Abbey Luck is new to graphic novels, but not to cartooning. The California-based artist is founder and creative director of Prone Studio, and storyboarded for the animated TV shows Jeff and Some Aliens and Pickle and Peanut. She also created a Yayoi Kusama-inspired installation at Meow Wolf, the interactive art museum in Santa Fe, NM. Luck’s debut graphic novel, Pig Wife, presents a psychological horror story set in a remote mining town. It’s a tale “about family legacies of abuse and isolation [that] burrows under the skin,” according to PW’s review.
PW spoke to Luck about hard work and monkey torture.
What made you want to draw a graphic novel?
I've loved comics since I was very young. I was really into horror and alternative comics. My favorite of all time was Johnny the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez.
What was the inspiration for Pig Wife?
I was thinking about what circumstances would make you dehumanize someone, to treat them as an animal, and what kind of people would do such a thing. I heard about one of the worst cases of isolation abuse ever documented, a girl named Genie, when I was a kid and it always stuck with me. That story led me to research other stories of so-called feral children and the studies done by a scientist named Harry Harlow that were essentially monkey torture. I named the old woman in the book Harlow after the monkey torturer.
It seems like a lot of times, when somebody locks someone up, they say they're protecting the person but they're really protecting themselves. They never see it as torture, which is what it is.
How did you create the mining town?
I had to research it…Of course, most mines now are not underground. They're all open-pit mining because it's a lot safer and easier to just dig all that stuff up. But I visited Bisbee, Arizona, where they let you tour an old gold mine, to get the feel of it.
The art style shifts a lot across the book. What was your thinking behind that approach?
Basically, I couldn't go all-out on every page. I had to choose the moments when I was going to spend a week making a drawing, because it was just me and my assistant. So, there’s the straight story, where people are going to be mostly skimming over the drawings and doing the reading, and then psychedelic dream sequences. I also have brief histories of characters drawn as compactly as possible—I didn't want to spend a lot of time on backstory.
How did you find the right balance between humor and horror?
I mean, there's some debate whether I did find that balance. I like things that are horrifying and funny at the same time, like the show Severance and the films of David Lynch. I don't consider myself a super serious person. But I had some debates with my editor.
Is it true you worked on a Meow Wolf installation?
Oh yes, I did. I did the Kusama-inspired infinity room, where you walk through a freezer in the staging room—a lot of people don’t know you can walk through, and that leads you to what we call the infinity spa, because it feels like a sauna.
I lived in Santa Fe for years. I went to the College of Santa Fe, which is actually a college that went out of business. It doesn't exist anymore. But I still have a strong connection—a lot of my friends still live there, and they all worked at Meow Wolf, because when that place opened, every artist in town went to work there.
What's next for you?
After I finished Pig Wife, I was like, I am never doing that again. But it’s kind of like when people have kids. You forget about how traumatic it was.
I'm working on the next book. It's called Worms. It’s a psychedelic horror comedy.
