her talent and imagination warrants.

Conrad Groth: I heard an interview where you were talking about how you were always a drawer, you always loved to draw. [Is] there was a point that you remember that got you interested in comics specifically as a way to channel your artistic impulses?

Sole Otero: When I was a child, five, six years old, I wanted to be a writer more than an illustrator. If you asked me at that moment what I wanted to be, I would have said writer. But I always liked to draw at the same time, and when I was fifteen I decided to take a workshop on comics. I started reading a lot of manga, and that’s what took me into the universe of drawing comics and making comics.

At the beginning, my brother was writing my scripts. And actually after that I tried many, many times to quit making comics. I wanted to be an illustrator, not a comic artist, but I had a lot of ideas about stories I wanted to tell, I had more ideas than time to make the stories. I started being fascinated with the power of the specifics of comics, with how things can be told in ways that are not possible in literature, in cinema or in poetry. It’s a very specific language that has its own value and its own properties. And for me it was very automatic to think in terms of how to build the page, thinking about what I was wanting to tell.

When you’re creating a comic, do you focus on the script first and then do all the drawing? Or is it more of an organic process?

When I am thinking about the scene I want to draw, how to draw it comes with the text at the same time it all goes together. I also think in terms of cinema, they are very connected in that way to me. But when I work with comics, I also think in terms of how to distribute the information on paper and how to connect the balloons and how to arrange the characters. That is something that doesn’t exist in cinema. So, to answer you properly, I would say that it’s the story that takes me to the drawing. But I also think that the story decides how I should draw things. It comes after in a way that it’s like it’s what the story needs.

In my first book [Poncho Fue], I used the weight of the text a lot to express emotions inside a balloon, or the amount of text, or the text escaping from the balloon. Sometimes there’s something in Mothballs with that, or maybe like two balloons that are overlapped. These kind of things that belong only to the language of comics.

Your first two graphic novels seem entirely hand drawn, but for Mothballs, you made the switch to a more digital clean line style. I’m curious what changed for you in your process to switch your style up completely like that?

I think there were several things that all came together at that moment of my life. One of them was that I was moving a lot that year. It was 2019 when I started making Mothballs. I was in New York visiting my brother, and he suggested that I try his iPad for drawing. I was a little bit like, “No, I don’t know if I really like this,” but I tried and I tried and I and I discovered that the clean line was fitting very well with what I was doing, that it was much faster than what I was doing at that moment. Because I started Mothballs at first with acrylics. And then, because I wanted to change the technique, I started making it with markers, with Copics. But then I tried the iPad and I saw that the colors were much brighter, that the line was cleaner, that I was able to work faster, that I was able to clean the image. And it’s not that it was my first experience with digital drawing, because I had been working with [Adobe] Illustrator for quite a while when I was working as a children’s illustrator. That made me change my style completely. I found that the iPad was very convenient, that I didn’t need to travel with a lot of paper in my luggage, that I could move around to Buenos Aires, to Europe, to the US without carrying a ton of paper.

And at the same time I was influenced by this aesthetic that I saw a lot on Instagram and everywhere… like, I changed the proportion of the bodies that I was drawing. Before that, I was drawing with much bigger heads and smaller bodies. I grew up in the ’90s with these cartoon aesthetics, and I was working as a children’s illustrator. So that was the aesthetic of everything that I was doing. And at some point I got a little bit tired of that, feeling that my drawing was looking childish, I wanted to change the proportions because of that. It was a new way for me to look at the body, the female body. Like to take it out from the… I cannot find the word in English.

I think that the Argentinian comics style right now is very diverse. And they are influenced by very different kinds of comics. So, you can find a lot of things. I am surrounded by friends and artists that are in a line that is not so far away from mine. That can be Maria Luque, for example, who uses a lot of patterns and colors, and also Femimutancia, who also has these very strong women that have the same kind of body. And the colors are also connected. I think that with some other, especially female authors, I am connected with aesthetics and also with the topics. But it’s not something that is general and extended to all Argentinian comics, because there are Argentinian comics artists that are, I don’t know, in the line of Daniel Clowes. There are a lot of people that work for American mainstream comics, a lot that work for the French mainstream market. It’s a diverse environment.

It’s curious to me that your comics are published mainly by a Spanish publisher [Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial]. I wonder if you see yourself as fitting more into the global Spanish scene of comics, or if you feel that Argentine identity when you’re creating these works.

Well, that’s a difficult question. Because it’s true. I cannot talk about something that is not my own country. I feel very connected to the topics that interest me. I just follow the politics and the everyday life of my country, even though I am far away from there.

Even though you’re a bit of a nomad yourself.

Yeah. I am a nomad, but I feel like I am always carrying Argentina with me. But the truth is that the book is a Spanish book in its origin. All my books have been Spanish books in their origins because my publishers were Spanish, and I work with them to make the books. And I live in France and…

You’re in Berlin now.

Right, I’m in Germany. [Laughs.] I feel like I just became some kind of nomad that is everywhere around, but I am always carrying Argentina with me.

There you go. OK, let’s dive into the actual book. Can you talk about what you see as the story?

Well, the main thing that I can say about the story of Mothballs is that it’s based on the real life of my grandmother. It’s the story of a grandmother that just dies, and her granddaughter is going to live in her now abandoned, or now left behind, house. She’s there, and she has her own conflicts with her life. So, she starts digging into all the things that her grandmother left in the house. And by retelling to herself the story of the grandmother, she start discovering things about herself also. Because there is a connection between her grandmother and her related to the fact that there are similarities in their personalities. But Rocio, the main character, the granddaughter, is afraid of being like her grandmother (Vilma). It’s a story of how she starts to understand the life and the personality of her grandmother. I think it’s about the relationship between them and what they have in common and what they don’t have in common.

Is there a parallel for the reason you created this book, in that you wanted to delve deeper into your own family’s history. Was it your own curiosity that drove you to create this story?

As Rocio says at the very beginning of the book, it’s not that she’s discovering the story of the grandmother, because she always knew the story. She’s taking the story of her grandmother that she knows and reframing it in the way she needs. And that’s exactly what I did when I wrote the book. I knew the story of my grandmother. It’s not a biography. It’s an auto-fiction. I put different information, real and not real, to build a story. But what I was really digging into was the personality of my own grandmother, because she was a difficult person that ended up in her life being quite alone, quite lonely. And for the character of Rocio, that is me, it’s a fear of that loneliness. It’s a fear of having the same kind of resentment that her grandmother has. And I was also digging into this mystery that for me was: how can someone go that deep into that resentment? And how can that push people away? When someone is so angry about things, it makes people go away or stay away. I think that was my quest, just to tell the story. There was a thing in the family that I think happens in every family, some things repeat themselves across generations. Sometimes it’s more like a mirror — the opposite, the contrast. Sometimes trauma is reflected from one generation to the next. I was interested in that. I think that’s a point where you can find a story.

In a way, this book is all about the secrets that the family keeps from each other. The idea that there’s this barrier to being honest with each other. Like the grandmother’s brother, who’s gay and refuses to tell his family. The instance of the grandmother having a child and she can’t admit who the actual father is. I’m wondering what you’re trying to say about how hard it is to be honest in a family like this.

I think that that’s part of the trauma. The untold things are there and are damaging and are never solved. That’s why Rocio is opening this Pandora’s Box. She starts unboxing all the things that are inside of the family. And for her it’s a way of healing, of finding a solution, and also a way to fix her own relationship with her parents, who are not really talking about what is happening, not being too clear. Even though they are talking a lot, they are not really talking about what they should talk about. I think one interesting thing about families is that sometimes people talk a lot, but they are not really talking about what they should. They always talk about the same superficial stuff, but not about the main trauma, the main issues.

This dancing around the elephant in the room.

Yeah. The elephant is in the room. Yes. [Laughter.]

Another of the big themes in the book is the idea of being able to choose your own path in life, [perhaps] one of the main reasons why the grandmother character becomes so resentful. She has these plans of being a teacher, of doing something with her life, but is forced to be a homemaker. I’m curious if the idea of Rocio choosing her path at the end, as wanting to be a photographer and choose a more artistic path, is also relevant to your life. Where you’ve chosen this artistic creation path for your career. Is there a parallel there that rings true?

Yeah, actually that is a direct connection, because I think the only person in my family that ever told me not to draw, to not waste my time drawing, was my grandmother. [Laughs.] So yes, that was one of the things that triggered my will to do this book, because I was not supported by her with that at all. At the same time, if I am honest, I think she was scared because I had the opportunities that she didn’t have to become something more… sure. As a way of living, like being a doctor or a lawyer, whatever. And I decided to be an artist. So she was thinking that I was not taking the opportunity that she couldn’t take. But that’s in my own life. I tried to represent that in the book, because I didn’t want to carry the weight of her own failure, of all her frustration with this topic; I wanted to make my own choices. I’m in a different generation. I have other opportunities to work on other stuff. I think at the end I just did that.

This book does deal with four different generations, so there is a big theme of there being a gap between the values and ways of thinking between the generations.

Yeah. And it’s based on real people that I have in my mind. It’s not only the family of my grandmother. I mixed the family of my grandmother with the family of my grandfather, the family of my dad with the family of my mom. Half of the family come from Italy, the other half from Spain. I mix all these stories. And I also mix some stories from the neighbors of my grandmother and my grandfather, stories I’ve heard many times. And I think that because I based all the characters in the book on real people, I was able to see this gap between the generations in a more realistic way. I also had the chance to go to Italy to visit the town where my grandfather’s family was from, which is the one in the book where they had to run away from before the second World War. So I went there, I met the rest of my family that stayed there. It’s not something that is very important in the book, but in a way it helped me see.

Right, right. You could track that whole family path.

Yeah. And also it was quite crazy. This has nothing to do with the book, but it was quite crazy. While I was drawing this book, I was in Italy, and then confinement happened and I was confined in Italy. And I was drawing this, and I was drawing the house of my grandfather there. I was confined, and the character is confined inside the house too. So, I was feeling super connected with this travel in between continents and this sensation of being locked in a house. [Laughs.]

Wow, it does seem like you really felt a lot of the things happening in the book.

Yeah. And I also chose for the book this period of Argentina that is the 2001 crisis where the country exploded. There were a lot of protests and stuff. I decided to choose that moment because that was a moment where a lot of Argentinians emigrated from the country because the situation was very complicated. And I also emigrated from the country. My situation was not complicated, but I decided to leave because I wanted to work as a comic artist, which is something that is quite difficult in Argentina. A lot of my friends and a lot of people I know left the country because of the same economic reasons. So I was feeling a connection between these two moments that I lived. And I also chose 2001 as a moment because the grandmother character is a character that is not very interested in politics, kind of hates politics, because she blames everything that happens to her and her family on politics. And for me, the crisis of 2001 was a moment where all the people that were saying out loud that they were not interested at all in politics, suddenly they had to take care of politics because the crisis got into every house. It was impossible to run away from it and not pay attention to it. And for me, that was the perfect moment to make Rocio aware of her own need to connect with what was happening outside. Which the grandmother was not capable of doing. And that was what was making her so far away from other people. She was always focusing very narcissistically on herself.

That brings me to something I was thinking about a lot in this book. So, Rocio, the granddaughter, and Vilma, the grandmother, are the main characters. But I feel in a way that the third main character is the house itself, because it’s the place that connects them. It’s the place where the grandmother has basically spent her life feeling trapped there. And Rocio feels trapped there too. I’m curious how you went about making this house so realistic and so detailed. Did you actually go to that house and were able to see how it was? Or is it more of an invention?

Actually, it’s the house of my mother. It’s from the other side of the family. But it’s a house where I spent a lot of time when I was a child. It’s still in the family. It’s a house that I was very connected to. I was always very curious about this house, because my mother was always telling me how the architecture of the house changed a lot. It’s a typical house of Italian immigrants in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, where they basically bought a plot of land. They built several houses, one behind the other, and in time they were reselling these houses or dividing them or building something on top of the other. They were changing shapes very often in the last century. I was always very interested about how my mother was telling me like, “Here is the kitchen, but before this was the living room.” And before that it was the room where I was sleeping with my sister. I was crazy about all these changes. Like how the walls changed and were in another position. And I also remember the house of my great-grandmother in the backyard, and then how it was torn down. Yeah, it’s a character in itself because it was alive, because of all the changes that happened there.

I didn’t really visit the house since I started making the book, and I didn’t have any photograph of it. I just drew from memory, because I was in Italy and I was confined. I didn’t have any way to revisit it for real. But I really remember it, because I spent a lot of time there. Of course, I made some inventions that my family was ready to point out after. It was very funny when I published the book finally, and I showed it to my aunt, my uncle, my mother that lived in that house, they were all like, “Ah, no, actually this was not exactly here.”

I find the way you depict the house so interesting, because you draw all these beautiful patterns and wallpaper. And the shape and size of it changes depending on what kind of moods you want to impart. Like, I love the scenes where you draw Rocio as this gigantic character in a tiny house to show that she has almost outgrown it or feels like she’s a bit over the whole experience.

I think that it also has a lot to do with the experience of… I don’t know if it happened to me specifically with the house of my grandparents, but when I visited my primary school years after, I found that it was super tiny compared with the memory that I had of it. When you grow up, things get tinier in comparison.

I do find it interesting that the grandmother never seems to have that moment. It’s only the next generation, Rocio, who sees that there’s perhaps more to life than this house.

Yeah. I think that the grandmother has another connection with the house that it’s her castle. She’s inside those walls and she cannot go out. I think it’s kind of subtle how she becomes a bit agoraphobic. She doesn’t want to go out. She only goes out once, because she’s very angry, she’s pissed about something. But the rest of the book, she’s hiding there since the moment that she gets married.

And I use the patterns on the walls as another way of expressing feelings. I think that’s something that comes from my education as a textile designer. I got a degree in textile design from university. I didn’t study comics, I studied that. So I love to use patterns and to make it part of the comic. They can also express some things in the comic.

One thing I wanted to touch on is that it’s a very realistic book in a lot of ways. It’s focused on these real human stories and moments. But then you add some strange, even supernatural elements to it, like the ghostly world that Rocio enters at the end of the book. Or like how the [rake] character is depicted as a lizard person. I’m curious why you added some of these elements that feel very apart from the more realistic parts of the story.

I think because from the very beginning, when I thought about writing this book, I wanted to make something that was literally magical realism. It’s the cliche of a South American author, but I love it. I love the idea about this naturalization of magic around us. I think that happens more with the fact of this presence that is inside the house, what is happening to the pictures that Rocio is taking inside the house. And the fact that the smell of the grandmother is kind of her ghost, which is something that is very real, because sometimes smells take us to another time and make present the person that is not there.

But with the lizard thing, I think it’s not so much about magical realism, it’s more about a metaphor, to try to tell a situation in a way that reflects the way the character feels about the situation. Like I think that this guy is very handsome and he looks very nice and interesting, but then he’s just like a lizard. I wanted to show it as a transformation, because when we tell these stories about people that are abusers or people that harass other people, I think it’s important to show that they look like normal people at the beginning, you know?

But once you see the real side of them…

…then you discover that they are not so nice.

Right. Now, your book deals with a lot of very heavy moments. It deals with hard emotions and really tough feelings that people go through. But I didn’t feel that it’s a bleak story. You don’t read it and feel the heaviness. I’m almost wondering if the colorful and cartoony style of the drawing, in a way, softens some of the harsh realities in the book. Makes it so you can tell a really tough story in a way that people won’t be turned off by. Does that makes sense?

It’s a part of what I actually like as a reader. I also like that from movies. I really love things that are a little bittersweet, when they have some happy moments but are also sad, like when you see a story that’s like, it’s life, you know? It has some horrible things that you want to forget, but you have to face. But there are also some sweet memories in between them. Some things that are part of life, that are important. That’s what I like in books when I read them. And that’s what I wanted to show in this book.

Right. You have to balance out the hard moments with the more funny parts and the joy to create that full, three-dimensional picture of life.

I think it’s a way of not being depressed about life. I think it’s important to tell stories and learn from them — or try to learn from them. But life is always going to be life. There are always going to be sad things happening, that’s kind of unavoidable. I want to think of it as a colorful experience. [Laughs.]

Do you feel like at the end of the book that you’ve ended it on a hopeful note for Rocio’s life moving forward? What do you want readers to take away as they finish the story?

Yeah, I really wanted to give it a hopeful end. And also, I wanted her to get out of herself. I wanted her to be outside with her friends. Like there is the thing in the book that she’s not capable of seeing a lot of people faces, like they’re invisible during the book. All the characters that are in the background. And at the end, the faces of the characters appear again and she’s ready to see them again. I think that’s part of what she was lacking and what her grandmother was lacking — the ability to think about others. It’s part of depression sometimes that you cannot really think about how other people are feeling because you are too centered on your needs or what you’re lacking that you cannot really give what others need. And I am not saying that that’s the solution to depression, because of course it would be too easy, but it’s what changes when you get out of depression.

One thing I was curious how you came up with. There aren’t exactly chapters in this book, but you organize it through these transition scenes of someone either leaving or arriving at the house. I’m curious how you came up with that as the device of how the story is organized, because it’s very clever to me.

It’s funny how I got there, because it was because of a friend. I gave him the script to read, and he told me the story’s good, I really like it, but it looks like a soap opera where everybody’s stepping out of the room and closing the door. Like a lot of characters were coming and going. And he told me, “You need to take out all these scenes where people are going in and out of the house.” And I thought like, no, I don’t want to do that. I want to make it even more obvious. So that’s how the idea came to me. I just decided, OK, I can use the door as a part of the book, but not in this dramatic way, more like in a way of showing something. And I think this decision solidified the idea that the house is another character in the book, because it’s all about who is coming and going inside of this house. But yeah, it was all part of the process of making the script.

I really like to do that, because sometimes when people tell you, “No, don’t do this,” you can always think, what if instead of not doing this, I do it even more extreme.

One thing I just wanted to touch on — that I don’t believe you’ve done in your previous books — is that you occasionally include a two-page spread of an entire scene. Was that something that was just fun to do digitally, because you could plan it better that way? The framing imparted so much movement and liveliness to those scenes.

Actually, why I started using them for this book was that I was working digitally and I was able to work on them very easily. When you are thinking about a comic, it’s like when you are composing a song, a lot of things have to do a lot with the rhythm that you’re telling them. So maybe some pages have a lot of text and a lot of information, or maybe some panels are very similar because it’s just the same characters talking in the same room and it’s a repetitive action. Then when you add these splash pages, it’s like giving air to the character and to the space. There’s a pause. It goes more slowly in those pages. I feel like it changes the rhythm of the story. And in my other books, I use it only with single pages, but here I decided that some moments were more long and slow and they needed another rhythm. It was a new resource to explore.

Is it fun for you to create that rhythm, to create a page that you feel is really satisfying?

Yes. I usually do what French called decoupage. It’s like deciding which part of the text it’s going into. Every page is like an intermediate in between the script and the storyboard.

Like a puzzle you have to work out in your mind.

And then when I have that, I start drawing directly. I usually don’t do a storyboard. Sometimes when I am just starting to draw, there’s a boring set of like six panels in my mind. I am like, this is just a regular page. It doesn’t have anything funny on it. So I think, how can I tell this? How can I make this page in a way that is a little bit more challenging, a little bit funnier? How can I use the narration of the comic in a way that can add something to what is happening on the page? And that’s usually how I come up with pages that are not like the usual six-panel grid.

So, that’s why you’ve done pages where you have the little inset boxes over the drawing and crazy layouts. You just wanna shake things up and break up the pattern.

Sometimes I just decide, OK, on this page, I want to use the house as a dollhouse, which is something that I did a lot in Mothballs. That’s why it seems like the house is another character, because I think that I never had a dollhouse when I was a child. I always wanted one, so this was my opportunity to build my own dollhouse. Well, I complain, but I played a lot with Legos and built a lot of houses. [Laughter.] But yeah, it was like creating a new game, a new way of playing with the page every chance that I had. Some days I was not very inspired. And also some pages didn’t allow me to play that much.

Well, the only thing that I haven’t said was that the book is very connected with smell. Because in Argentina, the word mothballs — or naftalina, as we call it — is related to this sense of the past. It’s a very common word that is used a lot in tango. It’s part of the argot of Argentina. Something that is old, that is very, very nostalgic. It’s like a synonym of nostalgia in a way. And I like the idea of that. That’s why Rocio is fighting all these fleas that are in the house, because by fumigating the fleas, she’s able to take away the smell of the grandmother from the house. And that’s the way she’s liberating her spirit from the house.