La Perdida: Finding a Home for Comics in the World of Books

by Sunyoung Lee, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 3/14/2006

With two Harvey awards to her name, and a publishing history that encompasses everything from self-publishing to indie publishers like Fantagraphics to major trade book publishers like Pantheon and First Second, Jessica Abel could be considered the new sort of comic insider: she's as comfortable in the plush world of trade book publishing as she is in the gritty milieu of mini-comics and zines. As a teacher of comics at New York City's School of Visual Arts, she's also responsible for shaping how a new generation of artists approach the medium. In a sense, she's presided over the blossoming of an industry.

Abel's latest offering, La Perdida, tells the story of Carla, a half-Mexican expat trying to find a place for herself in Mexico City. (Abel herself lived in Mexico for two years, though the story is pure fiction.) With La Perdida, Abel has created what could described as a slacker thriller.

La Perdida was first published as a serial by Fantagraphics, which also put out Soundtrack and Mirror, Window, collected volumes of her popular zine Artbabe. The current incarnation is a lush, 275-page hardcover book by Pantheon, complete with glossary. In addition to numerous other projects, including a prose young adult novel, she's collaborating with her husband and fellow comic artist, Matt Madden, on a textbook on comics that's forthcoming In 2007 from First Second.

PWCW: Where did your idea for La Perdida come from?

Jessica Abel: It was a long process. I started working on the idea when I was still in Mexico, which I left in March 2000. But I didn't get it to the point where I could do much with it until I was back in the States.

The initial spark of the idea came from the scene at the end of chapter one where Carla is hallucinating: she sees bullet holes in the wall and has this image of Joan Burroughs being shot and falling to the floor, and I had this idea of the apple rolling across the floor somehow still being there. [William Burroughs killed his wife, Joan, during a re-enactment of the William Tell trick.] I'm not sure where that came from. It had something to do with peeling wallpaper, because [Matt and I] had done that ourselves in Mexico. The idea of renovating, and particularly peeling wallpaper, is so interesting because you're peeling back the years, and you can see wallpaper that relates to how other people used that room. I didn't really know who was in the scene, who was seeing the hallucination until after I pictured it. And gradually I started building the characters from there.

PWCW: Did you have a complete portrait of Carla as a character when you began?

JA: No, one never does. The way you learn about character is by putting them in situations where they have to do things. So, at first you have a character who's kind of a semi-hippie, wide-eyed expat. Then you put her in a situation where she's living with this boyfriend, and see how she reacts. Then she meets this fake radical blowhard, what does she do about that—when he challenges her in this way, what does she do? Of course it's a process that's coming out of my own brain, but there is a way in which—and people talk about this all the time—it feels outside of me, her decisions are her decisions, they're not mine. After a while, she's made enough decisions that there's a matrix of personality, and if you try to make her do something that she wouldn't do, it doesn't work.

PWCW: How is working on a serial different from working on a book?

JA: La Perdida is actually the first serialized stuff I'd done, as well as the first graphic novel that I've done. Previously, I'd done short stories that were self-contained in a single issue. But I really wanted to do a longer story, and the reason I did it serially was totally for practical reasons. Comics are incredibly demanding, and without deadlines, periodic deadlines, I'm not sure I would have ever finished it. It was also a way to get feedback in the middle of the process, and feel like I was actually working on something that was happening in the world. Also it was a little bit of money. All of these things are important. And my intention from the beginning was to go back and revise when I finished it, to pull it into a book. And I did. I spent six to eight months last year doing revisions on the book. They're subtle, but they're definitely there.

PWCW: Has there been an increase in people interested in making comics?

JA: Yes, definitely. I think in general, comics in their pre-2000 form were not bringing in any young readers at all. What's happened with manga and just books being available in bookstores—whether it's literary comics or manga or whatever—is that kids are reading these things again. Twelve-year-olds splayed all over the aisles, we've all seen that. And that is so crucial for an art form. Making comics is incredibly difficult. It's totally counter-intuitive as a thing to do with your time. So it takes a powerful sense of this is something important to me, this is something I want to do, early, to get into it. And as a result of that, I have a much larger population of women in my classes now than I did even five years ago. Certainly if you look back—I started teaching at SVA five years ago, so I can't go back further than that— but if you look at records of who was in those courses before that, you have 99% white men. Not the case any more. It's a really diverse program. We haven't reached 50/50, though some individual classes might have 50/50, but you know, one-third girls is impressive. They're not all doing Japanese stuff, either.

PWCW: How did you learn about making comics?

JA: Partly from art classes, partly from books, partly from trial and error. I wish I had gone to SVA now, in our program now, because where I was in '97, I would have been there in '91. It took that long to learn how to literally draw, how to tell stories, what kind of stories I wanted to tell, and some kind of discipline so that I would actually finish anything. Those are all things you learn in the program. That I had no help at all with them just meant that I spent a lot more time flailing than I really needed to.

There are a lot of cartoonists who defend the old system and say, 'Aw, you just gotta learn it yourself, go off to your studio and figure it out.' And I'm like, why do we all have to reinvent the wheel? Why do we all have to figure it out on our own? No, you can't teach genius. No, you shouldn't be dictating what kinds of stories people do. I don't do that, though. I think my students come out more themselves than they went in.

That's one reason why I'm writing a textbook—I want to commit to paper an approach that I think works, and propagate it. Maybe it's egomaniacal, but I think we do a really good job, and I want people to be able to use that. It's not a how-to book, it's not a tip book, it's a textbook. It's got explanations and exercises and homework and critiques. It's designed for classroom use, but it can also be used by individuals or groups outside of a classroom. When they do our textbook, they'll go through the whole thing, they'll have the tools. You have to understand all the elements of comics, how they fit together.