Miss Lasko-Gross

Entrevista com Miss Lasko-Gross:

- - -

"NRAMA: What did you use to draw it?

M-LG: I used Micron pens. I used Prismacolor markers. It looks like watercolor, because I used the markers with a watercolor technique. I don’t use any brushes, because, as I said, I literally drew that book on subways, at clients’ houses, outside in the park. So you can’t really bring around ink and brushes.

NRAMA: Was it very cathartic?

M-LG: Yeah, the story that comes to mind is “Dork Now and Forever,” where I’m dancing around to the Cats soundtrack. I think I blanched the whole time I drew that because it’s so humiliating but once you put something like that to paper, you never have to feel bad about it again. It’s out of your system. Now I feel like I’ve taken control of it. If you read the story, “The End of Melissa,” that’s where I start turning myself around by doing comics. I feel like when you do comics, especially autobio, you get to show people how something happened entirely from your perspective. You almost control how they see things and they have no choice but to sympathize with you and to see things your way. That was the only power I think I had as a kid. It’s probably why I continue drawing comics. It feels good.

NRAMA: Are you someone who had read a lot of autobiographical comics?

M-LG: I didn’t. I’ve gotten more interested in them since I’ve been working on one. But I really liked Persepolis. I really liked Fun Home this year. American Born Chinese was really good. I enjoy good autobio.

NRAMA: Did you think of any of them when you were trying to put together a structure for the book?

M-LG: When I’m thinking editorially, I think more about what I hate in other people’s work to avoid it because I can’t change my life story. I can’t make it so that I grew up against this sweeping historical backdrop or any of the things that makes for sensational stories. You’ll probably notice the book’s not narrated. I really strongly feel that if you have to describe something that’s going on in a panel, then you either don’t have enough confidence in your own work or you don’t have enough confidence in your readers’ ability to understand your visual storytelling. That’s something that I feel very passionately about. So I didn’t narrate it. I didn’t explain to people the way I was feeling. That’s just wasting readers’ time.

(...)

NRAMA: Your work is very detailed, is that a way you’ve always drawn?

M-LG: What I used to do is use a lot of those little Letraset sheets and I would make patterns by crisscrossing them. My big thing is doing everything by hand. I don’t color on the computer or anything.

NRAMA: Did you do anything on computers for this book?

M-LG: Lots and lots of cleanup because my pages are very sloppy since I drew them on the subway. There will be lots of little lines that need to be cleaned up so I spend hours on hours cleaning it up to make it look like I drew it in the studio like a normal artist and not on the street like a crazy person."