An Interview with Sophie Yanow
We are very happy to feature a conversation with Eisner-award winning creator Sophie Yanow. We first met Yanow in the pages of her biting and engrossing memoir, The Contradictions, which was the subject of our first ever comics review (over at The Rumpus). For that review, we got to know her previous work, What is a Glacier? and War of Streets and Houses. In all her work, Yanow is an exciting comics maker—in art and content. Read on to hear how the county fair featured in her journey, and where she’s at now!
1. Describe your comics journey--how did you get into making comics?
I made quite a few fan comics as a kid – mostly Sonic the Hedgehog and Calvin and Hobbes knock offs! I also drew and wrote comic strips with one of my childhood best friends and we would submit them to the county fair. It would have been great if I had realized at 8 years old that I usually need a deadline like that in order to finish things! In middle school and high school I drew in sketchbooks, but mostly I was reading and not making comics. I had been reading Johnny the Homicidal Maniac in middle school, and in high school, I got really into Adrian Tomine, Gabrielle Bell, and Jason Lutes. I also read a lot of webcomics. My favorite was stuff from Vera Brosgol, Jen Wang, and Erika Moen. I had a good friend who had a webcomic that he kept up regularly, and I wanted to do that. But I would draw a couple of strips and not keep going. 15 years later I found out I have ADHD. I made a zine with two of my friends at the end of high school, and we tabled at the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco. I made some drawings for it, no comics – but it definitely gave me the bug for self-publishing. We traded our zine with other people, and I met Hellen Jo at that show. She is the person in the comics world who I think I’ve known the longest. She was making a lot of comics at the time and it was very inspiring to me.
Freshman year of college, I was blogging about comics and I co-founded a comics library, and I got fed up with not making comics. I managed to do an independent study in comics and that’s when I started to experiment more – and then I started making comics for every class I could. I was in a studio arts program, so I would take printmaking classes and make comics for the assignments. I tried out things like the 24 Hour Comic (drawing 24 pages in 24 hours), My friend Kane Lynch and I did it on our own, not in connection to the official day. I managed to finish mine and that felt like my first really big success. And then after I graduated, I got a job at a comic shop in Berkeley called Comic Relief, and I started signing up to table at things like the Stumptown Comics Fest and the San Francisco Zine Fest. I was surrounded by comics every day, and those shows gave me that much-needed deadline to finish comics. I’ve sort of kept that model for as long as I’ve been making comics; I still usually need deadlines in order to make or finish things. I can get it from a publisher now, but if I’m self-publishing something, I usually need to sign up for a festival or create some external deadline for myself to complete things.
2. How did you develop your voice/unique comics style?
I tried doing fantasy, then I drew some autobiographical stuff, then some sci-fi. The sci-fi story was about 30 pages, full color. I didn’t love the result – it felt kind of scattered and I didn’t really know how to write satisfying stories, but in retrospect I was just figuring out how to throw a bunch of my interests together and try to make a story out of it – which I still think is a great approach. I just didn’t really understand traditional story structure at the time, and I was trying to do that, but I didn’t succeed. After that I took a step back – I went back to try making short, black and white, somewhat experimental, and semi-autobiographical comics. At this time, I went up to Fantagraphics and interned there. I showed my work to Eric Reynolds, and through the grapevine I heard that he thought I could draw well but that I needed to find my voice. So I dialed it back even further. I stopped trying to make “good drawings.” I was heading to Montreal for an artist residency after that, and in preparation, as an “exercise,” I copied Gabrielle Bell’s “30 days of comics.” I drew journal comics every day for a month, but then I kept going. I think that’s where I really started to find my voice, and that led to nonfiction, and eventually, I circled back to fiction once I kind of knew how to write.
3. How do you think the comics form creates a community forum?
One of the things I love about comics is the accessibility. They’re relatively easy to make in terms of materials, they have a low financial barrier to entry (although they do take a lot of time, which can of course be a barrier). But if you do make them, they’re easy to share – they can be online, or in print. So if you want to have a dialog between artists, it’s not difficult. The turnaround is pretty fast.
4. Are you working on something now?
I’m still exploring right now. I just started working in animation. I got to work on Adventure Time: Fionna & Cake as a storyboard revisionist and it was really fun. I’ve been writing some very short strips, but I’m not sure what comes next. The Contradictions felt like an albatross. Now that it’s done, I’m still figuring out what I want to do next in comics. I have a newsletter that I send messages out to occasionally, sometimes with what I’m reading or enjoying, along with updates about my own work: http://sophieyanow.com/newsletter
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Sophie Yanow is an artist and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Contradictions is her first book with Drawn & Quarterly, the webcomic of which won an Eisner Award and was nominated for the Ringo, and Harvey awards. Yanow is also the author of What is a Glacier? and War of Streets and Houses. Her comics have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Fusion, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Nib. She has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and her translation of Dominique Goblet’s Pretending is Lying received the Scott Moncrieff prize for translation from French. Yanow has taught at the Center for Cartoon Studies, the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and The Animation Workshop in Denmark.
Another wonderful interview!