‘It’s not an homage, but at least it’s an understanding’: Mark McGuire & Alain Chevarier on Clay Footed Giants

The following conversation took place on Sept. 28, 2024, at the Brooklyn Heights Public Library. It was a rainy Saturday, the weekend of the Brooklyn Book Festival, and friends, family, and others gathered close for this thoughtful, lively conversation.

Originally published in French, the black-and-white English language edition of Clay Footed Giants was recently put out by Mad Cave Studios. This gorgeous book with a lush cover tells the story of two fathers, Pat and Mathieu. Together, and not without conflict, the fictional friends, who, like their creators live near each other in Montreal, navigate all the complicated emotions that surface throughout the emotionally frenzied journey that is early parenthood. It’s not just their early lives — like growing up as highly sensitive boys in cultures that overwhelmingly reject that premise — that haunt them both; it’s also, and just as compellingly, the often-traumatic intergenerational stories, and perhaps even more so the silences, that each man carries.

This is a condensed version of a conversation that took place in a spacious, beautiful basement room at the library. I have edited the conversation for purposes of clarity and concision while trying to stay true to the event’s tone, which included moments of lightness and humor interwoven with enriching illumination. What struck me over the course of our conversation, then listening to a recording of it afterwards, was the meaningful nature of the collaboration between Mark and Alain. The two have a special rapport — each drawing easy inspiration and encouragement from the other. That, alongside the expertly crafted illustration and story work, is undoubtedly the reason why this alliance led to such an evocative work of art and literature. I have already found myself recommending this book to fellow parents, comics lovers, and countless others. – Tahneer Oksman

TAHNEER OKSMAN: I'm honored to be helping introduce this book to Brooklyn. Clay Footed Giants is an exceptional work, and you should be proud. To start, maybe one of you could give a description of the book. How would you summarize its main thrust?

ALAIN CHEVARIER: The book is a story about fatherhood, about what happens when you start raising children and realize that all the fathers before you gave you something. Some of it is good. Some of it, not so much. You're stuck with your own childhood, and it’s really put back in your face when you're not ready for it. Especially when you're not ready for it.

Kids have this magical capacity to stick the finger where it hurts. They do so because they instinctively know there's something there. They've got antennas, which we lose a bit as we get older.

It was interesting to tell the story of two dads that are trying to be better dads than the fathers that came before them. And yet, they realize they’re not so different. The question is, how do you break that cycle and start learning to care better? Mixed into that are also the effects of war because both of us have a parent or grandparent who went through one.

That's pretty much how I quickly sum it up when I'm at a bar with someone [laughs].

Mark, maybe you could talk about the process of this idea becoming a graphic novel. Collaboration can be tricky, especially when you're both parents, and you're both at times working on other projects. How did the book come to be?

MARK MCGUIRE: The book started out as an anonymous blog on WordPress when I didn't have the courage to really own the kinds of things I was feeling and writing about. It started with a poem. It's interesting because when I went back and looked at it recently, I realized the whole book is in that poem. That was a week when I was home alone with my two kids in Montreal while my partner was out succeeding in her career and being invited to do all kinds of things.

After the blog, I had the idea to make a film, and I did some research with neuroscientists at McGill who knew about inherited trauma, the field of epigenetics. I thought, well, that could be interesting as a documentary or maybe a hybrid.

Then I met Alain one cold Saturday morning in Montreal. It was a parent-kid play date. On his little iPhone screen, he showed me these paintings he had made that were him trying to come to terms with the impacts of his grandfather's POW experiences during World War II, how that affected him as a man, as a father. I had just received a box of photos and letters from my dad. My whole life I had asked him questions about his experience as a soldier in Vietnam, and I didn't get many answers. When my daughter was born, he came to visit us in Montreal, and I think this was his way of responding to my questions.

So, Alain had these paintings he was working on. I had these letters and 35-millimeter slides, and I was trying to think what would be a good way to present them—a blog, a film? And then Alain said, “do you know this comic book artist, Manu Larcenet? He's written about masculinity and war and trauma.” I started reading his work, and then I read Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. I thought, you know, this would be so much better because Alain and I were tired of looking at screens all day, editing films or answering emails and stuff like that.

He had a simple notebook and pencils. We could do that anywhere. We could sit in a park, we could sit in my living room, we could go to his studio.

AC: Mostly your living room.

MM: A lot in my living room. So, we thought, well, a graphic novel would be good. It would be less expensive. And it's a compelling art form where you can juxtapose different time periods. You don't need to spend a fortune on special effects.

I proposed it to him one night. We were watching the NBA finals at a sports bar in our neighborhood, which is something I never do, but he convinced me to go out. We didn't have any funding. We didn't have a publisher, and we only had like half a day a week to work on it because we were busy. But over the course of six, seven years, we did it. That's how it came together.

For me, one of the most moving aspects of this book was thinking about how when you become a parent, you expect that your whole life is going to change. But you don't really think about how, in a way, you're going to have to relive your own childhood.

Perhaps you don’t actually have to, because there are plenty of parents who don't deal with their own childhoods; they just sort of put them aside. But it's a problem, and it remains a problem. In this book, you showed the process of recognizing and coming to terms with your own emotional responses to the people around you—your children, your partners.

Could you talk about that process in real life, or as reflected through the characters. Of recognizing that, as a parent, at times you can feel afraid of your own emotions, of your own emotional responses?

AC: There's a reason why we chose two pro-feminist guys that are a bit self-righteous, and full of themselves [laughs]. Because it's us.

It was easier to show that even those guys, they're still struggling. They're being unrealistic with their expectations of themselves as fathers. They're still being dragged down by some things they don't want to see, even with their best intentions.

I remember when my first daughter was born, and in the prenatal courses, I was there with my wife and the nurse was saying, “If you get to the point where the baby's been crying for an hour, and you pick her up, and you're just about to shake her, put her down, go for a walk.”

I stayed home for two years with my eldest daughter while my successful wife was traveling the world as a contemporary dancer. And I got to the point where I realized, “Oh, that's what she was talking about.” So, I put her down, and I went for a walk. And I thought, oh my God. It's true. No matter how kind I am, I still have the potential to hurt my kids.

As a parent, I think it's inherent. You're going to hurt your kids no matter what. It's not just the stereotypical dads that don't want to talk about their emotions or how they feel. No, it's everyone. We all have our blind spots.

MM: I had a lot of fear about how I was reacting when my kids were young. I understand it was a fear of losing control, and then a sense of shame afterwards. It wasn't something that a lot of men I knew were talking about, how they were experiencing that, but the women I knew talked about it. That was interesting.

In Montreal, in Quebec, we have paid parental leave for all genders. You could have up to a year at home, paid, with your kids. That's special because obviously it means that women can return to work, their jobs are protected. That forced me to have to be present with my kids. It wasn't easy. There were times when I begged Rotem [McGuire’s partner] never to leave me alone with the kids because I was scared. I just didn't know how I would respond. And then, afterwards, I felt a lot of shame about it, and I didn't want to tell anybody.

When I met Alain, because of our shared background and understanding of each other, we could talk openly about anything. When he started to show some of his drawings and some of the writing we had done to his friends, I ended up meeting people who told me they appreciated it, and they felt similarly. It was mind blowing. It was like, okay, I'm not the only one who experiences this.

That was important because it reduced the pressure. At that time, I felt like my nervous system was revving on bright red. You know, if you're thinking about the dashboard of the old car with the needle? I would do everything possible to avoid being triggered, which really had impacts on my day-to-day life, like invitations to do things out in the world. I would try to avoid things that I knew might set me off. So that's part of the story — talking about it, realizing you're not alone. Cutting down the sense of shame and isolation. Creating friendship.

When I saw the drawings appear in Alain's notebook, of him taking these things that were a source of suffering and pain for generations in my family, it was beautiful. And there was so much humor there. I also talked to my mom about it, and she started to open up and share stories that, for her, were a source of shame. That was liberating. For the first time, to have these conversations about stuff I had always wondered about and didn't understand. It created better relationships for me in the present with most people in my life.

One of the things I loved most in the book was the representation of friendship. I think there’s something beautiful in seeing that friendship is complicated, but it's worth it, it's worth breaking through that solitude. I'm wondering, for both of you, what's your history of friendship in general? And was it fatherhood that allowed you to feel like you could make these connections? Or was it something else?

AC: As a kid, I didn't have many guy friends. I was a pudgy artist, and I didn't like to run. Now, I do sports all the time; I'm a maniac. But as a child, I really hated them — passionately, and because I sucked at them.

When I eventually found friends through sports, I always liked the more down to earth or sensitive or open people. I liked open-minded guys who were like, “Yeah, sure, come on, you're an artist. It doesn't matter. Come and play with us.” It's about the love of the sport. When I discovered that, I thought it was amazing. It's not about just putting the puck in the net and then showing off to everyone and bragging. It's about fun. That changed my view on male friendship, and even on art. It's not about showing off that I can draw. It's about telling a story.

There were two moments that come to mind when I think of the hard times. The first was when I went to visit Mark at the school where he works, and I told him, “I’ve got bad news. We have three fathers in the story. We're going to kill one off, and you're going to be the headliner. Your story's going be upfront.” Because I knew that the storyline would work better with him, with his character, as a central figure. But I saw that, for Mark, that was going to be hard.

He took some time to think about it, and then he agreed. Fast forward a couple of years, I'm starting to make the final drawings, and we're at the gate at our kids' school. And Mark says, “You know what, it's taking a long time to make those beautiful, inked brush pages with lots of details. I think you have to make it faster and simpler.” And I was thinking, you're just putting your finger on all my insecurities about drawing right now. For me, it has to be as beautiful as possible, so people love me and love my drawings. I've been drawing since I was a kid, and it’s my identity; it has to be beautiful.

I had to let go of that and say, “You know what? They just have to be good enough.” It’s like how they talk about the good enough parent. In being good enough, what I didn't realize is that my drawings would tell the story better because they go right to the essentials. I don't have all sorts of things that glitter over the drawings to convince you that I'm good. There's just the important stuff so when you look at them, you're drawn into the story. I'm not trying to coax you into telling me I'm good. I'm okay now. I know I'm good [laughs].

I'm glad you know that. You should know that.

AC: Thank you. It took a while. These were vulnerable moments for both of us because we were going to have to show ourselves naked. That's a hard thing to do, but I think that's why the book works.

MM: What happened at the beginning is that we gave all the best material to this fictional dad. We gave him the stuff that we didn't have the courage to assume was our story. And then when that character disappeared, the other characters became less beige. They became more fine-grained and compelling.

AC: More shitty and vulnerable too.

MM: Not the best people either, yeah. That was interesting, because we could go a bit deeper once we finally made that choice.

There’s something I also want to say about male friendship, which is that I didn't have a lot of male friends growing up. I had a lot of friends who were not male. They were more fun to talk to, they were more open, they were more in touch with their emotions and the kinds of things I was interested in talking about as a very sensitive person. And then, I was a bit of a misfit on the basketball team at Davidson [College], when I would come to practice straight from a class on feminism. I was so on fire with excitement and passion to talk about what we’d learned, and, in the locker room, the coach and my teammates didn't share that same enthusiasm.

It's changed a lot, but at that time, the interactions I experienced with other boys and later men was often one of dominance, of finding out and exploiting people's weaknesses. You didn't want people to know what your vulnerabilities were. It could become very uncomfortable if people found out about those things.

And then the males I was friends with were not the stereotypical kind of dominant, tough men. They were sensitive. They could have been artists, they could have been in theater, they could have been interested in books and ideas and stuff like that.

It's interesting because, now, I have a friend who's an artist. Sometimes I really miss him when I don't see him, and I call him up on the phone. There will be this moment when he asks, “Did you need something?” [Laughs.] Because I often borrow tools from him, or stuff like that. But sometimes I'll call just to see how he's doing. And it makes him uncomfortable, even though he's a sensitive artist guy. It's interesting.

[Turns to TO.] Is it like that for you with your friends?

No [laughs]. We call each other on the way to the subway, or at any free moment. Sometimes we just ask each other, how are you doing?

If there was one thing I would love to see, if you had workshops to go along with this book, it would be to tell people, especially certain kinds of men, to go call their male friends and just ask them how they're doing. It’s such a boost. I can't imagine my life without those unplanned calls.

AC: One of the dark sides of the book is that we're showing a bit of the path towards extreme violence—fathers who are so isolated and stuck within themselves that they end up doing horrible things. And that — the phone calls — that’s a way out. It’s a way out of that spinning circle of going crazy and having financial problems and personal problems and wanting to pick yourself up by your bootstraps, all alone, never with any help.

In some ways, one of the most powerful things about the book is that you're modeling this coming to grips with having all kinds of feelings and being okay with that.

I wanted to ask about the trickiness of writing from life. Obviously, one of the things you did was you made up characters. That already creates distance. But I wonder if you could each talk about how you navigated that territory?

MM: For us, it was important that when the book came out, we wouldn't be sued or disowned by members of our family [laughs]. We wanted to maintain good relationships with everybody.

We had a lot of early drafts that we shared. I used to carry around this little three ring binder, and I would bring it on family visits. I would say, “Here's where we are. Take a look.” My brother has seen early drafts. My father came to Montreal — his character is, I would say, one of the most fraught characters in the book. He came to visit, and he gave us these letters and photos. He said, “I don't give a f— what you do with these, but if you want to work with them, maybe it'll help you.” And then he drove all the way back home to Florida, chain smoking the entire way.

I said, “Okay, I think that counts as his blessing.” Then, when we started along on the project, he came back for another visit. Alain and I went out to lunch with him. Alain can probably tell the story better than me.

AC: We were at a restaurant, and it was the first time I met Mark's dad. And we talked about the story. Mark talked about his memories, and sometimes your dad strongly contradicted you and told you, “that's not how you felt, or that's not how it happened”.

Then we showed him the chapter where Bobby, the teacher, talks about the Vietnam War with Pat. We chose that part because we knew he wouldn't get angry at us with that one. He went through the pages as he was reading, and there's one panel at the top of a page—you see a bunch of people, and their eyes are sort of hollow.

What it says there is that most of those people, their bodies came back from Vietnam, but their souls stayed there. Your father pointed at that drawing, and I could see he was a bit shaken — I’m shaken as I'm saying this. He said, “it was like that. That's true. That's it.”

I felt like that was also his blessing. I think, in the end, the book is not an homage, but at least it's an understanding.

MM: The goal was to humanize him. As I said before, I think I became less sanctimonious as the project went on. I realized that the things that happened in my childhood that I had a lot of strong feelings about, I was reliving them.

With my mother—she saw every version of the story. She saw every drawing that Alain made, and she had opinions on all of them [laughter].

We tried to integrate as much of her feedback as possible. We counted on her because she was the keeper of the family secrets. If there was something we needed to know about what happened in the past, she was a great resource. I would call her up and say, “Okay, Alain and I here in the book, and we're trying to figure out what to do next. What do you think? Do you have any memories?” And she'd say, “No, I really don't remember that. That wasn't important to me.” And then she'd find some reason to hang up the phone and I'd say, “Oh, there's a story there.” [Laughs.]

I'd call her the next day, and she'd say, “Well, I might have something that would interest you.” And then she would open up about this amazing thing, and I'd tell Alain about it. And we would try to figure out how to integrate it.

We call the book autofiction. It’s a mix of some things that happened directly to us and our families, and some things that might have happened in other generations or to people we know. I like to say that everything in the book is true, but not everything happened.

AC: Making fictional characters based on yourself is so liberating because you can do all the what ifs that you want. Those what ifs end up being closer to the truth than actual events. Fiction allowed us to go deeper into the stories without fear of showing ourselves too much or hurting loved ones.

MM: I don't know how we came across this idea, what if. What if you could have conversations you always wanted to have that you just couldn't for one reason or another. Because the person may no longer be around, or you just didn't have the courage.

There’s a scene with my brother in the book where we have kind of a daydream conversation about things I always wanted to ask him. Alain was able to help me have that conversation. It's not to say that's how it would've been, but it's one version of how the story could go.

I'm going ask one final question, before we turn to audience questions. Having now completed the book, do you feel like you can put the past behind? How has the process changed you?

MM: I'm a different person than I was when the project started, when my kids were smaller. I can just feel that I'm not revving as much. I'm not avoiding things. I feel more secure talking about things.

When the book came out, we had some friends we'd known for a long time, and they read the book together. And one of them wrote to my partner and said, “You know, after we read the book, we had a conversation for the very first time about how difficult it is for my husband to talk about his emotions, and how he struggled with being a father.” For me, that was amazing to hear, that the book helped another couple confront their issues.

Alain has a great quote from a Montreal Expo baseball player, Bill Lee, a pitcher that he likes to use, which is relevant. [To Alain] Do you mind if I say it or do you want to say it?

AC: You can. Go ahead.

MM: “It's never too late to have a happy childhood.” It’s this idea that you can go back and revisit things. Storytelling is important. If you make a book about the past, and there's some humor in there, and some beautiful drawings, and it touches people's hearts, well, the past is no longer this scary, overwhelming thing that's in a box in your basement.

My dad gave me an enormous, unexpected gift by unburdening himself. He trusted us to tell that story. I'm grateful for that. Because when it was just a box of stuff in the basement, and he never shared any of it with me, it caused him a lot of suffering, and the rest of us too. Now it's out in the world, and it's not so scary anymore.

AC: You'll see in the book I talk about my relationship to my grandfather, who was a POW and escaped a lot because he wanted to get back home. My dad saw his dad for the first time when he was five. And their relationship was fraught because my granddad was always angry, and my dad was sensitive. And then, when I was a child, my family, we lived at my grandparents' place for three years. And my granddad yelled at me all the time.

As I grew older, I developed a strong relationship with him, where we talked a lot. Eventually, he talked about the war. That started for me a whole process about trying to understand why he was so angry, why my dad was the way he was, and how I wanted to be.

Audience member: You mentioned how you all met. What was sort of the first conversation around this project?

AC: Well, we were in a gym. We were there with our kids, and I saw a six-foot-ten guy grab a basketball and shoot it with perfect form [laughs]. I wanted him in my league team. I said, do you want to play? He said, never again. But then, quickly, in the gym, we started talking about other things.

MM: Alain was kind of a model for me because his kids were a bit older, and he had a partner who would go away for months at a time because she was a dancer. Whereas, for me, it was just a couple days at a time. I figured I could probably learn some tricks from him on how to survive these trips.

He didn't succeed in recruiting me for his basketball team, but he recruited my daughter. He coached her when she was five years old on a basketball team. It gave us a lot of time, in the car and in the locker room, talking about ideas. In the book, you'll see that there are scenes of the girls playing together during practice and stuff.

Another audience member: I love the idea of fathers pursuing kindness and healing and vulnerability. As you guys are navigating that in your own storytelling and art, do you have other art that you look to with similar themes you might pull from?

MM: It was hard to find models for what it is that we wanted to do. We would find things that were kind of the anti-model, or we would see that it was just kind of getting into it, but not going as deep as we wanted to go. We were interested in telling the story over multiple generations.

But my daughter recently lent me a book — it’s part of a series of two books — called Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. It's a coming-of-age story about these two boys who fall in love on the Texas and Mexico border. One of the dads is a Vietnam veteran, like mine. He's shut off at the beginning of the book, but as you follow his arc, he becomes more open to conversations and being a father.

AC: As we mentioned before, French graphic novelist Manu Larcenet was a big inspiration. In his graphic novel, he talks about fatherhood and struggles.

MM: In English, the book series is called Ordinary Victories.

AC: For me, there were also a lot of children's movies. When I think of Miyazaki’s animation movies where the fathers are actually nice, when they actually care, they make mistakes, but they're not like dumbasses or overly sensitive and useless.

Another audience member: Could you talk about the significance of the book’s title?

AC: That's a biblical quote. Clay footed giants are, in that context in the Bible, strong men with lots of power who are weak at the base. They have flaws that are always getting in the way of their equilibrium. We felt like that's who we were portraying. We’re those strong/weak dads.

Another audience member: You took six or seven years to finish the book. Given the autofiction element, and the trauma that your ancestors experienced that you think you inherited in some way, how did you know when it was done?

AC: The book was over when there was no more money in the grant [laughs].

At first, the ending was bleaker. Then our editor told us, you guys have to put something in the end to pick us up a bit. So we made that last part in the book, the epilogue where we show things getting better. It’s not perfect, but it’s better. We wanted to show that they characters are dealing with things. They're still struggling, but they're dealing.

MM: I think the question of when it was over was more pronounced for Alain because he had to do the really hard work of a year in his studio making the final pages when we finally got a grant.

I'd say another thing is that we had a sense that it was time for the story to go out into the world. This is actually a tough story, but when we were near the end of it, there was a period of time in Quebec in which, in thirteen days, there were fifteen suspected femicides. It was really shocking us because here we were telling a story of men who were on the edge of harming themselves or harming their loved ones. And we felt we had a story to tell, and we wanted to put it out there into the world. So it was like, okay, let's do this.

AC: Another aspect of it was the structure of the story itself. There’s a book I love by Robert McKee about scriptwriting. He says you’re supposed to put your character in a position where he makes a choice, and that choice will transform him forever.

There’s a scene where Pat’s having a breakdown. What does he do? He goes down into his basement, and hides in his lair. And then he wants to come out of it. So he grabs a bottle of alcohol, but then he's like, nah, no. Instead, he takes out a paper bag and starts breathing into it. After I drew that, I realized, that is the crisis. That is the moment where, if he grabs the bottle and starts drinking, he's becoming like his dad. He's going that route to feel better. And if he takes the bag, then it's betterment. He's looking for a way to help himself that is non-toxic, that's not going to hurt him, or others.

When I was drew that, I thought, oh my God, I found the moment. From then on, it was easy to see how he was making choices he needed to make in order to get better. And that leads to the end, from his character's perspective.

Thanks to you both, and congratulations on this incredible achievement. It’s been so great to hear more about this book, and I'm sure it will be finding its people.

The post ‘It’s not an homage, but at least it’s an understanding’: Mark McGuire & Alain Chevarier on <i>Clay Footed Giants</i> appeared first on The Comics Journal.