Are there any self-imposed taboos in your work, like rules that you won’t break?
Yes, there definitely are. Probably a lot of them are not things that I’m immediately conscious of. I won’t put a beautiful girl on the cover of my book, just because I find it boring and kind of pandering, and also obviously kind of misogynist. I guess I don’t really like to put people on the covers of my books at all.
I’m very careful about the way that I depict violence, domestic violence, sexual violence, things like that. I think it’s important to show, and I won’t hide them. There can be a tendency to think it’s fine to show these things as long as you do it properly in a way that it telegraphs your true intentions, so you have to have a disclaimer on every page that says, well, this character is stomping on a duckling, but I would never stomp on a duckling.
I try to show things like that with as little judgment as possible, because when you encounter those things in real life, they don’t usually come with a disclaimer. And usually when violence suddenly appears in your otherwise violence-free day-to-day life, it is difficult to know how you are supposed to feel about it. So I don’t want to give the reader any help in that regard.
I also won’t show things that I can’t stomach. So if there’s a certain type of violence that I show, like, for example, I don’t know if I’ve ever shown somebody being burned alive. I think probably not. But if I were to show that, I would do my best to read firsthand accounts of that type of death, people who have come close to it, people have witnessed it, or maybe even watch videos of it if they exist. I mean, to my way of thinking, it’s the least that I can do.
Like, to honor those who have been burned alive.
I guess it sounds kind of silly when you put it that way. I just don’t think that I have any right to use that as part of my story if I can’t face it. Does that make sense?
Well, you’re taking a lot of time to draw it, so that’s a sustained amount of time where you have to think about it.
Yeah, and that’s part of how I choose the things that I write about. I will purposely choose things that are difficult for me to think about. I really hate drawing close-ups of people screaming. I hate to look at them, but I do sometimes think they’re necessary. So I and make myself do it and I lean into the discomfort for my own sake to feel like I’ve earned it, maybe. It makes my entire process sound very masochistic. It’s like the comic is just a byproduct of my own need to just kind of swim around in the cesspit of human experience. That can’t be healthy.
And yet.
And yet. I mean, it’s more healthy than a lot of other ways that I could be chasing that feeling.
My brilliant friend Matthew Perpetua interviewed my brilliant wife Julia Gfrörer about her brilliant book World Within the World for the Comics Journal! If you’ve ever been curious about her stuff, this is the interview to read.
Tags: comics, horror, interviews, Julia Gfrörer, matthew perpetua, The Comics Journal, world within the world