Jon Macy is a rare and important figure in the gay-male comics scene. In the 1990s he produced several very underground-y comics that to this day have their devotees. His three books published since then were released several years apart, owing to his meticulous creative process. His latest, Djuna Barnes: An Extraordinary Life (Street Noise), is a sumptuous graphic biography of a legendary literary and LGBTQ+ figure.
Macy charts Barnes’ path from a childhood ensconced in a strange cult of sexual libertines called the Oneida commune to her work as a freelance journalist in the early 1920s to her participation in the fabled Lost Generation artists’ scene of 1920-30s Paris. There she hobnobbed with the likes of such luminaries as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Though her published output was small, her 1936 novel Nightwood is considered a classic of modernist literature and a landmark of Sapphic fiction. Barnes died in Greenwich Village in 1982 at age 90, a highly eccentric – though revered in certain circles – recluse. Macy recounts her life as the quintessential tortured artist, with obsessive, warts-and-all admiration. Speaking with Macy about his new book and his unorthodox career path, it struck me that he and Barnes are the perfect match of biographer and subject.
Note: Due to highly conflicting schedules this interview was conducted via email in late October into early November 2024, then lightly edited for clarity.
ROB KIRBY: Before we get into your new book about Djuna Barnes, can you give us a brief history of your comics career? I want to know what brought you from point A to point Djuna.
JON MACY: I started in 1991 with my first series Tropo, from Blackbird comics. It was very underground. I was initially embraced by cartoonists from Fantagraphics and Michael Allred, especially. It was by the end of the series that I felt a lot of social pressure to address the AIDS epidemic. I was in my early twenties, but had stayed celibate. I think these two things were the catalyst for my turning to erotic comics. I was contributing to the Meatmen anthology, which was quite important to me. I also did a lot of short four-pagers for gay skin magazines, and that's what led me to come back to Fantagraphics/Eros to do another series. Nefarismo is famously the least-selling book in their catalog. I like to think that’s because it was before its time, but really it was just not sexy. It was about sex and gender transformations, but as an Eros book it wasn't what they needed. Back then I was reaching deep into reading transgressive books like Bataille's Story of the Eye, Joris-Karl Huysmans's Huysmans Against the Grain and The Master and Margarita by Mikhael Bulgakov. My brain was full of fire and guillotines.
There was a terrible thing that happened to a comic shop in Canada where the police ordered my books to be held behind the counter, but then raided the store and confiscated them. I felt terrible. Those guys lost their store. It made me think twice about the consequences of pushing things as far as possible. You have to read the room and not endanger everyone on the supply chain just because you want to shock people.
After I backed off from comics for a while, I then started working on my first graphic novel, Teleny & Camille. It was an adaptation of an erotic novel attributed to Oscar Wilde and his circle of friends. They each wrote a chapter in secret with this clandestine operation, and would leave their chapter at a bookstore for the next person to pick up. They were really trying to outdo each other, not just with the sex, but with the beauty of the writing. I've never read a book that has that level of visual reference. They didn't have the terminology we have today, so they conveyed their feelings through mythology and symbolism. Things like describing an orgasm as “a rain of fiery rubies” and such. It took me almost thirteen years to finish my book, but it won the Lambda Literary award in 2010.
I got involved with a great little LGBTQ nonprofit called Prism comics. It was founded by Zan Christensen who later left to start Northwest Press, which published Teleny. Working with a nonprofit was like having a new family. It felt so good to be giving back and also to give space to a whole new generation of young cartoonists. I was on the board and we gave out the Queer Press Grant every year. But they could only give the grant out to one person (or split it between two people), so Tara Madison Avery and I started Stacked Deck Press and published as many people as we could in the anthology Alphabet. We got a lot of cartoonists published for the first time, and paid them, too! Stacked Deck also published the Butch Lesbians of the 20s, 30s and 40s Coloring Book (2018), and most recently the Polyamorous Coloring and Activity Book (2023).
That brings us up to date. I'm sure I've done more that I'm forgetting about. I did some stuff for Negative Burn from Caliber back in the '90s.
When you talked about the authors of Teleny describing orgasm as "a rain of fiery rubies" for some reason that reminded me of your 2014 book, Fearful Hunter, which you forgot to mention. Tell us about that book and what brought it about as your follow up release to Teleny.
Fearful Hunter was supposed to be a short romp of a book, but it quickly grew into a full-fledged graphic novel. I wanted to tell a story where I sketched first and wrote later to sort of get really loose with the storytelling, as an experiment. I swore to draw only things I love to draw, so it's basically a lot of trees, nature, pickup trucks and punk boys. Then here in California came Prop 8, which if you remember was the defense of marriage act or whatever they called it. It was a slap in the face and everyone was protesting it. I'm a shy cartoonist so I did what shy cartoonists do: I put it all in the book. I was already creating a romance, but instead of being lighthearted it got complicated by the opposition saying “gay marriage would be frivolous” and we only wanted to get married “to be political,” which was a lie. I wanted to make something personal and emotional. I created a gay male werewolf who was biologically predisposed to monogamy. He gets one chance at love, and who he picks, for better or worse, is his mate for life. It gave the plot real stakes. My ultimate goal was to create a love story that straight people would “get.” With Teleny it was about releasing ourselves from internalized gay shame, and with Fearful Hunter it was blocking out the gaslighting that claimed that we can't have what other people have. The world has come a long way since then. I'm far more hopeful than I have ever been. I don't listen to people anymore, ha ha. My book didn't change the world, but it certainly changed me.
Can you tell us what it is about Djuna Barnes that became an obsession?
When I first read her novel, Nightwood, I was struck by it. I immediately found out how old she was when she wrote it (she was 44). It became this benchmark where I felt I had to live that long and write my masterpiece by that age. So, the obsession started right away. I had to know everything about her, and that was sparked by how much mystery there was. She was a recluse and ferocious about her privacy. She burned letters and told lies to interviewers contradicting other interviews. She was hiding something and, as someone who grew up with an unstable parent, I smelled it right away. I think that was a lot of it. I saw the signs of abuse and trauma. Her desperation to tell her story, but also afraid to do it. It's all over her books, but what really happened on that farm to make her so caustic and cynical about life?
I was bumping my head against a wall for a long time during the research. I knew her books were semi-autobiographical, everyone agreed on that, but most of the academic papers I read sided on a lack of evidence. As a cartoonist, I felt the story mattered more, so I went in with my gut. I decided that her books were absolutely true and ran with it. The poetry was the only thing hiding it, under that she was blatantly telling the truth. Then I compared a list of the events to narcissistic family dynamics and boy did they all match up. One to one. After that, it was a matter of editing. I had to take out thirty pages. Thirty finished pages because I felt that the readers would not believe it. I'm talking about the incest here. Her family would have these struggle sessions to control her. She'd stand, while the whole family would be seated in a circle around her, and they would bring forth their complaints about her. She had to listen to the discussion silently and reflect on it. I found a pamphlet from the Oneida commune that gave instructions on how to do this to members, to reeducate them. Should I have included it? Maybe, but I felt keeping to more everyday abuse would make it more real for readers and so impactful.
What were some of the challenges you faced in bringing her story to life?
The biggest problem was visually. Most of the buildings she lived in are long gone. I have been to her apartment at Patchin Place in Greenwich Village many times, but never in the actual room. It’s been remodeled, but it would have been nice just to feel it. The apartments above were still intact, and I could see images from the rental company. No one would let me in. I would draw floor plans and comb through biographies of people who had been there for details. Anais Nin put it in her journals as it was a big deal to be invited in that famous one-room apartment with the famous recluse. We don't have glamorous recluses anymore, which I find sad. Who is the Greta Garbo or Miss Havisham of our day?
The farm house she grew up in was near Huntington, Long Island. It was torn down so long ago and is a parking lot now. It was one of the earliest farm houses around, so the local historical society tried to save it. Phillip Herring, in his biography of Djuna, mentions that there was a painting on the wall of the farm before even the Barnes lived there. I had been stressing so hard about that house. It's a big part of the story and I had no idea what it looked like. It's like a character in the book and I didn't want to get it wrong. I'm crazy that way. I contacted the historical society and asked for a picture of the painting, but it turns out they had a treasure trove of images and even an inventory of the house when they were trying to save it from destruction. It was gold to me, and I was also charmed and validated by their excitement about my own saving of Djuna Barnes. This is repeated again and again when I would contact people for help, and we would get close and enjoy our mission to document a small but very interesting moment in history.
There was her flat in Chelsea, London, that was really just a storage room above an old antique shop. It really showed her character as it was filled with carousel horses and suits of armor. I contacted the company who owns the building, and it became a fun mystery to solve for them as well, but then we discovered that the whole area had been bombed in WW2 and rebuilt later. I left it as how the building looks now at that address because I'm sentimental about that relationship.
There was also Hayford Hall, which was a manor house Peggy Guggenheim rented in the summers of 1931-32. It's a place that has huge literary weight. It's equal to Lord Byron's Villa where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (which is an abortion allegory, if you ask me). It was during the lockdown, so I couldn't travel to the moors of Devonshire, England, but I did find an old realtor's pamphlet on eBay that showed the interior and great hall. I found an artist online who lived near there who was willing to peek in the windows, and luckily didn't get into trouble doing that. There was a lot of this. Maybe it doesn't matter in the long run if I got everything right, but I really was obsessed. I wanted to be there and live it with them. I started to have dreams where I was with Barnes. I once found her on a street in Manhattan, too drunk to find the theater where they were having a dress rehearsal of her play. I had to half carry her, but by the time we got there she was ready to go. Unfortunately, the show was over and everyone had gone home. Isn't that the story of Djuna's life?
Tell me about your physical process for creating this book. Did you do a mix of analog and digital drawing?
This is my first all-digital book. I do start out in a sketchbook, but then I scan it and the rest is on a tablet using Procreate. It was hard to find the right brush for the inking though, it wasn't until I found the roughest, nastiest– like drawing with a burnt stick – brush that I felt it looked like real ink on paper to me.
Really, it's not that different drawing that way as opposed to paper and brush except it's easier to fix your mistakes, and I am faster because I'm not worrying so much. I do miss the smell of ink while I work. In the beginning I was having trouble getting into working on a tablet, getting in the mood I mean, and then I opened up a bottle of India ink and the smell took me there.
I made two fonts for this book, I tried to make one for each book I do, but this one just never worked out. I ended up using the font I made for Justin Hall based on his letter and it goes with it nicely. I mean it disappears. It should be seamless. I agonize over fonts to an obscene degree. I'm sure I'm not alone. I also find that kind of tedious work very comforting. I could kern all day.
Who are some of your visual influences? I've always meant to ask you if Alphonse Mucha was an influence on your style or if I'm assuming too much.
Like Djuna, I was a big Aubrey Beardsley fan as a child, but then I found comics as a teen and never looked back. There were some artists that I wanted to draw like: Jack Kirby, Barry Windsor Smith, and Gene Colan. I gravitated towards the looser, more fluid line work. Later, I looked outside of comics for my heroes. I just discovered some really weird line art by Romaine Brooks, a painter in the 1920s.
With this new novel about Barnes I wanted to give it an old timey feeling without having to add horse-drawn carriages in every shot. I intentionally made everything one point perspective to emulate a stage or early photography ... it was always flat and straight on. You had to hold still for a long time as the film developed. Just slowing things down and not doing any forced perspective kept it from looking too modern. This led me to silent films, which became a huge part of my life doing this project.
There is just something that clicked with me and silent films, especially the early ones, were the most like comics of all other mediums. Yeah, the words and images are separated, but in the early days they were used to performing on stages, so this was all new. They were creating it as they went along. They would usually be posed in a way that was a static but dynamic position and then start moving. Or move into a final pose that really sold the action. Of course, they had to sell the story with their actions just like comics. You can say whatever you want, but if the pictures don't make you 'feel it,' then you have not succeeded.
Also, body language changes over the decades. Men and women stood differently. Sometimes it was people imitating famous models or maybe just the heels of shoes were changing as well. I was drawing people in the 1920s, but I wanted to show how these artists were very forward thinking, so I would often use a stance from twenty years ahead to give them a more modern feeling. I'm not sure if it reads, but subconsciously I think it does. I also took this approach to gender. Masculine and feminine people do not stand in the same way, obviously. but when you add in cross dressing to the mix it does become a challenge. After studying all the butch lesbians of that time I realized it was the boots that gave them that particular swagger they had. Very important, the boots.
The post You’re My Obsession: A Conversation with Jon Macy appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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