You were a student at the Center for Cartoon Studies out in Vermont – how did that change the way you work, in both positive in negative ways?
Achsa Sprague (the subject of the Xeric-funded comic I Still Live) was famous when she was alive and working, and her life story is amazing. Why do you think she isn’t more well-known today?
Good question! I don't have the answer. I wonder the same thing about many incredible women, queers, people of color who have been left out of the history books. I work with spirits and it felt like Achsa literally flagged me down while I was in Vermont and demanded that I draw her story. She was a workaholic in her lifetime and she self-published her own zine-style books of prose and poetry to pay for her tours around the U.S. She could be kind of manic and I sensed her urging me to work on her story all day, well into the night. I think many of the women of the early spiritualist movement in the mid-to-late 1800s have been forgotten because of the de-bunking that went on in the 1920s and later. Spiritualism had become a big industry by then, and there certainly were frauds and people indulging in sketchy practices. Harry Houdini set out to debunk the entire movement because of an alleged personal vendetta and spiritual betrayal, and he basically succeeded. I've noticed lots of men who read I Still Live like to bring this up. Truth is, Houdini learned a lot of his early tricks from spiritualists. The spiritualists often used trickery to induce the suspension of disbelief of their clients, but I don't think that implies that they are criminals, or even fraudulent. Magicians and healers have used similar tactics on needy individuals throughout the centuries, and people continue to seek out their services and swear by the results. I believe the Spiritualists, mostly women practicing forms of magical healing, therapy and entertainment within their homes and the homes of their neighbors proved a threat to the male-dominated theatrical magic/illusionist industry. This is why Houdini went after them the way he did, in a similar way that early physicians went after midwives. So they tend to go down in history as crazy women pulling off elaborate hoaxes. Looking into it further, it's much more complicated than that. Sara Rath, a Vermont author, is currently working on a fuller, more comprehensive bio of Achsa's life. I look forward to reading it.
What was the process like for gathering and editing the material for Gay Genius? Would you do a project as large as that again?
Oh wow. I kept saying I wouldn't do it again but of course that didn't last long. I'm right now working on the 3rd run of the Collective Tarot, a collaboratively produced Tarot deck. It's a huge project and we've been at it for five years now. I have plans for more Gay Geniuses, but ideally they will be smaller page counts and staple-bound. Color still, but more affordable like a periodical or zine. The artists who submitted pieces to GG were propositioned by me to submit to the book via my manifesto/call for submissions. I wanted to curate the anthology as a testament to the history and art that was being produced within my communities. It was a long process. A lot of folks, including myself, have a lot of punk damage to wade through when we are on the brink of taking ourselves seriously as artists. The DIY ethic, while it has taught me so much, is fundamentally an individualist, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps kind of ethic. I'd like to see a shift to DIO: do-it-ourselves. Many of the contributors needed a good amount of coaxing. I see it as fundamentally a self-esteem problem, a result of years of being told that our artwork, bodies, voices, and lives are unimportant, unworthy. Gay Genius is meant as an ego-booster-shot to the veins of my queer communities, and a thank-you offering to all those who have come before, whose blood runs through those veins.
What were your initial thoughts when I came to you about the free comic Brad Trip? You came up with a mystical, dark interpretation of the theme. In fact, all of the contributors seemed to have some personal mythology or magic worked into their pages.
I know, right? It was uncanny the way all of those stories fit together...! I didn't know what I wanted to do for Brad Trip till a few weeks before the deadline. And then it just spilled out. I create my comics as spells, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. Someone special to me has a moth phobia and the comic is partly for her. I have been scared of moths in the past, but recently they have been around me a lot and I become easily obsessed. Scary, magical, metamorphic night butterflies. The comic is a nod to the myth of Baba Yaga and Vasilisa, a spell for my special friend, and an homage to Ivan Bilibin, a bad-ass book illustrator who specialized in Slavic folklore.
Do you have some personal symbols that came up in the Brad Trip piece that seem to recur elsewhere in your work?
Yeah I do. I had night terrors a lot growing up and my very first one was a giant slithering serpent. Snakes pop up a LOT in my pictures. Serpents are a common night terror vision for people. The snakes I draw are more of a reference to ancestral knowledge passed down through DNA than a phallic symbol, but you never know. In my family ghosts are very real, so they show up a lot in my comics. Skeletons and bones. Witches and crones. Also cats, birds of prey and scavengers like ravens, crows and raccoons. I'm out on the porch right now and a crow is teasing our cat. I love gynocentric symbols like spirals, meanders, chevrons, that ancient stuff. I use a lot of black. It's hard for me to start drawing on a white piece of paper, I am more comfortable filling most of page with ink and then drawing the images out of the shadows.
Tell us about the Collective Tarot group and the cards you helped create.
Oh gosh. Well my friends and I wanted a Tarot deck that we could relate to more than many of the decks available on the market, so we decided to make our own. It started in 2007 when we began, as a group of five, to study the tarot. Through consensus process we renamed some of the cards, re-represented the minor arcana suits by different magical objects: feathers, keys, bottles, and bones; changed the 'face' cards to 'phase' cards: Seeker, Apprentice, Artist, and Mentor. Enlisted a bunch of our artist friends to draw cards from the major arcana and printed a first, self-published edition of 500 decks in 2008. We sold out very fast, but it took another 2 years to get the next edition printed, published by Eberhardt Press in 2010. Again we sold out very fast. We are just finishing the fundraising for the 3rd, independently-published round of 2000 decks. They are 78 color cards + a compact two hundred-and-something-page booklet, wrapped in a handsome sleeve. They should be out in August. I don't think any of us, when we were first starting out, had any idea how big the project would become. People have really taken ownership of the deck for themselves, assigning their own definitions to the cards, tattooing the images on their bodies, which is pretty awesome. I drew the Bones suit, the suit representing the element of earth, as well as the major arcana card the Code (a newer, queerer version of the Emperor).
You had one of the greatest collections of books, I got a lot of great ones when I went to that moving sale of yours. What are you reading now?
Aw, thanks! I'm kind of a hoarder so it's healthy for me to get rid of stuff periodically. As long as they are going to good loving homes! Ha. right now I am reading through the stack of awesome minis I got at CAKE in Chicago: Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream # 2 by Laura Park, Face Man by Clara Bessijelle, Stonewall by Sasha Steinberg, lots of cool stuff. Other than that, most of my reading is research-based. Genealogy research, reading about the Goddess, continuing research for the Babe Bean comic, and trying to do as much learning as I possibly can. I just finished reading Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother and it really blew my mind. I don't think I've ever read a book like that before. Also I just finished the first two Hunger Games books, which prompted me to finally start reading my Medicinal Plants of the Northwest book after it sat on my shelf for years...
Whose comics did you like reading before you became a comic artist? Who are you reading now?
Hmm...Bloom County, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Elf Quest...los Bros Hernanadez, Phoebe Gloeckner, Julie Doucet....Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, Marjane Satrapi, David Small...right now I love Laura Park's stuff. Elisha Lim, Matt Runkle, Clio Sady. I want to read comics by crazy people, POC, socially conscious radical homos, aka all of the above.
