Jessica Abel
In creator Jessica Abel, comics have found a tireless advocate in the medium’s shift to mainstream acceptability through the medium of graphic novels.
Abel’s most recent work, “La Perdida,” won her major acclaim for its realistic portrayal of a clueless American expatriate in Mexico City — prior to that, Abel garnered attention for her comic “Artbabe” and her graphic short story collections “Soundtrack”and “Mirror, Windows.” Part of Abel’s appeal is due to a misunderstanding — her style and presentation create such an intimacy and seeming transparency to the works that some readers mistake her fiction for tales culled from her own life.
Abel’s career walks a parallel with the boom in graphic novels. Slowly over that period, alternative comics began to get more attention — first in alternative weekly newspapers, then in magazines. About five years ago, publications like The New Yorker and the New York Sunday Times Magazine began employing alternative cartoonists like Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Seth, while book publishers like Pantheon and Harcourt began publishing the sort of titles that were once the sole providence of companies like Fantagraphics — it was all changing and Abel was in that wave.
Abel and her husband, Matt Madden had a baby in December. Her upcoming books include “Life Sucks” and “Drawing Words and Writing Pictures,” both from First Second Books.
JM: When you started out, what goals did you have in the form that made you want to do mini comics and self publish?
JA: I don’t think I thought about it very concretely, I just made comics and then I don’t even know how I got the idea to make-up photo copied mini comics, I don’t know where that came from. I must have seen them around or something or known that it was something that people did, but it wasn’t like I was trying to join the movement or anything. It was just once I did it, it turned out there kind of was a movement and I was in it, then. But I didn’t know that at the time.
I started getting involved in the early ‘90s. I was making my own comics but also trading comics with people, there was a lot of mail order stuff that was going on at the time, ordering mini comics through the mail. I’d get envelopes with two bucks in them and send somebody back a comic and that went on for a number of years.
My own ambition at the time was to keep making comics. I knew that I wanted to be published by Fantagraphics — and in the end I was. After the Xeric issue, they picked me up to do a second run of “Artbabe.” That was achieving a goal but I didn’t really have any idea of what that would mean in terms of my life, where do you go from there?
JM: Was that where you saw yourself, in the Fantagraphics mold of material?
JA: At the time, it was kind of the only game out there. There were a lot of small publihsers out there, but most of them were more mainstream. Drawn and Quarterly got started in the early 90s maybe, so it wasn’t really there when I was forming these ideas. And because I was such a big fan of “Love and Rockets,” especially, I had long thought that that was the way to go.
