Lucy Knisley is the cartoonist behind 8 graphic novels, at least 1 picture book, and a slew of online auto-bio comics (a few of which we looked at for our webcomics column years ago.) Frequent library visitors may recognize “Kid Gloves,” which was a 2019 Library Reads pick, and from her keen eye for storytelling that moves the heart, be it with joy, sadness, melancholy or uproarious laughter, and the stomach, usually towards the nearest meal and/or apple cider donut.
After spending years firmly working in non-fiction, she made transition to middle-grade fiction in 2020 with “Stepping Stones.” In anticipation of the sequel, “Apple Crush,” coming out May 3rd, Lucy took time out of her busy schedule to sit down with us to talk about farm life, the challenges of separating non-fiction from fiction, and the kinds of Halloween houses we all wish were in our neighborhoods.
It’s been a while since her last interview here, so welcome back Lucy and thanks again for chatting!
The last time that you published a book was the first book in this series: “Stepping Stones.” What was it like shifting from First Second to Random House Graphic? Was there a big difference?
Lucy Knisley: I’m still sort of publishing my books in various places. I have some at Chronicle, I have some at Random House, I have some at First Second. Some at Fantagraphics even. I’ve always managed to diversify who I work with and it’s great because it gives me the opportunity to work with lots of wonderful people and in fact one of the Random House is that Gina Gagliano was heading up the division and she had come from First Second. She was a big part of what made First Second so great. So it was pretty similar.
I have a new editor at Random House, Whitney Leopard, who I really love. I’m trying to push myself more towards fiction than my previous work so I’m trying to keep my memoir work with First Second and my more fictional, middle-grade stuff with Random House. Then my more adult stuff with Fantagraphics and my kid stuff with Chronicle. Although I am putting out a kids book not with Random House as well.
Is that like your picture books or more like “Stepping Stones?”
LK: My picture books. I’m doing a picture book right now.
That’s really cool.
LK: Thanks!
It’s like you’ve got your pies in a whole bunch of different fingers… Wait…
LK: Yeah, haha. Exactly.
Are you enjoying the shift from memoir to fiction writing?
LK: Yeah. It doesn’t come naturally. Like, my natural inclination is to tell non-fiction work but I really have always wanted to make fiction. I’ve always pushed myself to it. It’s funny because I feel like writing fiction is actually more personal and exposes yourself more than non-fiction.
When you write a story that actually happened, other people have experienced that story. It’s sort of this objective thing that occurred in the world. It’s already out there. But when you’re writing fiction, it only exists in your body so when you put it out there, it’s like this extension of your inner self that’s out there for people to judge and read and experience in various ways. So it’s always felt more vulnerable, for me, to make fiction so I’ve had to sort of train myself up on fiction.
“Stepping Stones” is my stepping stone to fiction, essentially, where it’s very based in my own experience growing up on a farm with step-sisters but it’s also a story that I’m telling and I’m able to take creative license with the story. Now as the series of “Stepping Stone” [Ed note: Peapod Farm series] progresses, it’s departing more from real life and moving towards fiction more.
To prep for this interview, I read a whole bunch of your books from my library because I realized I’d only read a couple of them and I was like, oh, we’ve got them all. So when I got to “Stepping Stones,” I was like, some of these stories seem very familiar from “Relish.”
LK: Haha, like “I recognize those.”
Was that on purpose to transplant them into the stories?
Continued belowLK: There’s only so much of my story I can mine. The good stories that I have? I needed to take a few things I’d already told, in “Relish” specifically, to put into “Stepping Stones” because I wanted it to be based on me and I wanted to feel this connection to this character but I also wanted her to have her own story. Now I get to spread my wings a little bit more in terms of writing fiction and the stories depart a little bit more.
What’s nice about that is I can see myself in more of the characters and not just the one that’s originally based on me. Now I can pick and choose certain traits I identify with for each of the characters.
Has it been a bit of a struggle to fictionalize the reality that you have put it in? Do you find it harder because you keep wanting to go “Well, here’s the story. It’s so ridiculous in reality.” Or do you want to go, “Well, I should change this and I should change this.”
LK: I actually find myself wanting to change more but because so many of the people in my life have kinda gotten used to me telling true stories, they’re like “but that’s wrong. That didn’t happen.” And I’m like, “No, this is fiction!”
Has that been difficult for people to differentiate your fictional character from you, both personal, i.e. the people who are a part of your life, and also people who only know you through your memoir work?
LK: For the most part readers are very cognizant that there is a separation, though I find that working in middle grade is a big difference. You have to make those distinctions more clear. I’ve discussed this with friends of mine who work in children’s fictional worlds and how difficult it is for kids who feel this connection to an author to make any kind of separation between themselves and the author.
It’s tough when you’re an adult and you’re writing for kids and you still feel basically like a kid – when you’re like, yeah, no, I’m still 12. What’re you, what’re you talking about? I’m in no way pushing 40. I’m 12 – to make those distinctions clear. It’s interesting. And the people in my life are used to this level of exposure that they’ve gained through my work.
Specifically the “Stepping Stones” series is about me and my step-sisters and our differences and similarities and the way we sort of found our places with our family. My step-sisters are no longer my step-sisters. Their father passed away and we had long periods of separation in our lives. But we’re still close friends. One of them lives in Australia now and one of them lives in California.
Oh wow.
LK: Yeah. So it’s a little bit tough to connect personally with them these days, now that they live so far away. I do send them the books and we do discuss them. In the earliest book, which is the most based in reality, there were a lot of discussions about what happened and how to depict certain characters – their father in particular – which was a sensitive subject because he had passed away not long ago but had caused a lot of problems for me as an adolescent so I wanted to walk this line where I was telling kids that, yeah, adults can be jerks. Adults in your family can be jerks and you just have to deal with it.
They don’t always redeem themselves, they can be jerks, but it’s so different when you have a relationship with another adult because you can recognize “this person’s a jerk. I don’t wanna be around them” and then you don’t have to be. When you’re a kid and they’re in your house, you’re like, “this person’s a jerk and there’s nothing I can do about it.” So I wanted to write this story where that’s part of this frustration the character was feeling but at the same time I had to be sensitive because this is based on a person who was beloved and had passed away.
Continued belowThere were a few lines I had to walk there, yeah.
Moving into the second book, you can develop this more as you start to age the character up and also differentiate them more and more from their real-life counterparts.
LK: Yeah, it’s interesting. My own son is 5 and was beginning kindergarten when I was doing a lot of the work for “Stepping Stones” and the theme of the book is moving away from this childhood/family centered world and into this more friends centered world and certain characters are finding romance interesting and other characters are decidedly not. So it’s interesting because my own son started kindergarten and I was watching him form this new world outside of the house that I was not a part of, experiencing it from the other side at the same time while writing it and trying to embody that mindset of being a kid and going through it.
Has it been helpful for writing the adults in your books to be on the other side of that equation? Give them a little more empathy?
LK: Yes! I think I would not have been able to write the adults with the sensitivity that I have before I became a parent. Because there’s just so much more about this kid-parent relationship that I understand now and I think that it creates a more two-dimensional person when you’re seeing it from this side of things.
How many books do you think you’re planning out for the series or is it a take it as you go kind of thing?
LK: It’s a little of both but I have the book signed on as a trilogy right now. My thought is that, since it’s set on a farm and so much of farm life is based on the season, that the first book is spring/summer-based, this book that I just came out with, “Apple Crush,” is set in the autumn, and then I want to have one set in the winter that talks about farm life there: tapping maple trees for syrup and what you have to do in the wintertime to sludge through the snow to get to the chicken coop and that sort of thing.
I want to cover all the seasonal aspects of working on a farm as a kid. Right now, the idea is that it will be a trilogy.
Are there any farm chores you’re dreading putting in? Like any you’re dreading depicting?
LK: All of the chicken stuff was always my least favorite stuff as a kid. It’s so funny that now there are all these young, hipster adults who are like “Chickens! Yeah. Let’s have chickens.” Some people handle it beautifully but some people go into it without the understanding that they are gross, and violent, birds.
Their pecks hurt.
LK: Their pecks hurt! And they poop everywhere and they kill each other and animals kill them and you have to deal with it. I am of a sensitive nature that I cannot handle that and so many times as a kid I would open up the coop to find slaughter and it was horrifying. So a lot of the chicken stuff is like eughhhhh.
In the first one, it just kinda like “Oh. They’re cute and little but they’re also annoying” and in this one they’re more like, “Oh. They’re turning on each other. They’re violent.” In the next one, I think I’m going to deal with the animal break-ins and the fox attacks and things like that which were the worst aspects of dealing with the chickens for me. A lot of the farm stuff I think of fondly, like the maple syrup tapping was awesome. To this day, we’ll go back to visit my mom in the springtime and her friend has a sugar shack where they do a maple boil every year and you can huddle around this maple scented boil and drink sweetened sap cocktails and things that are really lovely.
But as a kid, of course it was like, OK. Before school, I have to go to all the maple trees and haul these giant buckets of sap back.
Like 5am before school or 7am before school?
Continued belowLK: Well, you know, we were always late to the bus stop. I think it would vary but yeah, I think it was 6 or 7. I’ll split the difference.
I would always spill the sap on me and it was all over my hands, so I was cold and wet and covered in maple goo. That was a weird preschool task that I had to do that I’ll cover in the next one.
So your mom’s farm had a processing unit for the maple sap? It wasn’t sent out to some other farm that had the facilities?
LK: We were pretty small potatoes. We didn’t produce it en masse. We produced it for friends. And my mother was also a caterer in real life so she had a catering kitchen that was separate because of health codes, where it has to be separate from your house. So she had a guest house with a catering kitchen in it which is where we did the maple boil in our place, which just meant this little catering kitchen had, at all times, the most enormous pot you’ve ever seen on the cooktop and you just pour the maple syrup into it and it just smelled amazing and it would be on low all day.
It wasn’t serious business. My friend with the sugar shack, that was more intense and they have a production line situation happening. I think we would get a few gallons of maple syrup from all that labor and arduous work on my part.
That’s a few gallons that made yourself though.
LK: Exactly! Exactly.
Are you enjoying working in middle grade as opposed to working in adult memoir? Or is it a completely different beast?
LK: It’s a completely similar beast to me, actually, on all levels. Like, I’m working on a children’s picture book, which is the bulk of my work at the moment. I’m trying to write this book that I respond to but I respond to children’s literature too. I read a lot of it, especially now that I’m a parent, I’m exposed to a lot of it. I don’t really differentiate between a lot of adult reading and children reading. Because, as I have said, I am, in fact, 12 years old.
As a kid, I read a lot of grown-up books. As a grown-up, I read a lot of kids books. It just seems similar to me, writing for kids and writing for an adult. I like that I try not to differentiate that too much because I don’t like the idea of dumbing down to write for younger audiences. A lot of the kids I know and love are much smarter than me and I hate the idea of trying to write for someone I don’t identify with. So, for me, it’s very similar to put myself into different headspaces. Which probably says a lot about my adult writing than anything else, that it’s “children writing for adults.”
It means it’s very accessible.
LK: Yeah. I would hope so.
You’re not trying to put up a million walls between you and the work.
LK: I just think that with comics you get the opportunity to communicate on multiple levels already where you’re telling a story and you’re showing pictures, which is why it lends itself so well to non-fiction writing because it’s how I experienced it, in two dimensions of experiential storytelling.
For comics to have that ability to communicate on so many different levels, it doesn’t seem like there’s room for walls in a lot of cases. It doesn’t seem like there’s a reason for walls, unless you’re telling an impenetrable story and trying to be arthouse, then I get it. But if you’re just trying to tell a story that communicates something, then comics gives you multiple tools to do that and there doesn’t seem to be a reason to use a lot of stiff arm in that regard.
When you’ve been working on the children’s books, the middle-grade and your previous memoirs, how do you approach the actual creation of the book? Laying out panels and how you tell the story? How does it differ from picture book to middle-grade to memoir? Because I notice there’s a difference between how you approach paneling and laying out a page.
Continued belowLK: Sure. With all of my travelogue stuff – “French Milk,” “An Age of License,” and “Displacement” – those are basically journals that I kept. There’s no panels. There’s no layout. There’s no forethought at all. It’s just kind of laid out onto the page. The immediacy of those is what I kinda enjoy about travelogue and certain kinds of work. It’s so different from my usual storytelling, of all of the different steps I take to turn it into a book, that I feel like it’s a process I kind of need, this sketch booking process.
That’s kind of an anomaly. For most of my books, it starts with a script and then it moves onto something I call a makette. I’ve heard other people use other words for this but a makette for me is just the text laid out on a comics page, like how much room I’m going to need to convey a certain amount of text. Sometimes that means putting the panels in, something it doesn’t.
Sometimes it’s just like “OK. I’m going to need a page to do this, this and this.” So that’s like a PDF that just has words on it but just shows me how many pages I need to draw. That’s the point where I start spiraling in despair and go, “Oh no there’s so much to draw.” Then I do the pencils straight onto the makettes and move onto the inks and colors from there.
That’s the same for all of your books?
LK: Generally, yeah. The picture book I’m working on now I’m painting it by hand in gouache because I’m a masochist and I decided that was a great idea, right before I hit the halfway point and realized “Oh, this is going to take me a long time.” So this one’s a slight departure because I tend to work pretty fast in most of my comics.
I’m a fast drawer but a slow colorist & painter, which is why I now have a colorist for my “Stepping Stones” series. Whitney Cogar is awesome. She’s coloring all my “Stepping Stones” books. But now I’m challenging myself to step back from the digital shortcuts I’ve been taking and push myself in a different artistic direction because I think it’ll “lend itself well to later on work.” Oof.
But yeah, that one’s taking a little bit longer because I departed from my usual MO.
Do you like working all digitally? Cause that’s what you did, aside from Whitney taking on colors, for “Apple Crush.” I really like how all the book publishers say how the book was drawn. I find it really fun.
LK: Me too! I don’t really remember that from books I read as a kid and I think it’s really nice they’re doing it.
I did all of “Stepping Stones” with pencil on paper and that was great, except for all the editing I had to do, scanning and cleaning up the pages, and it was just, oof, it just took a lot longer. But it was cool because then I had this whole thing of original art and all these pencil stubs that I’d used the pencils down to the very eraser. Then I moved house and I was like, “I don’t want to move original art for the rest of my life. That’s really annoying.”
When the pandemic hit, this was early on when all the stores were closed so I couldn’t go out and buy paper and pencils anymore. Unless I wanna order them but I don’t trust the quality of the paper; I wanna be able to touch the paper. And we went to go stay on my mom’s farm for a few months after the schools closed so we would have help with child care and be out of the city.
I realized that I was going to have to change my workflow because I didn’t have all the resources. I didn’t have my scanner and I didn’t have these art supplies and I didn’t have paper and I needed to be more mobile. So I did find a way to do it all digitally but I was forced into it, I should say. You know, kicking and screaming.
Continued belowI think my reaction is now to go back to this stupid, expensive, time-consuming methodology for this picture book where I’m like “Well, you’re gonna make me work efficiently and fast? I’m going to go back to this totally ridiculous way of working.” But it was a great push for me and I’m glad I did cause now I know how to do it and I know that I’m capable of it but like a lot of artists, I’m very attached to mark-making in the flesh, so to speak, so it’s hard for me to work all digitally I should say. It’s a lot easier in some ways and it’s a lot harder emotionally for me to let go of my art supplies.
Are there any steps that you’re going to keep going forward as a hybrid or are you going to slow scale that back to all physical?
LK: I’m going to try and keep drawing my graphic novels that way. It just speeds up the process digitally. And now that I’ve had a taste of someone else coloring my work, I can never go back. I’m just hooked forever. I don’t have to color. These pages. The thing about coloring pages is it’s not just the time and energy you spend coloring the pages, it’s when you’re drawing it and going, “Ugh. This is going to be such a nightmare to color this. I’m just going to change it so it’s easier to color.”
Now I’m like it’s not my problem, I can do whatever I want!
I’m sure Whitney appreciates that.
LK: Oh I’m sure she loves that. I don’t close any of my lines anymore. I’m like, “Oh, I would like these trees to be autumnal and multifaceted and colorful” and she’s like “great. okay. thanks.”
I know Whitney’s work from “Giant Days” so you’ve got a really good colorist on hand.
LK: I know, she’s so good. I worship the ground she walks on. I had to pay for the coloring myself and I’m like: Worth every penny.
Is that normal within publishing?
LK: Usually that’s worked into the contract where they’ll pay the creator a little bit more so they’ll be able to pay to afford a colorist if that’s in the cards. So that’s what we did with Random House.
They found her for me and reached out to her, which was nice. Cause I had auditioned a few different colorists and nobody was quite getting it so it was really nice that they hooked us up.
What are some comics series that are either inspiring you now or served to inspire the series?
LK: Let’s see. It’s interesting because the stuff my son reads – and he’s a really good reader for five years old. He’s almost six – the stuff my son reads is so different from the work I make and the work that I imagine making but I feel like it all informs it. Because he’ll read middle-grade stuff and I’ll go “Wow, this is really different.”
What did we just read? I really loved “Snapdragon” by Kat Leyh that came out last year. I thought that was so beautiful. My son really likes the “Witches of Brooklyn” series. It’s cool because it seems like these books are references because they are about quirky young girls but they just happen to be what we’re reading and what we’re interested in.
I just read “The Witches,” the Pénélope Bagieu translation. I’m reading a Nate Powell book about his own experiences during the pandemic which I find really interesting because he’s a parent. What else? What am I reading right now?
To be totally honest, my son discovered “Harry Potter” from his neighbors and so we’ve been reading “Harry Potter” with him a lot which is so bittersweet because I really loved it as a young person and now I’m like ohhhh. I don’t wanna support her anymore and I don’t want him to get addicted the way I’m addicted. It’s just so exhausting.
You can say it’s a stepping stone.
LK: Exactly. So we keep kind of being like “What about C.S. Lewis?” – we read “The Hobbit” last year, which was awesome – and trying to push that away but it’s too late. He’s in. It’s so much in the cultural zeitgeist-
Continued belowIt’s hard to avoid.
LK: It really is. A lot of my friends that don’t have kids are like “Oh no. I’ve completely cut that out of my life. I avoid all of it.” I’m like, I would but it’s all kids still talk about. These books came out 20 years ago and every other kid in my neighborhood is dressed up as some character from “Harry Potter” for Halloween and we were going, “Uch. Ah. OK. We can try and love the art and hate the artist. We can try this.” But it’s difficult to navigate and as an artist I’m frustrated because I’m like ”All you had to do was nothing to keep her career. That’s it! Nothing!”
But anyway.
We still have like 10, 15 copies of every book at the library, constantly going out. But it’s always nice seeing other series slowly building up and get big.
LK: Right?
Has he read any of the “Wings of Fire” series?
LK: Yes. We have read “Wings of Fire.” It’s awesome. He reads all of the “Hilo” books, which he loves, which are amazing. They’re so good. Oh. He’s getting into the “Bad Guys” series, which they’re making a movie of it.
We got to the library every week and there’s a hundred and fifty book limit for every card.
Oh wow. That’s amazing.
LK: And we have three cards in the family and there’re no late fees. Our library is this short bike ride away so we go all the time. He constantly has this steady stream of books coming in and out. He’s reading all the Dav Pilkey stuff. It’s always everywhere in the house. There’s just so much, so much, good stuff to try and distract him from the cyclone of “Harry Potter” that’s roaring down on our lives.
Have you noticed a shift in quality and accessibility of, specifically graphic novels and comics, since you were an adolescent?
LK: Oh yeah. Definitely. Obviously, Raina is partly to blame, haha. Raina is so wonderful and funny. It’s so great because we moved into this neighborhood where there’s a kid in every house and when they find out I’m a graphic novelist the first thing they say is do you know Raina Telgemeier? I’m like “I’ve known here for, like, 20 years. Yeah, I know her.” Instantly, I’m the one that knows Raina and I’m, like, revered. Like, [whispered] “she knows her.”
And I’m like, “I also have books. I also make books you know.” [Laughs] But it’s so funny to see how much it’s changed. We still have friends and neighbors who are like, “Well I prefer my kid to read ‘real’ books” and I’m like, “Did you just say that to my face? This face right here? You said that to me?”
It’s funny because I feel like I’ve amassed this arsenal of personal weaponry to use against that attitude, where I’m like ”Well, you know. With graphic novels, kids are not only reading the text, they’re gaining subtext through the visuals. It’s actually more challenging to a kids’ brain because they have to take it in visually as well as through the text itself.”
It’s sometimes like talking to a brick wall and sometimes not. The amount of parents that are now more supportive of it is wonderful and I feel like I’m doing my part a little bit to help to be a person that’s actually about to give a list of recommendations. That’s like, “It’s not a genre. Let’s find some books within the medium that fits the genre your kid is interested in. There’s non-fiction, memoir, there’s history. There’s all kinds of things.”
I think part of it is that graphic novels have embraced true stories – she says, being like “I’m doing fiction now.” But the truth in graphic novels – the history, the science, the non-fiction stuff – I think appeals more to parents and teachers and librarians for bringing books into the hands of kids.
I will say that librarians are the #1 reason, in my mind, that this has changed in my adulthood. I think librarians had recognized the merit of graphic novels much earlier on. They saw that kids responded to them, they saw people reading them, loving them, and being passionate about them and realized that this was a legitimate form of communication and literary work and artistic work and have done unbelievable things to put them in the hands of kids. Librarians and booksellers have changed this entire world to suit my particular profession and passions to which I owe them everything for.
Continued below
That’s really cool.
LK: It’s awesome. We have this incredible children’s bookstore down the street from us called “Booked.” They have multiple graphic novel reading clubs for kids and we’re sandwiched in between that and the library which has multiple graphic novel reading clubs for kids. It’s just incredible to see their graphic novel section expand.
We live in Evanston and Emil Ferris lives here, Kyla Roberts lives here. So there’s people working in the industry here. I think when I was a kid, this idea of being a comic artist was so abstract to me. To me it was like the comics just exist. They sprang from the mind of Zeus and now kids know Raina Telgemeier’s name! They’re like, “Do you know Raina Telgemeier? She’s my favorite author.” And I’m like I don’t even think I could’ve named the authors of the books I was reading as a kid because it was so beyond my capacity to understand that these were real people.
Now kids do that. They’re able to find work that resonates with them personally, characters that look like them or act like them or sound like them. You know, pick and choose from this huge selection of graphic novels that didn’t exist when I was a kid. I was reading Archie Comics, “Calvin and Hobbes.” As I got older I was reading “Strangers in Paradise” and “Sandman” comics, things like that. I would take what I could get.
There was not a lot there that really resonated with me but I was like, “Yes. It’s a comic. I’m reading it. I’m incredibly passionate about these characters I have nothing in common with.” Now kids have this luxury where they can waltz in and be like, “I want a comic about this specific type of story and this specific type of comic. Do you have that?” At the same time they’re getting books that are about completely different characters from themselves. It’s opening their world to expand their empathy. You don’t always get that with prose books where you don’t know what a character looks like.
Do you think you would ever work with Scholastic publishing?
LK: Totally! I mean, I’m so much of an equal opportunity publisher person so I would totally work with Scholastic. I think that right now I have plenty going on and I’ve loved working with all the publishers I’ve worked with and I’d have to think of a different genre to work in and expand into.
OK. I’ve got adult work with First Second, middle-grade with Random House. I’ve got children’s book and I think there’s something in between picture books and middle grade? Like, elementary grade books! I could work on with Scholastic.
Get some YA in there?
LK: Yeah exactly. YA is, ooh, that’s the pinnacle for me. That’s the highest part for me. I have to work my way up to YA because nothing compares.
Are you hoping to one day be making books with that audience in mind or are you taking it as you get a story, you’re figuring out where it fits?
LK: It’s a little of the latter, I guess. There’s some fictional work I’ve been wanting to do for a really long time and it changes nebulously in my head. Maybe it would be for younger audiences and then I kind of go, well no. Maybe older audiences? But this is the problem when you don’t really differentiate your writing, where you’re like “Eh. Writing for kids is just the same as writing for adults.” You can’t find the right place for every story.
This story has been on the backburner for years because I’m like, “Is it…for kids? It’s not like R-rated but like, hmmmm, how do I…?” So that can be tough for this. There’s also this confusion that some readers have with graphic novels where some readers who aren’t as familiar with it see pictures and think “that’s for kids” even though it’s decidedly not.
Like “Strangers in Paradise.”
LK: Like “Strangers in Paradise.” Exactly. Which I was reading, I was probably 13 when I started reading it. It’s fine.
I have this big graphic novel collection, of course. I have this pretty big library and we have all the neighborhood kids come over to my studio sometimes to look through my comics or do a workshop with them to draw comics. I realized that not all my comics are for kids and I was like, I’m gonna put some of these on the top. The European stuff is gonna…which, in Europe, they would think nothing of children reading “Priapus” but I don’t want to get in trouble with my neighbors.
Continued belowWhich is fair.
LK: Yeah and my child reads all my stuff and I try and explain as I go. Like, “Oh this is…well…how to explain?” But not all parents are like that. Not all teachers are like that. So it’s interesting because it’s hard to embody all of those points of view when talking about comics.
I was going to ask who your favorite character is in your current series but that seems unfair considering how initially based it is on your real life.
LK: I really like the cats hahaha.
The breakout hits!
LK: It’s always funny. I always get these notes from my publisher being like “more cats!” and I’m like “yes, ma’am. My pleasure.”
The first two pages. Mostly cats.
LK: Yeah. Gotta have the cats in them.
Were there any animals that you didn’t want to draw?
LK: Horses are hard. I haven’t put any horses in it yet. The children’s book I’m working on is about bicycles and a critical mass of bicycles, like a group bicycle ride. I don’t think I could’ve picked something worse to draw. To paint! I’m sorry. To paint with gouache. Had I tried to think of all of the worst things that you can do. Oh, crowds? Of bicycles? From various angles? And different kinds of bicycles. Like recumbent bikes and, you know, bike bikes with the baskets on the front and they’re so difficult to draw.
So animals are easy compared to that. I’ll draw a horse any day before I draw 50 bicycles on one page.
So it’s the critical mass and not the object itself?
LK: The object itself is hard enough. Bicycles? Yeah. But then having to draw it 50 times is like, “oh. okay.” I am getting better at drawing bikes now after all of this effort. But yeah, those were really hard for me to draw and I was like, “This’ll be great. I’ll do an entire children’s book. 40 pages? 50 pages of 50 bikes a page? Yeah. That’ll be good.”
What was I thinking?
Easy peasy.
LK: Yeah!
Do you ever want to put more educational bits into your books? Like in “Apple Crush” you have a whole segment around how does an apple crush work? How is cider made? And in your memoirs you’ll have recipes, which I’m sure your mom is very happy to have had those shared.
Or like, how do you create or make these asides? They’re always so much fun. You get these cross-sections and they’re so inventive. Is that something you want to put more of in there or is it just when the opportunity arises you seize on it?
LK: I think that’s a big part of the way I storytell. The ADD quality of storytelling and writing in that, I can’t tell a story about a farm without focusing on these weird side-quests that really interest me. I don’t think of it as educational. I think of it as interesting and I think that’s how a lot of people’s minds work. That they’re like, OK, this is a story set on a farm.
But whenever I’m reading a book and there’s a story, it doesn’t matter where it’s set or how it’s set, I always wanna hear about what they’re eating. The meal preparation. What are they eating? And when? Like over the pandemic, I listened to the entire “Outlander” series.
Oh wow. That’s a lot of hours.
LK: It is a lot of hours. This is what happens when you draw for a living and can listen to audiobooks all day. Yeah. I just blasted through the entire thing and my favorite parts of those books are when they’re like “OK. It’s time to churn butter. You take the cream but it in the thing and separate it and…” To me, it enriches a story to have those little details. I think it’s just part of how my brain works. How a lot of people’s brains work where they really feel more connection to the characters having these little pieces of information.
I don’t think of it as educational. I think of it as interesting, you know. Living on a farm, this is the stuff you do and it’s cool. You get to eat good stuff after. All of my instructional things about raising chickens and crushing apples end with “and then you get apple cider. Or then you get fresh eggs. And it’s so good.” All of that effort from all of those chores and all of that time spent doing these things results in a full sensory experience.
Continued belowAnd I think that’s kind of the whole point of the “Stepping Stones” story. These growing pains that you experience when your situation is changing, when your family is changing, at the end of it, you get more family and that’s great.
Maybe explanatory was a better word I should’ve used.
LK: Yeah, yeah. And it varies. I’m interested in farm life and cooking and food obviously. For my book about reproductive health, there was a lot of stuff about breaking down the myths surrounding reproductive health and that was a little more educational. Like, fervently educational because that is something I feel is underrepresented both in comics and the general populace. I was really taken by surprise by a lot of this stuff.
For certain ones, I’m like, I’m going to stop this story and we’re going to talk about the history and the science of this but with “Stepping Stones” I tried to integrate it a little more. Like if they’re doing this chore, let’s explore a little bit how that chore is done and what happens at the end of it. Let’s talk about how apple cider donuts are made because they’re so good and let’s talk about how they’re made.
I’m really looking forward to the fall. I’m like, “How many months until the donuts? How many months till they come back?”
LK: Right? I’m not really doing a tour for “Apple Crush,” I’m doing a few events, but I pitched to my publishers “what if all the events were Halloween in the springtime? We could have apple cider donuts and pumpkin carving and we can trick or treat.” And my publishers were kind of like, “I’m not sure the bookstores are going to go for that.” But I really want to eat apple cider donuts! That’s the endgame of all of my hard word is just to eat stuff.
If only you had a fall release.
LK: It was supposed to be but then the pandemic put my work behind by about 10 months.
Oh man. At least the next one will hopefully be winter.
LK: Hopefully. That would be swell.
What is the trick to drawing good food?
LK: Oh man you’ll have to ask someone who’s good at it.
I feel like this is something I really struggle with and something that doesn’t translate well in my work, even for my book about food. I didn’t have the texture right. For me, it’s interesting. I really like the whole instagramming your food thing. I will look at a picture of food anytime but it’s so funny because you can look at a picture of the same food that’s taken in a bad light or with a worse camera and it can be like “ew.” And then when you get a photo with great lighting and a great camera, I’m like “that’s amazing. I wanna go there and eat that right now.” I think it’s the same with drawing.
I do my best but it doesn’t always translate. There’s a book by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen called, um…I reference this book all the time. Anyway, Claes Oldenburg is that artist who makes these giant food sculptures sometimes and his partner Coosje was also an artist. Later in her life, she developed all these food allergies and couldn’t eat food but their big hobby was to go out and have these elaborate, fantastic meals together. When she couldn’t eat them anymore, Claes Oldenburg would start drawing them in his sketchbook for her.
He did these incredibly beautiful, very simple pencil and watercolor drawings of food and they’re all kind of architectural cause that’s how he thinks. And they were so beautiful and she would look at them and enjoy them through what she called Gastronomy of the Eye, like she’d be able to have a sensory experience looking at them. It’s so cool and he did it so eloquently, this really beautiful thing he would do for her, and I think it was this labor of love and this passion for food and passion for her.
So I think that sometimes it’s hard to quantify what makes a food drawing good and what makes it bad. It’s not the simplicity, it’s not the medium, it’s just really hard to put your finger on it. And all those drawings are so good and I aspire to be that good about food. But it has nothing to do with realism, it has nothing to do with what angle, what light, any of that stuff. It’s a really difficult thing to do and for me, that’s where comics is a perfect bridge because you can rely partly on the words and then your drawing is supported by these other descriptors.
Continued belowAnd it fits within the world that you’ve set up so it doesn’t have to be a photo but made with pencils.
LK: Exactly. And now back to everyone looking like a cartoon character but the food is hyper-realistic.
I feel like that would be very jarring.
LK: It’s really tough to make that transformation. I always think of “Calvin and Hobbes.” The food is always mush in “Calvin and Hobbes.” No matter what, it’s always a pile and it’s true. When you’re drawing that simply and that evocatively, that’s what food’s gonna look like in the drawing.
It’s perfect because Calvin always hates it and is chewing it up and showing it off. It’s hard to do when you want to convey that something is really delicious if you use those simple techniques.
I’ve never thought about it like that. It’s been a while since I’ve read “Calvin and Hobbes” though.
LK: It holds up.
I have the hardcover set at home. Got it at a Barnes & Noble when I was, like, 8. It’s beat up. It’s so beat-up I read it so many times.
LK: That’s how it should be. Our son is reading our old copies now and it’s so cool watching him leaf through these already totally dog-eared, falling apart copies. Reading over his shoulder now as a parent is very different. Especially…my son is almost six, Calvin is six. He’s a blond troublemaking kid and I’m reading with a lot more sympathy for the parents now.
And my husband and I kind of look like the parents, just a little bit. Just enough to wonder if this saw into my future.
You gotta watch out. Once your husband starts saying things will build character, that’s how you know you got problems come winter.
LK: Oh yeah. He’s already well on his way.
To jump back a little, when you were making the travelogues and your diary webcomics, is that something you generally enjoy doing for yourself personally as a diary comic? Like, as a project not intended for the general public to read. Or do you like doing them as a daily/every-other-day “these are the thoughts for the day,” throw it on Instagram, throw it on your website type of project?
LK: I used to be a lot more passionate about those immediate translations of experience to comic and something happened where I was keeping a sketchbook, posting it online, doing regular travelogue work while simultaneously working on my book stuff and my parenting, you know, a child.
Then when the pandemic hit it was suddenly like, I don’t need to do this anymore so much. Something happened where I think part of it was we all became more aware of certain race and class injustices in the world and I wanted to step back and make space a little bit. That was part of it. Part of it was, I think, with everyone when the pandemic hit we all went a bit further into the insular nature of our families and ourselves and were less out there, literally and figuratively.
I went from posting publicly a lot, and I have since I was sixteen and started a Livejournal, and I really really stepped it back in the last couple of years and I think the pandemic is part of that. As we are all experiencing this shared thing and experiencing it so differently from one another, it’s kinder to both myself and to others not to be like: “Let’s talk about all of our trauma constantly. Let’s put this out here. Let’s talk about this experience.”
Because we’re still experiencing it as well, I don’t feel like there’s an end cap to it. I feel like I’m still processing and trying to understand and put my head around it. The webcomic thing is really interesting because I just went from being really passionate about it and doing it as an instinctive practice to just being like, nope. I just don’t have that anymore somehow.
I hope to get back into it. I value that part of my process, this immediate translation and the sharing and the immediate response that I could treat as a sound board and to feel this connection to my readers and to understand what I was trying to say through their eyes. But now it’s a lot more that I…I just talk to my kid haha. I talk to my partner and my friends. And I go to bed really early instead of staying up to doodle in my sketchbook. I try to pour a lot more energy and creative juices into making things.
Continued belowI went through a period where, instead of doing sketchbooks I was making tiny houses.
Oh wow.
LK: It was this perfect representation of what was happening to me in the pandemic. Like I literally just want things to be very controlled and peaceful and I wanted to understand how things are put together. I now have the tiny house. I have a little art gallery that lives outside on our block so people can contribute little pieces of art to the art gallery outside.
So I just kind of started doing this microcosm artworks instead of these macro “spread it everywhere” ones. I just want to spread it to within 30 yards of my own house. And like I said I’m teaching our neighborhood kids workshops and I did this really elaborate Halloween thing this year where I made a Witch’s Walk?
It took me months.
It was this incredibly decorated…every decoration I painted myself and kids would come up the walk and I made this elaborate candy dispenser object that was a cat head so people had to turn the cat’s nose and the candy would drop into its mouth so the kids had to reach into this scary cat’s mouth to get the candy.
Then there was, I made a fortune telling omen thing where kids had to pick a symbol. Like, they had to pick the hand and then there was a book that would tell you what that meant for your future, like helpfulness or something, and then you could get a little sticker of the hand. What else? There was a big wheel you could spin and it would tell your future. All the futures were like “~there’s candy in your future~” or something like that.
It was just this ridiculous installation piece that I did right when I was turning a little bit away from the internet sharing world of art. Where it became more like I’m just going to be this weird Halloween person in my neighborhood.
I’m sure they very much appreciate it.
LK: I hope so!
I know I always appreciated seeing it in my neighborhoods. You’d walk by and be like “There’s the house!”
LK: Yeah right? It was cool because on Halloween an owl landed on our house right in front of this elaborate thing I had made. Everyone was gathered around this elaborate thing and so everybody saw the owl and we were like “this owl is our Halloween owl. Like he came to see my weird Halloween setup.”
Do you think you’d ever make a fiction story serialized as a webcomic?
LK: I’d like to. I think that in addition to sort of being more analog with the passing years, I also become less tapped in. So there’s all these people making comics on Tik Tok now that I’m like, “How? That’s cool. But how?” I came of age in the age of Livejournal, which obviously doesn’t really exist anymore, so that’s where my learning stopped. I figured out Tumblr but then it kind of went off the rails. I vaguely figured out Instagram but then it was purchased by Facebook and that made me all crabby.
I don’t know. I would love to do a serialized thing. In fact, the story I alluded to earlier where I was like, I don’t know if it’s for an adult or for a kid, would make a great web serial comic. But I would have to have a Youth come and show me how to do it these days. Like there’s so many platforms now. I’ve kind of lost track of how to promote myself online.
Webtoons is the big one.
LK: I know but I never trust these things anymore. Cause Livejournal fell. Tumblr fell. They’ve all fallen!
Ozymandias in the desert.
LK: Right haha. Which is it gonna be next?! It’s all just gonna be owned by facebook anyway. These days it’s just gonna replace the internet.
But not your Witch’s Walk.
LK: Not my Witch’s Walk! Facebook can’t own that. Yet.
Let’s not tempt them.
LK: Right exactly.
I’m guessing that the walk was an inspiration for Jen’s scenes in “Apple Crush.”
LK: If anything, the “Apple Crush” Jen scenes were an inspiration for it.
Continued belowArt influencing life?
LK: Exactly.
