How are we ever going to learn to live together? From Thomas Nast to Signe Wilkinson to this article's interview subjects, Whit Taylor and Mattie Lubchansky, political cartooning at its best questions, clarifies, and (when required) eviscerates the political landscape. Political comics, fiction or non, invites the viewer to arrive rather than retreat, a reminder that we seen, we are a source of power. In the times we now live, which I, like a little idiot, thought could never get so dark, the works of Taylor and Lubchansky invigorate me to see more depth of possibility among the bleakness of our current control of the world.
Whit Taylor and Mattie Lubchansky spoke with me this past fall, just after SPX, where Taylor was tabling. The feisty conversation between the two Nib alums was what I was really after, and because I want you, dear reader, to have only the best, I have cut myself out of it entirely, as you certainly have heard enough from me already. To begin, let's find out why Lubchansky was mysteriously absent from the Small Press Expo's festivities and floor.
-Sally Madden
WHIT TAYLOR: I'd like to know.
MATTIE LUBCHANSKY: I was at my niece's bat mitzvah in Tampa, Florida. I've missed so many things for SPX before, and this one, unfortunately, I was made aware of the date of my niece's bat mitzvah a full year before I knew what the date of SPX was going to be, and I was just praying that it was going to be an early or a late SPX this year, then it wasn't, which was A little sad. It's probably my favorite show to go to. So I was a little disappointed, but it was nice to see my niece become a woman. I had to miss it the year I had Simplicity, my new book out,
Ahhh Simplicity. What is my book, Simplicity? It is a science fiction, horror, satire kind of book. It's the 2080s and America has collapsed into walled fascist city states. An academic goes from the New York City state to the Catskill Mountains to do an ethnography of a cult for a museum being built by the CEO of New York.
This fall I have a book coming out with Joyce Rice. She is the illustrator for it and I am the writer. It's called The Greater Good. It's on public health history, nonfiction. It's coming through 23rd Street Books in November, just in time for everything that's going on with public health.
I'm very, very hype. Just in time for public health to become illegal.
Yeah, right!
Public health workers are like, like on the ground, doing really good stuff and are dealing with a lot of nonsense, like harassment and that sort of stuff. I do see some of the public health schools being better on Instagram lately. They're like making it fun.
There was this quiz about which preventable disease are you or something? I think that's like a good modern way to get people interested in epidemiology, diseases and whatnot.
That's good.
But it's also cute.
I'm actually very curious about how you feel about the new coalition of what the government is doing, like state's rights for public health.
Looking back, I totally had ADHD, and some neurodivergent stuff that was not figured out at the time, I could not sit still and read a book with lots of words. But I gravitated towards nonfiction stuff, stuff with bullet points, stuff with pictures, stuff that had facts that I could easily digest just because I found that to be a lot easier to read and sit with and it was more interesting to me. I think that's also why I like comics.
Sometimes in meetings [for creating issues of The Nib], we would pitch ideas for themes for the magazine. And there was one that I had come up with that we never ended up doing when The Nib stopped.
A couple of times we did The Nib Summit in Portland, we'd all go there for a week and write down all of our ideas for themes, and we'd categorize them into themes that people will want to buy, things that are newsy and grabby. And then we had a category called Nibby, which was like things that were fascinating to the five of us only.
Five, is that right? Me, you, Eleri Harris, Shay Sarah Mirk, Matt Bors, I guess Mark Kaufman was there too, and Andy Warner. Shit, Seven of us. ah Sorry.
Oh, you know me, I'm always trying to squeeze fiction into the nonfiction stuff that I would do.I have genre of fiction brain from reading too much science fiction as a child, being obsessed with science fiction and horror and fantasy and like genre things were always just more fascinating to me.
I'm not a gifted caricaturist. I don't like drawing people, don't like drawing the extant faces of people. When I was drawing political cartoons, I just didn't want to be like, and “did you see what Ted Cruz said this week?” And then draw Ted Cruz saying it.
The materialist in me wanted to zoom out a little bit and look at structural stuff. And then you could talk about that with science fiction or whatever you want it to do in a way that's like not talking about like, oh, “Did you see the news this week?” You know, Leno-style.
On the big board of Nib ideas. I remember we had both ghosts and demons as themes. I was really excited about doing other of those because, woo! I could do a weird two-page spread about something. I'm also obsessed with ghosts and monsters and stuff. So this is the opportunity to draw my weird bugaboo gross stuff.
Monsters would have been a good theme just in general.
Monsters will be good.
“Bodies” is the one I would have wanted. Something on like the microbiome and probiotics and how everybody's really into all this stuff. Years ago I went to some conference and there was this woman who was an expert on the microbiome, the internal like mix of things you have in your body, like various forms of bacteria, the living things in your body that essentially help you regulate your body.
Like when someone says “your gut…”
Yes, your gut! And the connection between your gut and your brain. Now I sound like a MAHA influencer,I don't really mean it in that sort of sense.
Your gut flora is always the thing I hear.
Yeah, your gut flora. There's through stuff out there how that can affect your mental health and your, you know, physical health.
During early lockdown, a plate I have in my collarbone from an old injury got infected during early lockdown. Because it was summer 2020, I had to wait a very long time for surgery. During this wait I was on antibiotics for three months, and I did go completely bug-nuts insane.
And I was like, “oh, all the all the all my brain floor has been eaten by the antibiotics”, I mean, we were all out of our minds, but I was really especially fully out of my mind in a way that I just didn't feel like my brain was working at all. So it's very fascinating to me.
How about you, Mattie?
Oh, God. ah I don't know. The Nib magazines were always like a challenge for me because I don't do long-form nonfiction work. I always did short satire stuff.
So it was always, “how do I squeeze what I want to do into the theme?” And every so often I got to do like a two page spread of something weird. I reviewed Scott Adams’ Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter for the Scams issue. And I got to draw a bunch of Dilberts, which was really important for me. I drew some Dilbert's for the worker issue as well, because of my obsession with Dilbert.
But I think if we did a ghost issue, I would do maybe a little memoir comic about the time that I was in the 9/11 pit alone at an old museum job that I had where I was monitoring the temperature and humidity for that one column. That's “the last column”, they call it. We were doing the conservation with the 9/11 museum with this job. The pit had been cleaned out and finished, but the museum had not been installed yet. And I took, you know, the eight hour OSHA safety course to be able to go on the job site. Then I went on a day where the construction workers had off, so I was completely alone in the 9/11 hole.
I'm really not- for all my medium belief in cryptids and obsession with monsters and stuff-
Oh, I'm meeting all of those.
-I am not a woo-woo person in my day-to-day life… But it was so tremendously haunted down there. The psychic weight of it. Feeling physically crushed by it was, really, a very, very, very, very strange feeling that I would probably try to do something a little more earnest about, which I didn't do that often at The Nib.
I've not been to the museum since it was built. It's a weird travesty, the form in which it now exists kind of got gnarly. I don't think about museums, you can read my book about it. Now that it's kind of a theme park, now that you can buy a cheese plate shaped like America in the gift shop, I bet the psychic weight of it is a little diminished.
A cheese plate, really?
Yeah. I don't know if it's still there, but a sibling of a 9-11 victim went and reviewed the museum for Deadspin or Gawker or something (the infamous plate).
I remember editing one of your comics that you did that was pretty earnest. It was about depression or something like that. Do you remember that one?
It was for The Drugs Issue and it was about starting Lexapro right when the pandemic hit and this thing where so much of the stressors of society are the things that are bothering us. My brain chemistry is fucked up. I do have depression, but why am I doing this thing to become more functional in a broken world or whatever? People got mad at me for that one.
Why? I feel like that's so relatable. How could you not be a little wacky in this current situation? If you weren’t, I'd be a little concerned.
Exactly! Lots of people got mad at me. They felt like I was saying don't take depression meds. And I was extremely talking about how I was on depression meds.
We're diagnosing more, but everybody's just really burnt out right now, continually stressed with no ability to escape.
Every person you see on the street, every day, everyone you talk to, is having the worst five years of their life. Innervated and alienated from everything and everyone around them, everyone feels fucking insane. And the people who don't feel insane are all evil.
Yeah.
And you see them having a good time. Yeah. And it's just like, yeah, why would you not? Lots of People got mad at me. They felt like I was saying don't take depression meds. And I was like I was extremely talking about how I was on depression meds.
Well, you know, it took me having kids to actually put all those pieces together because for a while I had all these things and I was like, this doesn't quite make sense.
And then I had kids and I was like, “I can no longer function the way I used to function. I have to rewrite and do everything differently.” All the things that were working for me before with my executive functioning just shit the bed. So I had to kind of learn how to do things a little bit differently, but actually it's been good. I kind of can't give a shit about things as much anymore. Cause it's just not logistically possible, you know? It's freeing, a little bit.
If I didn’t have kids, I don't think I would be able to have a lot of money from comics. No matter how many things I've put out, it's still not the money maker. But, let's assume in this scenario that I have that. But if I hadn’t had children, I probably would want to do some travel, do some residencies, go on some weird trips. There's this clown motel in Nevada that I really would love to go to and make a story about, and just drive there. How am I realistically going to do that with two young children right now? I’d feel irresponsible bringing them there, you know? Everything's very precarious at all times, but that seems to be the case for most people right now, whether you have kids or not.
My kids are in public school. We live in a town where there seems to be a really good community feel, where people really seem to have a similar vision of the type of society they want to live in: multicultural, variance of income, similar goals of like how they want to raise their kids… our neighborhood is very gay, I love all that. I wouldn't want to live somewhere that wasn't like that.
it's still like struggle like everything's so expensive and time consuming. I feel really selfish sometimes, making comics. I know that I can't not make comics, I’d be so very unhappy, but it also feels like a luxury these days.
Yeah, it feels a little bit like we’re tap dancing at the Kit-Cat Club just as it fills up with Nazis.
Right.
I feel the same way about my neighborhood, I live in Western Queens and everybody here is very community focused and oriented. I have a similar situation where, until very recently, I had health care through my wife's very, very solid union job. She's in journalism. Recently they completely restructured and got rid of her job, so we don't have that anymore because journalism is dying.1
Things are suddenly looking a little more precarious, but I don't pull in enough money to live, even if we lived somewhere a lot less expensive, just from comics. I have a lot of other things I do to fill in the gaps, like freelance illustration, I've got like two podcasts, I'm hustling constantly just to make everything work.
If I didn't have to worry about money, I would just be traveling constantly. I would be living somewhere else for a month here or there or whatever. [regarding Decatur, Illinois or Enid, Oklahoma, apparently the two cheapest cities in the USA], probably not. I mean, I don't know the laws on the books, but I have a bad feeling about my availability to use the restroom in Oklahoma.
That's real.
I mean, Illinois is fine by me. I don't know. I've only ever lived on the East Coast, and I will never leave, and you cannot get me to leave.
I'm from New Jersey, and I live in New Jersey. I went to college in Rhode Island, and then I was in L.A. for a bit, and then Boston, then New York, and now I'm back home in New Jersey where I said I would never return, but I actually really love it.
New Jersey is underrated as far as locations go.
It really is.
I understand what you’re saying, though. I also edit comics and work freelance with other publishers. That makes more consistent money than my comics at this point. A few years ago, early in the mid 2010s, there were a lot more opportunities online for things like editorial cartooning. There was a lot of think-piece cartooning, which I'm honestly kind of over. I don't really need to do that anymore. But there was a period where I was making decent money, publishing comics online. And that dried up significantly in the past few years. All these places don't exist anymore, you know?
I have the same thing going. For 10 years, The Nib was like my steady income and doing everything else was on the side. um And now that's gone, due to the selfish actions of the evil Matt Bors. I am kidding.
It looks like you have a fun rollicking lifestyle though, from what I can see.
Thank you. I mean, it's pretty rollicking. I like to leave the country. It's where I like to go. I'm experiencing a sort of sense of rollickingness often. Last year, we took a very long trip to Japan, which was great. Right after I finished Simplicity my wife and I took two and a half weeks for our 10th wedding anniversary.
But we went away for a long time and I was like, “Wow, traveling is great. Why don't I do this more often?” “because you're not making any money while you do it and you're spending all your money while you're there.” I literally have every single thing I ate in every place I went every single day written down in a document that I can send to people [inquiring] “where do I go?” Here's 45 things. A very simple thing I think about all the time is this famous Onigiri place, just a bar where you sit down and they serve you Onigiri.
It's been open forever, a 30-person line to get in at all times. But the staff gives you an umbrella to shade yourself while you wait, which is great. It was just an Onigiri with a raw egg yolk inside of it, and that's all that was in there. A soy sauce-cured egg yolk and it was like one of the best things I’ve ever eaten in my entire life. Just the most simple thing, rice and an egg yolk but made with such care and beauty. I love to eat and would probably spend all my money on food and eating at a lot of fancy restaurants.
I like eating as well. I've literally been trying to get you to come to my house and my garden so I can cook veggies for you and your wife.
I want to come out. It's very hard to get away from my life. I want to eat the vegetables. It is nothing personal that I've not been out there yet.
I'm not taking it personally, It's okay.
Okay, good.
The vegetables are taking it personally.
Well, now the tomato season is over.
It's bean season.
I'm fasting until next summer when the corn and the tomatoes are good again in Jersey.
I'm going to be making a lot of squash dishes for the next few months. Dry beans, all the winter staples. I keep wanting to make a gardening comic, but I'm like, “there's no way I can make this interesting.” It's just going to be really navel gazing.
I don't know, Mel Gillman does those great comics about foraging…
Yeah, but that's foraging, I feel like that's just more interesting.
I don't know. I disagree. I think you would do a great job with it.
That was a little boost I needed to really consider it, so thank you.
Speaking of beans, I was going to say the other thing I would spend money on is what I got really recently, I succumbed to buying some of the Rancho Gordo beans-
What is that?
Oh.. it's… Oh God… Oh no…I’m about to ruin your life. So it's these beans, they’re from out West, they're heritage beans… I can't describe this to you. They're just, “what if beans were so expensive?” We got them and made just, you know, standard beans and rice for lunch. And they were incredible. I've been missing beans my whole life. I don't know why I didn't need beans all the time. These are amazing. And then the next week we tried to make the same dish with the Goya beans from the store, and I was like, “I'm going to kill myself. This is awful”, I now have to buy golden beans that cost a thousand dollars, the world's most expensive beans, I think.
I definitely became a bean girl this summer. I grew a bunch of varieties because everything's so depressing this year. I decided to get really obsessive about this stuff, so I planted at least seven or eight varieties of dry beans over an arch. Whenever I'd see something depressing online, I just go to my bean arch and walk around for an instant release of stress.
You have a bean arch!
…And now I have jars of dry beans.
You ever seen that episode of Joe Pera Talks with You where it's just about Joe Pera telling you how to grow a bean arch.It's very good. He's a comedian. It's really the most gentle comedy program ever made. I think you would like it.
Oh, there's also a Rancho Gordo bean subscription, Whit. Oh, God, this all sounds so stupid, these beans are so good, I cannot stress to you enough, Whit.
I'll put an order in and then I'll compare it to my own and we'll we'll go from there.
[Regarding making political cartoons] I can't stop. It's the only... I don't know. Everything's political, man.
Yeah, it doesn't feel like I'm explicitly trying to make it political. I feel like that that's how I exist in this world, that's what I'm attuned to.
I think we're both just very attuned to it for whatever reason. I mean, everything is political. My life is so politicized at this point, it's like I can never tear myself away from it. Me just like waking up and walking around is now a problem for people. But even in the past, before I came out, it's just that sort of thing where like, once you sort of glimpse the superstructure of how society is built, it's kind of impossible to talk about anything else. I'm working on a new book right now that's straightforwardly a romance, which is very different for me. But half the book is still like me talking about capitalism and state formation because it's always running the background radiation in my head.
I relate to a lot of what you’re saying. Comics, I feel like, initially especially was a way for me to figure out identity stuff, especially around race and ethnicity. I'm Black, I identify as Black, my family's mixed though, on both sides. I have heritage from a lot of different places. My parents are both from the South, but then moved North. So I feel like I've always had this weird cultural experience where I spent a lot of time down South when I was younger. And then I grew up in this relatively affluent New Jersey suburb that was not super diverse, I never quite fit in like culturally there. I've always felt like an observer, or somebody who's been very aware of the absurdities of everything. I was thinking of this recently as my grandmother passed away a few weeks ago and she grew, was born and raised in New Orleans.
I'm so sorry. Is this the one with the funeral home you wrote about?
Yes. She was featured in a bunch of my Nib comics and ended up in New Jersey in the last decade of her life, and I really got to know her during that period. But like there's no way I can't hear her experiences and my mom's experiences of literally living under American apartheid, I've always been aware of the systems my entire life. I was talking to my husband about this, like even experiencing racism in kindergarten for the first time. And he's like, “seriously, like you dealt with race in kindergarten?” I'm like, “yeah literally like somebody told me I couldn't hang out with my best friend anymore because I was the wrong color”, simple shit like that.
Jesus.
There's no way that those formative experiences don't affect the way you view the world, you know? And I think that led me to majoring in anthropology and getting interested in cultural anthropology. That has definitely affected how I approach a lot of my comics. It's just a scary time to be in a marginalized group right now. It always has been, but like especially right now. It's scary.
I never grew up in a time or a place that was scary, it's not scary to be a white Jewish person in the tri-state area. I am not fundamentally in danger and I never have been. But growing up when I did and just being aware of genocide survivors and stuff around. How do you absorb that information when you're very young? People were trying to kill me and everyone like me until very recently. Also, I grew up in a little town where there were five or fewer Jewish families. Most and it was just a way less severe external sort of marginalization, this weird thing of just feeling outside of everybody on some level.
Politics are everywhere, man. Show me an apolitical piece of work, you know?
That's true. Even with folks who think they're making points apolitically, there's always a point of view there, whether they're aware of it or not.
I was at a bar last night, and playing in the bar was the new Top Gun movie, the one that came out like two-three years ago. And that movie was trying to be the most apolitical movie of all time. Like, they won't even name the evil entity that they're fighting. It's not like the Russians, it's not the Iranians, it's not the Chinese. It's just unmarked planes they're fighting and calling “the enemy”. But also, this is military propaganda for the army that, at the time when it came out, is incinerating people across the globe daily, and valorizing the people who do it. Someone told me a long time ago, and this is totally true, that every time you see a piece of military equipment in a movie or a TV show, that means the Department of Defense has looked at the script and approved it.
Wow.
Personally, yes: I am immune to propaganda, but most people aren't.
Being pregnant, having kids has made me even more pro-choice than ever because having kids is really hard and it destroys your body, and then you have to like rebuild it, figure out who you are, what you are and what you can do after that. And like, I don't think that that's something we should take lightly. I've always been supportive of choice. I worked as a health educator, I literally had birth control charts and I'd help people figure out what they wanted to get to use and then we'd get them prescriptions. I did HIV testing, I did all that stuff. I feel very connected to clinical public health, like giving people referrals for abortion providers. We used to do that too, it's healthcare. As somebody who has a background in public health, like that's how I see it. I also worked in the school system, seeing kids who had pregnancies and didn't know what to do. And why shouldn't we have more content that's engaging and explains and destigmatizes these things? That's my take on it, to shine more light on the experience of abortion. I think if people knew what was involved and it was just like broken down and treated it as a regular medical procedure, I think there would be a lot less confusion and discomfort around it.
There's like all sorts of parallels in terms of the current wave of attacks on bodily autonomy writ large with regard to a lot of things. It's very interesting in terms of the intersection of the different types of healthcare. For some reason we've decided to put a certain number of things in a little mystifying box.
Many find it hard to understand the relative risk of things compared to other things, like abortions in general are not, if they're done safely and on time, very dangerous compared to a lot of other things that we take for granted, like for instance, driving a car; that's super dangerous.
All this nonsense right now about anti-vax stuff is really sickening me. A lot of folks who didn't grow up around childhood illnesses tend to not realize exactly what that would look like if we didn't vaccinate at the level we did, what that would actually mean for people. There's a lot of myth-making and fantasy around health right now. I think it's actually gotten way worse in the past few years
I think all the time about this stuff as it impacts trans health and how there's all these procedures that are demonized, harder to access, and criminalized. And it's stuff that is completely available to cis people whenever they want.
Yeah, the whole idea of gender affirming care is unfixed, what does that actually mean?
Especially when every celebrity is getting like FFS or FMS, right? It's already happening. I talk to like any middle-aged cis woman, they're always like, “oh yeah, I'm on estrogen (or progesterone) also”. But for some reason that is not gender affirming care, that's not ‘evil’ for some reason. The idea that some of these things are different because of who wants them and why. Like, if you want to get an abortion for I-don't-want-a-child reasons, that's ‘evil’. But getting one for- I mean, they're trying to take it away for all reasons completely. The idea that we can segregate these kinds of healthcare because of what they mean politically, right? It's about freedom and autonomy, they want you to feel a pressure to stay in the places they want you to stay.
It's not driven by reality. It's driven by whatever their endgame is. There's a big stink about abortion, but this country is doing so little for our kids right now. It's just a really crappy time to have children. I don't know if there ever was a great time to have children, but especially right now, it's a little hostile.
I think all the time to myself, “Okay, so you want to leave the country? Where are you gonna go, Hotshot? Is there a secret country that isn't subject to the fascist turn by every single nuclear power on Earth right now, that you can only know about if you look at a globe in a mirror?” Where am I gonna go!
I think about that question, I don't have a second option right now, you know what I mean?
Like, I think that's the reality for most people. I would like to stay and make things better. I don't know how. Right now I feel like I'm kind of treading water, raising my kids, like trying to make my work when I can, you know?
I don't know if there's like a magical place that's going to be any better the long run.
It's called Queens, New York, baby.
What is fun and not fun? I mean, I think I grew up so obsessed with watching The X-Files every week that I got really into thinking about this stuff all the time. I think it is more fun to think about than the stuff that the government is now saying, less fun than a homicidal fascist, racist, sexist, transphobic regime. I think conspiracy theories are not fun when they're real, or when they have you know real consequences, but they are fun to think about.
A fundamental thing for me in terms of what I've been talking about, where people in America feel so alienated and have for such a long time, where everything feels wrong and there's nobody actually addressing the root causes of these problems, so this causes other wacky things to flourish. They can either be really fun, like the Mothman, or they could be QAnon, which is like not fun for anybody. It's less fun when real people's brains are getting baked online.
um Like that's not like fun or funny to me. um But you know, harm harmless ones, i think are like, I think about aliens and ghosts and fucking cryptids and stuff because they are pure in their wankiness.
That's one of the things I love about your books. There's like a sense of discomfort that lingers throughout a lot of it. In Boys Weekend, the way you did the gradual brainwashing of that troop of dudes was really smart and creepy.
Oh, thank you so much.
Even with the Simplicity folks, there's a lot of thought put into how you presented them and how you made them talk. It made me feel like I was in a Quaker school, it was giving Quaker vibes.
Yeah, those, I mean, the people in Simplicity were very inspired by the Shakers, specifically.
I love the Shakers.
Who were, you know, Quakers on some level. They were the Shaking Quakers.
They also shake.
They also shook.
Shook!
That's the thing people know about them, is the not having sex and the chairs and stuff. But the other thing they used to do is receive ecstatic visions in church during services, tear their clothes off, and go running around in the woods naked. They were really deep in the shit, ecstatically, which I thought was so cool. My wife, whom I've known for a very long time, went to Quaker school, soI've just absorbed all this knowledge about Quakers.
I went to Quaker school for elementary school. So when I read Tis a Gift to be Simple, I was like, oh, we to sing it all the time.
It's been stuck in my head for years.
It was this artsy Quaker school. All the buildings were red, it actually felt very culty, I'd like to address that in comics form at some point.
I come down a little more positively. I never was in that sort of thing, but the idea of communal living, I went into that book very judgy, and by the end of it, I was kind of like, “I don't know, it's not so bad.” Everybody here hates each other. The idea of consensus and intentional community and all that stuff. But if I was 10 years old and you told me, “you have to sit quietly for an hour”, I would probably have gotten insane.
We had a morning meeting, we had to sit down and my legs would fall asleep, but you weren't allowed to move.
Silence.
I remember I would stand up to filter out and I'd feel like I was going to pass out because my legs had no feeling in them.
And what you have to do is you're allowed to stand up to speak when the spirit moves you. So you just fake the spirit moving you, to say something about your day, if your If your legs were falling asleep.
The thing that I find fascinating about conspiratorial thinking is that there are so many things currently happening right now that if you were to state them plainly, you sound insane. If you just told somebody who doesn't really pay attention to politics or doesn't have a structural problem with America and just told them about Operation Condor, they'd be like, “well, you're insane”, but no, this happened. I don't like that this is all real stuff. ah So I guess I can give over to conspiratorial thinking in that it’s often just the facts of what America does, will do, and has done.
X-Men.
Yeah.
I think I first got into it through the cartoon, now there's a new X-Men I like, X-Men 97.
It's not bad. It's pretty good.
And there was just something about the teamwork aspect of it. Mutants feeling like not fully part of society. And don't know, it just stood out to me. My brother and I would watch those cartoons and then I started getting into the comics. My mom was the one introduced me to comics because she also had trouble focusing in school sometimes and she was like, “I started reading comics and that helped me get into reading” and then I started reading Archie at first and then I started reading X-Men and some and some of the Marvel stuff, Generation X and all of that. I don't know if I have a favorite though.
You don't have a favorite X-Man?
Well, okay, I mean, are we talking about personality or talking about powers? I do like Gambit for personality reasons, he's Cajun and kind of reminds me of family stuff.
You like Gambit for his accurate representation of Cajun culture?
No, it's not accurate, it just makes me laugh.
I always had a huge crush on Jean Grey.
Oh yeah, she's badass.
I thought she was cool because I also have a brain that doesn't really work very well.
I like Rogue. Something about the allure of “I can't touch you”, teenage girl stuff.
I was into with playing the X-Men brawler, a side-scroller video game that they would have at the movie theater. Do you remember that?
Vaguely.
And I was obsessed with playing as Nightcrawler because he was so cool.
Oh, I do love Nightcrawler.
We all love Nightcrawler. Cool dude.
Comics are so isolating, you know, I'm in a dark hole all day. Especially with traditional book publishing, like from when I have the idea to when it is a book, and a book in people's hands it is like three years. So you're just sitting with this thing, hoping this is interesting to people, hoping anyone gives a shit. The thing that I legitimately do like the most, and this sounds so corny, is just meeting a single person that comes to like a thing and reads it or comes to a convention and buys the book or talks to me about it or whatever is so infinitely rewarding compared to sitting at home.
I agree. I feel like that makes it worth it, people would just get it. like Sometimes they don't even have to say anything, but, “I like this and look forward to the next issue” where I appreciate that. It's very small, but something I realized too, even just being at SPX last week, because that was like the first show I'd done this year, is people really do need to hear that you like their work and that... like that you appreciate what they're doing because you can often feel thankless when you're by yourself and working on something. There is often a lag time between when it's made and when it comes out, it can feel thankless sometimes. It really does make a difference when somebody comes up and says something, however small.
I love comics readers because we are such a niche sort of medium in terms of, like, how seriously we are taken by the mainstream press, by how much your average reader of books doesn't consider it literature. The people that really love this stuff and come to shows, or come to events, or come to comics readings or whatever, have like some understanding of how difficult it is to work in comics and how much dedication it takes.
I was recently on a comics panel and the crowd was great, everyone was wonderful. But earlier in the day I was talking to a volunteer that was like taking me somewhere And she was like, “I love graphic novels. Not that I read them, but I used to be a teacher, and in the end: anything to get the kids reading.”
You know, I've noticed that sometimes I think that there has been a major shift, like even in the past decade with librarians embracing graphic novels, being real champions of them. But I was at some school event where a discussion was, “Well, you know, when they're young, they're going to be looking at the picture books, but essentially we want to phase out that to real books, real novels.” But picture books can have value too. Having visual literacy is important. Being able to discern things and make connections and understand what happens between panels, that requires intelligence, requires engagement that speaks more to them not really understanding comics than to comics not having value. But there's still, like, for instance, Dogman. My kid, like all the kids, loves Dogman, and I know, like, things like that, they can be like, well, that's kind of like a junk food read.
I don't support Dog Man because he's a cop.
Yeah, that's tricky.
But go off, I guess. Was the dog also a cop?
He was his pet. Actually, I don't know if they ever brought that up in the beginning. I mean, I guess he was employed in the department.
But he wasn't like a police dog?
He was kind of a police dog.
Well, then that's two cops. ACAB includes Dog Man, I'm sorry, Mr. Pilkey. I'm a thirty-nine year old childless woman. I haven't read Dogman, I'm sorry.
It's easy to say, like, "oh, I love so much the public health stuff you're doing for The Nib, where I learned so much, reading that work, truly all stuff I had no idea about for the most part, and I just learned a lot. That being the main familiarity I had with work for a long time, I was rereading Fizzle the other day um in preparation for this. I was really taken aback by how good and gifted you are with regular-people dialogue. This sort of slice of life mode of storytelling that I am like so completely incompetent in and never even attempt.
I'm so stuck in my ways as a genre writer, I am always very envious of that ability to write and make interesting in terms of visual story flow of two people having a conversation about something that is not trying to kill them, or is not from space or whatever. I find myself really impressed with it.
I appreciate that. What's funny because you're like, I'm a genre person, I'm a slice of life person, that's the. type of stuff I'm drawn to. I love the rhythm of conversations, I love drawing like little minor facial interactions. I'm sure it has to do something with like being a quiet kid, being a quiet person, somebody with social anxiety. I've always been somebody like who likes watching people.
And I've always felt like I've had two sides of myself as a cartoonist. The part that likes to do more educational nonfiction stuff and then I have a side, which is like really dear to my heart, which is just making personal stories, whether they're fiction or autobio, even though I found autobio to be really difficult nowadays, I don't really have much as much of an interest to do it anymore.
Sci-fi is not really in my wheelhouse, and you do it in a way that I find to be really engaging. Your satire is on point, I love the the attention to details. In Boys Weekend, all the little products, the advertisements, how you you world build dystopias. But there's like a warmth to the work too, an in-depth exploration of identity and and confidence and like self-knowledge and relationships. I really liked in Boys Weekend, the relationship between Adam, the the guy who was getting married, and and Sammy. It was so complex because like he was such a bro, but there was complexity to his character, he wasn't just one note.
Thank you. I forgot until rereading Fizzle also that we share a love of making fake advertisements.
Oh, I love that stuff.
It's not easy, but it's a fun way to like introduce a tone into something. You can dial up the surreality of a situation or the world that the reader is in by like making the advertisements a little goofy and also like do some world building. I'm just like, here's like the place that we are. This is what a commercial would be like. And this is, for me, totally ripped from specifically RoboCop and Futurama, the two things I'm always thinking about when making fake commercials.
I feel like you can also tap into, like, the culture at the time and the way people speak. I grew up watching lot of sitcoms, especially stuff in the 90s that just had this certain way episodes wrapped up. I like making spoofs of stuff like that. We're kind of on a downward spiral with reality television right now, but I still like playing around with stuff like that in my comics. I went through a phase where I was really into dating reality television shows like The Bachelor.
You did a Nib comic about The Bachelor, right?
Yeah. But Bachelor is trash now. But I haven't watched it in a few years.
Oh, no, it's not good anymore?
It's just bad. When the contestants already know what they need to do, they come in, they have an agenda. I mean, reality to television by definition, isn't really genuine. In the earlier eras of reality television, I did feel there was something genuine about the people coming in because they truly were not aware of the system that they were being put in for reality television, but now everybody's hyper aware of "what you have to do".
So it's just not interesting anymore.
Yeah. Everybody's like an aspiring actor in a way that they didn't always used to be. There used to be a couple of aspiring actors, sure. But there was always like this... aspiring DJ.
Listen, the act of DJing makes you a DJ. All the amateur DJs reading this: I don't think you have to be a professional DJ.
There used to be genuine weirdos that were just there being weird and wanted to be famous, but had no sense of why or for what. They would just be there, acting strange because that's genuinely how they were. Whereas now it's almost like we're and like the capitalist realism phase of reality TV, where everyone's hyper aware of the structure of the thing and they understand, “oh, I'm an archetype of this or that kind of person”.
There always was this suspension of disbelief, like, just, like... And that's why I wrote my Nib comic about The Bachelor and wrestling. You know that a lot of this stuff is not real, but that's part of the enjoyment. You're pretending all these relationships and things. As a result of, for instance, social media and all the podcasts and things devoted to breaking down like the politics of The Bachelor. At first I was like, that's kind of fun... but now it's not fun anymore. I just wanted to watch it at night, be on my Twitter, which I don't use anymore, and just read the stupid comments.
My first love, creatively, was music. And had a band when I was a teenager and I would love to spend a year and just devote myself to making music. We're ramping up right now to record again in a month or so. It is a side project for all of us, everybody's got a job that is not music. We don't tour. We play mostly in New York City. We played an away show in D.C. earlier this year at Liberation Weekend, which was incredible, but that's like probably the furthest afield we'll ever go as a band.
We're all pushing 40 and have jobs, ah but it is like, it's called Faith/Void. I'm so immensely proud of the work that we do. I would love to really, really spend some time to be able to do it, but it's just never worked out with how my life goes. We call it ‘Shugazi’, which is a very stupid joke. It's sort of noisy post-punk. It's like, “what if their replacements were all really bad at their instruments?”
I've always loved movies. I worked in a video store back in the day when those things... existed. Getting to rent whatever I wanted and watching all the art house stuff and that was around when I got into indie comics was a very foundational time for me. I was really interested in documentaries, specifically. And I also feel like being able to make nonfiction comics is similar to that in sense, except for a lot less expensive. It hit me that I was likely not going to be able to to direct a feature length documentary effort without a fair amount of capital. I just wanted to tell stories, to do research, but like there had to be another way I could do it. And I'd been making comics informally all along. So it felt like a natural shift.
I like the challenge of it sometimes. It's like, how can I make this topic that seems boring on the surface or dry or like technical, how can I use comics to make it something that's more digestible and more interesting? And I think that's like big challenge, for instance, with public health, because I still feel like a lot of folks don't fully understand what public health is. And now we're starting to see it now that all these things are being stripped away and, um and we're in limbo with a lot of stuff. It's an opportunity to use visual storytelling to to address things that might seem really one dimensional or like even even removed because it's hard to understand or intimidating or jargon-y or academic-y. That there's ways to take that stuff and like make it fun. But it's a lot of work to do that. So, and there's not, I don't know. Like, I like working on graphic novels and like things like that, but it's so much work.
I've done research now two books in a row, I'm putting like the heaviest air quotes possible. It's like for both of them, I read a couple nonfiction books and wrote down my thoughts as I read the nonfiction books as I was writing my stupid little story. And i'm just like, “this is awful”. Simplicity grew out of me reading this book, Paradise Now, that drove me nuts about millenarian, pre-Marxist, socialist cults of the eighteen hundreds. And then the book I'm working on now is after reading David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything. I think people who do nonfiction, like serious nonfiction work, are God's strongest soldiers. I don't understand it.
I want to do more kids' nonfiction now that my kid's getting to that age where he's asking about all these things and like, it's like random stuff.
it's just like me and like, maybe that's the way forward to do some, some stuff for younger ages too, because, uh, I don't know, he'll come home, like now he's into the Titanic, so everything's built in that. Kids love the Titanic
Oh my God, in my neighborhood, there's a mutual aid project, free books for everybody. And there I saw it. I see a lot of children's literature being cycled through, and there’s one of them that's called I Survived 9/11. There's all these books that are the I Survived dot, dot, dot.
It's interesting you said that because we have I Survived the Titanic. We got that last week, and I said literally out loud, “I wonder if there's an I Survived 9/11?”
So, yeah. ah I feel like there's a whole new world of of stuff for nonfiction for younger groups that I'm interested in
Actually, does this ever happen to you where, because your work is not like, you know, ‘how to draw comics the Marvel way’, nor like anime style, but a little cartoony, but you write about serious stuff… do people ever get weird about it to you? Because sometimes people have the mindset of, “but the eyeballs are so big, you can't talk about serious subjects if the eyeballs are big (or whatever)”. And I'm like, “I don't think that's true…”
Yeah, I get a lot of like, “oh, are these for kids?”
So somebody had given this shitty review of Montana Diary, a mini comic I made a few years back.
And it's about a road trip through Northwestern Montana, Glacier National Park, and it deals with a lot of stuff around like politics and history. And some guy was like, “What's the big deal? She went to Montana and she had a bad time. like I'm sure like I could make a ah comic like that just above the Jersey Shore”. And I'm like, but you didn't make it… but I would actually love to do some type of anthropological reflection on the New Jersey Shore. That would be great.
I think the hard thing with making political work is to not get too didactic, especially with fiction. And it's really, there is such an impulse that I have for a character to like to turn to camera and be like, hey, you, go, you know, take up arms against the state or whatever. But you know, if my work as it currently stands has a lesson to be learned that is not too in the weeds about it’s that: if you want the world to change, you have to do something about it. You can't wish and hope forever. Direct action gets the goods.
In a lot of ways it's a really hard time to be in any sort of entertainment or media, but also it's a great time because especially as it feels more precarious to live online, I like having printed media. I like having zines and mini comics and like, I like being part of that culture. Even going to SPX last week, things can feel really gloomy right now and tedious. Sometimes it feels like I'm throwing work into the void. You know what I mean? I'm 41 now. I'm not where I was when I started, I'm having to rethink my relationship with comics and the expectations I had versus like what I'm experiencing right now. It's just been a great experience despite the ups and downs. Overall the community is really good, a lot of like-minded weirdos. We might have totally different lives but when I can see them we can chat about comics and be obsessive together. When there's a lot of disconnection, it's nice to have that to come back to, even if it's changing and shifting.
An artist I've been rereading is Brecht Evens lately. Evens' artwork is just so lush in the way that he plays with pacing is just very exciting. I'm looking forward for Cannon, the new Lee Lai book, she is one of the best comic storytellers out there right now. I recently read um Wedding Juice and other melodramas by Sanika Phawde, I really liked that. That was one of the more exciting comics I've read recently. The way that she plays with space and color, is just so happy and whimsical. I just like the way like she makes people move. It's just like kind of like goofy and strange and like wacky.
I've been really obsessed with ah Evan Dahm's 3rd Voice comic. It's a web comic, exactly the kind of work that I love to read and want to make. The world is like so well developed, a masterclass in world building in terms of when you need it to be developed, it is developed, and where it is not important, it is left to your imagination to make the world feel just completely humongous. um And it is not too bogged down in detail for the sake of detail in the way that so much fantasy and science fiction is like, so like I have to work on every single little thing.
The world needs more idiosyncratic. Yeah, I was going to say the world needs more idiosyncratic, sort of like hard to pin down art.
I'm seeing a lot of younger cartoonists now who I think are like going back to that sort of just like DIY, like and rusty, crusty stuff. I like that. I want more of that.
The post WHIT TAYLOR/MATTIE LUBCHANSKY: The Ticket for 2028 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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