Lyrical and Topical: Megan Kelso’s Squirrel Mother

By Ian Brill -- Publishers Weekly, 6/27/2006

Megan Kelso has long been a cartoonist of note in the worlds of mini-comics and alternative comics anthologies. Her short stories have a keen sense of the small things in life that are quietly important. She presents them in a very lyrical way—subtle enough to be an easy read but with plenty going on beneath the surface. In 1998, her first collection, Queen of the Black Black was released by Highwater Books. Now Fantagraphics has just published The Squirrel Mother, collecting work since 2000, with added new material. These stories capture everything from the heartbreak of dealing with an estranged family member to a biography of Alexander Hamilton, all while Kelso deftly manipulates both her drawing and narrative styles. PWCW talked with Kelso about the new collection.

PWCW: Why a collection of short stories instead of a long-form narrative?

Megan Kelso: I am close to finishing a 200-page graphic novel called Artichoke Tales that I've been working on since 1999. The stories in Squirrel Mother were done in the midst of working on that longer book. Most of these appeared in anthologies over the last five years and offered me the opportunity to get my work seen in different venues while working on a long project. The short stories also allowed me to try out certain things that I could then apply to the graphic novel.

PWCW: Most of these stories are very lyrical "slice-of-life" tales. What attracts you to this type of storytelling?

MK: Although my work is not strictly autobiographical, I often begin with visual memories, such as the way our living room looked when we moved out of the house I grew up in. I used this image in the waltzing story. I usually let the memory, which is the kernel of the story, roll around in my head for a while and collect other ideas that go along with it. I like making stories that are about more than one thing, and I'm interested in creating multiple narratives, either with two strips running concurrently, such as in "Green River" and "Squirrel Mother," or with the words telling one story and the pictures telling another, such as in "Split Rock, Montana."

PWCW: In The Squirrel Mother there's a variety of art and narrative styles for the different stories. Are you consciously approaching each story differently in terms of how they look and how they read?

MK: I've been working on a graphic novel the whole time I was doing these stories, and with that project I need to maintain a certain consistency, so it's fun to try new things in the short stories as a change of pace. I try to let the story dictate how it's to be told, and the wonderful thing about comics is there is so much latitude in creating different narrative styles. Sequential panels are such a solid narrative form that there's a lot of room to play around with timing, pace and rhythm.

PWCW: A few of the stories, such as "Nettie's Left-handed Flute," deal with music. Since comics is a silent medium, how do you go about re-creating sound on paper?

MK: I've always been interested in the problem of depicting sound in comics. I try to come up with a kind of expressionistic pattern or decorative line to represent the music, something that will spark the imagination of the reader. I was inspired years ago by a wonderful cartoon by Saul Steinberg that showed in graphic form the sounds emerging from different instruments. He drew the different sounds as solid, three-dimensional matter, which made so much sense to me as a strategy to draw sound.

I've been trying ever since to use that approach. Then, combined with clues from the story, such as showing a flute being played, or saying it's a waltz, it will hopefully create a specificity to the kind of music I'm trying to show.

PWCW: "Fuck the Troops" is a very political strip. It stands out next to the other stories in the book. Why the choice to include it in this book?

MK: I think that without the Hamilton stories and "Green River," which is also political, "Fuck the Troops" would have been out of place in this collection, but joined with the history comics, the topical ones made a certain sense. I'm interested in American history, political science, war and violence (there is a lot of stuff about war and violence in Artichoke Tales), so I thought those stories were important to include. They are as much "me" as the more gentle, lyrical stories—and for me Squirrel Mother is a snapshot of what I've been doing for the last five years. I think when Artichoke Tales comes out, the intersection between the lyrical memory stuff and the political/war/history stuff will make more sense to readers.