Monday, October 13, 2025

DIY Bad-Boy and Black Cohosh author, Eagle Valiant Brosi, spreads Scabies all over town, leaves us wanting more

Eagle Valiant Brosi's Drawn & Quarterly debut, Black Cohosh, came out this past June, rising the tides with tears of laughter and mostly sorrow with a shadowy coming-of-age memoir about a rustic Appalachian youth and the struggle to be understood. Over the last 6 years, Eagle has produced 80 issues of his elusive free zine, Scabies, monthly musings for creating anonymous friendships, which is how I came to arrange for a phone call with him this past August. Thank you, Eagle for taking the time to talk with TCJ between the bouts of gardening overtaking his Virginia home. All photos are by Eagle Valiant Brosi, unless indicated otherwise.

-Sally Madden

Eagle with butternut squash

All right, so we've got light stuff and heavy stuff to talk about today.

Yeah.

I usually like to start heavy and go light. Is that okay with you?

 That's fine by me.

Though I do think eating dessert first is a better idea than eating it last, but we're going to see, won't we? 

Wasn't that in a movie?

Was it? Probably a good movie because it's a good idea.

It's a very bad movie, Remember Me with Robert Pattinson.

It wasn't reviewed in Seventeen Magazine, so I haven't seen it. Do they say some dumb thing about how life is short?

Yeah, and then in the movie, he’s in the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, and that's how they end it. 

He was in the World Trade Center on 9/11? Yeah, sure, so was I. Do you like dessert?

I love dessert. I used to volunteer in a nursing home when I was in high school. For some residents, it was just hard to get them to eat, so I'm a big fan of just feeding people cookies for meals, you know? When you're in that state, aren’t things already difficult enough?

I love cooking, baking pies and cakes and that kind of thing. It's really fun. I know we have an American version of The Great British Bake Off, but it sucks… this is such white male bullshit, but I legitimately think that I could be on Bake Off.

 With the  passion you reveal in your zines for recipes themselves I can tell that you have been tinkering with them in a way that is probably well suited for a baking competition.

We're not starting heavy.

This interview is only supposed to be about baking, listen to me.

Black Cohosh by Eagle Valiant Brosi, Drawn & Quarterly, 2025)

Last fall you discreetly mentioned that you were going to have a book coming out with Drawn & Quarterly next year, which is this year, which is Black Cohosh. And I thought, oh yeah, I know exactly what this book is going to be: a great opportunity to showcase your long-running series Scabies, the monthly zine that you make. A combination of essays and comics and recipes, some autobiographical stuff in there, a lot of gag comics. A lot of the comics I've seen in Scabies are what, if I feel disappointed by a New Yorker cartoon, I wish it could have been this instead. So I was looking forward to this one-man anthology from D&Q. Can you explain to me why this isn't an anthology of your series, Scabies, that I enjoy so much?

So basically it's because of Tom... I'm just going to throw Tom Devlin under the bus about this.

 Sure, I’m familiar with the expression, “it's Tom's world, we're just living in it”

I sent him… one issue of Scabies that I wrote. Issue 48. I printed out around 20 copies of the thing because that's my usual M.O. right, 20 to 50 copies. I submitted basically what that issue was to Drawn & Quarterly. It had been 48 months of me making this comic. My original idea was that they would publish all 48 issues of Scabies. But I never said that to Tom, so I can't truly throw him under the bus.

He wrote me back saying, we would like to see more. And I was like, well, guess what, dude? I have so many pages more. And so I sent him 210 pages, and he said, “okay, thank you, but let's actually go back to this original comic and let's just flesh this out”.

several issues of Scabies, photo by Sally Madden

So Scabies is a monthly sixteen-plus page comic that you’ve been incredibly difficult about getting me additional issues.

…sometimes it's twenty pages…

…pages you've never scanned. Are you just drawing these directly on letter paper and then photocopying them?

Pretty much, which is unhinged.

It was normal, then unhinged, but now it's just darling. You know, it's quaint now.

Good luck to anyone for getting these. I'd love to tell readers where they're available, but- that's the thing. There are some issues of it that I don't even personally have…

Where did they go? What did you do?

I shouldn't say this, but there are issues where maybe I flew too close to the sun on something else that I had read, and then just needed to like maybe do a mimic? I think close to everyone's guilty of making like a Simon Hanselmann-like ripoff at some point in time of being like, “look at these disgusting characters who are partying”. Even though I guess Simon Hanselmann's ripping off Meg and Mog… I started making these zines to make friends, at least that's what I tell people.

 It sounds like it's working, you tell me.

Well, I moved to this town and I never made any friends because of Scabies. I’d give them out for free, I'd put them out in bookshops and coffee shops and bars and stuff.

 Is your contact information on all of them?

No.

Okay, where's the second half of this plan, Eagle? I can't wait to start a support group for people who have been picking up these comics in coffee shops, haunted by the futile longing of how to get in touch with this person who made these zines much less obtain another issue.

So I've met some of them and it's funny because they don't know my name, right? They only know this idea of Scabies. And so they're like, “oh, you're ‘Scabies!”

You’re “Scabies”?

Yeah, they call me Scabies. 

Okay…

And it's just like, I don't really want to be called ‘Scabies’.

Do you correct them?

You know? I mean... Yeah.

I do know, especially since right now I have shingles and I keep accidentally saying scabies, which in my personal experience is a word people want to hear even less than “shingles”, but when I start my zine Shingles, we'll see how well it does. Why did you name it Scabies?

Because I had scabies. I don't know.

What a really good reason. What are scabies, for people at home who aren't medical professionals like you and me?

It's... I guess I would call it an STI. Some people would say you can get them from dogs and couches, but those are all lying husbands. It's an STI, it’s a mite. It starts centralizing on your wrist and on the back of your knees. It's these parasitic insects that start breeding and they poop inside your skin and that causes you to itch and that creates scabs. For whatever reason, scabies at night are very active, so you can't go to sleep.

It's like inside-your-body bed bugs.

Yeah, and the only way to get rid of them is basically to rub a neurotoxin all over yourself, which probably takes three years off of your life. So I had scabies, and I didn't want anybody to touch me, because I didn't want anyone to get scabies because of me. So it had been a very long time without physical human interaction with anyone. I remember seeing a dad pat his son on the back and thinking, “oh, I would kill for somebody to pat me on the back!” That's all I want. So instead of becoming an incel, I started making zines.

The quilted sign for Connie and George Brosi's bookstore, quilted by Connie Brosi

Good job.

My parents owned a bookstore that only sold Appalachian books and authors who self-publish, or even if they had a publisher, would ask, “can you please carry my books?” You know? That's what happens in bookstores.

Sure, I've said the same thing.

I know they're being completely normal, but they took themselves so seriously. I said to myself, this is a fun little comic I'm doing, it's a hobby. I don't want to be serious about it. It's something that you got that you maybe don't even want, you know, but you've got it now. How seriously can you take something called Scabies?

You definitely are setting readers up for, just-here-to-have-fun, but also secretly there's going to be a little bit of learning. And it might be learning how to make more four biscuits, but it also you will include essays in there along the lines of, ‘what the fuck are we all doing, do you see how, trashed everything has become?!’, but with a ‘let’s make love while the bombs are dropping’ mentality. 

Oftentimes you slide in at the end with a very personal note directed towards the reader as if you know that person. Suddenly everything is just between you and an anonymous reader, very protective and nurturing, like a hug that you can't get from another person because you have scabies.

I grew up surrounded by hippies being so positive all the time, you know? And I hated that positivity as a kid, and still to this day, I feel like sometimes when I get a compliment it feels like the fake hippie hug.

You’re welcome. We have to talk about hippies now, because you brought it up. But also, can you tell me why today, the day that we are recording, August 9th, 2025, is more than a little bit significant to your own personal artwork as well as the history of the entire world?

Yeah. I mean, I think you're talking about Nagasaki.

I am talking about Nagasaki.

It's the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, which is-I hate to even admit this-I went to Google, right? To see what the Google doodle is going to be about Nagasaki?

Slizard Petition, 1945- Eagle's grandpa's name is listed halfway down the right column

Oh no! 

There's not a Google doodle about Nagasaki. But should there be? I don't know. So, my grandpa worked on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. My dad was born in 1942 Rhode Island. And before he was a year old he was moved to Oak Ridge, where they were building this atomic bomb. My grandpa started the first church in Oak Ridge, a Unitarian Universalist church, which is funny to me, um, ‘cause it's Tennessee.

That's the thing about bombs and rockets and stuff, and particularly in Appalachia, right? There was this weird confluence of Appalachia, progress, science. John Nash, the subject of A Beautiful Mind was from West Virginia, as was Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician. Johnson and Nash were born in the same decade within 80 miles of each other in West Virginia. And it's like, what the fuck is going on? How did at some point in time in the 50s and 40s, some of our most like coherent mathematical minds come from fucking bumfuck nowhere? So anyways, my grandpa worked on the Manhattan Project and was under authority when they dropped the atomic bomb. He was part of a petition written to the US government, pleading, “Don't drop this on Japan, drop this in the middle of the ocean and let people see it and let people know it.”

I guess that this goes into being a hippie, because all hippies secretly have money. And the hippies that want to go to a Phish festival without any money, they very quickly drop out of the scene when it becomes clear that this is likely unsustainable without a secret BMW waiting for them in the parking lot. If you go to a Rainbow Gathering-

A rainbow is a visual phenomenon that I see usually in the sky, you can’t “go” there, what are you talking about?

There’s a group of people who go by the name ‘Rainbow’.

Okay. Is it just refraction appropriation?

Think of modern day hippies as Mennonite. And then think of Rainbows as Amish. They were kind of a bigger or cultural phenomenon in the 70s and maybe even 80s, but they're that much thinkier. You have a higher chance of getting scabies from them, it's that much more patchouli, you know?

I see.

But, they all have secret money.

Okay, woof. I was raised to be cordially untrusting of hippies, and you’re really reinforcing my elders’ ethos here.

I guess I should not talk about hippies and I should stop beating around the bush about this.

There were all comics coming out of America pre- and during WWII, we have awards named after the people making them. But when I think of the backbone of comics, at least… that we know of, is Japanese comics. And the backbone of those comics made by the Japanese was in indirect response to the dropping of the atomic bombs.

There's a lot, obviously, like Akira, Barefoot Gen… I don't need to sit here and name like all the Japanese comics influenced by the atomic bombs being dropped, but it is important to recognize that America did this. My father's father directly helped in this endeavor. His PhD advisor at the University of Chicago was Leo Spitz, who has been erased from our atomic bomb knowledge. We think of Oppenheimer and Einstein as the creators of the atomic bomb, but actually it was this other guy named Leo Spitz, but he changed it to Szilárd because Spitz was German. He was a Hungarian Jewish man who had made the patent for the nuclear chain reaction used in an atomic bomb. He got England to get rid of the patent because he was afraid of the Nazis copying it to develop the atomic bomb.

Szilárd immigrated to America, taught at the University of Chicago. had my grandpa in the class, My grandpa figured out how to build synthetic rubber, and then after that, they put him on the Manhattan Project, after which point, Leo Szilárd says, “hey, let's not drop the atomic bomb”, which is why we don't talk about Leo Szilárd. But, my grandpa also signed this petition that Szilárd had put forward. 

The history that I was taught was that the Japanese were just not going to stop killing themselves, and I just don't know if that's true. I don't think we had anyone in 1930s or 1940s America who was an expert on Japan, anyone who wasn't in a camp, that is.

I think about how like this idea of kamikaze, right? The suicide bomber. And apparently kamikaze translated in Japan is not “suicide bomber”, it's “divine wind”. It's a pilot, you know?

page from Black Cohosh by Eagle Valiant Brosi, Drawn & Quarterly, 2025)

Oh, that's a pretty big loss in translation.

They're saying like, oh, these pilots. And I think about today, right? I think we see this in foreign affairs and in abusive domestic partnerships where people decide, “well, I have to retaliate because you just don't, you won't stop hurting yourself”

It's a real look-what-you-made-me-do, which comes up in your book.

I'm at the point right now where I'm completely convinced that everything I know about Shintoism is wrong. I don't understand why we drop these nuclear bombs on people.

I don't know why we have to frame it in this way of saying, “oh, well, we had to do it”

If a bunch of people are killed and they abolish a religion, I don't know if we would be capable of creating a cultural product that comes out of that, the way that manga has come out of it. It's amazing to think about this idea of like the way that they're processing this trauma, this massive grief is through art.

Whereas, I don't know, did you have that fear, say, when the pandemic struck of, “oh my lord, we're going to see some really bad art come out of this and there's nothing I can do about it”?

I know that the art I made during the pandemic was bad. I mean, it's not just the pandemic because there's also Black Lives Matter, which is a perfect storm for a white guy to make the worst artwork imaginable, right?

Well, thanks for making it.

I feel like I shouldn't maybe even.... I don't know if it makes sense for a white guy whose grandpa made the atomic bomb to be in comics. I always wish that there was just a group of very well known people who could tell me what to do, what not to do. And there's not, sadly.

An interesting take from someone raised by hippies, who famously do a lot of telling people what to do and what not to do.

Basically, once you become an Oak Ridge scientist, you stay working at Oak Ridge. And my dad was a 60s radical leftist. My grandpa, from my understanding of things, was kind of like, son, you can't continue going to communist gatherings and have a relationship with me. I can't leave this job, you have to stop.

 Meaning, what, “you have to stop because they're going to find out and I'm going to lose my job” or “you have to stop because I don't agree with this”

It's even stupider than that, when you're an Oak Ridge scientist, you... can't leave the job. You don't get fired. They put you on the stupidest things that you can work on. And my grandpa had this vision that after they finished the atomic bomb they'd figure out nuclear power. What ends up happening, though, is the government sells some of those scientists to Monsanto, and so they were basically forced to create genetically modified corn. 

I started making a whole book about this and ditched the idea of it because it was just too…  I don't know. I don't want to write a book about my dad, it's hard, right, to write a book about somebody. 

Well, wait, you just wrote this book about your mom.

I know. I know.

You're multifaceted.

But I've, but my dad's story is not my story to tell. I have that story with my mom. It's our story together, you know? With my dad, there was no commonality or bonding. But like, I do want to say this, because I think this is super fascinating to me, during the making of the atomic bomb, when my dad was born, they did not allow black people to live in Oak Ridge. But my dad had like a nanny, a black woman, who basically raised him. She would like take a bus from Knoxville, Tennessee to Oak Ridge every day, and my dad truly loved this woman. It's probably the government's worst fear that black people would get an atomic bomb in 1950s America. This woman, whose name was Pauline, which is the same name as his mom, so it's kind of a weird, had a big influence on him, he was very activated by the civil rights movement. And then seemingly got distracted by Vietnam. He had a job with the Students for Democratic Society and he did all this stuff with them. 

I haven't had a ton of hippie interaction, but I talked to some loved ones who had, and wanted to know what you felt is worst thing about hippies. Not, that they're the worst people ever, there's worse people, such as myself, but you tell me, is it:

A. Their proclivity towards unsolicited advice, which often pairs with like a champagne-flute-fragile ego?

B. Their obsession with individualism while insisting that they're building community?

C. Passive aggressiveness dressed as being laid back?

D. Bad things with lentils?

E. none of the above?

There's an easy answer to this, and it's none of the above. The obvious answer to it is hippie culture is cultural appropriation. That's hippie culture in a nutshell. I don't know how many hippie things you've been to because you say you're sheltered from it, but if you go to a hippie thing there will be there will be white women wearing sarongs, wearing feathered bonnets. The fashion is cultural appropriation, the music is cultural appropriation. They play didgeridoos. They play bluegrass music. They're not from Kentucky. That's appropriation. Everything about everything about their culture is cultural appropriation, as a second generation hippie, I really have to word this in the correct way. There are also little boys named Braxton. And Braxton wants to come to me and tell me his name is like Blue Jay. And that when Braxton does that, it pisses me off. And I feel like, "you haven't fucking earned it". And then I remember that the core component of hippie culture has always been stealing from other people's culture.

It's very Unitarian, there's something to learn from all this stuff so we should learn from it kind of way of life, right? I also don't know of any other white people who are getting dreadlocks aside from hippies.I could be wrong about that. I mean, maybe Korn.

Comment below if you've ever seen a white person with dreads who's not a hippie, what kind of music are they playing? What are they up to? What manga are they making?  

Though my parents would not call themselves hippies, they were born in 1942 so they are back-to-the-land. I was very clear about this, they thought hippies were emo, like 80s punk rockers today would be like, I'm not fucking emo, I'm fucking punk. They felt very regimented about that. They would also be like, "as a back to the lander, I'm not into drugs and free sex and all this other stuff. I'm actually into living my politics". Let me mansplain some bullshit here: basically you had the beatniks who were like, “we're going to discover America”. And the back-to-the-landers are like, okay, “we discovered America. We actually want to remove ourselves from America, we want to remove ourselves from society, because now that it is discovered, we've realized it's rotten". I feel like, under Joe Biden's presidency, the conservatives were like, “we are removing ourselves from this society, we are pulling our kids out of school, we are having fuck ton of kids”. 

Woof.

I'm one of seven. They have a ton of them, and they're like, “we're going to bake our own bread. We're going to grow crops.” It's the same shit. It's the same exact shit, history is repeating itself. Cottagecore and trad wife shit is just like hippie stuff. These people who have so many kids, I see the youngest kid and feel so bad for them. 

And you're the youngest…

Yeah, I'm the youngest. And it's like, we're not learning from our mistakes. You know? I'm sorry to the evangelicals and to the cottagecore and whatever people are out there. But, like, the hippie movement didn't do anything: it lost. They just removed themselves from society and society moved on without them. I mean, to really get into it, I think a lot of Christians, a lot of MAGA people talk about how they're hated, right?

When I was a kid there was constantly talk of hippies getting beat up for being hippies and it really created an us-versus-them kind of situation. I touch upon it in the book, but you know, with the murder of Bert J. DeLeeuw. His neighbor just fucking killed him, for seemingly no reason. My dad's whole thing with the SDS was getting beat up. He was just kind of like, “I'm a dumb boy. I can get beat up, my way of showing my activism is by getting beat up and not fighting back”. Hard to see how that's going to pay off long term, but I understand the sentiment behind it. 

You mentioned earlier not knowing how to read until a later age, like Maia Kobabe

As soon as I learned how to read, I started getting into my sister's books, like YM and Cosmo and Seventeen, also the Sweet Valley books. When you don't know how to read and you're aware of books, you recognize a famous book and you're like, “when I learn to read, I'm going to read that book.” And those books sucked! But it was the books that I was kind of ashamed of being seen with that I thought were so good. I'm sorry if people love The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo. I thought Alexandre Dumas would be so good, but reading that was just painful to me.

Wait, do you mean Sweet Valley High? With Elizabeth and Jessica?

zines by Connie Brosi

So many good Sweet Valley Twin books. The one story that stays with me has a girl named Ronda who dies of an OD, and the way that they told her death, it was so much about her physical appearance being beautiful than it was actually about her dying. And I kind of enjoyed that. I like melodrama for the sake of melodrama. 

So, my parents had a bookstore, right? And they only sold Appalachian books. And then this kind of weird sea change happened where- I don't know if you know bell hooks?

I'm a lady who loves love, of course I know bell hooks.

So bell hooks moved to my hometown, and that was kind of like a spaceship landing. 

I can imagine. I mean, I can't actually.

It was very cool. You don't need a panel of experts when you have bell hooks present. She would have these dinner parties in her home. With Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, Nikki Giovanni and- I don't know if you know who Dorothy Allison is-

I just was reading Bastard Out of Carolina at Caroline Cash’s place, and that book is a sickening page turner. I cannot believe the roll call I'm hearing from you, this is shocking.

It's totally, absolutely shocking.

I have to lie down.

And I would just, I would just be like sitting there at night thinking to myself, what the fuck are they talking about? I attended a lecture between hooks and Allison at the local college, at the time there was this book that came out called Crapalachia, which is a great name for a book.

Well, depends on who's writing it, doesn't it, Eagle? 

Well, he's from West Virginia- But I'll straight up make this claim. J.D. Vance plagiarized Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place when he wrote his book. Everything in J.D. Vance's book is in Crapalachia beat for beat. At the end of Crapalachia, the author does this thing, he says every time that he lied in Crapalachia to make the story flow better, he wrote it down, he had like five pages of this. And of course, somebody asked bell hooks and Dorothy Allison, during their conversation, about a book a white guy made, specifically about him putting in the citations of where he lied. And I'll never forget this because bell was like, “you know, with Dorothy Allison, that all this stuff didn't happen exactly the way that it appears”. But Dorothy was so good at writing. It doesn't fucking matter at all.

 No, who cares? Are we in court?

And it was just like, it's so nice. And I think that that really kind of changed a lot of stuff in my life. People talk about Thomas Wolfe living in Asheville and you're like, oh my God, like this Thomas Wolfe guy is so amazing. It was kind of like that with bell, living there. But you could go to the Goodwill and run into her shopping, just like a human. Just a glorious presence. 

Oh I meant to preface this with the fact that my dad worked at the college bell hooks moved to teach at, not as a professor, but as the editor for the literary magazine, Appalachian Heritage that now goes by the name Appalachian Reveal- who who the hell wants a poem published by Appalachian Heritage, right? When you think of heritage? So I get why they changed their name- a poetry, essay, and short story kind of quarterly magazine. He would bring home the slush pile and I would read all the things. 

The submissions we were getting before bell hooks and the submissions we were getting after bell hooks were remarkably different, right? Because people would, of course, they'd want to catch her eye. It went from like mamaw's quilt and civil war reenactors to a lot of queer and feminist black and brown people talking about their bodies, suddenly, which is just remarkable in a way.

My dad was an intensely slow reader, so my mom basically did his job for him. All he did was he read the stuff that me and his student workers would say is worthwhile. 

Did you read comics as part of your time, you know, growing your literacy?

Yeah. That's how I learned basically.

Did your parents get the paper? Did you read like the Sunday funnies and stuff like that?

I was very attached to Prince Valiant because of course my middle name is Valiant. I mean, it's great because they don’t draw nipples.

 Why is that great? 

There's something so hilarious to me about drawing, like, chiseled man... as they all often do with Prince Valiant. And then they're like, “well, it'll maybe take away from some of this homoeroticism if I don't draw the nipples”, but they're like drawing like a bulging crotch or a cod piece. There's so much other detail that they're putting into the picture that's way crazier than nipples.

page from Black Cohosh by Eagle Valiant Brosi, Drawn & Quarterly, 2025)

Funny that you're bringing that up since, in Black Cohosh, well, in your comics in general, you have a lot of nudity and sexuality, but it's not titillating. As a reader, I'd say you get your flirting done in your essay portion of the zine, not the comics.

But then when you're actually drawing, for example, you draw your mom nude multiple times in the book, something almost no human will dare to do, cartoonist or otherwise. The idea is a real struggle to find in culture, nudity for something other than the hope for eroticism. You and Keiler Roberts both are doing the lord's work here.

I don't think… me and Keiler Roberts are the only ones...

Maybe other people are, and I'm going to look them up as soon as we're done here. ‘Cause I'd like to see more of it.

Maybe this is going to make me sound like the biggest pervert in the universe, but I did not have a problem with drawing my mom naked at all. There was a scene where she's dead, I had a hard time drawing that. I also had a head cold when I drew it, and so I would sneeze and ruin the page, sneeze and ruin the page… 

I think it means you're less of a pervert for not having a problem with it- We're the perverts who won't just draw our moms naked. Now who's the hippie?!

It's arresting having a memoir from someone who we don't know, the reader doesn't get to know what you're literally saying. We can try to guess your thoughts based on your actions, just like in real life, but whenever your character speaks we see indecipherable language, no caption cheat sheet to tell us what you're really saying. 

In one of my favorite moments in the book, you are relentlessly teased at school because people can't understand your speech. But then you make a comic about a classmate that we all hate, whose name is obviously Kevin. When you were a kid getting your revenge, what was that like?

page from Black Cohosh by Eagle Valiant Brosi, Drawn & Quarterly, 2025)

I made so many comics of revenge. I had a seemingly superheroic power of making very evil comics about people. My first draft of this book was a villain origin story. There was a boy named Randall Bachman and I made a comic book called The New Adventures of Sandal Sockman, which was about him wearing socks and sandals, and he got mercilessly teased because of me. I don't even know if he ever wore sandals and socks. There were all kinds of weird ways that I bullied people via comics. 

Reading the slush pile, you read a lot of bad biographies right and there's a lot of bad biographies out there, a lot of people who have bad motivations for writing a biography, whether it be that they're trying to process their divorce in a weird way, or because they they want to maybe fix something that was wrong, and the heart is so far not in the right place, you know? 

I wanted to throw myself under the bus a few times and be perfectly honest about how I'm kind of not the best, I wanted to be an unreliable narrator. You don't know what I'm thinking ever. Back when I was a kid, nobody could understand what I was saying, I just fully went into it being like, “you guys don't even know what the fuck I'm saying, so you can't judge my story.”

How did that work out for you?

You know, I don't know.

Your dad comes off… not so great in this book, another big villain is Roger That, who also lives on the commune with you guys. As a reader, we hate them, but am I correct in guessing that you might have more empathy for these two guys than the average person reading this book? 

Well, Roger That is an amalgam of different people. When I came up with the name Roger That, I thought, surely this has been taken by another comic book, and it hasn't. I've been reading Precious Rubbish, right? And I feel like if I were Kayla E, the way that I would present Roger would in a sweatshop of him making me make shadow puppets for him all the time because he was constantly doing that. Constant shadow puppets. Cutting out things with the X-Acto knives and that kind of very much into puppetry, paper mache kind of work. The walking, slacklining thing, it was always done on a bicycle with the inner tubes taken off, easier than you might think.

page from Black Cohosh by Eagle Valiant Brosi, Drawn & Quarterly, 2025)

I mean, this might sound totally insane because I haven't read it since I came to this conclusion, but in a sense, I write Roger That in the way that I wish I had a relationship with my dad. I wish that I had this dad who was a little bit more, “let's do something together. Let me give you a skill”.

At the time when you were being forced to make these shadow puppets, did you enjoy it initially and eventually got fed up with it?

I never liked it and never will. I don't like puppets. I... I don't like puppets at all…

 You don't like puppets, period? No kind of puppet?

Let me take it back.

I'm just asking questions.”

I don't know. I don't know how to say it.

You're trying to think “who's been the one puppet ever, that I've really loved?”

I mean, obviously everyone who's seen The Puerto Rican War loves those puppets.

Good save.

The anomaly doesn't prove me wrong. I think it's more of just proof that like John Vasquez Mejias is just really amazing and talented and good at what he does. I'm saying this, and now I'm thinking about Jim Henson. I love Jim Henson… maybe I need to take it back. 

Are you still making Scabies?

Sometimes...

I'm assuming you are because you gave me a recent one. You were making the monthly for a while. What are you doing now? 

I'm not making them monthly. 

I have a lot of weird ideas for comics. Most of them are not autobiographical, but the most steadfast one I'm working on right now is an album biography, but I do talk in legible script in it.

page from Black Cohosh by Eagle Valiant Brosi, Drawn & Quarterly, 2025)

So you have this book that has a spine on it and that is so people who are shopping know this is a comic book. This is a graphic novel, but you mentioned in this short film that we may or may not be sharing with others that you wanted to make Seventeen Magazine, but instead you were just drawing comics and not making Seventeen Magazine. What the hell does that mean?

I made one comic and I keep going back to it, but it's like a man proposing to this woman and she's like, “I would say yes, but I took a personality quiz and I can't marry you because I'm supposed to marry Joe Jonas.” You know those, like, quizzes, right? I think I had one that was like, what does your burrito say about you?

I just remember reading Seventeen Magazine, YM, Cosmo, and it was almost like it was the back of the cereal boxes, but sexy.

Even if it's not the most nourishing (and sometimes it is) you're compelled to get through it. It's been some favorite reading of mine for sure.

There's Highlights, there's Cricket, I did one whole issue that was only Goofus and Gallant comics. Somebody later pointed me to a parody that had been done a lot better. I was so sad about it.

 At least you only knew after the fact, what a gift!

 I remember one gag, Goofus uses Saran Wrap as a dental dam.

I remember reading that exact strip. [Goofus and Gallant’s Guide to Sex and Dating, MAD # 337, written by Desmond Devlin, art by Dave Manak]

 I was so pissed about it because I was like, “ want draw that”!

Look, we love Goofus and Gallant, we need to know who we are, and who we continually fail at aspiring to be.

Yeah, I mean, there's also something to be said about, like, boys being dumb.

What do you wish that people knew about Appalachia- Do you know, by the way, how hard it was for me to learn how to say that correctly before I talked to you today? 

Don't worry about it. I mean, that's an ableist problem, I don't say half of things right.The Appalachian Trail goes all the way into New York. And those people call it Apple-a-chee-a. And it is completely fine to say any word like that. I think white people can be very white-cultural,  searching for something all uniquely their own. And so many people turn to Appalachian culture as that, this claim of authenticity. And one of the things they might know is that it's supposed to be said in a certain kind of way. But you say Gah-LONT and I say Gay-LONT (we both say “Goofus”).

Constantly, at least for me, I see these portrayals in the media where people are like, “we traveled all the way from New York to Virginia to find a Trump voter”. Dude, you don't have to go all the way to West Virginia to find someone who's MAGA, they're in New York. I would say there's an Appalachian perception of us being backwards, yokels, hillbillies, whatever have you. I think people would be shocked if they actually spent time there, at how the people are different from the perception.

If you could make a version of Seventeen Magazine, what would it look like?

I would do something true crime, I'm more into schemers than I am serial killers. I would do quizzes. I would probably do an eligible bachelor law or bachelorette of the week. You know, find out, “Is Channing Tatum Married”?

You mean as an investigative journalism piece to find out if Channing Tatum is married?

 Yeah.

page from Black Cohosh by Eagle Valiant Brosi, Drawn & Quarterly, 2025)

You obviously were inspired by these magazines that are meant to go in the garbage. As many are inspired by comics, like Uncle Scrooge or MAD, also designed to go in the trash. But of course, YM, Cosmo and Seventeen have the added stink about them as being completely socially unacceptable for a boy to look at. But with older sisters you had an in there, I'm very happy for you that you've had that opportunity.

I can't really... Okay, so I feel like I should probably say this. You know how when you watch the Crumb documentary and Robert’s like, “actually, my brother is way smarter and better at comics than me”? I have an older sister named Sky, and Sky is a lot more talented as a cartoonist, a lot more talented as storyteller, she would make comics and stories for me and my brother, Glade. I'm going to say this and you're probably going to think I'm lying, but she made a Seventeen Magazine that was for girls who were living as pirates, I think she made it when she was fourteen, maybe twelve. I'm still flabbergasted by that work, you know? I mean, this is the horrible thing, right? It should probably be Sky talking to you. She probably has better stuff to write about in her whole life than I do. 

What does that mean? 

I mean, don't know. I mean, I do know, which is that at one point in time, Sky was considered a favorite. She was the youngest daughter, the fifth child. And my siblings started a group because they felt like Sky wasn't punished enough, called Siblings Against Skye, S.A.S. (pronounced “sass”)

Were you also a member of S.A.S.?

Kind of. When my sister, Blossom, went away to college, S.A.S ended, and Blossom's like 10 years older than me. My poor sister Sky is, like, 10. She has two older sisters who leave her behind. They go out and do things. Sky's at home. Sky’s drawing at home. Sky was just constantly reading Lynda Barry. Then she would draw these comics about our childhood.

I don't have any of them. I wish I could show you. My sister would make comics about the injustices of all lives, right? About other people having nice new clothes and for getting hand-me-downs. And then my dad made a comic of being like, "well I do is complain and draw comics about it.”

So now I'm making comics myself. about my dad, but not about my sister. But I think about Sky and about the book that she should write.

And I also think, I don't know how to put this without kind of sounding braggadocious, but Sky went to Yale, Yale's where the Doonesbury dude went, and he has some kind of scholarship. Sky got that scholarship and she never fucking wrote the book. It's almost this sliding doors kind of BS of my sister. It was going to be a memoir all about her life, but maybe, when you're like 21, how do you have the courage, you know?

In Black Cohosh, you come off like a singleton, but you do have these six other siblings. How did you come about the decision to leave them out of the book?

If all six of my siblings were in there, and they all had their own personalities, the book would be gigantic, right? It would be a series and it would be never ending.

Was there an original iteration where you thought you would include them?

Yeah, I mean, when your mom dies, you just start making comics about it because it's what you do, you know? I drew all kinds of different, what you would call drafts of this, with them and without them. I had them once as a monster, all congealed together and all saying the same thing. I don't know if that works. I don't know. I don't think it did.  

page from Black Cohosh by Eagle Valiant Brosi, Drawn & Quarterly, 2025)

In your book, there's clowning, there's crystals, tarot, and sigils, what do you believe in? 

I would say what I was raised with was a form of esoteric stuff, some of it clearly derived from perception of witchcraft from the Victorians, some of it maybe even you would call Shintoism, in terms of my belief structures, I think that the most important thing for me to see in it is that all this stuff has flaws. Like, with astrology, we see goalposts being moved. You now have to know when you were born, at what time exactly, and that's pretty fucking classist. I do think that there was something to be said about seeing wisdom and camaraderie with things. Iin terms of spirituality, it should come intuitively to you. Just how a baseball player starts believing in ritual and routine and stops changing those socks, that there's a reason why that we do that. 

I'm sure that even if Jesus Christ came back for dinner tonight, you would still be gardening tomorrow.

Well, I would be pretty pissed off at him, to be quite frank. It makes me think about, this  joke, “You might mess up in life, but you'll never fuck up as bad as Jesus did at being Jewish”. This is pretty funny, at least, this idea of Jesus messing up.

Just like you and me.

 

 

 

The post DIY Bad-Boy and Black Cohosh author, Eagle Valiant Brosi, spreads Scabies all over town, leaves us wanting more appeared first on The Comics Journal.


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