Clowes • Okazaki • Schrauwen • Griffith
Interviews, Essays, Excerpts & More
Enlightened Transsexual Comix
Sam Szabo
Silver Sprocket
Hardcover, Color
128 pp., $24.99
ISBN: 979-8-88620-017-1
The rumors are true: Sam Szabo is a really incredible cartoonist. Her work is laugh-out-loud funny, poignant and a shining example of how good comics can be. This past year, her debut graphic novel Enlightened Transsexual Comix [ETC ] came out of the proverbial comics closet and onto our bookshelves. Silver Sprocket gave it the star treatment: full color, hardcover, spot gloss, the works. I couldn’t help but wonder: was this my favorite comic of the year? Absolutely.
This comic follows our protagonist, An Ancient Cosmological Entity known as The Enlightened Transsexual, as she trapezes across the astral plane and into our hearts. Follow along on her journey as she deals with bratty tops, census questionnaires, Mark Zuckerberg, personal questions from strangers and (of course) working for Starbucks. ETC is a refreshingly candid comic with flawless comedic timing. The protagonist is put in extremely uncomfortable situations, held in them and then, after all the buildup, the joke hits — as does the point of the story. It’s the kind of book that yields new laughs and frustrations every time it’s read: from the gags, the expressions or just the way Sam chooses to draw Cathy in ghost form. Reading what the Ancient Cosmological Entity says throughout the book feels like talking to my friends. Gossiping about our days, our bosses, our partner’s friends’ partners. Complaining to each other about the person we walked by on the street who asked us an intrusive question and followed it up with unsolicited advice. More than anything, the protagonist of Enlightened Transsexual Comix is wise,
confident and witty. She knows Sex and the City like the back of her hand and she knows exactly who she is: a Samantha.
The last day of January, on a cold winter’s night, I had the pleasure of taking two edibles and FaceTiming my friend Sam Szabo at 2 a.m. to talk about her book Enlightened Transsexual Comics (Silver Sprocket 2023). This is that interview.
CAROLINE CASH: Let’s talk about anger.
SAM SZABO: Yes.
In your book, Enlightened Transsexual Comix , there’s a lot of anger, but it doesn’t come off as an “angry” comic.
Whew. Well, that’s good to hear. When I started working on the comic, I was venting a lot of frustration, so I worried that anger slipped into the story. I try to keep things fun and good-natured, but sometimes the drive to be funny is coming from an angry place.
Humor and anger go hand in hand. It feels natural to use humor to convey exactly how pissed off you are.
Part of the reason I like humor so much is that it does allow you to sneak some negative emotions in there. A lot of the book is about my frustration with the reality of being a trans person in the world right now. When I’m allowing myself to be angry in my writing, I usually have a panel where my character is smiling in shock of whatever’s going on.
Smiling at the horrors of being alive and existing?
Totally! While working on the book I thought a lot about how anger is mostly driven by ego, and ego is funny.
Ego IS funny, and intrinsically tied to all autobio comics.
Cartooning lends itself to self-absorption, because of the nature of the job. If you’re making comics about yourself, you’re entering the highest tier of selfabsorption. And I say that completely neutrally and with no judgment attached. I think self-reflection is good. Selfawareness and self-absorption are kinda two sides of the same coin. It’s helpful to think about yourself a lot! This book especially, out of all the comics I’ve made, feels like the best reflection of me.
Out of all your work I’ve read, most of it being straight-up memoir, this
fictional book does seem like your most self-reflective work. Because this is your first full-length graphic novel, I was wondering if your writing practice changed at all while working on Enlightened Transsexual Comix ?
When I first started working on it, I didn’t know I was writing a graphic novel. I’ve
TONY WEI LING: My first question has to do with humor. It’s always hard to describe humor/comedy in a way that feels meaningful. The Anandlike flavor, maybe, has something to do with jumbling the ordinary and the fantastical, or with jumbling a story’s emotional punches with its comedic punch lines.
How would you describe the humor or comedy in your work? And are there ways you wouldn’t want it to be taken — descriptions that feel off to you?
ANAND: I think humor has been a prominent part of the way I write my stories. I wouldn’t really call it “laugh out loud” funny. But there are certain concepts and smaller minute aspects I find funny, and I just delve into that. Sometimes, a comic will start as a joke. Then I will think about how I can progress it into a story and how you can humanize the characters and situations. Also, a lot of cartoonists
in India would make their comics a little too grim to make it seem like a formal, serious medium. I wanted my comics to be accessible: humor is a good crutch for that.
I’m influenced by how the internet and memes have evolved now. What we find funny has changed a lot; sometimes, it’s just a low-res image with something random written on it. And I will laugh at it. Comics really adapt well to that visual language. My hometown, Mangalore, is also a major influence in my storytelling and humor. People back there have this fantastical and slapstick way of talking about everyday things, plus almost all of them are very right-wing and problematic. I find humor helpful to navigate this convoluted and violent history of my people.
An interesting thing happened in November [2023]. I was doing a reading of my story, “6 Feet Under the Ground,” and I reached a part I didn’t think of as humorous, but the audience was laughing INTERVIEW
quite a lot. So, it got me thinking about how we don’t really have control over what the reader finds funny and doesn’t. There aren’t many descriptions that I would say that feel off to me. Sometimes people describe it as [David] Lynchian, but it’s mostly a compliment. I guess I’m more of a [Jim] Jarmusch guy.
That really lands for me — what you’re saying about humor as a way to navigate complicated dynamics (of seriousness and prestige vs. internet meme ephemera, on one hand; of these two aspects of Mangalore politics/ culture, on the other). And I also find it difficult to see Lynch in your comics — they’re funny more in the way that some Italo Calvino stories are, or Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh,” even [laughs].
Yes. I think this thing about comics and the inherent humor it has appealed to me: it blurs the aspects of high art and low art. When I was starting to make comics, I was studying in an art college and starting to see the bureaucracy in the art industry. It made itself seem pious and important. And around 2019, when TikTok became big in India, there was this dialogue about how people conceive the content put out there to be “cringe” because it was made by people who weren’t from urban spaces, who weren’t upper class/caste. I feel that sort of brought out this prejudice people have where they found people having fun, dancing to songs, using their surroundings to make videos as cringe or unpalatable. So, I wanted my comics to exist in between that idea of being “important” and “cringe,” possibly
where it can erase that line and exist on the plane of understanding the confusing and intertwined lives around me. I totally count Manto as an influence. I strive to have that punch, the crispness in his commentary, of how we are all stuck in the madness and brutality of our political and social systems.
Funny, talking about Manto and cringe in the same breath feels so wrong and so right. There is something about the way you both embrace the embarrassments that come just as surely as tragedy. Absurdity doesn’t capture the deeply undignified responses we often have to ongoing violence, but cringe maybe does. I’m thinking of how you sometimes have characters going off about Hindutva zealots and politicians, but inevitably in an embarrassing or self-serving way; they can’t help but wrap up these huge issues of injustice in petty personal dramas. As a reader, I don’t feel like I get to judge those characters from on high or disavow my own cringe by finding it in them. But there’s also no moral permission slip, no “everyone is equally cringe, so don’t judge!” Of course we have to judge.
In “4 Ears” and “My Cold Brother,” I sort of wanted to highlight the kind of relationship, say, middle-class kids, who know what is going on to a certain degree, what is going on around them, have with politics. They know it’s bad. But what are they going to do about it? The [brother] won’t even come out of the fridge! And embarrassment is something I felt comics captured very well, too, the kind of bubble Adrian Tomine’s characters live in. When
Sunday 5-6-7-X
Olivier Schrauwen
For all the perseverance of funny comics in the graphic novel age, Belgian Olivier Schrauwen is one of the very few cartoonists working in a meter I shall call “epic comedy.” This is not just to say that books like Arsène Schrauwen and Parallel Lives concern themselves with significant historical moments or a great span of time and also tell jokes. I mean that Schrauwen’s construction of the comics page is premised on a severe friction between words and pictures that is both humorous on its own and crucial to the scope of his narratives.
There is great fun in doing what we are told is the wrong thing. Schrauwen’s aims, like Chris Ware’s, are as much compositional — musical — as they are literary, but Schrauwen’s means of accomplishing this is not diagrammatic but repetitious. It is a rare panel in Arsène Schrauwen that lacks text narration to restate what the artist has depicted often through a very clear visual simile — a donkey with an erection to communicate sexual arousal. Often, the text also explains the simile, and often, the text is so brief as to do little more. That this is funny instead of boring speaks on one hand to Schrauwen’s command of craft. Over hundreds of pages, it also forms a sort of algebra, by which the artist “shows his work” on the page to demonstrate the absurd calculations performed by the book’s narrator, O. Schrauwen — who is an in-story comedy variant of Olivier Schrauwen, the artist of the comic — in telling the story of his titular grandfather in the days of Belgian colonialism.
Sunday is both a much larger and a more intimate work. This is the story of Thibault, a cousin of O. Schrauwen,
who is a typography designer living in Ghent. Across the 468 pages of the series, now completed with 2023’s final issue, we spend one day, Sunday, with Thibault as he avoids his overdue work, anticipates/dreads the return of his girlfriend from a trip abroad, reminisces about his youth, drinks, smokes, jerks off and generally accomplishes nothing. He narrates everything to us throughout. But soon, the words and pictures distend.
while we see much more.
While the narration in captions is Thibault’s throughout Sunday, the images constantly drift away from him so that while both captions and drawings are “taking place” at the same time, the images will flash in and out of Thibault’s thoughts, or follow other characters around the city, or outside of Belgium, engaging in their own dialogue and standing in contrast to the omnipresent narration that is tethered completely to Thibault’s present-tense impressions. He can only see what is in front of or occasionally behind his eyes,
Thibault’s job, which is to contemplate the pattern of letters, is of consequence. Throughout the day, he (tries to) read philosophy, (tries to) look at art, (tries to) watch The Da Vinci Code, but desire, fear, regret dictate the patterns he discerns from reality. The farce at the heart of Sunday is that the discontinuity between text and image creates a counterfactual beat as the panels move in sequence, so that Thibault’s self-absorption intermingles with snatches of the other characters’ lives — as if two lines of narrative are moving forward in parallel and vibrating into one another. Sitting alone in his garden, Thibault recalls an embarrassing sexual episode from his youth. He tells us about it in caption text. And keeps telling us as the images cycle through him, an illustration of his memory and what the woman Thibault is recalling is doing at that moment, across town, listening to a minimalist piano concerto and the repetitious plonks of this performance embody the “notes” of Schrauwen’s panels, each change of scenery a different tone.
Of course, “narrative” can be undermined in music through discordance, just as easily as a movie character’s voice-over can undermine what we’re seeing. But by its visual properties, comics allow multiple chronologies and realities to share the same space; in Schrauwen’s work, comics is a reality that parodies itself. What is funny is not just the narrator’s jokes or the images undermining the narrator but the particular gleeful texture of reading Sunday.