Cartoonist, Interrupted: MariNaomi
MariNaomi is the author and illustrator of the SPACE Prize-winning graphic memoir Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Resume, Ages 0 to 22 (Harper Perennial, 2011), the Eisner-nominated Dragon’s Breath and Other True Stories (2D Cloud/Uncivilized Books, 2014), the upcoming Turning Japanese (2D Cloud, 2016), and her self-published Estrus Comics (1998 to 2009). Her work has appeared in over sixty print anthologies, and has been featured on such websites as The Rumpus, The Weeklings, LA Review of Books, Midnight Breakfast, Truth-out, XOJane, Buzzfeed and more. Mari’s work on the Rumpus won a SPACE Prize and an honorable mention in Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Comics 2013.
…
DS: Where are you?
MN: I’m in LA, where I live. In my home office. I recently tried having a studio but I gave that up. I was being driven crazy a little and getting kind of lonely only speaking to dogs all day.
DS: Whatcha workin’ on?
MN: I’m working on a graphic novel. It’s YA book. I’m so close to being done with it. I’m excited.
DS: What makes it a YA novel?
MN: It’s about teenagers.
DS: It seems like with comics there’s a lot of — not even confusion — but a loose barrier between shelves. Like in a YA section of a library you’ll see all kinds of comics that could be shelved in the adult section. With your stuff and a lot of autobio stuff, that tends to be in particular a place where those categories fall away, or are at least inscrutable.
MN: With this graphic novel I’m working on, versus Kiss & Tell, much of it takes place as a teenager. In Kiss & Tell I’m kind of looking back on things from an adult perspective. But in this I’m coming at the story from the perspective of a teenager, which gives it a different kind of feel.
DS: Right. I think that kind of distinction is… has to do with voice and storytelling, but it also has to do with the kind of piece you’re making. If there’s distance you can be more essayistic or analytical, but — and now I’m thinking about something by like Debbie Drechsler or Esther Williams. It can be maybe a little more straight acting rather than examining.
MN: To be honest, I never read YA novels when I was YA. I think it was 6th grade, so I was 11 years old when I first picked up Kurt Vonnegut, and then I realized that all the books they were giving us in school were crap —
DS: Can you remember which ones were crap?
MN: God, I don’t even remember what they were having us read — just that Slapstick completely blew me away.
DS: Yeah!
MN: It was maybe step one to me leaving high school early. I remember my teacher was giving a big box of free books away, and I saw Slapstick and it has an interesting cover and my teacher was like, well, that may be a little beyond your reading years, which of course made me want to read it more. It was the first time I was exposed to satire, for example. Everything just clicked. It was as profound to me as the first time I took LSD. My whole worldview changed. I realized what a tiny little universe going to school was and how I didn’t want to do it anymore.
Laughs
I mean, it took a few years before I came to that conclusion, but I think the first step in getting there was reading something so beyond what they were giving me. What did they give us in high school — In Cold Blood, Of Mice And Men — they still give them the same stuff to read. It wasn’t all crap. Once I got that first Kurt Vonnegut book I wanted to read all the Kurt Vonnegut books.
DS: That book is so insanely subversive from the first second. It’s those twins and they’re best friends and geniuses. They have sex with each other.
MN: Oh, man, I mean, I ate it up. I was always kind of a horny little girl.
Laughs
I mean, I didn’t start reading YA until about five years ago, when publishers were looking at Kiss & Tell, but they were specifically looking for a book for teenagers.
DS: There are a lot of references in that book, and your other books, too, that maybe kids would miss. I disagree with changing references to meet kids existing interests though… did you ever read a book called Skinnybones, by Barbara Park?
MN: Mm, no.
DS: Barbara Park is a humor writer for kids, and she’s amazing, she’s one of my favorites. She had this classic book that came out in the eighties, called Skinnybones, and there are lots of dated references that kids wouldn’t get now, like baseball players and stuff, so they did this new edition of it where they changed everything. Like every time they talk about Atari, they would change it to, I don’t know… Game Cube or whatever. God, even that is such an old reference.
Laughs
So they just updated everything. To me that’s so patronizing, and its not good for growth. It doesn’t make people try to learn a new reference.
MN: I was thinking about this the other day, with those old Bugs Bunny cartoons that I grew up on, from the thirties or whatever. I didn’t understand most of the reference in those cartoons. But it encouraged me to think about them and at least inquire about them.
DS: When he’s doing Groucho and stuff.
MN: Laughs Yeah.
DS: But that can be fun, because then when you do happen to see the primary source later it’s like OH.
MN: Yeah. It’s funny, when I first saw the movie Casablanca, and I didn’t see it until I was in my twenties —
DS: I still haven’t seen it.
MN: Oh, it’s good, you should see it.
DS: All right, fine, god.
Laughs
MN: It was one of those ones I resisted for so long because I was like, oh, I’m sure it’s bad because everyone loves it. But then I saw it — and on top of it being a fantastic movie — just, all these references coming alive in front of me, was amazing. It was pretty trippy.
DS: Yeah, I had never seen Blues Brothers and then I finally did, like last year, and I was just so happy the entire time it was playing. There were so many comedy THINGS.
MN: I think there’s a lot of value in exploring the roots of things. There’s a lot of pushback not to, especially for young people.
DS: If you were in a situation where they wanted you to pull — like you had that one story about meeting Duran Duran at a party — would that be the kind of thing they wouldn’t put in a YA book, because they would think the kid wouldn’t care?
DS: That would seem to be a bit of a more mature story. Maybe not because of the reference, not because of Duran Duran, But just because I don’t know if kids would really identify with that story. I’m tying to think back — if I read that as a teenager, I think I might just think, wow look at these old boring people.
Laughs
DS: Yeah! Well, it probably has to do with thinking about yourself in the past, I mean, it’s memoir. It’s remembering your relationship with art that meant a lot to you in the past. Then you’re meeting the artist and it becomes a cool, you know, a party story. But maybe for kid, since they’re absorbing the art that’s going to be formative for them, since they’re in that part now —
MN: I’d be curious to see how an eleven year old would read that book. I kind want to see that now. Find somebody —
DS: Yeah, get an eleven year old! Where’s an eleven year old? Do you know any kids?
MN: No, I know none.
DS: I don’t know any kids. There are some babies around…
MN: I am covered in babies all the time.
Laughs
Long thing where we talk about kids
MN: …I’m gonna do my best to corrupt him and make him an interesting person.
DS: Yeah, you know, just get him cool albums and stuff. A kid needs the big sister channel that the cool stuff comes through. Do you have siblings?
MN: I do have one sister.
DS: Did she get you into cool stuff or did you have to do it on your own?
MN: Oh, I’m the older sister. But she has gotten me into things. She’s six years younger than me, but she’s really cool.
DS: Being the older sibling is really cool.
Laughs
I mean, I have friends who are younger siblings and they’re great. Older sisters in particular, though. You have to be tough. You break in the parents.
MN: Tell me about it.
DS: You’re like, look, the Ramones. I mean, my brother never got into the Ramones.
MN: There’s a lot of road paving that goes on. I was very protective of my younger sister when she was in grade school and I was in high school by that point — I think I put this in the book. She was getting picked on, so I just came to the school and pushed the kid over.
DS: Whoa.
MN: Yeah, I came over with my boyfriend, and we had Doc Martens on, and I was a death rocker —
DS: Whoa!
MN: She pointed out the kid to me and I just went up to him and said pick on people your own size! And just pushed him down.
Laughs
DS: Your sister is so lucky!
MN: It felt really good to pick on that kid. Actually, she must have been nine years old. She was little. And she was really small for her age, so she got picked on a lot. Later on — not long ago, apparently — the little kid who bullied her admitted that he had a huge crush on her, but of course, after that, was terrified. As he should be.
DS: That’s funny. My hunch is always that, that narrative, of, the little bully has a crush on you, doesn’t really play.
Laughs
When I was a little kid and some kid was mean, they were always like, oh, he has a crush on you. I was always like, no. That’s not the — don’t tell me that.
MN: You never know though. There was a turning point, I think, when I was about 14 and I discovered sex and drugs, where I became more of a bully and less of a pushover. I was sort of the Peter Pan of bullies where I would bully people who were bullying my friends.
DS: You were in a gang.
MN: I was starting to discover boys and how to flirt. I was kind of mean. That was how I’d get their attention. I’d sort of put them down if I thought a boy was interesting or cute. Sometimes it worked.
DS: You were new to power. You were an oppressed person who got a little and you were like, I’m gonna use this.
MN: That’s the problem with kids though. They don’t know anything. They make all these mistakes.
DS: Yeah, I was just reading this really great — do you know the cartoonist Sophia Foster-Dimino?
MN: Yes, I love her stuff.
DS: She’s such an insightful writer. I hadn’t really seen anything by her before and then I just found everything I could and read it — this is like a week ago. There was one part in one of the Sexual Fantasy comics about how when you’re young you always want to say and do the right thing, and you feel unsure. Then, as you get older, you learn how to behave. Not even just memorizing social conventions… the gap in between knowing what you want to say and do and actually being able to do that closes…
MN: Sometimes it never closes —
DS: I mean, it never really closes.
Laughs
MN: That sounds good, I haven’t read that one.
DS: I guess, what she was getting at, I thought it was a really original way to describe confidence.
MN: I’ve been thinking from the opposite end lately. When people become parents, for instance, it’s hard to keep up with what’s going on in the world, even just social norms and words — like cisgender. Some people don’t know what that is, and it just boggles my mind. But, of course, they’re busy with their babies, and of course you prioritize that over stranger’s feelings. But these are kind of the first things to go. I don’t want to fall out of touch to the point where I become a less compassionate person. I think that’s my ultimate fear.
DS: Sure. But I think there would be a divide between someone who didn’t have a lot of time to read and get news and vocabulary about social movements, but is still intuitively compassionate — I mean, they don’t know the word cisgender but they’re not The Devil.
MN: Oh, I’m not saying that being out of touch means you’re a bad person. As you get older, time goes by faster, and it’s a lot — I don’t want to be flip about it.
Long thing about normcore
DS: To change the subject, I did want to ask you about writing personal stories. I always want to talk to autobio writers about this, the value of being public with your private life. My introductory thought about that, is, when you’re making art about something that happened in your life, there’s a degree of removal that sort of insulates you from vulnerability — and, I mean, that’s the vulnerability that you’re introducing into your life by being public with your stories.
MN: Sometimes. There are certain stories I wrote that I can’t read without getting very upset, because I don’t feel removed from them all. It would be helpful if I did because I could probably make a better story, because I could think about myself in the third person. I just did a reading the other night, a story of a friend I knew who disappeared — it wasn’t even a very significant relationship, it was a friendship I had with a work friend —
DS: Oh, I know that story.
MN: It’s a small story, and it’s not even that sad! But I was up there and I started crying while I was reading — awful. I don’t know. The sadness of it, of never seeing him again, just kind of hit me.
DS: Were you on tour?
MN: No, just a reading at a local bookshop.
DS: I ask because maybe you were tired. Not to diminish the gravity of the story.
MN: I was a little nervous about the Eisners, which was the next night. It makes me nervous to be put on the spot like that.
DS: Someone said the other day, my friend who’s a performer — actually, it was a facebook post, I should stop calling facebook posts “things people said”…
MN: Laughs Facebook posts are our new watercooler talk.
DS: She was nervous about a show, so she wrote something like god, I hate performing. I wish it weren’t my favorite thing to do.
Laughs
MN: That’s hilarious. Sometimes I feel that way about comics.
DS: Yeah.
…
DS: Kiss & Tell was your first book, but those weren’t your first comics, right?
MN: Yeah, I’ve been making comics since the nineties. My first comic was published at Action Girl in ’97 or ‘98. I don’t know that my stories have gotten better. My art’s gotten better.
DS: It can be harder to spot progress in the writing when you’re doing comics — like if you’re expecting that you’re going to turn into Faulker or whatever, that’s not really the right test. It’s just a different language, images and words together. To see your drawing improve over the years is a gift. Thank god for that. We get to see that curve.
MN: Yeah. Just, even, going to figure drawing classes and seeing yourself improve feels really good.
DS: Did you feel like, when you were a kid, or when you were a teenager, you had to have a thing? A specialty?
MN: My thing was always that I’m gonna be a writer.
DS: Yeah.
MN: I have an autobiography that they made us write in kindergarten. And my thing says I’m either a writer or a caterpillar doctor.
Laughs
I didn’t know the word for entomologist.
DS: You’re so specialized. You’re like “I only do caterpillars!”
MN: Well, they’re so cute and fuzzy.
DS: I remember being on this weird page of my kindergarten yearbook where everybody wanted the some kind of caterpillar doctor job. Everyone else wanted to be doctors and lawyers and stuff. C____ wanted to be a Sticker Maker.
MN: I can see the appeal in that.
DS: Yeah, well, if you’re a Sticker Maker, you get to have a lot of stickers.
MN: And stickers are the best!
DS: Totally.
interview by Sara Lautman
MariNaomi’s books at 2D Cloud
coming April 2016
