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.
An Interview with Susanne Reece
An Interview with Susanne Reece
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.