Lilli Carré Looks Into the Lagoon

Comic creator and animator Lilli Carré has been a talent to watch since Tales of Woodsman Pete hit the stands in 2006. Her first professionally published comic, Woodsman Pete was nominated for an Eisner award. Since then, her work has been featured on exclusive greeting cards, at galleries across the nation, on screen at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and in the anthology Best American Comics as both a contributor and cover artist. Her first graphic novel, The Lagoon, came out from Fantagraphics Books this October. Simultaneously matter of fact and otherworldy, The Lagoon tells the story of a family alternately bewildered and enchanted with the singing swamp monster next door. PW Comics Week spoke to her recently about aesthetics, storytelling and The Lagoon.

PW Comics Week: You're very early in your career, but you already have a strong personal style. The sinuous curves of fire and smoke and water, the plain—almost humorous—human figures, and of course the triangle of black shading on every nose in sight. Where did it come from? What are your influences?

Lilli Carré: I started doing hand-drawn animation before I began making comics... It was through animation that began to develop the style of characters that I draw. The inexplicable nose-shadow thing, for instance, first occurred when I tried rotoscoping once—it was a friend with a very pointy nose—and it just stuck. I am influenced by a number of experimental animators, and I think I formed my own cartooning style after discovering animation

PWCW: What drew you to animation, and what then brought you into comics? Do the two halves of your artistic world interact with each other?

LC: I just really love drawing and writing, and the idea of drawing every single bit of the world you can create through animation is really appealing. The animations I happened to see while at school were so idiosyncratic and sort of boundless, it just seemed like the perfect medium! Once I started animating, though, the idea of being able to really indulge in single panels and move a story along though the pacing and stillness of comics was attractive for different storytelling—there's a different sense of narrative control, and it's refreshing to spend so much time on a single, still drawing in a comic and pitting one image against another, rather than 12 drawings for every second that whizzes by in an animation. I like doing both, for telling different types of stories. And they both call for a similar amount of time sitting alone and staring at blank paper, which on some level I must enjoy.

PWCW: How did the process of creating The Lagoon differ from Woodsman Pete or your work for Best American Comics?

LC: I started it while at a summer school thing in the woods in Michigan, and initially it was simply an 8 page story. I just couldn't shake the setting and the weird potential of the characters and their relationships to each other, so I just wanted to keep writing it and try to pull more story out of that little 8-page short. I was still in school, though, so I worked on it in a very undisciplined fashion for about 3 years total. I changed a lot in that time and so did the story, so it's the only comic I've made where I've thrown large chunks out and switched things around and had editing play a big part of the making process. I played around with the structure of The Lagoon in contrast to most every other comic story I've done, because most often I'll thumbnail the whole thing from start to finish—this one was much looser.

PWCW: What inspired you to intertwine a story about a Creature From The Black Lagoon-like creature with a siren-like song, with moments from the life of an eccentric family?

LC: Hmm. Having a somewhat isolated family living near a lagoon was inspired by being at that summer school in the woods where I started writing the story, which itself was nested around a little lagoon. I like writing about a family dynamic, there's so much meat there to write stories about, and there's an interesting pull the members of a family have on each other. I wanted to have this creature, this slippery unknown thing, disrupt this little family pod, resulting in them assigning their own desires to it and forcing themselves to make sense of it. I wanted the creature to be a lot of things at once; seductive, monstrous, banal.

PWCW: The Lagoon ends with a beautiful but somewhat cryptic image. Were you trying to say something specific, or are you trying to get the readers to assign their own desires to it?

LC: I like stories where the symbolic meanings are more opaque than not. It's something I haven't come across in comics enough. The ending, rather than exhausting the possible meanings of the story, follows its own logic. I can't really imagine the story ending in any other way. I do want people reading the story to want to read it over again and to get into piecing together its different elements.

PWCW: What's next for Lilli Carre? What projects are you currently involved in and what might you like to do in the future? More comics? More animation?

LC: I have a 32 page story that I just finished for a forthcoming Mome, and it's the first time I've used full-color. I've been working on a new collaborative animation project, but it's going real slow. But that's the beauty of these things, right? Nice an' slow. I have a longer story cooking in my head, but I'm still assembling the pieces—in the next few years I'd like to focus on that and really get into a longer format story, and write characters that feel like they can run around on their own.

PWCW: Out of all your work, both comics and animation, which ones would you say are your current favorites?

LC: I like the 32 page story I just finished. Using full color really allowed for so much play with the mood and tone of the story. I have no idea if the color sits well with itself but it just opened up a whole new range of possibilities for the storytelling!

PWCW: Obviously, people enjoy reading your comics. What comics do you enjoy? What's on your pull list?

LC: Important comics for me have been those of Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Chester Brown, and Julie Doucet, to name a few. Some comics that have recently really excited me are those of Amanda Vahamaki, Kevin Huizenga, and Dash Shaw. They are making comics that to me feel wildly vibrant and thoughtful.

PWCW: What do you look for in a comic? What would you like to see more of?

LC: I'm curious to see where comics go—I think that comics are really blossoming right now, and are being pushed towards new, weird directions. I'd like to see where that goes.