Illustration by Jessica Abel
Jessica Abel
Issue #27
The comic-book artist talks about her teen years as a punk rock poser, writing in full prose, and the release of her comic series, La Perdida, in book form
By Ann Heppermann
Published: March 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
Comic-book artist and illustrator Jessica Abel meets me at a busy French bistro-style café in Manhattan during the lunchtime rush on a January afternoon. She arrives at the restaurant schlepping a wireless keyboard and a mouse that she sold on craigslist.com to a buyer who shows up and collects his purchase right before we settle into our interview. She’s in full multi-tasking mode today, on her way to teach her first day of class after the Christmas break, a seminar course called Pictorial Problems at the School of Visual Arts.
The frenzy of the moment kind of reflects the state of things for Abel, who’s in the middle of a million projects. She’s working with her husband and fellow comic-book artist and illustrator Matt Madden on a comic textbook tentatively titled Lines on Paper. And most interestingly, she’s writing a young-adult novel, called Carmina. For someone who has solidified her reputation in the comics realm — most famously for her comic series Artbabe, which recorded the angsts and reflections of many hipsters during the ’90s — Carmina will be her first prose work.
Meanwhile, Abel’s comic series, La Perdida, originally published in installments by Fantagraphics from 2001 to 2005, is being released in book form by Pantheon, and she’ll be heading off for a book tour this spring. The series chronicles the adventures of Carla, an American college grad who travels alone to Mexico City in an effort to live independently and discover the culture for herself.
We split a fancy French sandwich and talk shop.
What do you say to people who say that you can’t teach comics?
I think they haven’t thought it through. I mean, you can’t teach talent. There is something very real about that. However, there are so many concrete skills that you can teach. The idea that you somehow have to, as I did, discover that all for yourself is dumb. I’m still learning techniques that I could have learned in school. I just learned how to use a T-square last year. I just never bothered to figure it out. Now I’m like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe how much time I wasted.” And if I had gone to school and had a decent teacher who could have said, “Don’t do that, that’s stupid, why don’t you do this?”
I think it stems from this modernist idea that the artist alone is somehow a more pure way of being and working than learning in the academy. But the fact is the people we hold up as models usually have studied. A lot of these cartoonists either had groups of friends or apprenticed themselves to a master. To say to someone, “You need to sit in your own room and figure this stuff out” is just silly.
So is the textbook you’re writing with your husband — which is set to come out in a few years — going to solve this?
The approach of the textbook is that there are many how-to books and many of them have some nuggets of good stuff. But our book is going to be the first one to be an exercise-based, classroom-style book to learn comics. You’ll be presented with an idea, and then there is a series of exercises that you do in class. If you’re not in a class, we hope that you form a group. We’re really encouraging people to do group learning so that there is a lot of feedback going on and people can accelerate their learning.
It’s like recreating a community.
And it gives them some analytical guidelines, so instead of going, “Oh, that’s so cool” or “Oh, that’s bad,” it’s like, “Why is it bad?” and “Why is it good?”
So you’re about to go on book tour for La Perdida?
I’ve edited [the book version] and made it more seamless. It’s very similar, but there was a chapter that was only online. If you have the individual issues, you pretty much have it. However, I think that I’ve improved it. I had the arc written when I started it, but I didn’t have the entire thing written by any means, so there were some red herrings in it. Especially in chapter one and two that petered out and ended up not going anywhere because I thought I was going to do something with it and didn’t. There were some sort of tweaks I needed to make in Carla’s character early on. I think it’s going to be a much more complete story even though the tweaks are fairly small.
In La Perdida, Carla is always looking for the “real” Mexico. As a former expat living in Mexico, what do you think of the outsider’s search for authenticity?
I think Americans in particular go about looking for some kind of authentic existence with much more vigor than people of other cultures do. They just feel like imposters all the time. Like I remember wanting to be a punk rocker. I graduated high school in 1987. But in 1985, I felt like I could not dress punk rock. I could go to shows, but I had to be a real geek at shows because if I tried to dress punk, that would mean that I was a total poser. I felt like I missed the boat by so little, but I had missed it, and it was over. The lesson that you learn about authenticity when you get older is that there is no such thing. You are who you are. And Carla certainly does not know that. In Carla’s case, it causes untold disaster, and she’s not in control of it.
Now you’re writing the young-adult book, Carmina, that’s all prose, not comics. Was it a hard transition from comic-book artist to flat-out writer?
Well, I was an English major in college in Chicago. I’ve wanted to work on prose for a long time, but I hadn’t found a way to do it. And I’ve done a lot of prose writing, which was not ready for primetime. None. The fiction was always bloated because I was like, “I can use as many words as I want!” And I’m so excited and I just keep going. So with Carmina, I’ve gone through a really long process with this book. I’ve written almost a whole draft, thrown it away, started over — tightened the structure, trying to think about what is essential and paring it down because, you know, it’s the old question with comics.
But I’m reserving judgment until the thing is done because it is so not done now. I feel like I can do it and it’s going to be a good book but I don’t know that. I don’t have any basis for that, really. At the moment, I’m not really doing comics at all; I’m mainly doing writing. And that’s a sanity builder, I have to say, because comics are really, really, really, really hard.
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