Debut creator Robert Mgrdich Apelian serves up Fustuk, a YA graphic novel about food’s ability to inform personal identity and foster connection. Seventeen-year-old Katah remembers little about his late father, an acclaimed chef in the Pars Empire. Recurring dreams of his father soon lead Katah to a powerful spirit named Az, who agrees to cure Katah’s gravely ill mother in exchange for a dish that is comparable to what Katah’s father once made. As he and his chef older siblings clash over what to prepare, Katah struggles with feeling disconnected from his family and their shared love of cooking. In a conversation with PW, Apelian spoke about the feeling of being stuck in between cultures, and the stress of wanting to be perfect.
How did you craft the novel’s Middle Eastern-inspired setting?
I originally wanted to build a Middle Eastern fantasy world largely because I wanted to both talk about my heritage and experiences, but also about the amazing history and mythology and beauty of the Middle East that I wasn’t seeing a lot of. It felt like everything that was set in the Middle East was about religious conflict or war or fully exoticized, and so I wanted to make something that was about celebrating the culture—something made from within it that felt real and happy. As I built out the plot and set out to represent these different cultures, it started to feel more and more like the real world. At some point, I thought that if I wanted to faithfully represent Middle Eastern cultures, then I should make it fairly close to the real ones, not fantastic, made-up versions.
The way the world of Fustuk is structured is based on the way a lot of Middle Eastern religious and mythological texts saw the world, basically saying that the world ended at the real Caucasus Mountains. So while I was modeling the Pars Empire after these mythological representations of the world, it also ended up being very close to the real world and the real cultures that inspired it.
What research did you do to create the fabrics, patterns, recipes, and other cultural signifiers used throughout the book?
I started with a lot of historical research, because there’s a lot of stuff that I didn’t know. At some point I found this book called A Persian Cookbook: The Manual by Bavarchi [estimated to have been written between 1501–1736], which was a good model for me to use when I was trying to figure out what a kitchen looked like at that time. That was one thing that was really hard to find that was such a core part of the plot. How did people actually cook? In what context would they cook? And through that I found Amir Sayadabdi [a Persian language translator], whom I reached out to through Penguin. There are a lot of things that are hard to find in English that were much more available in Persian, so he helped me a lot in fleshing some of that stuff out.
A lot of mythological references and cultural touchpoints like textures and fabrics were built off things from my own life. I drew a lot of these rugs based on the ones in my grandparents’ house. But of course, I wanted these things to have meaning and be accurate, so I did do a lot of research into what kind of rugs would show up in this time and place. Which ones are Persian? Which ones are Armenian? What do the symbols look like? What does each one mean? I tried to alter patterns to include certain imagery. Did you know that the cedar tree symbolizes immortality? That has relevance here, so I tried to pepper that into the set dressing. It’s a bunch of things that maybe nobody will ever notice, but that I think are cool and add depth.
Katah feels stuck between his sister, Noori, and his brother, Garo’s, opposing cultural views. What did you want to convey through their dynamic?
It’s sort of twofold. I grew up pretty assimilated and even though I wanted to just live my life the way I had already been living it, I had this feeling that, if I did that, I would be losing a lot of my own culture. My kids wouldn’t be raised with the same connection points that I had, and that would be a huge loss. So I started connecting with my Armenian culture through the Armenian community here in Boston, and I started seeing how different others’ experiences with my culture were.
The way I work out my own issues is to have two voices in my head argue things out until I can hash out why I think a certain way. Eventually, I gave these voices faces, and that’s how I arrived at Noori and Garo, and Katah is basically just me trying to figure out where I stood in between these two opposing ideas. Half of this book is therapy.
One of the main reasons I wrote this story was to communicate this experience of feeling in between, which I think is a pretty common feeling for anyone from any kind of diaspora. Trying to figure out where you stand while also considering what sort of circumstances your parents came into. Why did they hold on to the parts of themselves they held on to, and why did they assimilate the way they did? I was just trying to understand the whole broad picture of what factors into your upbringing and your relationship to your heritage.
Throughout the book, disparate timelines alternate between Katah’s present-day experiences, dreamscapes, and past recollections. Did you always imagine each timeline with its own limited color palette?
I knew that I wanted to distribute the different timelines in a way that was visually intentional. Also, I love monochromatic palettes. I read mostly manga, and I visualize a lot of my art in grayscale, so I thought that a limited color palette would be a cool way to differentiate the timelines. As far as deciding what those colors were, a lot of it was because I wanted to make sure that food looked good, so I went with warm colors. In the end, the palette kind of ended up being the colors of the Armenian flag.
But also, the blacks of each timeline are actually a very dark version of the timeline’s inverse color, because I love the way orange and dark purple looks. It’s a little difficult to make out that difference on a screen, but the colors came out really nice in the physical copy.
How has your debut experience been so far?
It’s been really stressful, but in a satisfying way. Around 2017, I started really focusing on my own art. For a long time, I had just been practicing art, penciling little ideas on a notepad or on my phone, until I felt like my art was good enough to pitch something. The fact that it worked—that I got a book deal, and I was able to quit my job and draw full-time—was a dream come true. But also, I’ve never cared about something I’ve done as much as I care about this. So it became immediately stressful. I’m like, “I need this to be the best thing I can possibly make.” This process took a lot of time and devotion, and I’ve landed in a healthy place where I can say that I’m very happy with and excited about the result. It was also so cool to have other people helping me and working on it that were as passionate about it as I was, so that was really validating.
Fustuk by Robert Mgrdich Apelian. Penguin Workshop, $25.99 Jan. 20 ISBN 978-0-5936-5889-5; $17.99 paper ISBN 978-0-5936-5890-1
