Leela Corman on Victory Parade, Genocide and Transgressive Art: “This Is My Corner Of Humanity’s Coffin To Carry”

MARINAOMI: Thank you for agreeing to this interview! I'm excited to delve into the making of your beautiful and haunting graphic novel. First off, please share the origin story of Victory Parade. Where did the seed come from, and how did it grow? What was the timeline of its creation?

LEELA CORMAN: My long books always begin with a single image that lodges in my brain immediately and becomes the emblem of the project, no matter where else it ranges. For Victory Parade, it was an image of a woman working in a factory during the Second World War, in the U.S., wearing coveralls and a kerchief. This is an image very far from my familial experience of the war, where no one was rosy-cheeked and the only can-do spirit was surviving in the forest until the Nazis were gone. That image came into my head when I was nearly nine months pregnant with my second child. I had been in a kind of in-between place during and in the year leading up to that pregnancy, for reasons that anyone who knows me will know. I didn't know where the image would lead, though. Another thing about that emblematic initial image is that while, so far, those do become an important part of the books, they have at least to date become the B plot. I'm not sure why that is.

The timeline was: initial idea, summer 2013; book pitch, summer 2016; start of research and notes, fall 2016; delivery of accepted manuscript (draft 12!), fall 2023. In the interim, I birthed a child, taught many classes of undergraduates, illustrated a couple of record covers, made a lot of short nonfiction comics, reconnected with my ancestral town in Poland, started a band, played a lot of shows and recorded an EP with them, went to a lot of residencies, navigated a global pandemic, and moved my family out of a fascist state to a safer one.

That’s a lot of life happening while you were creating your book! How much did all this stuff affect your story? I imagine reconnecting with your ancestral town might have had quite an influence. Can you tell me about that?

My initial trip to Poland changed my life and my artistic direction, and completely upended much of what I had believed all my life about my ancestral country. But it didn't affect Victory Parade, because work on that was already well underway when I made that trip. It has definitely caused me to want to do much more work in and about Poland, though.

Can you speak a bit about the wrestling motif in Victory Parade? I love this element to the story, a wild and colorful outlet for the character’s pain and trauma. What inspired you to go in this direction, and what kind of research went behind it?

This answer can kind of go in a lot of directions, but a good start is the cover art I did for The Mountain Goats' Beat the Champ LP in 2015. I had never drawn wrestlers before, but when John [Darnielle] asked me to do it, I jumped at the chance, and I got really into it. I love drawing sweaty bodies in motion. For me it connects with my own past as a martial arts student and then a dancer. I've spent a lot of time being a sweaty body in motion, and it felt really good to draw that, over and over.

A little deeper background to this is that grandmas love professional wrestling. My Yiddish grandmother watched WWF when I was a kid, and she especially loved Hulk Hogan - I think because of his Cold War, anti-communist persona. When I married Tom [Hart], I ended up learning a lot more about that era's wrestlers and adjacent characters; he watched a lot more of that as a kid. But it was definitely in my family. My mother told me they started watching wrestling on TV when they first emigrated to the U.S. in 1953. Her favorite was Haystacks Calhoun, apparently. I've heard a lot of stories from people about their grandmothers' love of wrestling. I don't get it, but I love it.

In any case, when I started thinking about Victory Parade and who the characters were going to be, it was immediately apparent that the Jewish refugee girl would become a wrestler as a trauma response and also as a repository for all the things about her that wouldn't be considered traditionally "feminine"; although I think awesome, crushing power is very womanly. I don't love the words "feminine" and "masculine"—I think they're meaningless—but you know what I'm saying here.

My research for the wrestling aspect of Victory Parade was a little tough, because I didn't find a ton of documentation of women's wrestling prior to the 1950s, a little late for my characters. But I did find some. There were some excellent photos of sideshow wrestlers from the 1920s and ‘30s, and I feel like I read that there was a women's circuit during WWII, but because I did that research so long ago at this point, I'm not sure I trust that memory. That was some of the earliest research I did, in early 2016. I found a memoir by a woman who'd been a wrestler at that time, in the U.S., that was helpful. Of course, I watched Ruth Leitman's documentary Lipstick & Dynamite, even though it's about a slightly later time. It was still incredibly helpful. And I did find a little 1940s women's wrestling footage, which gave me a sense of the outfits, hair, and the way the ref looked. I had to kind of triangulate on the subject, and then I had to embellish a little. I think the reader will allow it.

I also want to add that, of course, the gold standard here is Jaime Hernandez, who is a personal deity to me, and of course there's an homage to his wrestling comics in Victory Parade. Honestly there's so much Los Bros homage throughout my work, over the years, but there's a very explicit one in this book.

Oh my gosh, I love your familial ties to wrestling! I didn't see that coming. What you say about masculinity and femininity really comes through in this book. It appeals to me as a gender agnostic enby, that these characters don't fall into gender roles so much as they're trapped in them.

I think that's accurate about the characters' relationship to gender. I think they're mostly just fumbling through it, like so many of us, and of course not talking about it, because that wouldn't have been as possible back then. I'm not saying no one was, but they would not have been in circles that were. Rifche/Ruth/Ruby is probably queer. I didn't want to fully answer that question for her or for myself, in part because the things that might have made people think that in her time—her physicality, her abilities as a wrestler—aren't the actual markers for it, in my mind. But she's also largely asexual in the brief time that we know her. She's focused on other things, mainly survival.

I don't actually understand gender. I feel it, but I don't understand it. I have a lot of feelings about how people behave around it, but I don't have any kind of working theory of it. I don't understand why it isn't seen as a cool playground for people. What are people afraid of? All the gender expansion happening now makes me really happy. I hope this is our collective future.

One thing that I love about Victory Parade is that it tackles so much darkness but doesn't shy away from absurdity and humor, such as in the scenes inspired by Busby Berkeley. Am I correct in that read? Can you speak a bit about this? How did you toe the line here, artistically and emotionally?

Yeah, those are Busby Berkeley numbers I'm referencing. In the beginning of the book, I straight up copied stills of the [1943] film The Gang's All Here: that's theLady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat number. That returns in a later scene that I won't spoil. The other scene that references his choreography is one I made up based on it. I really, really love Busby Berkeley. I can't get enough of that kind of thing. I haven't seen every film, but I'm working on it. They're full of great vaudeville-style acting, sometimes people from that world, and then there are those pioneering, mind-blowing dance numbers, with so many dancers making massive shapes and formations. They're cheeky and sexy and ridiculous all at once. At some point in 2017, I scrawled "Busby Berkeley death scene!" on a notecard, and forgot about it until I found it again in 2019. I'm very grateful to 2017 me for doing that! It turned out to be one of my favorite aspects of the book. I realized, after I'd drawn those parts, how much the theme of massed bodies shows up in this book: massed dancers, columns of troops, mass graves. I was thinking about that a lot.

I also want to point out that Busby Berkeley created an astonishing piece of dance agitprop. It's the closing number of Gold Diggers of 1933, one of my favorite films of his that I've seen. It's the Remember My Forgotten Man song. It's truly incredible and while I recommend that entire movie, you should also just go watch that number. It references Dorothea Lange's dust bowl photos, bread lines, maimed and traumatized WWI veterans, and it ends with a big art deco vision. It's really stunning.

I want to preface this next statement by saying that I think most of the time when we say we're making something transgressive, we are not, and that I highly value artworks that manage to achieve that. They are few and far between. One of my favorites are many of the novels of Rabih Alameddine, especially passages from I, the Divine [W.W. Norton, 2001] and The Angel of History [Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016]. Another is Lina Wertmüller's [1975] film Seven Beauties ("Pasqualino Settebellezze"). That film contains one of the most transgressive scenes I have encountered in any movie... one set in a lager [concentration camp], already one of the most transgressive places humans have made. Atrocity is a transgression, that we can all agree on. War crimes are by nature transgressive. But that's not the kind of transgression I'm talking about here.

I think a lot about transgressiveness in art, because it was so highly valued when you and I were coming of age and being educated as artists. I have a lot to say about this, and will gladly follow up if you want later in this conversation, but for now I'll say that I think the Busby Berkeley scene where the lager dead dance and sing is one of the most transgressive things I've drawn. Maybe the only one. And maybe I’m wrong, and have no right to claim that; I tend to feel that to claim transgressiveness in one's work is a kind of stolen valor. But I wish I could commit it to film.

Transgression requires a boundary in order to exist. Holocaust depiction and memory is often very boundaried, very controlled by propriety and solemnity, as it often should be. But it is also all too often sanitized and sentimentalized, and I find that much more offensive than any other approach to it. How dare we clean it up? How dare we let people be comfortable with it? It was ugly, let's make sure we keep it ugly. It was sores and shit. It was dysentery and desperation. My dancers are defiant in their daring, they say, “We are alive and taunting you even in death.” I don't want children to see Schindler's List, that abomination; it's Auschwitz Lite, Holocaust for Goyim. It exists to make the comfortable cry comfy little tears. Imre Kertész wrote that, “The authentic witness is or will soon be perceived as being in the way, and will have to be shoved aside like the obstacle he is.”

To commit genocide is to commit the greatest transgression there is, and as we know, there have been many genocides before and since the Shoah. I chose to work with it not to privilege it above all others, but because it is mine. I wanted to stay in my lane and not try to make work as an outsider, culturally speaking. This is my corner of humanity's coffin to carry.

As for the humor, dark humor is what Ashkenazi Jews specialize in. I want to say "especially Polish Jews," but I suspect I'd have some angry Lithuanians and Ukrainians at my door. I'd let them in; we could all side-eye each other's borscht and one-up each other on the dark jokes.

Considering the genocide happening in Palestine, how do you feel about the timing of the release of Victory Parade?

I feel a little weird publishing a book about the Holocaust and getting attention for it at this time, now that that's happening, to be very honest. I created this book as a way of using the past to talk about now, though, so I will repeat what I said in the answer I just sent a minute ago: I chose this subject matter in order to talk about the broad human experiences of genocide and trauma, from my own cultural lane; I chose this subject not to privilege it above others, but to carry my corner of humanity's coffin.

As you know, book publishing timelines are very long. So the pub date for this one was set long before 10/7 and the subsequent genocide in Gaza. What I hope to do is to set a fire in people's hearts about atrocities. To my fellow Jews I want to say, “Look at the piles of bodies, look at the parents cradling their children’s corpses, look at the mass graves in my book, in our grandparents' towns, and in Gaza, and ask yourself, does this look familiar to you? How could we?” I know that propaganda keeps many people from truly seeing this, though. I don't want anyone to think that just because I am talking about the Shoah, I am trying to justify the Nakba or what is happening now in Gaza.

I feel we have learned nothing, broadly speaking as a species, and closer to home, as a people. However, groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace give me hope that many of us have internalized the lessons of the Shoah, which are that dehumanization leads to genocide and always ends with mass graves. "Never again" is completely meaningless unless it is applied to everyone, full stop. I know no one in power is listening, but I know that we are right about this.

The war in Ukraine weighs on me because that's where part of my family are from, because it borders where the rest of them are from and where I have active connections now, and because there is so much historical resonance anytime Russia invades another Eastern European country and tries to brutally recolonize it. And also because Ukraine is a site of the Holocaust and a place where elderly survivors still live, now being bombed by yet another larger neighbor. And it has serious global repercussions.

These genocides are leading us into even deeper darkness and shame from which we will not recover.

It is timely that your book involving genocide is coming out at a time of genocide, but then there always seems to be a genocide happening somewhere. There are multiple going on right now. People are so fucked. I'm not putting this in the interview. Or should I? At any rate, is there anything you want to talk about that we haven't addressed yet? Ugh, I feel so sad and helpless about the world...

Same. I take heart from this piece of Jewish text: "You are not required to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it." It's a small comfort against what feels like a deep ocean of brutality, but I hold on to it like a hand. Yes, put it in the interview that there are multiple genocides going on right now and that there have already been so many. That's an argument my book is very on the side of.

I'm always down to talk about confrontational art, especially by women & LGBTQ+ folks, but really by anyone; happy to talk about particularities of Yiddishkeit in my work too. Is there anything else you want to explore? Should we tell the world [redacted]?

I don't think the world is ready for [redacted]. But I love these subjects!

What do you consider confrontational art? That makes me think of Yoko Ono inviting audience members to cut pieces of clothing off her body, which is one of the most uncomfortable things I've seen (not in person, alas). Or Yoko Ono performing onstage beneath a movie screen of (presumably) her vulva up close, with flies landing and taking off. As her son plays guitar before its hirsute splendor (which I did get to see in person - joy!). If this weren't a professional interview, I'd add a fly emoji here, but I will abstain.

And yes, please tell me about Yiddishkeit in your work!

I love Yoko Ono. What a genius. Have you ever read Lisa Carver's book about her, Reaching Out with No Hands [Backbeat, 2012]? It's so good. One truly transgressive artist regarding another. One of our former students did a great comic about women performance artists where she talked about Cut Piece. I haven't seen the performance you're talking about, with her son! I need to do that.

Yeah, I am talking about that kind of art, as well as a lot of other cultural production. I've been thinking about this a lot in recent years. When you and I were coming of age, confrontational, uncomfortable art, music and literature was everywhere, and the act of being confrontational in one's work was highly valued. At least in my corner of the subculture, a woman's fury was sacred. I'm thinking of Diamanda Galás, of Lydia Lunch, of so many performance artists and writers and visual artists who were making visceral, sometimes over-the-top work. I should say, I lived in a very particular bubble, and wasn't paying attention at all to pop culture, so there was probably a lot of analogous stuff going on in that sphere that I was totally unaware of, that others could talk about. I grew up in New York in the 1980s, and the most interesting art and music to me was the kind that was a little scary. I left for art school in Boston in 1990, just after the NEA Four scandal. It felt like the most important kind of art a person could make was confrontational and intense. And I'm a pretty intense person, so that really appealed to me. It was a golden age of heavy abrasive music and really wild comics.

I know you probably have so much to say about this! You were in San Francisco, the epicenter of a lot of this subculture. In any case, making work that is intense and that does not offer comfort has always been important to me, and I've spent much of my life just trying to refine my ability to do that.

As for Yiddishkeit, it comes naturally because I grew up in that culture. I know I brought it up, but now I'm not sure how to elaborate!

To be honest, a lot of the counterculture I’ve been exposed to was second- or third-hand, or kind of happening in my periphery. Most of my youth was spent just trying to get by! The Yoko Ono/Sean Lennon experience was a concert at Fox Theater in Oakland in the '00s. She’s a phenomenal performer.

As for Yiddishkeit in your work, I suppose you could explain how you might recognize it in another artist’s work? And how they might recognize it in yours?

That's a good question. Sometimes it's obvious that someone is working from the same cultural background. A good example for me is Joan Micklin Silver's film Crossing Delancey [1988], which I just love. It's such a corrective to all of the misogynistic portrayals of Ashkenazi women in American film and literature; portrayals I grew up accepting as accurate, because that's how it works, they teach you to eat shit and like it. It's a film that celebrates us in all our intensity, humor and big personalities. I love it for many other reasons, too, but that's the one that's relevant to the question. I mean, if you're one of us there are certain ways of being that you recognize, and here I'm really being culturally specific to Polish Jews, because I don't want to generalize - I think people are different regionally, historically, even if that difference is subtle. We have a specific brand of dark humor.

Then more broadly I think about the concept of doikayt, hereness, which is of great value to me. One of my great artistic idols is the multidisciplinary artist William Kentridge. I've loved him for years, and he's a crucial part of my curriculum in all my classes. But only recently did it occur to me that he's practicing a certain kind of doikayt, at least in my eyes. If doikayt as an artistic practice means engagement with the cultures you live among, then that is exactly what he is doing.

What is Yiddishkeit, how do I know when I see it? It's Thalia Zedek singing Come's Fast Piss Blues. It's a Felix Nussbaum self-portrait. It's Irena Klepfisz's poem "A Few Words in the Mother Tongue." It's in the way my characters are sarcastic with one another. It's in glances and gestures.

Perhaps those of us unfamiliar with the culture might relate to the sarcasm on a Gen X level!

And now, my final question. Who is your ideal reader, and what will they ideally get from your book? I realize we often have many ideal readers, but I'm talking muse-level. Like, do you have a reader in mind when you're working? Someone you're speaking to directly?

Hmm. I'm not sure I have a single type of ideal reader. Sometimes in the past, I might briefly imagine an artist I admired reading my work, but I don't do that anymore. Most of the time, my work is so animated by my ideas, and then I become so completely buried by the process of making the resultant work, that I'm not thinking about the reader at all, except in very abstract terms. Only inasmuch as I try to make sure the comic is readable, generally. In fact, I'm usually surprised to learn who my readers are!