The Comics Journal: Interviews

Jessica Abel
Interviewed by Robert Boyd,
excerpted from The Comics Journal #190

For those of us who follow the minicomics scene, the sudden success of artists like Adrian Tomine and Jason Lutes came as no surprise. I predict that the next young cartoonist (only 26) to make this leap into the public consciousness will be Jessica Abel.

A college encounter with Love & Rockets inspired her to start drawing her own comics in 1988. Her stories appeared in the University of Chicago-sponsored Breakdown and in Ivan Brunetti's Biff Bang Pow. Picked as a "Stinky Date" (from the infamous contest in Hate), she schlepped over to the Chicago Comic Con to meet Peter Bagge. She decided it would be useful to have a sampler of her comics work, so she printed 50 copies of Artbabe to show publishers. No publishers took the bait, but it didn't matter -- Abel was now a minicomics self-publisher.

Five issues later, Abel has a new, Xeric-grant financed issue of Artbabe. her work, has also appeared in Pulse!, the Baffler, Action Girl Comics, NewCity, The University of Chicago Magazine, Flying Saucer Attack, and The Willamette Week. If you haven't seen her comics yet, don't worry -- you will.

ROBERT BOYD: Have you always lived in Chicago?

JESSICA ABEL: I went away for a year to college in Minnesota, but then transferred to the University of Chicago.

BOYD: What did you study?

ABEL: English.

BOYD: So you don't have any academic art background?

ABEL: No. I'm working in an art school now -- which doesn't count. [laughs] And I took some classes while I was at the U of C, but only a few. So I'm mostly self-taught.

BOYD: Have you been reading comics since you were a kid?

ABEL: Off and on. I wasn't a comics collector, because none of my friends were -- I didn't really have too many friends anyway [laughter] -- but the girls I knew definitely didn't collect comics. I had a few key experiences with comics when I was a kid that I've carried with me. One of the main ones was getting that big fat collection of 1940s Wonder Woman with the Gloria Steinem introduction from my stepmother when I was a little kid. I just pored over that book -- I have it practically memorized.

BOYD: So what other childhood experiences formed your comics background?

ABEL: I had a friend named Kristin whose parents had a boat in Michigan and sometimes they'd invite me to go up and hang out with them on their boat. So we'd take a car trip up there which seemed like it took a million, million years. Her mom would always buy each one of us one of those three-pack comics at a gas station, and I was really into that. It was the high point of the trip because I hated being on the boat. I was with my friend which was good, but the comics really helped the situation.

I liked just about anything that was animated. Anything else, I wasn't that crazy about. I didn't hate it, but I wasn't that into it. Every time a Disney movie was going to be on TV I'd think, "Oh, cartoons!" Then most of the time there would be something on like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and I'd be devastated! [laughs] I hated that. I was really, really up for animation in basically any shape or form. Saturday morning cartoons -- I wasn't allowed to watch them when I was a little kid, but once that regulation was relaxed, I'd just sit through anything that was on.

BOYD: Were you the editor on the school paper?

ABEL: One of the editors -- there were tons of us. There was a big journalism program at my high school, really a pretty good one. You became a reporter in your junior year, and then you could try out to be an editor. There were 25 editors on the paper, so I was one of many. But typical of me, I denied myself what would have been actually fun for me, like being a feature editor or an opinion editor, and I became a news editor, which I hated and felt absolutely no connection to. It's like I kept trying to tell myself, "No, get away from that creative stuff... " (But the first thing I did in comics was a little comicky drawing while I was an editor.)

I don't know what deep psychological craziness explains that. But that's how I felt about it at that point. I was still doing art, I was into music, I hung out with punk rock types in high school, kept doing that in college, identified with that sort of lifestyle, and started to drift more and more into doing artwork. I did a comic version of Medea for a classics class for my final paper. I got an A on it. I thought, "Oh, that's pretty cool. That was easy."

BOYD: Was this at the University of Chicago?

ABEL: No, that was at Carleton, my first college. I had discovered Love Rockets when I was at Carleton in Northfield, Minnesota, which was my introduction into the alternative stuff. It took me a really long time to feel like I knew anything about that scene because I'd go into a comic store and just look and go, "I don't know... " I couldn't remember people's names, and there was nobody else I knew who was reading that stuff so I couldn't really talk with anybody about it.

BOYD: There's almost no consumer information like there is for records.

ABEL: Right. So when I was in college I picked up Love Rockets and, not to put too fine a point on it, it changed my life. It's really clear from reading my early comics how influential it was. And I'm not at all ashamed of that. It was an admirable goal to go for. And it remains influential in some ways. Although I think my style has diverged from it quite a bit, the approach to telling stories is still there.

BOYD: And the willingness to take on the subject matter that you do.

ABEL: Yeah. But to me, my subject matter is not all that damn adventurous because, while it's not autobiographical, it's kind of my life.

BOYD: It's not adventurous from the point of view of outside comics, but from inside comics it still is, just because there are just so few comics like it.

ABEL: Yeah, but not growing up as a collector, not growing up in and among other comic artists or readers, I started off as a sort of outsider to the comics world.

BOYD: I think that helps.

ABEL: Yeah, that's what I mean. People on that on-line comics group were raving about the Steve Bissette interview [TCJ #185], so I started reading it. I'm not really that interested in his work so I wasn't going to read it, but everyone was saying it was so great. So I started reading it, and I thought, "This is so fascinating because this guy is so down on the industry, but he's so in it. He's so inside the conventions of it that he can't see outside of it." And neither could any of the people he was dealing with.

The whole Tundra thing he was talking about -- they put out some really good comics and some really crappy comics, and they were all creator-owned, and this is some sort of radical concept. The whole idea that this is some huge break with tradition, which it is, is so ridiculous. I mean, no one would ever think of trying to take creator's rights away from someone like Jim Woodring. Nobody else could do what he does. Nobody. That's my perspective on it -- I'm so outside the traditional comics industry that it just doesn't even cross my mind that what I'm doing is really breaking with tradition. It just doesn't even seem like it to me.

BOYD: Did seeing Love Rockets prompt you to do a comic?

ABEL: No, not at all. I started reading it and started tentatively trying to pick up things from the really under-stocked store that was in this tiny town in Minnesota. When I transferred to U of C, I found that there was a group of people there who were starting a comic called Breakdown. It was a student comic book -- a student club.

BOYD: Was Ivan Brunetti part of that?

ABEL: Yeah. His strip was in the school paper, but I think he'd actually graduated by that point, or else he was a senior. I was a sophomore. He was older than me, and I didn't ever really quite get whether all of these guys in the group were in school or not in school or whether they graduated or not. I never saw them around in classes very much. But it was headed up by a guy named Joe Schmidt who I've never heard about in comics since, which is weird because he was so into it. They were all a bunch of comics geeks, and I liked them a lot. I went to an organizational meeting and decided to do a comic. My friend, Erica, who was my best friend from high school, had written a story the previous spring called "The Junkie" that I wanted to use in some way. It really struck me -- which shows where I was at when I was 18. So that's when I started doing "The Junkie" for Breakdown, when I was a sophomore. I kept trying to get away with doing comics in classes -- I did another version of Medea for another class [laughs]. There were four issues of Breakdown that I was involved with. By the fifth issue, it transformed into some kind of lame fanzine. We got money from the school to do it.

BOYD: That's excellent.

ABEL: I was the editor for the second, third, and fourth issues, which all came out my junior year, and I put them together pretty much single-handedly. Joe just sort of handed me some comics and then dropped off the face of the earth. I did "The Junkie" in two issues, then I did this other incredibly lame story in two issues, and a few other, shorter pieces. And I did all the ads and everything else. That was a really big experience for me.

BOYD: So doing the first issue of Artbabe wasn't a huge leap or anything.

ABEL: No, but, at the time, I never thought of Artbabe as being what it is now; I never thought of it as a minicomic. Anyway, my senior year -- I was an English major but I was always trying to get away with something -- I decided to try to do my final project as a comic book instead of doing a research paper. This sort of combined a couple of options they had -- a creative writing option, and a drama option -- so I said, well, this is kind of one and kind of the other (and kind of neither), but they let me do it. I wrote the whole script and drew the first chapter of five then never did anything on it again. But it was an epic thing, and I did the first chapter -- and got honors for it, so what the hell, right?!

After I graduated I kept doing comics. Ivan was putting together Biff Bang Pow and wanted to use some stories from Breakdown, but they were so embarrassing, I had to redraw them. I was doing that for Biff Bang Pow and drawing some new stuff, and I had submitted a little entry to the "Stinky Date" contest in Hate. Peter Bagge picked me for the first Stinky Date. He was coming into town for the Chicago convention and he wanted to draw me so he could render me for the strip. Therefore I was going to the Chicago convention and I thought, I should put together some stuff so I can show it to publishers and get published (I thought I was pretty hot shit at that point). So I put together the first issue of Artbabe.

BOYD: So it was a portfolio.

ABEL: Yeah, basically. I did 50 copies of it and printed them with some potato prints on the front, and went out, met people, traded comics with people, and acted like hot shit. I met Peter and he drew me, and it was a lot of fun. That's where I made my reputation for being a rock 'n' roller because I was in a band at that point. I haven't been in one for two years! [laughs] Everyone was going to some comics event, but my roommate (and bass player) and I were going to see Babes in Toyland. That ruined me for life because then Peter pegged me. I haven't even listened to Babes in Toyland for two or three years, and they still come up in conversation!

BOYD: So basically you got into doing minis without being really previously exposed to the minicomics scene.

ABEL: Well, I'd seen minis and had a bunch of them, but I wasn't into minis per se. And I've never been into minis per se. I think minis are great in the sense that they get people doing something, and it's a way in to finding a wider audience. It can be an end in itself when artists start publishing their work in a nicer way and/or paying attention to it and doing a good job with it. They can end up self-publishing. But I don't think self-publishing is the only answer to doing quality work. I'm not a do-it-yourselfer snob at all. I'm not punk rock about that stuff. People will write to me who are. They expect me to buy into their point of view simply because I self-publish. It makes me mad. I think they're idiots.

BOYD: But you have done it yourself for four issues, and now with the help of the Xeric grant, you're going to do it yourself again, except on a much higher level.

ABEL: Yeah, well, I am, but I'm only doing it because --

BOYD: Because that contract from Drawn Quarterly hasn't arrived yet?

ABEL: ... Well, kinda! [Boyd laughs] Not exactly, but like I said, when I first started out I thought I was hot shit -- I thought I was it. It took me until the third issue to realize that I sucked! [Boyd laughs] That's what it took to give myself a kick in the ass -- to feel like I sucked. To really sit down and say, All right, I'm going to do this right now, I'm going to do as good a job as I can.

BOYD: When issue #5 comes out, people are going to think you're hot shit, I'm telling you...

ABEL: Well, I hope so! But people have thought I was hot shit all along, and that didn't help anything, you know?

BOYD: Ah, I was the enabler, huh?

ABEL: [laughs] Yeah. It was your fault, man. No, I'm really appreciative of the support people have given me. It's been really great all this time. But I think a lot of people were saying, "You're hot shit for minicomics."

BOYD: I want to ask you about "Doc Trader" because it seems like an unusual switch from your previous work, although in issue #4 there was a hint of that.

ABEL: Yeah, I've been doing the two characters that I've now changed into the "Doc Trader" characters since the second issue.

BOYD: Most of your stories are basically realistic and set in a milieu that's familiar to you. But now you're doing these totally extravagant adventure stories. Why?

ABEL: First of all, the two characters that I've used as main characters, when I initially used them, had really different personalities and were in a really different milieu than "Doc Trader." But they were still set in the past, they were still drawn in a '40s-ish style (at least my attempt at it -- with a blatant disregard for foreshortening and proportion and perspective). I'd just put it all together real quick, which is something that I visually really enjoy if I let myself do it. I tend to be incredibly tight with my stuff and now I'm going off the deep end! I can't stop; I have to do it the way I'm doing it.

BOYD: Well, it looks good, so why ... ?

ABEL: Because it drives me crazy and I'm gonna get carpal tunnel syndrome -- I'm having all these health fears about it. I'm pleased with my work now, but it's so much fun to do things in a different way. Also, the stories are so fantastic, they're so out there. In my normal stories, I would never have a character whip out a gun and shoot somebody. I'd never, ever have anybody say the kind of stuff that they say in these adventure strips. It just doesn't fit at all, and it's so contrary to my sense of rightness to have that happen. A lot of my work, especially now, is about joy. And it's about really inhabiting yourself -- this is sounding really touchy-feely and horrible! -- but it's about really living your life. And so much of the stuff I write about and the way I live and the way people I know live is so repressed. "I can't really say that to her because it's so hard and I feel so insecure and... " When you have a moment where you can break through and make a connection, it's feels so wonderful partly because you're living most of your life in such a repressed way. This is what the end of #5 is about: wrapping it up with, for once, a happy ending. And "Doc Trader" is kind of about that feeling. Do you ever feel like you have to run? You just want to run really fast, as fast as you can go? You just want to feel your whole body move? You know what I mean?

BOYD: I think so.

ABEL: It's a feeling that's really hard to explain, but it's like you have to feel the limits of your physicality. So that's what "Doc Trader" is about: doing whatever comes, just throwing anything in there and it's all a lot of fun and it's exciting. It's a totally different thing, and, while I have no intention of abandoning what I'm doing with my more serious comics, it's a good complement to it.

BOYD: Let's talk about issue #5. Although "The Heart of the Turtle" felt basically realistic, it's set in the rather exotic locale of the countryside around Lafayette, Louisiana. Why did you do that?

ABEL: The story was built around the image of the woman taking the turtles off the road. That original image comes from the journals of Ellen Gilchrist. I thought a lot of it was really dumb, but at one point she says something like, "I'm a good person, I take the turtles off the road rather than run them over..." This image stuck in my mind; when I read it, I pictured her driving down the road and taking turtle after turtle after turtle off the road. I put the image together with some of the characters from my old story, "10 mm Gutwrench" and thought, "Maybe one of them could be telling a story that he saw this woman and fell in love with her... " There was something weird and affecting about it -- this urban hipster who is a fish out of water. But I just laid it aside and didn't deal with it for a really long time. When I came back to it I thought, I better find that passage to see if I'm really ripping her off. So I found it, and it was so much less than I remembered! I thought, How did I get to here from there? I had no idea. But I thought, well, I guess that means it's mine, anyway. I tried to make it into a different story, where it would be an allegorical or prophetic dream. I was trying really hard to think of what these things could represent. I was thinking about the Joseph myth in the Bible where he interprets the Pharoah's dreams prophetically. I kept asking people, "What do you think this could be prophetically?" People were all giving me these psychoanalytical interpretations and I was like, "No, no, no. Prophesy. It means something literal." [laughs] And they were all really confused. I went back and forth with it for a long time and ended up pulling it back to reality where it was dream-like and yet something that apparently really happened.

My uncle used to work in the oil patch, so I called him to talk about it. He was saying things like, "There wouldn't be all these turtles... " and that's when I started thinking this was a really ridiculous idea. There would be other animals as well, maybe, but all turtles just seems really weird. So that's what brought it into the realm of hallucination for me.

BOYD: But it seems plausible.

ABEL: Sorta yeah, sorta no. I think it should be in that realm where you don't quite know whether it could happen or not. It could, hypothetically, but the odds are really against it. The theme of the four seasons came out of that; I had that little piece about the turtles that I wanted to work with, and I had the journal entry I had written about the snowstorm.

BOYD: "Heart of the Turtle" struck me, after you told me about the characters who were repressed in some way, as being a story about that. The guy has an incredibly emotional reaction for no reason that he can quite understand. And he can't tell his friend about it.

ABEL: He's remembering it, but he's lying to his friend about it, saying the experience was not emotional, but just a funny thing that happened. I'd say most of my comics all through the years have been about people wanting to making connections, and lacking those connections; lacking them and not being able to make them.

BOYD: Certainly "The Ant and the Grasshopper" has a lot of that, as well as being really funny.

ABEL: Oh, you think it's really funny? Good! [laughter] I had no idea! I think all of my stories all along have been about that. Even the old "Doc Trader"-esque stories were about that, in a much more dramatic and cheesy kind of way, about the connections people are trying to make and don't make. This is not only me; this is a huge theme among young cartoonists (and some older cartoonists) -- the theme of wanting to be connected to people.

BOYD: Was "Jack London" based on a real journal entry?

ABEL: Yeah. The journal entry is the part that describes the storm. The story is fiction.

BOYD: So you weren't called into your boss' office and marked down for writing in your journal on company time.

ABEL: No, I was always afraid I would be, but I wasn't. I've been called into my old boss' office before, but it was a fictionalization of a real event set in my old job. But the reason I used the character Courtney Clare, who used to be something of an alter ego, was because this story was a much more direct fictionalization of my own experience than these other, wholly fictional stories.

BOYD: I liked it. I liked a lot of details about it, like the way you drew snow; I don't think I'd ever seen it depicted like that in comics. It looks so realistic.

ABEL: Yeah, I felt that white ink could be a really effective way of removing detail. The whole point of the snow is the "white-out." It removes things.

BOYD: For instance, the first page where you see her in that train makes her seem so isolated because she's against this background of hazy, white snow. There were also great, telling details like where you draw the cheeks and nose being red. I think people forget details like that; everything is sort of genericized.

ABEL: My approach to any page -- an approach that I often try to fight in order to pursue some kind of elegance and simplicity -- is to fill everything in. I have an almost unstoppable urge to fill everything in. I'm trying to control it and make it work for me, but I really can't stop myself from doing it. I look at the texture of each thing; I try to make each piece of the image the way it should be. So thinking about such things as the red cheeks is a natural result of me of trying to make everything look closer to realism than I'm really capable of doing with pen and ink. I'm trying to deal with light and shadow, but also to deal with texture and also color and all that other stuff, in black and white ink. It's impossible, and that's why I'm always fighting it.

BOYD: All the stories represent seasons?

ABEL: Yes.

BOYD: "Jack London," is winter. "Heart of the Turtle" is summer?

ABEL: Yes. And "The Ant and the Grasshopper" is a fall story because Aesop's fable is about the turning over from the summer to the winter and storing up what you need for the winter. In a way, the fall for me is about clamping down; storing up reserves for the winter.

BOYD: Now that makes perfect sense.

ABEL: I've turned "The Ant and the Grasshopper" kind of on its ear; in Aesop's fable, of course, the grasshopper goes out into the cold and dies. And in mine she continues to walk all over her friend.

BOYD: I assume that eventually the friend is going to get wise.

ABEL: I felt like it was totally the opposite -- that the whole deal would be this endless cycle of her being used, getting fed up and then giving in.

BOYD: You wrote it, so you know what it means.

ABEL: No, no. It's interesting if you felt the other way about it. But what I was thinking when I was doing it was that this was a character type who continues to allow herself to be walked on.

BOYD: Now I understand why that's autumn. And I think I understand why "Viva!" is spring, even though there's no specific seasonal thing in it.

ABEL: Spring fever, man!

BOYD: Yeah, exactly!

ABEL: I've had badass spring fever since February. [laughter]

BOYD: That's because the winter has been so long!

ABEL: Yeah. In a place like Chicago, we basically hibernate all winter. When you do go out, nothing's really happening -- bands don't tour, and you just go to the same bar you always go to or you stay home and try to keep warm. Dress in a million layers -- no fashion happening. When spring comes, and people go absolutely off their heads! You have people in 50 degree weather wearing bikinis and rollerblading at the lake. It's crazy! And all kinds of weird shit happens in the springtime; all that kissing in the bar. Totally realistic. [laughter] And I have to tell you, that story was probably the one that took me the longest to draw per page because of all the hatching and making it as textured as I needed to make it.

BOYD: There were so many people in every panel.

ABEL: Well, a crowded bar. It's got to look like a crowded bar. That's my thinking. And drawing that was like pain. [laughs] Because every time I was drawing it I wanted to be there, I wanted to go out, I wanted to see my friends, I wanted to make some trouble. It was really hard to sit home and spend 20 hours on a page and draw the thing instead of being out doing it. That was hard. Especially since I was drawing it during the spring.

BOYD: How did you get a Xeric grant? What is the procedure for getting one? How does it work once you've got one?

ABEL: There are two deadlines a year and you submit the project that you want to do, which needs to be very near complete when you submit it. You write a proposal and a detailed and accurate-ish budget and a couple of other things. You turn those in before the deadline. The review date is about a month or two after the deadline and then you find out about a month and a half after that whether you got it or not. I got it in October, and I have until August to use the money. What you do is you have to either pay for things yourself out of your pocket and submit receipts for reimbursement, or get 30-day credit and submit invoices to get the money before you pay.

BOYD: Well, I'm glad you got it because #5 is the strongest issue yet, by far.

ABEL: Thanks.

BOYD: Every story is good and different from the other. The fact that there are no continuing stories is going to be really good for you because people are going to be picking it up for the first time.

ABEL: Yeah, there absolutely could not be any continuing stories from #4, and probably shouldn't be any into #6. Because who knows when or how that's going to come out.

BOYD: How did you get in contact with this alumni magazine The University of Chicago Magazine. to do color strips?

ABEL: They called me, actually. They saw the Camille Paglia piece in the NewCity and they really liked it. They said, "We wish we had thought of that," partly because the Paglia talk was on the U of C campus. They just really liked it. So I said, "I'll do stuff for you guys, I just don't know what exactly." I have done a bunch of these journalistic comics, but so far they've all been assigned; I haven't come up with the ideas myself. I'm always so completely swamped with work that I don't really have a lot of time to sit around and go, "You know, it would be really great to do a comic on this... " But I was going on a trip last summer and I wanted to do something with it so I could make it a business trip and write a lot of it off. And get cheap, fabulous, media-rate tickets. Anyway, that was the motivation for doing that particular strip -- it was totally mercenary.

BOYD: You were talking about the problem you had with black and white because of trying to be as detailed and realistic as possible with an intrinsically limited medium. Is that somewhat mitigated by working in color?

ABEL: Sort of. There are other problems with color. One thing is that I'm not as good at it. I'm painting with gouache. I haven't tried to deal with light in a very realistic way. I've begun to think about it, but I haven't done a lot. I've done more in black and white with light than I have in color. I'm not a master painter at this point, although I think I'm getting a lot better. The only problem with color is that it goes really slowly. And gouache is much thicker stuff -- it's harder to draw clearly. It's hard to draw with it, basically.

BOYD: So the University of Chicago thing grew out of doing the NewCity stuff, and they assigned you these projects.

ABEL: Yeah.

BOYD: Do you go to these events (the Godzilla convention, the Camille Paglia talk, the Miracle Tree line, etc.) with a tape recorder handy?

ABEL: Nope. Take notes.

BOYD: Everything sounds so verbatim!

ABEL: Well, I'm probably lying. [laughs] When you take notes, you kind of make things up a little bit. But it's close. And the people look somewhat like that. I'll draw them a little bit, but I'll just sketch in their general features -- a narrow face or a wide face, glasses or no glasses...

BOYD: So you're there with a camera and a tape recorder.

ABEL: No. I'm there with a pad of paper. And I interview people -- just ask a few brief questions and draw stuff. My notes are incredibly sketchy. I just kind of fake it when I get home.

BOYD: What about Camille Paglia? You must have been recording that -- it's so long and detailed.

ABEL: Nope. Wrote them all down.

BOYD: Jesus!

ABEL: [laughs] You should see my notes -- they're so long. It was a two hour talk. The woman can talk. She's a bonehead but she can talk, talk, talk. So yeah, I wrote a lot of stuff down.