An Interview with Susanne Reece
Describe your comics journey--how did you get into making comics?
I blame it all on Lynda Barry. I didn’t grow up reading comics. The only ones I ever got my hands on were Archie comics, which seemed old fashioned to me in an uninteresting way at an age when I was tearing through a series of novels from the same period about a pair of twins by Rosamond du Jardin that were mysterious and made me wish I could go back and wear taffeta and little white gloves. Or some Thor comics my grandfather bought me and my sister one summer. I remember acid colors, a giant centipede, and characters with big muscles and little waists. There were comic strips I liked in the newspaper—Shoe and Wizard of Id—not many. I always drew, though not consistently—I was into music in school and played in the marching and concert bands and that took up most of my spare time—and always liked writing but didn’t think I was any good at it, as evidenced by my grades in English class. I didn’t even think about making comics until the early 90s and I was in Columbus studying art history at Ohio State and I found Lynda Barry’s “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” in one of the alt weekly papers that used to be distributed around campus. The one that carried her came out on Wednesdays, and I’d birddog the cases on High Street, waiting for them to be filled. I loved the writing, the drawing, the sweet-funny-sadness of them. And how personal they felt. I hadn’t really even started doing any personal writing of any kind at that point, but it planted a seed. Eventually, I got tired of writing about art that other people made as an art historian, and I wanted to make my own. I had moved to New York at this point and knew a lot of artists and writers. I painted at first, and that led to printmaking and book arts and an interest in illustration. And I was also blogging back in the day, and the things I was writing were personal stories about my life in New York. I tried making comics at one point in the mid 2000s but got frustrated with them. I thought it was because I didn’t draw well enough. I kept pursuing both things separately until one summer, I did an illustration residence at School of Visual Arts that included a class on sequential narrative that was taught by Andrea Tsurumi. Learning more about how to actually create a visual narrative from her got me excited about the idea of making comics, and I was off. Andrea eventually became my MFA thesis advisor at SVA when I did the low-residency MFA in Visual Narrative program there.
How did you develop your voice/unique comics style? What subjects and media are you most drawn to?
The first creative writing I really did was blogging back in the mid 2000s. I wrote every day about my life in New York. What I was doing with that blog was teaching myself how to write personal essays and finding my voice, learning how to shape a story. I started reading a lot of memoirs and personal narratives. I remember reading Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club around that time. I grew up in Texas like she did. And I was struck by how direct and honest yet funny her voice was. Reading has been just as important as writing to me in figuring out how to do my own work. Not just reading comics. But there, too, I was drawn to comics with personal narratives. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home came out right around the time I made my first little tentative comics. And those were personal stories. Sort of like comics versions of blog posts. I read Aline Kominsky Crumb. A friend pointed me towards Julia Wertz. I found Vanessa Davis and Leela Corman. Gabrielle Bell. Summer Pierre. I’ve only ever really made autobio comics and graphic essays.
My visual style took a while to develop, and so did working out what media I wanted to work in for comics. I had a good friend when I first started to make comics who was INTO comics and had been for years. This person was in my ear with you have to use a crow quill or better yet a brush and Bristol and only black ink. And I kind of hated working that way? I think it’s part of what led to my frustration when I first started making comics. It felt wrong to me. And I quit making comics for a long time and focused on drawing and painting.
I love color and started painting in oils right around the time I got frustrated with that early foray into comics. The color in oils is so vivid and lush. I love the feel of it and the smell of it and everything about it. When I moved north of the city and in with my boyfriend/now husband, I moved into a space that is just not suited for working in oils, and so I started to work with watercolor and gouache on paper. I especially love watercolor. When I started making comics again, I drew in ink and then added watercolor. I wanted color and didn’t care anymore if that wasn’t the way you were supposed to do comics.
Working with watercolor definitely influenced my style. And so did making more work. Everything got looser and messier. And I love messy. I like my drawing better when it gets messy.
I mostly work on an iPad Pro in Procreate now. It helps me work faster and cuts out all the scanning and fiddling around in Photoshop. And I essentially learned to kind of replicate my analog process of drawing, inking, and then coloring. I just do it now in layers Procreate and then merge them when I feel like the comic is done. I use the 6B drawing pencil and sometimes the gel pen or studio pen, and the gouache brush in Procreate. I’m not a brush gearhead, and I wouldn’t know what to do with the extra brush kits that are available. When I paint analog, I always end up using, like, a size 3 brush for everything.
In terms of comics forms, I still had a certain ambivalence about traditional comics paneling, and didn’t like it at all for my own work for a few years and tended to call the things I made without them visual essays. But over the last couple of years, I’ve started to drift back towards panels, I think possibly because of Instagram, but I’m not sure, though I still don’t necessarily make visuals that would be considered sequential. Like, I don’t often show a series of time-based images in my comics, like someone walking around and doing something. I also don’t tend to use dialogue, speech balloons, or emanata. I like a more associative relationship between the text and image that works a bit more like a mental slide show, that lets the reader think through something with me. I’m happiest when it feels like I can’t separate the text, the written part of the story, from the images and have either of those aspects work as well on their own as they do together.
What are some of the joys and challenges of working on diary comics?
I love the process of making diary comics—getting an idea, writing a little script for it and shaping it into a story, then figuring out the images, and going back and forth between the text and the image until I get the balance I want. Once I start drawing it, I usually make some changes. It’s so satisfying when it all comes together. In a lot of ways, they are like writing a micro personal essay. And they give me a chance to think something through that has been a question for me and why it is I want to tell someone else about it.
Because of the pandemic, and no longer being in Manhattan during the week for my day job (I freelance as a copywriter in healthcare advertising), not being around other people or having that stimulation of being in the city, means my diary comics have tended to be less about this or that thing happening to me, but more about what I’m reading, things I’m thinking about.
The biggest challenge is the time it takes to make them. It always takes longer than I think it’s going to. I’d love to be able to just bang out 4 sketchy panels, do them quick and spontaneously, but I have come to understand that it’s just not who I am or how I work. And that’s ok. I have also realized that I can’t do them every day, even though I’d like to. Because they do take me so long to make. There are other things I want to work on, longer pieces, more developed and considered personal stories and visual and graphic essays, and comics poetry, which is my current obsession. And there’s not time to do that other work and daily diary comics. I try to do one every week now and post it on Instagram, but sometimes, even that’s not possible.
Are you working on something now?
I am really immersing myself in comics poetry right now and making things I can’t really share, because I want to submit them to journals. Ultimately, I want to have a collection of comics poems that would make sense together for a book.
I’m also doing some flash memoir writing with an eye to a longer work that would be a collage of smaller pieces, including comics poems and graphic lyric essays, that are also an exploration of time, place, and memory. I have been obsessed with these themes for years. I once read somewhere that most writers write the same story over and over in different ways, and I think this is true for me. If it sounds vague, it is still right now. I just keep working on pieces of it and will see where it goes. That’s how I figure things out for myself, by working on them. I’m not someone who spends a lot of time outlining and planning and thumbnailing. I just have to jump in and do it.
In addition to working on these personal projects, I’m teaching some online classes at School of Visual Arts for the Visual Narrative department through the Continuing Education program. I’m teaching a new Comics Poetry class I designed for the first time this winter and spring. And I also regularly teach another class through SVA called Creative Writing for Visual Artists. I love teaching and helping other people explore new aspects of their creativity. It helps me stay engaged with my own work, too. I’ve started a literary zine to publish the work of students in my classes (the first issue is currently stalled at the printer because of the paper shortage), and I hope to eventually open that up to submissions from other visual artists who write and to people who are doing comics poetry and other text and image work and to evolve that into a micropress.
Susanne Reece is Texan-New Yorker, who creates visual and comics essays and comics poetry, and writes creative nonfiction, short fiction, and poetry. In addition to teaching Creative Writing and Comics Poetry in the School of Visual Arts Continuing Education program, she also works as a professional copywriter in advertising. She earned an MFA in Visual Narrative from School of Visual Arts. Her interests include non-sequential visual storytelling, book arts, and DIY publishing. Her work has appeared in No Tokens, Oh Reader! magazine, and REDINK Poetry Comics, among others.
The best way to keep up with what I’m doing is to find me on Instagram @susannemreece. You can also check out my work at www.biblioteksyrinx.com.