Episode 659: Leela Corman

[00:00:01] John asked me to do that album cover kind of out of the blue. And that was my first experience drawing wrestlers or doing research into wrestling at all. And that was a very specific time period of wrestling that he wanted to depict.

[00:00:28] Early 80s West Coast territory wrestling, pre-Vince McMahon, pre-WWE, whatever. Pre-Vince consolidation. Yeah. So and when it was a lot more gritty just visually. So it was a lot of fun for me to research and play around with. But no, no, I had no background drawing wrestlers.

[00:00:48] I have a background in martial arts and dance. So I had a lot of physical movement experience to draw on in my work, but not wrestling specifically. Is there a connection at all? Did that like spur this on?

[00:01:01] Was that the genesis of wrestling finally kind of making its way into this book? Yes. I think because I realized how much I enjoyed drawing sweaty bodies in motion was so much fun drawing wrestling.

[00:01:14] And it's funny, when I try to think back, I have tried to remember when that came into the book and that character came into my writing. And I don't remember. It must have been so organic that maybe she was always there.

[00:01:33] It seems like a really good way of depicting a trauma response, the coping mechanism. What about her coping specifically? The wrestling you mean? Yeah. I went back and reread the PTSD strip that you did. And there's definitely there are aspects of physical movement.

[00:01:53] As you said, you're a dancer, but almost finding a way to use your body to, I guess, to cope. Yeah. Well, I was a dancer. I should say I quit in 2017 in the early stages of working on this book, although that was not connected.

[00:02:09] Well, yeah, I mean, your body is the thing that's having the experience, whatever experience it is. So so you have to you have to include it. You're not a brain and a jar, you know, I changed therapist recently.

[00:02:23] So this is something that I've been talking to my new one about a lot. You also read about EMDR and I had a few conversations with her and my old therapist about somatic response.

[00:02:36] That that form of therapy, which which deals with where trauma is carried in the body. Yeah, I'm not so sure what I think of that. I'm also totally not an expert in any way. So no one should ever listen to my opinions about it. I genuinely don't know.

[00:02:55] Like, I don't know whether there's scientific backing for that and what people's experience of it is. I think I've heard that for so many years and when I remember being in my 20s in the 1990s and having friends bring that up and thinking like, OK, well,

[00:03:11] or even saying very specific things like I carry my trauma in my right hip. Like I kind of have an open question about that. You know, it sounds like they're carrying it in like a pocket or a fanny pack.

[00:03:25] Right. I mean, but I don't want to dismiss it at all. I never want to dismiss people's experiences of themselves and of therapy. I am not a good candidate for therapy period. Why is that? Because my mother is a therapist. So my mother is a Jewish psychotherapist.

[00:03:45] So I think that we probably spend a lot of time on that topic. Yeah, I mean, only because of that. It's also just it's just I found talk therapy to be not the best modality for me. I see how it helps other people a lot.

[00:04:00] I think I'm already a very analytical person with a lot of people to talk to. I like action. Like give me give me really structured action items and train me in some specific communication techniques and I can get a lot done. Yeah, solve a lot of problems.

[00:04:18] And I think this probably relates a lot to my mother, but but of being almost overly analytical to the point where it can actually be a problem and like a kind of paralysis in and of itself. Totally.

[00:04:32] And like if you're already a cerebral person from a cerebral culture, you know, maybe there's other modalities in there out there for you. You know, why did you end up moving back up north? Well, a bunch of reasons in 2019.

[00:04:48] I kind of opened my eyes and looked around me at Florida and at Gainesville and I realized I cannot raise my daughter there.

[00:04:57] I just started to notice the way that my friends with older daughters were talking about their kids experiences like I had one friend who said, oh, you know how it is when girls start high school, they immediately get depressed and start getting sexually harassed all the time.

[00:05:10] And I was like, wait, no, I don't know how that's not how it is. Is that how it is here? That's not how it was where I grew up. So, you know, I kind of started to finally really notice how everything was still felt to me anyway.

[00:05:27] Like it was run by this white Baptist old boys network behind the scenes. Maybe like maybe it's not the face of things, but it really felt like these are still the people in control. And then the pandemic happened. So I was already kind of my wheels were turning.

[00:05:42] I was thinking about how much I really wanted to be back in New England. I lived in Boston for 10 years and I was thinking, you know, that's a really that's a good place to raise a kid. That's a place where education is highly valued and very diverse.

[00:05:56] I was noticing how white the schools were, how segregated the towns still felt. And of course, the north is very segregated too. But if I were to send my child to public school in Gainesville, it would be not diverse at all. I heard that.

[00:06:14] Yeah, I know you heard that. I thought you were selling girls cookies because it's cold. You want to be part of this interview? I don't mind that you heard that. The truth. She's the only one in the immediate family that I haven't interviewed now at this point.

[00:06:32] Well, that'll come. The pandemic happened and everything kind of ground to a halt like it did for everybody. And, you know, no one could think about the future. But it became obvious that how bad things were getting in Florida. The fascism was becoming very visible.

[00:06:49] So all of these things that I had sort of had an inkling about in 2019 that made me want to get us all out of there. But what I thought was going to be a relatively slow pace suddenly became very glaringly visible.

[00:07:03] And then the breaking point was the first weekend of June, Tom took Molly Rose to the kids Black Lives Matter march.

[00:07:12] And while they were out, I was home and I started seeing reports that there were trucks flying Confederate flags running people off the road in McEnopy, which is the next town over. And apparently allegedly one was circling the kids march.

[00:07:26] I don't know if that's was accurate or not. I didn't ask, but it was like the epigenetic switch flipped like all of the lessons learned from my family about knowing when it's time to leave.

[00:07:40] Yeah, which my family did not because who could have right in the 1930s in Poland? You know, nobody thought Germany was going to invade till they did as far as I know, at least certainly not.

[00:07:52] You know, people living in a small town in southeastern Poland like my family. So it was like an instantaneous, you know, put the house on the market, update the passports, pack the bags and get the fuck out. Yeah. And we were we were at August 2020.

[00:08:09] I could never have predicted how bad things were going to get there. Yeah. It surprises me. The governor is certainly not helping things down there. Governor is the governor is a white nationalist and no one is talking about that in the national press before he was elected.

[00:08:27] That was something that people in Florida were talking about, and people are normalizing him now as a serious politician. I mean, I don't you know, who knows what kind of legs his career has at this point now that people have actually seen all pleasant.

[00:08:43] It was very funny like realizing on a national level, which is what a charisma black hole that man is.

[00:08:52] I mean, that's the bitter laugh that I can have because he is completely destroyed a place that I loved and continues to wreak havoc on the lives of everyone there, especially the most vulnerable.

[00:09:04] How quick was that timeline from from the the March to you actually like pulling up your stakes and leaving town? Two months. Two months. Yeah. That's it. That's a quick turnaround. Just completely uproot your life like that. Yes, it is when I want to do something.

[00:09:21] I'm very single-minded about it. Yeah. What's the process like? I mean, especially you and you and Tom being tied to the school down there. Why suppose during the pandemic, you could at least move a lot of the classes virtually at that point? Yeah, well, Tom was really smart.

[00:09:39] He had already, he didn't know he was being smart when he did this, but he had already started building a really robust online presence for the school. And so when the pandemic happened, they were already there ready to pivot to online completely. Now it's a mix though.

[00:09:57] There's a brick and mortar school and then there's the online classes. You ended up in Providence specifically because of RISD? No, actually I did not have a job at RISD when I moved here. I was still teaching at University of Florida, was teaching remotely for fall 2020.

[00:10:16] No, I just we chose Providence because Boston has become unaffordable. If I had my ideal dream come true, it would have been to Cambridge. I loved living in Cambridge. Those were a great bunch of years. It's a nice place to be, but that's okay.

[00:10:36] You know, Providence is nice. It's a cool little town and I love teaching at RISD. That was just a really nice thing that happened. Really because of Ariel Bordeaux, who was a librarian at RISD for many years and connected me with the chair of the illustration department there.

[00:10:57] Are you teaching comics there? Yeah, I'm teaching when there's space for it in the schedule. I'm teaching comics and graphic novels. There's always a comics component to whatever class I'm teaching. I teach some of the concepts classes for sophomores and I'm also teaching an AMFA program.

[00:11:16] So that's a more free form kind of advising students one-on-one on their projects right now. I'll be expanding my MFA classes next year and I do a lot of one-on-one independent studies in comics as well.

[00:11:33] I was thinking about this earlier, reading an interview that you were doing where, you know, it's a very familiar story for anybody who's over the age of, I don't know, probably like 40 that went to art school, didn't teach comics, had to study something else.

[00:11:48] But I wonder if there's obviously studying painting like really deeply informed the work you do and it seems like it afforded you the ability to almost approach the medium from a different angle. Yeah, yeah, I trained as a painter.

[00:12:08] There's a lot of stuff in my background through study and interest both that did not come into my work for a long time. Sort of I sort of siloed it off for 20 years and pretended it never happened.

[00:12:19] And then it all sort of came rushing back in in my 40s. So I've become much more of a multidisciplinary artist and a person much more interested in the multidisciplinary as well, like as an audience member. Why did you silo it off?

[00:12:42] I had a painting teacher who succeeded in she hated me and she did not want me to keep painting and she succeeded in in making me stop painting for 20 years.

[00:12:56] That was sort of an exciting incident when I was very young and vulnerable, took me a long time to recover from it.

[00:13:02] And the only way that I sort of climbed back out of what that experience caused for me was by just deciding to be an illustration major a few years later. I remember thinking, you know, I had quit school and I was taking some time off.

[00:13:18] I was waiting tables and doing other jobs and I, you know, I can't do this indefinitely. I was also drawing comics that whole time. I remember thinking, I can't do this indefinitely. I need to figure out how to get paid to draw pictures.

[00:13:33] That's how I became an illustrator and I did that for a really long time and I was just very focused on on that hustle because it's a real hustle.

[00:13:43] And for most people, it's kind of a short lived career because your style is only really relevant for a certain amount of time. For me, it was also no longer interesting after a certain point to do that kind of work.

[00:13:59] But luckily I was already, I had already long ago mostly become a person who makes comics. So when I came back to it, when I started bringing my painting training into my comics, that completely changed my artistic practice and made me a very different artist.

[00:14:18] Now I'm starting to go more in the direction of painting, just solely painting, which has been really nice. Getting tired or not wanting to, I guess getting bored with illustration. Was that a product of all the work being for hire? No, I never did work for hire.

[00:14:36] No one ever wanted to pay me enough to do work for hire. Like pro tip if somebody is going to ask you to do a work for hire job, it has to be at least five figures for that kind of work and that kind of headache.

[00:14:49] No, it was that I just like I was a totally different person. I mean doing illustration work started to feel shallow to me, doing editorial illustration. And you know, that's lucky for me because I had someplace else to go artistically.

[00:15:08] I felt like I was never going deep enough and never really fulfilling what I actually wanted to do as an artist. I really enjoyed it for a long time and I will still do things that kind of resemble illustration for people who really want my work.

[00:15:23] But it's usually like a friend wants me to do a tour poster for their band or someone wants me to design a tattoo for them or something like that's different. Leave the editorial illustration for the young, you know, that's probably more fun for them.

[00:15:39] Whatever illustration just left, you know, it just didn't feel it didn't feel like me anymore. I assume that's how the the Tube Mountain Goats albums came about. Yeah, that was just purely John asking me to illustrate them and that was a blast.

[00:15:58] Like that was like an artistic collaboration, you know, that was really fun. What's your sense of why you've gotten even more fully into painting? And what is what does that afford you that you're not getting in comics? It's just different.

[00:16:12] There's no better, you know, I'm doing both at the same time. Painting is just a different art form. It's like the difference between, I don't know, you know, punk and classical music or something. They're just different. They serve different moods, different different spectrums of experience.

[00:16:33] How would you describe the mood and experience of painting versus comics? Well, I'm not. It's not free from narrative, but I'm not trying to depict a recognizable narrative.

[00:16:51] And it's not sequential so I can work out a lot of ideas that I might be carrying around for a graphic novel in a single image that that. May convey them in a different way.

[00:17:03] A lot of it is also the process experience of painting, the physical experience of painting, which is something I get a lot out of in comics as well. But when I'm painting, I'm working really big. So I'm standing. It's physically very different.

[00:17:18] I'm zooming in and out between very far away and very close. And I'm not sure what direction it's going to go at this point. We'll see. Do you mean there's a sense of physicality in it? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

[00:17:35] I mean, it's not just a sense like it's a physical act. No, it's a completely engaging physical act. You know, having just stopped dancing, whether this is filling some of that void for you? No, I don't think so.

[00:17:51] Painting was one of the first things I ever did as a person. It's a very, very old thing for me probably older than physical movement. No, stopping dancing was a totally fine thing. I lift weights now.

[00:18:09] I mean, I always lifted weights, but now that's like a thing I'm a little more focused on. It is that thing of needing to fill that with something. I have a degenerative disc disease and I've not been able to exercise for the last few months.

[00:18:25] You don't really realize how much it impacts your mood until you stop doing it. I'm sorry to hear that. That sucks. I hope you can get some help for that. I got an epidural. I'm actually like back up and walking around, but... Good, good.

[00:18:44] I think it's just because when you're younger and you can move more, you take it for granted, really. I beat the crap out of myself until my body was not capable of taking it anymore.

[00:18:59] In the last couple of years, I've developed a lot of pretty extreme chronic pain that I'm managing all the time. I have a lot of injuries, a lot of arthritis, a lot of stuff going on. I look very able-bodied, but I don't feel very able-bodied.

[00:19:18] I don't move well anymore. Is some of that a direct result of dancing? Oh yeah, no one tells you when you start dancing in restaurants that it's bad for your body. I was dancing on hard floors in ballroom shoes all the time and training constantly.

[00:19:34] I think some of it is also... In my teens and twenties, I was a martial arts student. I got hurt a lot there. Some other unfortunate things. In 2018, I was hit by a car. It wasn't that bad. I was knocked off my bike.

[00:19:53] If I had been walking, she would have hit me in my side. I was in a very vulnerable place and I probably would have been in the hospital. She hit me in the hip and the knee.

[00:20:02] I landed on my hands and knees with my bike pretzels around my knees. I think I twisted my knees pretty badly and I didn't really notice it. I've already injured my knees a bunch of times. I get up and limp to where I was going.

[00:20:18] Then I had a really bad fall in the woods the next year in the snow. I really injured my knee in a way that was catastrophic and I've never recovered from. A lot of physical activity, a couple of accidents, a couple of pregnancies...

[00:20:39] These things would add up over time. Do you miss dancing? Not at all. Not at all? Nope. It always... Whenever I ask that question, somebody has an answer like that. It just amazes me of having devoted so much of your life to this thing and then stopping it

[00:20:57] and just being totally cool with it. The thing that happened when I quit dancing was that a friend had asked me to start a band with them and I immediately started doing that.

[00:21:08] Going from dancing to singing, which is another thing that I had not done in a very long time, felt like a really natural transition. That was great. I was ready to quit. There are so many reasons why that was a good thing. I was just done.

[00:21:33] Sometimes you're just done with something. Depending on the kind of music singing can also be very physical. Yes. I'm a belter, so it was good. Tell me about the bands. I didn't know you were in one. It was a noisy art rock band. They were great.

[00:21:51] I think in our short time we accomplished a lot. It sounds like a very RISD experience. It was not a RISD. It was in Gainesville. Gainesville was sort of a magical place in that it was possible to be a parent

[00:22:05] with a young child and studio practice and teaching part-time and also be in a band. I don't think I could sustain that. I couldn't sustain that here. Teaching at RISD is much more involved than teaching at University of Florida was.

[00:22:20] My kid is older and my career is a lot more absorbing, although it was pretty intense back then too. But it was really fun. We had a great time. We made an EP. We played a lot of shows. Everybody in that band was terrific.

[00:22:42] When did you start work on this book? November of 2016, right after the presidential election actually. Not because of it, just coincidentally. You say that. I don't know. Maybe subconsciously. It pitched it in June of 2016. And then November was just the right time to start working on it.

[00:23:02] I can't imagine that it didn't have some kind of impact on the book. Well, I remember thinking early on this is the kind of antifascist activism I can do because I'm no longer a person who can physically go to marches. That's not a way that I can contribute.

[00:23:22] I don't have a lot of money to donate, although I do when I can. But this is my antifascist work. This is the way that it... I mean, it was already from 2015 on, I was thinking a lot about rising fascism

[00:23:44] and the language around refugees that we use that's being deployed all over the world. That became very visible in 2015. So that was not the genesis of this book, but it was definitely in the mix when I started.

[00:23:59] The initial idea of this book came a lot earlier, way before I ever worked on it in 2013. But by 2015, I was really... But I wasn't ready to work on anything big between 2012 and 2015, 16. Was that just a result of having a young child?

[00:24:22] No, I mean it's just the result of doing one big book. It takes time to build up to another one. So my style always changes in between books too. Also, I released... I delivered Ontershark into the publisher and then two weeks later my first child died.

[00:24:41] So in 2012, I wasn't drawing anything. It was completely... The idea of drawing something was utterly meaningless. In 2013, I started making short nonfiction comics and that really picked up speed. And actually the person that I owe a lot to there is Vanessa Davis, the cartoonist,

[00:25:02] who was the person who I was complaining to her one night that I didn't have any good ideas for short nonfiction work. And that seemed like a really good thing to pitch to people, but I didn't have anything to pitch.

[00:25:14] And she was like, Leela, you just told me five stories that would be great pitches. And I thought, oh, you're right actually. And I went home and I wrote them out as pitches and I pitched them. And three of them got picked up immediately. So thank you, Vanessa.

[00:25:31] I'm going to do something that nice for Vanessa one of these days. This change of style between books, how conscious of a decision is that? It's a pretty organic thing that happens.

[00:25:42] The only place that I would point to that it is conscious about it is that I usually know when an idea needs a different style.

[00:25:51] Like with Unterzacke and I had the idea initially in 2003, but I knew that I wasn't really a mature enough cartoonist yet as an artist. I wasn't a good enough artist yet to do that book.

[00:26:06] So I had to kind of spend a few years working up to it with Victory Parade. That style had already been established in my nonfiction work. The pivotal piece is the PTSD comic that you mentioned.

[00:26:22] That's the first time I ever made a comic in watercolor and that really changed everything. So by the time I was working on Victory Parade, it was already a very organic thing like this is my style now.

[00:26:33] And that I'm guessing will be more true of the next book as well. That it'll be another departure? No, that it'll probably be less of a departure. It'll probably look more like the style of Victory Parade, but I don't know for sure.

[00:26:47] I won't know till I do it. Is the process more time consuming to paint? Yeah, I would say it is. But also in the process of making comics is time consuming. And because no one gets enough money to focus exclusively on it,

[00:27:06] nor do most people want to focus exclusively on it. At least, you know, not me. I have a life that I enjoy outside of comics as well. I love teaching and I have a family.

[00:27:19] And you know, I like to like leave the house occasionally, take a walk maybe, go to Spark. No, it's not very cartoonist of you. Well, I mean, the thing is that's an old stereotype that I think we can not go of at this point.

[00:27:30] Like there's a generation of mostly men in comics who were very invested in that idea of cartoonist as socially awkward and incapable of anything else. And that's bullshit. I love all the cartoonists that I think of as advancing that stereotype.

[00:27:45] I think they're all amazing, but I just think that that's just not how most people are living in this field. We're actually a bunch of pretty nice, well adjusted people with a lot of friends.

[00:27:58] Yeah, I mean, I will say that some of the best parties I went to were either at Bill Cardeloff's loft in Brooklyn or at like SPX. Yeah, see, I think comics is great. I mean, it's this is something I try to really emphasize with my students.

[00:28:14] Comics happens in community. And you're going to get your entire life from your community of artists like, you know, romantic relationships, friendships, jobs. These things happen within within your community and there's so much support in comics. Like it's such a uncompetitive field, which is nice for me.

[00:28:37] I don't like I really hate competition. It shuts me down. I never liked going to illustrator. It's like illustrator events where you're sort of like meet and greet in a meet and greet situation with art directors or something that's like crabs in a barrel.

[00:28:52] Comics is not like that. But in any case, I mean, you know, if somebody gave me a large enough advance, maybe I would take some time off and really just only work on my comics. But even then, you know, I don't want to lose my teaching job.

[00:29:10] I really like it. It's time consuming in that watercolor takes a while. It's slow. It takes time to dry between layers and I like using a lot of layers and viscosity. But I can't really work in black and white ink right now.

[00:29:28] Since I started working in watercolor when I work in ink, it's like there's so much resistance and it feels so empty of expression to me. Like I can't get to where I want to go with it.

[00:29:39] So I think it would take a lot longer if I tried to go back to working in black and white because I wouldn't be enjoying it. That makes sense.

[00:29:46] It also makes sense mentioning that you were getting more into just straight painting because there are a number of, we wouldn't even call them panels. But there are a number of moments in this book that feel like a painting.

[00:30:02] In terms of like a stand-all, like a shot that sort of stands on its own. Yeah. Well, there are some splash pages specifically. Are you referring to those? Yeah. Yeah. I read it as a PDF so it might have. Oh. It might have left my...

[00:30:21] But even with that, like it was still clear that there were these sort of like almost static moments in time. Yeah. But I mean, I think that's common in comics as well. It is. It is.

[00:30:35] But it also, you know, I can certainly point to a number of opportunities to do this well. Nate Powell does it really well as far as...

[00:30:46] But I think there's an extra layer that you're afforded and this was striking to me reading your book when it comes to those...

[00:30:56] Those dream moments or those fantasy moments, there's something about the fluidity of paints that really lends itself well into blurring the line between reality and dreams. Yeah. Very much so. They're really... It seems like the dreams are essential aspect of the processing of trauma in this book. Certainly.

[00:31:20] A lot of my goal in this book was to depict the kind of in-between states of consciousness and dreams and death. I was thinking a lot about how people process collective trauma on an individual level. That's kind of the thematic underpinning of the whole book.

[00:31:38] You described it to me a moment ago as being an anti-fascist action that you could participate in. Was that... Is that part of the book pitch? Is that something that you actually talked to when you... No. Okay. I suspected that. I don't actually really remember the pitch.

[00:31:54] I think I was pretty straightforward about it. But I might have said something like, I want to talk about what the inevitable result of dehumanizing people. Yeah. People were very reluctant to hear the word fascism in 2016 and they still are.

[00:32:18] There's something you said to Meg Lemke with the Postures Weekly interview really jumped out at me, but that there was no intention for this to be a Holocaust book. Yeah.

[00:32:30] But it was going to be adjacent no matter what just because of the time period it took place in, right? Well, that's how it became a Holocaust book because I knew I couldn't avoid it.

[00:32:41] If I was going to make a book that was set during the Second World War, your pet rabbit is very cute by the way. Oh, is she? She's just jumping around behind you. Very cute. Yeah.

[00:32:52] And the thing that happened also when I started making short comics was that I started working in the Holocaust space anyway. So I was kind of back in there anyhow. Thinking about the book in context of the... And I noticed that you mentioned this on social media,

[00:33:09] but the speech that Jonathan Blazer gave at the Oscars. And the lead up to that movie coming out, this is clearly from people who didn't read the book that it's based on, but I heard some pushback or read some pushback online. Like putting out a Holocaust...

[00:33:25] Like why put out a Holocaust movie at this point given everything that's happening in Gaza? But obviously it doesn't even require a close reading of that movie to see the parallels to what's going on with the Palestinian people. Yes, I agree.

[00:33:41] And I really hope that people will give my book that same read. Because what I'm not trying to do is... You know, there are two sort of broad sets of houses, I guess, of reaction in Holocaust descendants and maybe more broadly in Jewish communities too.

[00:34:06] Obviously there's more than two. But specifically here, I think there are those of us who treat the Holocaust as something that belongs only to us and get very insular about it. And then there are those of us who see it in the continuum of atrocities

[00:34:24] that humans commit on one another, which are all different from one another. They're not... People get so competitive about it, which is so weird to me. Like we can talk about the Holocaust and the ways in which it was unique or exceptional.

[00:34:42] But we could also do that with other genocides. And we can connect... All of these genocides are connected. The darkness that's in our species is the darkness in our species. It's not limited to one or two groups of people and no one is exempt from it, including Jews.

[00:34:58] We are not exempt from mistreating people. We're just like every other goddamn human being. So, yeah, I hope people will give it that read. I do feel a little awkward about it because I'm worried that I'll get that same reaction. But smart people will know.

[00:35:19] I may have said this to Meg too in this interview. So forgive me if this is redundant. But one of the other reasons why it was important to me to use the Holocaust as a way of talking about now, what's happening right now,

[00:35:33] is that I really felt like I needed to stay in my own lane culturally. It's not my place to tell the story of other cultures' experience. If I were to do a book about the Cambodian genocide, it would be very appropriate and wrong-headed of me.

[00:35:50] Right? Or any other experience that's not my own. And I'm not saying that people need to only make work that's about their own personal or cultural experiences. But this is kind of a big one. Like, you know, I'm carrying my corner of humanity's coffin with this book.

[00:36:08] It really comes out in a major way toward the end of the book when the husband comes home. And I'm curious, you know, again, saying that you didn't set out to write a book about that subject, but also when we were speaking of the rubies,

[00:36:24] her name, the wrestler, that she kind of entered the picture at some point in the process. Do you write chronologically? I wish. I really wish I did. I'd love to talk to people about that. Like, I want to get a sense of who writes chronologically and who doesn't.

[00:36:42] I have my suspicions about who does and who doesn't. Maybe I'll text some friends and ask them. But no, at some point while working on Victory Parade, I realized that I make comics the way I was trained to paint,

[00:36:55] which is all over the canvas all at the same time. You don't hyper-focus on one area for too long. You kind of bring the whole thing up as you go. Which it helps if there's a lot of intersecting stories. I guess. I mean, you know,

[00:37:09] when I think about writers who handle really complex structures in their stories, like the writer Kate Atkinson, have you ever read her work? I know the name. Yeah. She's a British writer who writes sometimes things that are classified as mysteries, but they're really something else.

[00:37:30] She's so good at what I guess is something mystery writers do too, which is just creating this very complicated intersecting set of narratives. It's like a, you know, one of those palaces made of toothpicks. I know that poll won the whole thing falls, right?

[00:37:50] But it's perfection when she does it. It all works. Or like I'm watching the adaptation of Three Body Problem right now, which admittedly I haven't read the books. I bet they're great. I will read them. But that's a really also complex, multi-layered story

[00:38:07] that takes place in a couple of timeframes and multiple characters and consciousnesses. Not all that successfully done, but when it is, it's really, really well done. It really comes together really well. I don't think I'm doing that.

[00:38:26] I think my work is more chaotic and kind of lower case than that. I should ask Alex Cigar about this because he's exclusively writes mystery books now. There's that cliche of writing backwards, like writing from the end, writing from the resolution of the mystery.

[00:38:43] Yeah, maybe that's a good trick to try next time. My next book, well, in the next book I'm making, I am sort of doing that kind of. Yes and no. I've heard this from a lot of different artists and writers,

[00:38:56] but Jeff Smith famously had the last panel of Bone figured out and then he had to work his way to it. And that's always struck me as a really fascinating way to do things. The last panel ever of the like, the ultimate total end of Bone.

[00:39:15] Damn, that's really ambitious. Well, he created it. He created the characters when he was, I really hope I'm remembering this correctly, but I think I am. Oh, I had the truth get in the way of a good story.

[00:39:27] Yeah, of them kind of like riding off into the sunset on the cart. That's great. I love that. I mean, I think that could be a really formally powerful choice to make. That might be a good thing to try as an assignment, honestly,

[00:39:42] for students, you know, something shorter than that brick you just showed me. It would have been a very long semester if that was true. I know. You're going to have to keep me up to date on this. I'm really curious.

[00:39:57] You know, I know you're about to do in April. You're going to do some dates with the book. I'm curious what the conversations will be like pertaining to like what we were just talking about, you know, with it being a book about the Holocaust

[00:40:12] written by a Jewish woman in this moment. I mean, same, you know, I started it in a very different time than the one we're living in now. I mean, I guess I have Jonathan Glazer's example to draw on.