An Interview with Ben Passmore

“It’s a medium that’s the closest thing to looking through someone else’s eyes.”

Ben Passmore by Audra McNamee

Ben Passmore

Ben Passmore is the author of the ongoing comic book series Daygloayhole, as well as the Eisner Award-nominated and Ignatz Award-winning comic collection Your Black Friend: and Other Strangers. He also wrote and illustrated Sports Is Hell (Koyama Press), which won a 2021 Eisner Award for Best Single Issue Comics. Passmore also collaborated with Ezra Claytan Daniels on BTTM FDRS (Fantagraphics). His forthcoming book, These Black Arms to Hold You Up, is a graphic history of six black activists and their armed resistance against racism and the police state. Ben contributes graphic reportage and political comics to publications such as The Nib and the New York Times. He lives in Philadelphia.

Interview with Ben Passmore

By Audra McNamee and Debarghya Sanyal

https://jsma.uoregon.edu/BenPassmore

Audra McNamee: How did you come to comics journalism and what does the term comics journalism even mean to you? Ben Passmore: The simple answer is that The Nib hired me for the first time about six years ago to do just general sort of like black identity stuff. I had just published a color version of Your Black Friend (a little eleven-page comic about black alienation), and they hired me to sort of do whatever. I had been part of an anarchist collective that made our quarterly called—it’s Louisiana so it’s a very Louisiana name—The Raging Pelican. We weren’t breaking any news or whatever, but it was created in response to the BP oil spill at the time and a lot of decentralized and grassroots resistance that was happening in the region that no one was really writing about. And for various reasons, New Orleans was sort of the center for news and actions, so fishermen who were blockading BP boats and infrastructure would come to New Orleans. I started as the sort of creative director. I could draw, so I was doing illustration, but also, I would do some interviews: We started covering things that weren’t spill-related. There was a big taxi drivers’ strike, which is really unusual for New Orleans, so me and a friend got a recorder, and we would just hire a cab and talk to them. And for me, even though I’m not from New Orleans (you know, I didn’t go to high school there, and that kind of stuff can matter—a lot of cities that really matters, depending on who you’re talking to), but the fact that I was just, like a black dude from a poor area somewhere else, a lot of these taxi drivers were cool to talk to me about the situations at the time, the regulations that they were fighting. There’s a lot of regulations that were just killing the taxi business. I’m an anti-capitalist, but you know, these are some of the only jobs for working people in that city, a lot of black working people, people that own like one car, two cars. So I jumped into it just because I was interested in just writing about what’s going on. I was part of a radical community, and I think we saw the journal as just like we’re dedicating our time to find some information to then bring to the rest of the community to respond to. So anyway, that’s a long answer, so I got hired by The Nib to sort of continue to do that, and honestly that was the first time I tied comics and writing about this stuff.

The first thing I wrote about was how me and my friends went to Stone Mountain, Georgia, for a Klan rally, and this is before anyone knew what Antifa was, so I was just writing as someone. I wrote a story about how I wore a mask to the Klan rally, and I got arrested, and I went to jail, and I got out. And I just wrote about what happened, why people wear masks. I also had a conversation with some guys, who were just picked up, who were in my holding cell, who were from—I think—South Carolina and they’re coming into Atlanta to just go to a club, as people do, and they were basically attacked by cops and chased across a muddy field in their club clothes, so I wrote about that too. Honestly, to begin with, I think I had a lot of skepticism about comics journalism, even though I’m hugely influenced by Joe Sacco, as a lot of people are. But, for me, I was like “I’m not embedded in Bosnia and writing a whole book about it.” Comics is a really inefficient way to communicate straight information, right? But over time, I was like, I think the thing I’m communicating is a specific experience, so that tended to be my angle going from there. And I think I’ve leaned a lot on my POV over time. Initially my first Nib comics were like stretched out articles, a lot of interviews. I still do a lot of research, but that ends up being more about building the world, anyway now I’m answering questions you didn’t ask, but that’s my answer. Debarghya Sanyal: As a political cartoonist, are there any specific publications or editorial approaches which have attracted you more than others, or, conversely, are there any specific journalistic styles that you absolutely avoid while you work on your comics? BP: In terms of publications, The Nib was the first person to hire me for this specific purpose; I really like working with them, and I’ve had opportunities to work for other outlets. But I think The Nib hired me primarily to sort of write about the black experience, as it were, and when I think it became immediately obvious that what I wanted to write about was my weird anarchist POV when it comes to decentralized movements like anti-fascism and stuff, which I don’t think is what Matt [Bors, The Nib editor in chief] and them had in their head as the thing I was going to write about, they

immediately were like great. They immediately trusted me as an artist and respected me, not as just, purely as a token cartoonist, which plenty of people have hired me for (you know what I mean, I think that comes with being a marginalized person, like I’m not mistaken, like I know why I’m here). But I didn’t really experience that in that way; they would hire me, in the beginning, they would request a topic, a lot like something that was in the news, for instance I was hired to do a comic about the ACLU. And, as an anarchist, a purely legalistic approach to resistance is not interesting. And I think another publication, someone else hiring me, would be like when I say, “Okay, I’ll write about the ACLU, but I’m not really interested in them and that’s what the comic is going to be about;” another publication might be like, “Well man you’re hired to do an ACLU comic.” But I ended up writing about...I started it before the big Charlottesville protest happened. There’s been a lot of marches in Charlottesville, the Klan showed up a couple times before the big Alt-Right sort of like squad unity thing happened, so I was actually writing about that and the ACLU’s response to that versus their representation of Klan members and Nazis in the past. And then the Charlottesville stuff happened, and I even knew people that went, so I just pivoted to that. And The Nib was super into that, so I’ve mostly stuck with The Nib although I’ve worked for other people to do sort of smaller stuff like even the New York Times—I did a one page about getting ready for protests. In terms of styles, Joe Sacco is a big influence, but when I was starting, I think one thing that felt important was to represent myself, which is true. As someone who’s at the demo, and even when it turns into a riot, I’m there. I was involved in organizing demos in New Orleans, and people would be like “All white people need to protect us,” or like “This shit is getting kind of crazy; as a black person I’m a leave.” And people should make their own choices, but I had a gut response to this idea that black people are fragile, or incapable of handling this. And just as a washed old black radical who’s read a lot about the 60s and 70s and Reconstruction, I know when it comes to anti-fascism, anti-white supremacy, black people are the tip of the spear: We’re out here. At the time, I was aware that, like a lot of times we’ll be talking to younger people, so it’s important to me to be like “Here I am,” not just talking to you about this thing that I’m interested in, but also as a black person in the mix. So there was some of my motivation to focus really on my POV. I was also really inspired by something totally random, not even comics, but Charlie Brooker’s TV show, How TV Ruined Your Life, and sort of his temporal relationship to space as the presenter but also someone affected by what is going on. I really liked that show, obviously, so I think when I was making the comics I also had that in my mind: what is the comics version, political comics version, of this? For a while, the reason I wouldn’t be like, “I’m a comics journalist,” was I’m not pretending to not be so subjective. I have a very strong opinion. I’m drawing this, so it’s not like there’s even the illusion of video. Clearly, [video] is also a subjectivity, but people, particularly people that don’t interface with the news, feel like my mom who is like, “A video—that’s what’s really happening.” So for me, I’m drawing the whole world. I’m not even pretending that I’m a neutral party in this. So for a while I was like, “I’m a political cartoonist...but journalist, I don’t know.” Because I don’t even have this ethic where I’m giving you the facts. I’m not breaking anything. I’m not really even giving you the facts outside of the particular kind of story I’m telling. People should just read this and then read something else if they want to get a balanced story. AM: You have talked about how your point of view impacts content and focus of your comics, but as a black artist documenting the deeply ingrained and institutionalized racism in the U.S., what decisions and influences have shaped your style of cartooning and stylistic choices? BP: A lot of people ask me about the humor; I make a lot of jokes. And I never made the choice necessarily to be funny. That’s just my response. In college, there was Jon Stewart. The Daily Show was real big... It existed before, but I feel like Bush really did a lot for Jon, so maybe there’s some of that. Also there’s—not that the black community is a monolith—but I think that there is a historical response to systematic violence and inequities to just being like, “You’re not going to touch me.” And I think one of those responses is humor. I wrote a really short comic: four panels about the different times cops have pulled guns on me, which in and of itself is very scary right? Any one of those times, I could go from someone writing about someone being killed by the cops to being the story. That’s not lost on me. The first time it happened, I was in my early 20s. So I think in some ways, the humor allows me to look at it in more of a systematic way. In general, making a story about it helps me to look at it in a broader way and not get so caught up in it, which I think helps me write about it. I think there’s a lot of people that are good at writing, very sincere, introspective, and writing very sad stories. I’m a limited writer; I’m not really going to do that, you know what I mean? I can maybe go there for a second, but if I go to that place you’re going to get something very rambling, unstructured and that’s for my journal, that’s not for y’all. Maybe this is some of my internalized white gaze. I myself, in my relationships with people will be like, “Ben, you don’t always have to make a joke.” My therapist even says, “We don’t have to be laughing right now.” Also as a Nib creator, writing for people who will agree with me, to a degree, as one of the few anarchists working, if I get to police abolition, I mean, these days, people, especially because “defund the police” has been sort of co-opted by a more moderate liberal tendency, but prior to that a lot of people would be angry when I’d write “no cops.” But as someone who’s black, whose readership, particularly for a while, was primarily white, particularly as an indie cartoonist because I started off doing weird sci-fi stuff, for me, the humor is just sort of this reflexive strategy to be humanized by the white viewer. Because there are probably white people who still think I don’t feel pain in the same way. They think I’m entertaining, but maybe they think that I don’t feel emotions as deeply as them. I think there’s a lot of people who would be like, “If I, as a white person, had a gun pulled on me by

a cop, that’s crazy, but that’s unusual for my life.” And they maybe assume that that’s normal for me, which it’s not. That remains true, so I think in some ways the humor when talking about something systemic is to try to open this door; it’s maybe humanizing me in a certain way. DS: When you write comics journalism pieces, who do you hope will read these works and what do you hope they will take away from them? BP: It really depends on like what I’m writing. The longer pieces tend, in my mind, to be sort of like what I imagined The Nib readership to be. In the last couple of years, it’s much wider than I think it was. Initially, I was like “Let me talk to these white liberals about some shit. Let me school them on some stuff.” Like the unhumble, flagrant, calculated anarchist that I am, it’s like “let me trigger them a little bit, but let me school them on like some stuff.” These days it really depends, because I’ve had some other projects that do really short stuff. And those range from me talking to other black people to me just trying to troll the alt-right people in the comments. In general, I try to talk to people who are maybe interested in radical politics but don’t know. Because the Internet is what it is, people will punish you for some shit that they just learned yesterday. So when it comes to like these broader things, for instance the ACLU, people don’t have access to critiques of legalism, conversations about violence in a logistical way but also an ethical way. I try to generally write to someone who’s day one, on some politics and reflexively resistant to what I’m trying to say. I lived in the south for 15 years, and most of the people you talk to don’t really know what you’re talking about. They have whatever smattering of ideas they got maybe from their parents, something they saw on the news. So when you’re like, “No prisons!” They’re like “huh?” Because of how social the South is, it’s not really an option to just not have that conversation, especially if they’re your neighbor. Your neighbor in New Orleans, that’s who’s going to check up on you—no one calls the cops there—that’s who’s going to get your mail; if someone breaks into your house that’s who’s going to call you, maybe even come out with a bat. What I brought to comics is just like, “Alright, I got to talk to you about this thing in a way that you can hear it, not in the style where this is an important issue.” I write in a way, where it’s like you don’t care; and you’re maybe not wrong for not caring as a first reaction depending on who you are, like I write in some cases for my brother, who is not particularly patriotic; he’s not particularly into cops, but probably is pretty skeptical of what I have to say. AM: Along with comics journalism, you have a lot of other genres under your belt—fiction, horror, science fiction. Is there a specific genre that you feel more comfortable with or more drawn to?

BP: Because I grew up on Conan, this mix of fantasy sort of sci-fi has always been my go to for doing stories. I did this comic called BTTM FDRS that was written by my friend, Ezra Claytan Daniels. And he got me really into horror. In general, though, if I’m left to my own devices, it’s going to probably be sci-fi. I never caught the African futurism wave; I’m a bit bit too nihilistic, and actually way too much of like a Luddite in a classical sense to be engaged in that in some sort of fantastical way. But, for me, sci-fi gives you the space to pare things down and focus on something. It’s a kind of mythmaking that feels not corny; I don’t have to introduce gods into it (maybe aliens). But it feels like some of the most grounded mythmaking for me and the myths I grew up on, like classic Star Trek sci-fi, Star Wars, Blade Runner. Blade Runner did a lot for me; you could blame a lot of things on Blade Runner in terms of me and my personality. DS: What are some of the greatest benefits of telling a story in the comics form, especially one that we might call nonfiction?

BP: I feel like it’s a medium that’s the closest thing to looking through someone else’s eyes. Documentary is a way that people really consume information, but in some ways, you’re still not getting how someone looks at the world fully. The nice thing about a cartoonist is you’re really getting the most complete way that someone sees and experiences the world. When you take that to a nonfiction place, particularly when talking about “the political,” you can get a really solid idea about how they’re perceiving this. The Nib has a range of people that write about these things in different ways, and some people are presenting answers for me. I’m not presenting any answers, and I don’t necessarily believe in that. I feel like that insults the complexity of the world. I feel like there’s a certain ego in being like “I can encapsulate the problem and the solution in 200 pages.” That’s not possible, that’s crazy. My favorite kinds of nonfiction comics or journalism comics, political comics are ones where I feel like I’m really understanding where this writer is coming from. That gets me to a place that is sort of solution-based because the more I’ve understood things, the more I feel like I can be a part of some sort of reconciliation. Part of my optimism is that if I really encapsulate where I’m coming from this will help someone who’s inherently just deeply antagonistic. We might come to some sort of understanding and then we can figure something out. Definitely a lot of this is based on my anarchism. If I was a socialist, I probably would make more appeals to legislation; at the end of the comic could be “Call your senator!” But because my vision of a liberated future is much more based in you and me, and what we’re going to figure out, and then that dynamic expanding exponentially, it’s always going to start with the individual. I’m always writing to a specific person, for us to figure something out. AM: How do you tend to conduct your preparation for a comic? When you do field work do you take lots of photographs or sketch things or take notes? BP: When I did a comic about the riots here in Philly, that was unprecedented here that level of anti-police action.

There are a lot of press people, and they bring cameras. But if you get really close to very experienced anarchists who are doing what they need to do whether or not they’re in a bloc by themselves or they’re part of all genders all ages all races that were just attacking City Hall. They’re in the mix. So if you bring out a camera, that camera’s probably going to get broken, you’re probably going to get punched in the face. So I don’t bring my phone or a camera to any of these things. I don’t bring any recording devices at all. I’m just relying on my memory and then I can Google Google Maps if I want to know what the street looks like. If I’m coming in, primarily as a viewer, like as a reporter, I’m not going to have the interactions that I’m trying to have. So I just go as Ben, and that really worked out. What the comic ended up being is I ran into a person and we ended up having a conversation about the riot’s role in black liberation.

When it comes to something like the ACLU, I’ll do a lot a lot of reading. I might hit up an expert, and interview them. So yeah there might be some interviews for context. There’s a certain point, you have to stop because there’s too much information, and I have to start paring down. My style is a little scattered: Either I’m just running into the middle of everything, and I’ll figure it out later, or I’m just piling on information until some angle seems interesting to me. Being an over-opinionated, highly partisan political person, I usually know what my gut feeling is about the subject, and that will guide my research—like anybody else that’s honest with themselves. When it comes to a lot of things, I kind of know how I feel about this, let me read about it. And when it comes to the history—like right now I’m working on a really big graphic novel about armed black nationalism in a very broad sense—and I know how I feel about this, but also this shit is very complicated. That doesn’t diminish my enthusiasm for it, but I want to include those things, like the role of misogyny and homophobia within these movements. To understand them right is to understand these are aspects of it, and that doesn’t take away my enthusiasm for certain figures (I would not remove the Panthers from history), but we’re lying to ourselves if we don’t understand that those things are part of it. It does bother me that even within my own political milieu there’s such a two-dimensional understanding of things: we either ride for things completely, or it’s the enemy. AM: Do you then have a process for gathering all of your research and turning that information into a pencil or a draft and then taking that draft and turning it into your finished product? BP: I usually begin with the script; a lot of times I’ll start with bullet points, and I’ll try to construct a classic narrative out of that. It always starts with context. In the “Letter from Stone Mountain Jail,” the one where I went to the Klan rally, I was really building to the moment where I had a conversation with those guys in prison. It’s only a couple of panels, but I knew that’s what I was building to. There’s a lot of classic storybuilding stuff I tried to do. When it comes to the visuals, outside of just representing where we’re at, I’m trying to fill in images that boost what I’m trying to say. I probably get too creative or I take too much creative license and enter into a very ham-fisted visual metaphor (so that’s a critique of myself). Sometimes I want to include things that are significant to me, but not significant to the story. Like [in “Letter from Stone Mountain Jail”] I was arrested, I was tackled, slammed on the ground, there was a whole bunch of pretty predictable funny stuff that cops did with my handcuffs. So the bulk of my experience personally was the pain of being handcuffed tightly and then seeing this white kid having a great time with his handcuffs. And then jail is very boring, so I slept through most of that experience. So if I made a comic about the things that were, emotionally, the most affective, it’d be a comic in which my wrists hurt for an hour, and then I was asleep for most of the comic...it’s not an interesting comic. DS: You mentioned that you’re working on These Black Arms to Hold You Up, the graphic chronicle of black resistance. Are there stories that you have to leave out or that you feel would be too difficult to tell in comics form, while you work on this text?

BP: There’s certain topics that I just don’t know anything about because of who I am; just as like a cis-dude. And I’ve tended to write about things that happened to me from my point of view, in part because what am I doing trying to write about experiences not my own? When it comes to something that’s more history, I have to write about subjectivities that are not my own, and for me that’s always a struggle. But in general, I’m like, “You can write comics about anything.” I can’t particularly imagine when it comes to history, what I can’t write about. I think the thing that makes me excited about the topic is that it’s hard. I could sit down and write a two page or 200 page comic just cheerleading all these people I like, not just the Panthers, Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams, Assata [Shakur]...I probably will just cheerlead Assata because she’s a perfect person, but most of these other people are very troubled, and I feel like it would be dishonest to not try to include things. A lot of people are pretty hesitant to write or to create content which expresses mixed emotions about our heroes, in part because they’re not written about a lot, and a lot of non-black people will read these things, and one is hesitant to feed into the stereotypes that are projected onto us.

I feel more motivated to both learn myself, because it helps me understand these people in our history more to understand all of them, but also I’m more motivated by reporting back to the group. I come from a milieu that is very active, we’re taking information because we’re going to use it. I came up in reading groups where we’re going to read like some Deleuze/ Guattari, and we’re going to read how non-violence protects the state, and we’re applying this to our community. So I still read and create art in that sense, where I’m really making something because I want to apply it in my own life, and I really like people who apply it to read this. If I go about life, a political life, but also just daily life, thinking of the black male revolutionary who’s this messianic figure, without knowing the fucked up things people do: what it means to be in that

position, what sort of justifications you make, you can do a lot of harm. There’s a lot of non-men revolutionaries who were put in the back because people really feed into this messianic idea of themselves.

I avoid drawing horses too; they’re very complicated, I hate that. I did it in Sports Is Hell, and there were like five of them, and I was like “That’s enough!” DS: Are there projects that you feel drawn to work on that you haven’t been able to create yet, and how do you decide what stories to tell or report on? BP: I have a lot of fantasies about being able to like travel places and write about them. There are all these uprisings that are super interesting, and particularly because American anarchism has been so Eurocentric, with some exceptions— like there’ll be some over-romanticization of the Zapatistas. If you’re a black radical, you’re really obsessed with Haiti, and anytime there’s an uprising, it’d be cool to go, or like I’d love to go to Chile or whatever, and that’s an issue of time and resources. Stuff moves so quickly and in a lot of ways comics is not a very sufficient medium for that. I’ll go, I’ll have an experience, I’ll fly back, I’ll draw, shit has changed. So there’s a lot of stuff even in the United States, I’ll see something in the news that is related to things I like to study, like the most recent is The Rise of the Moors. These guys are in Rhode Island; I’m from New England originally, I’d love to just talk to them and write about all of that because it’s really interesting stuff. Or sometimes I’ll get really obsessed with one particular radical, alive or dead. Recently there’s this guy in western Massachusetts, who was a meme for a second because he knocked out a Trump supporter. I thought it was hilarious, and then I found out he was from my area, and I’d love to do an interview on him because his life has gone on. He’s trying to run for city council, he’s one of the few black people in North Adams, Massachusetts. Things come up all the time, and I don’t have the time or it’s challenging for comics because it’s such a temporal thing. In terms of how I pick, a lot of times I’ll do something because someone hired me. And I’ll try to pick things that are sort of related to whatever is in the popular discourse. I definitely self-edit to a degree. Once in a while, though, I’ll get lucky: When I was doing the monuments comic in New Orleans, “Takin em Down,” that was a topic that no one really cared about yet, but it became news right before I was finishing. So that’s happened a couple of times, where I’m writing about something that’s more interesting in my life, and then it becomes news.

Now that I’m working on this history of black armed resistance, I’m actually learning a lot more about Reconstruction in the South than I knew. I’m embarrassed to say, I knew the big marquee things. People are writing about Tulsa, which is an important thing, the bombing of black Wall Street. But I’m an anticapitalist so there’s all these resistances, things that aren’t even necessarily just black people. There’s this guy in Mississippi, and he found out that there was a bounty hunter that was kidnapping black people and bringing them to Alabama, so he decided, because he was white—he was a teacher at an all-black boys school—and he was like, “Alright, I’m gonna dress up like a klansman, and I’m going to go beat up this bounty hunter, and kick him out of town.” These are the proto-antifa people we really need to be reading about. So that story in itself is interesting, but also it kicks off a white backlash, and then there’s a lot of fairly organized black militias that would come from a town over when they heard that white people were out trying to lynch people. So I’d love to do a comic that’s just about that. Because a lot of this stuff like the white rifle clubs. If you take away the dates and the old timey clothes, a lot of this shit is the same. All the shenanigans with the voting boxes, that’s from them. There were white rifle groups moving voting boxes, standing around them. A lot of that stuff is interesting, just because it’s a story about us, and reconstruction of the South—more than chattel slavery—kicks off a lot of contemporary American race problems. So I’d love to do a book about that. I don’t know if anyone will give me money to do that. AM: What advice would you give to aspiring comic journalists? BP: You’ll make millions, so just figure out what to do with your first yacht. They can really get you on the rental of the dock. At the end of the day, you want to own your own dock. When it comes to artists, you have a lot of imposter syndrome, and I don’t think that that goes away. I have been fortunate to work basically my whole career in comics with a lot of really good people. You can really get taken advantage of because you want to work for the New York Times, you want to work for Vox. Trying to get with people who treat you right and respect your voice is really important. Like you don’t want to make Ben Passmore comics, you want to make your own comics. We are in a really good time for journalism comics, I’m totally floored by the amount of cartoonists. Coming up, I didn’t really see a lot of them, and there’s more outlets for it, so working on your voice is important. For cartoonists, we’re weird people—you gotta be weird to really stick with this archaic art form—so you’ve gotta get outside. For me, particularly for the comics I want to make, it started with me being outside and having this relationship to a particular kind of community that is ultimately who I wrote about and for. If you want to do journalism comics, you really got to be out in the world, you got to figure out how to talk to people; it’s different than doing diary comics or fantasy comics; you’re really speaking to an audience in this way more than other mediums. So you have to figure out what that means, what it means to talk to people in a way that they can understand, even if it’s your own people.