[Hillary] Julia, tell me about this book. Can you describe the subject matter and
also can you explain what your inspiration for doing this book was?
[Julia] Great, so my book is "Soviet Daughter: a Graphic Revolution" and
this goes along with my inspiration as well because I wanted to create a book
that was in homage to my great-grandmother, who was a Soviet
citizen and was actually born before the creation of the Soviet state, so she was
born in 1910 and died in 2010, and wrote these memoirs of her time in the USSR
before she died and when I read them after her death I had thought this
absolutely needed to be a a book. It was just so full of incredibly rich
historical information and also just really hilarious, sort of touches about
her life, they were hilarious and also deeply you know touching and affecting
and meaningful. So I thought that the range of events that she experienced was
very useful as a teaching method, but also as just a story and I thought it
would make for a really great story for people to read. And so I transferred, I
translated her memoirs and translated them into images into the
form of a graphic novel. [Hillary] So why did you decide to do it in the form of comics?
[Julia] Yeah that's a great question. I had the text the memoirs and although
the text is in itself quite informative and interesting, there's a there's a lot
of silence there, like her writing did not go into what she felt about
everything she was experiencing she would say these really horrifying things
like what happened to her family during World War II and she grew up Jewish and
was Jewish and so there was a lot that happened to her family in World War II.
Obviously I'm not gonna ruin it, but she doesn't reflect on these things because
it's very much not the Soviet way to reflect in the same way that it is for
Americans to really think about their past and and come to terms with certain
things. More commonly in sort of the Soviet context you don't discuss
feelings you don't really go in there that much, but I wanted to convey a sense
of sort of gravitas and what she was experiencing, and I also wanted to
give people a sense of what it was like to truly live there
in a really visceral way and this is where I thought imagery would be the
most important thing as a way of just jumping into that historical period and
really feeling what it was like to live there. [Hillary] Great, so maybe picking up on
that can you describe your creative process how did you
compose this book can you sort of walk us through that? [Julia] Sure, it took a few
years to settle on a style. A few people might think that cartoonists have their
own style and they just sort of carry that with them in anything they do,
whereas I think actually there's a lot of, everyone has a lot of thought it puts
a lot of thought into how they want to represent the particular story that
they're doing. And so I went through a couple of different styles and sort of
trial and error style and nothing seemed to be working, and finally I drew a
little mini comic version of the first chapter and went to the comic fest MICE
[Hillary] That's the Massachusetts International Comic Expo.
[Julia] Right, yeah I didn't go up to little mice, like would you like to read my comic?
although that would be very cute, but no I went to the comics Expo in 2012 and
had this mini comic and I passed it around to a couple of people and one
person that I showed it to is Bob Sikoryak who wrote "Masterpiece Comics" and
just has a book out right now called "Unquotable Trump" so he works a lot with
form and so you know unbeknownst to me he would be the perfect person to talk
about form. And he looked at what I had and at that point it was very
rudimentary and it was more kind of a strict black-and-white very cartoonish
less realistic style and I showed it to him and he said okay this is pretty cool,
but what about this particular panel this is really interesting
what's this style that you're using? And that was one panel where I tried to
recreate a black-and-white photograph from the 50's kind of quickly, and he said
that oh it's very evident that you took a lot of care in the creation of this
particular panel and you were interested in this. This is interesting maybe you'd
want to do something like that. And I immediately thought oh that was my
favorite thing to draw here. [Hillary] Interesting that it
took someone else pointing it out for you to really recognize or think about
the fact that it was your favorite thing to draw when you were composing. [Julia] Exactly,
I hadn't had a lot of experience publishing comics before I had a couple
of short projects, but I didn't even know that it was possible or didn't think it
was possible to do an entire book in that painterly style.
I had seen it and actually it's not super different from Alison Bechdel's
style to a certain extent, but to really translate how I loved to paint generally
into comics of something that I just didn't really, I didn't think oh I
could actually just do this. You know and then once he said that I mean it was
like yes! actually this makes so much sense. And so I really thought the whole
thing and decided on this painterly style because it had a way of conveying
the particular time period like at the sense of a photograph an old
photograph, and there was also something about the style that reminded me of
Socialist Realist posters from the 1940s and 1950s so I used a lot
of reference images from that time that that were often very painterly and very
kind of almost like Realism from the early or mid 19th century ,this kind of
painterly style. [Hillary] So how long would it take you to compose your pages
did you write out a script and then break down how the pages would work? Can
you describe the sort of how did you actually put the words and images
together on the page? [Julia] Right, it was a ton of trial and error.
Most of, almost, I would say 99% of the book was entirely hand-drawn, and so if I
sort of screwed something about the while I painted it I would have to just
redo the whole thing and so it took a lot of
a thought and thumbnailing. And so what I would do is, I had the script first
[Hillary] Can you describe what thumbnailing is? [Julia] Oh sorry, it's the
creation of tiny, kind of very, very rudimentary sketches sort of when,
similar to the creation of films or a storyboard. It's almost like
storyboarding, very very very rudimentary. Some people get very involved in the
particular thumbnail some people just draw stick figures you know and so I
would have these sketched out pages. I would do maybe a couple of chapters at a
time that I would sketch out, and I would sort of think about where the words
would go, and I would send this to a trusted friend who at that point lived
in the middle of North Carolina. And he was very critical, and I love having very
critical friends because they are hard to find.
[Hillary] You want someone you trust who will give a
real opinion. So what about researching? I mean you mentioned
obviously reading your great-grandmother's memoirs, but did you
do other research for the book in libraries and bookstores obtaining
information? How did you go about it? [Julia] Yeah absolutely, I did a ton of research I
didn't do the type of research in the sense of making sure that what my
great-grandmother said was true because I took it at face value. [Hillary] So you
weren't verifying what she told you. [Julia] Exactly because for me it was less
important that it actually happened and more important that she thought that
this was happening in her life. I think that she was quite, you know I my
assumptions is that it was all true, but I've had events where people said you
know did this particular thing happen? I didn't see this in history books and I'd
say, you know this wasn't the point of the book.
The point was to describe her describing her own life. [Hillary] And not seeing it in
history books definitely doesn't mean it didn't happen. [Julia] Right, so it
also relates to what I do academically and so a lot of what I researched in the
book, or for the book, I also researched for my degree. [Hillary] So what kind of stuff
were you researching, and were you researching visual details in order to
draw them what a place looked? [Julia] Definitely those, but also
the print culture of the period just and just the general popular culture of a
period - so I was really interested say in the parts about the 1920s,
my great grandmother would describe going to all of these different clubs
and doing things like theater and so I would also be reading you know history
texts about the early years of the Soviet Union and the kind of composition
of these workers clubs, and you know what these kids would be doing how they would
hear about these things. It would just give me more of a sense of, not only
visual, but just how it was like to experience these things because that
would then inform how I draw them, right. So the kind of historical background was
there in order to inform the drawing style, but it also allowed a
more sort of rounded well-rounded understanding of the time period that I
thought was very important when I was constructing it. [Hillary] It seems really
important. I'm wondering for your writing what role reading plays, especially as an
academic. Does the kind of work you do as an academic the kind
of reading you do as an academic inform how you write? [Julia] Absolutely. If
anything it makes it, I think a little more difficult because it becomes very
self-critical and self analytical and everything becomes very meta where you,
you know, I would write a chapter or draw a chapter and then have all
of these kind of meta criticisms about the chapter right after I do it and kind
of imagine it, in a weird way it being discussed at a panel and
being picked apart and criticized for one thing or another thing. So but it
also means that I draw, I'm able to I think draw connections to other texts
and that's something that I do in comparative literature is write as draw
sort of cross national or cross-disciplinary connections from one
thing to another. And I'm I think I am lucky that I'm able to do this with
my own work as well. [Hillary] Your own work which is
cross-disciplinary, even this sort of form of a comic is cross-disciplinary. [Julia] Right exactly
so I'm trying to combine the two more. Like I just finished an eight
page comic about Walter Benjamin. [Hillary] Wow I can't wait to read it!
Academics the world over will be thrilled.
[Julia] Yeah I love him we'll talk about him, but it's published this month in the paper
Brigade, which is a sort of new Jewish Journal. [Hillary] It is? I can't wait to get it, you didn't
tell me. I'll have to run out and get it. [Julia] Yeah, it's very new, but so I'm trying to to bridge
the two more and clearly academia influences me a lot when when writing it
and so it's not just you know I'm not just reading works written in the Soviet
Union, but also works about the Soviet Union, and you know I'm able to go to
conferences and things where these things are explained in depth and I'm
very lucky in that sense. [Hillary] Right, how would you say your creative voice is
influenced by what you read?
[Julia] I think most people would say they're very influenced by everything they read.
I wanted to explicitly refer to a lot of things in this book specifically
where there's just a lot that I really love about certain aspects
of Soviet culture and art. So I truly just love 1920s Soviet avant-garde art
and film, and I wanted that to be conveyed in the book in I think more
subtle way. And so I included these sort of Easter eggs of different films and
different scenes and actually sometimes there, people catch them. Like
tomorrow I'm doing a panel on Vertov, and the discussant John McKay,
caught one and he emailed me. [Hillary] An academic panel at... [Julia] academic panel at
ASEEES which is the Association for
Slovak and Eastern European and Eurasian Studies, tomorrow in
downtown Chicago, and so I'm here also for this for this other panel presenting
a paper on a 1920s Soviet filmmaker, Dziga Vertov, and the discussant it for this
panel saw reference to Vertov in the book, and so we had a fun exchange where
he tried to look through a couple of different pages to find other other
references. [Hillary] Wow, Easter eggs for academics.
So before we get to the last question I just wanted to ask you
to sketch out again, without giving anything away, which is something you
mentioned before, the plot of this book so what's going on in this book?
[Julia] Right, I should have explained this in the beginning, but so
this is, 80% of this book is straight from my great-grandmother's memoirs and
you get a sense of her life and her life was pretty extraordinary. She grew
up in a poor Jewish family in Ukraine, and most of her life she lived in Kiev.
[Hillary] And what year was she born?
[Julia] She arrived in the world and
appeared in 1910, and so she was pretty young when the revolution happened but
still you know understood as a seven-year-old what was going on. And it
affected her quite a bit, and she became radicalized by the time period, and by
various people in her family and her friends and became very involved in
politics. And joined the Communist Party and ended up becoming a secretary
for what became the KGB at that point it was the NKVD and so she was very very
connected to the government. And had all of these ambivalent feelings about
what she was doing and there's a kind of interesting section in the book where
she knows that something is amiss in the government and people are disappearing
but she has to persevere nonetheless and so she had this incredibly vital role
although it wasn't you know she didn't have that much power but she was very
involved in the system the communist system.
But besides this she was also extraordinary in other ways. She was a
volunteer nurse during World War II and became a lieutenant in the Red Army so
she was definitely a proto-feminist before the word feminist could be used,
at least in the Soviet Union, she really just, her very persona kind of
embodied what it was like to be a feminist. For she did not care what other
people thought about her. She really worked with her own set of morals and
ethics and was very strong just a very very strong person that I looked up
to growing up, and she when I were very very close. And so I wanted the
book to convey this closeness that we have in the sense of connection because
I really did feel closer to her than any other member of my family and so about
20% of the book is more from my own perspective. So 80 percent is from hers.
[Hillary] So you're a character in the book [Julia] right exactly, so I have what I call interludes between
each chapter and the interludes are from my own voice, and are about either the
process of thinking about her life and thinking about my experiences with her,
but it was also about the experience of immigration from the USSR to the United
States in 1992. What it was like as a, you know Russian speaker with someone
holding these two cultures of Soviet and American in sort of one brain and
what that was like. And much of it was also about what it was like for
Lola growing up, not growing up but growing older in the United States.
[Hillary] That's a form of growing up. [Julia] That's true, growing up again in
the United States was a totally new thing for her. So I wanted to include
more of that as well and much of that I saw growing up so that is also an
important part of the book I think. [Hillary] So to conclude and speaking of people that you
look up to, I was hoping that you could name three books that you think
everybody should read. [Julia] All of the books. No but outside all of the books, so I
decided to pick three books of completely different genres because even
though this is a comic, I thought you know all cartoonists are also influenced
by things that are not comics although it is important to read them, and so I
picked my favorite my personal favorite comic or one of them which is "Fun Home"
by Alison Bechdel which has this really lovely watercolor style and
Bechdel talks about, draws about her experiences growing up with a father who
did not come out but was was gay, and her coming upon this knowledge and while she
herself was also coming to terms with her own sexuality, and her you know
homosexuality as well and so it's a, it's incredibly touching and important to
read, and also now an incredible musical. So yeah so I thought that
especially for people that haven't read a lot of comics I thought it
it was a great kind of introductory comic to understand that it's not just
superheroes you know there are extremely many increasingly many
nonfiction and important works. Which is what you work on. I also thought this was
extremely important for the book and for me, but my favorite poet and my
great-grandmother's favorite poet is Vladimir Mayakovsky. So I decided to
include him on my list and this is a really great translated version of his
poems where you really get a sense of... [Hillary] Who's the translator?
[Julia] Max Hayward and George Reavey, I did not know that beforehand.
But this is a great addition because it has Russian on one side and English on
the other. And you get, this page doesn't have a lot, but often he plays a lot with
form and so you get a sense of what it looked like in the original.
Which is really rare, oh so here you can sort of see how
differently the form works in this setting, and how differently he
might have read this out loud. There's also a page in my book, where I just
decided to draw Mayakovsky with a sort of splash panel behind him of a
Mayakovskiy poem written, like in cursive font, just as an homage to him and also
to my great-grandmother's love of him. Actually her memoirs were titled
Of Time and Of Myself, like she wrote it on the front page of these loose leaf pieces of
paper and it comes from a poem from Mayakovsky. So she just really loved him.
[Hillary] So what's your final recommendation? [Julia] It's the previously
mentioned wonderful aesthetic philosopher Walter Benjamin. This is a
great collection of his writings. My favorite collection that just has a lot
of really wonderful... [Hillary] I haven't seen that edition, I have the dogeared copy of the edition
that has the yellow cover. [Julia] Oh I don't have that one. This is
the first I saw. I just love the modernist kind of
the modernist cover. But they're constantly coming out with new
versions of this and as I said I recently wrote a page sort of it's a
graphic narrative book review of a few books on Walter Benjamin, but also about
his life and his influence. And his work just influences me so much. He
really, I think, thinks about the relation between art and specifically media
within the confines of technology. So mediated technology such as film and
things like you know shadow puppetry in the 19th century.
Where I think they have such an important effect on human
sensibilities and especially around. So and I think comics have a unique way
like film of accessing that really interesting mode that is a blend of
technology and effect.
[Hillary] Well that's a nice place to end. Speaking of your own comics. So thank you.
[Julia] Yeah, thank you so much.
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