It’s thanks to the conversation with Michael DeForge transcribed below that I end up on YouTube reading the featured comments on an abridged audiobook version of Whitley Strieber’s alien abduction memoir Communion: A True Story. Philippe Mora’s 1989 film adaptation of the same name, Communion, is one of two central inspirations DeForge cites for his most recent book, Holy Lacrimony (2025). What makes the film so compelling, DeForge says at one point in our interview, is that it “sidesteps whether or not the experience is real,” in favour of taking seriously the material consequences of the protagonist's experience—in this case, of alien encounter. I would say this, too, is what all of DeForge’s books do with the experiences of their characters, not least Holy Lacrimony with its aliens, and it makes them similarly compelling. The books are less interested in what is plausible, or normal, or even what’s right, and more interested in what social and political outcomes an act might produce, even those acts performed in private. 

DeForge, based in Toronto, has been making comics, posters, and illustrations, prolifically, for at least two decades now. Since 2013, between Koyama Press and Drawn & Quarterly, he has published more than fifteen books (some strip collections, some longer narratives), and his illustrations and comics have featured widely in both digital and print publications. Whether in black and white or colour, his images rage with intensity. They bulge, warp, or slim to needle thin. They disorient, not because of the uncanny forms or landscapes they contain, though these are delightfully strange, but because of the feelings of identification and recognition they still inspire. Their silliness is rendered with both generosity and realism. In this way, his books provoke similar feelings for me as does the YouTube comment section where I find myself in a post-interview browsing session. Six months ago,  @Useyourthirdresource commented: “No one can answer the questions this video is asking as these greys do not communicate to humans about themselves and they strictly follow their purpose, needs and objectives, keeping them all secret. Suffice to say they are not benevolent beings. Best to stay clear of them if possible. 😊” One month ago, @earthtru commented: “he's such a fraud.” Below that, an exchange: 

 

@AnalogLanguage 10 months ago

Definitely not aliens from outer space. Something much more complicated and strange.

╰  @Useyourthirdresource 6 months ago

What do humans know. 😊

╰ @theisisreincarnate 5 months ago

Human ( gov't) experimentation disguised as Aliens . - Trans-Humanism

╰ @Madddhatter115 1 month ago

  @theisisreincarnate yea right lol

 

Despite the high chance of stumbling across tragic, or, at minimum bleak, exhibitions of 21st-century subjecthood, I love reading YouTube comments. This brief, estranged exchange is an example of why. It feels familiar and sad, dark but sweet. What do humans know, :blush:? The human, slash substitute here for human gov’t, accounts for much of what is more complicated and strange in this world. That is, the world. Also: yea right lol. It goes straight to the heart of questions raised by DeForge’s work. Can you know what you know? Who can you trust? As @Useyourthirdresource prompts, whose benevolence can be assumed? Our own, or our neighbours’? What about those forces whose origins evade straightforward capture, such as aliens, or capital? Evidential logic is always and perhaps increasingly tenuous, and these questions loom large and ominously unanswerable. DeForge’s characters construct their lives under a cloud of existential unknowns emphasized by visuals easily mingling the grotesque and mundane. In his comics, urgently if more obscurely, DeForge presses on the same concerns as in his posters plastered around the city, which call, among other things, for worker solidarity, rent control, harm reduction, cultural spaces not complicit in arms dealing, living wages, sick leave, PACBI, and prison abolition. That is to say, across formats, he is always asking whether community can be made out of shared suffering, whether anything is indeed shared at all, and what kinds of political responsibilities we have to each other, even as we are engulfed by life as a venture of the impossible. 

 

 

I'm in a lot of collective projects, and I take seriously what it means to sustain those. I’ve also been around the block long enough to have been in many failed collective projects. Sometimes it feels weirdly inevitable in a way that is very disheartening. We’re in conditions where every apparatus and power is trying to stop you from sustaining collective efforts, whether they’re artistic, political—ideally both—it feels like everything is working against it.

 

What are your main tools when working? 

A lot of the finished pages anyone is seeing are done digitally. It used to be a more hybrid process where I would work analogue, scan, draw on top, and colour digitally but now a lot of the finished comics are digital from start to end. I mostly use Photoshop and a Wacom tablet, and I letter by hand. But I still do analogue work in a sketchbook, and a lot of my thinking goes into sketchbooks and notebooks first. 

I’m sure it varies, but what is the big picture process of developing a book like for you? 

I start with whatever idea I have, whether it’s the type of story I want to tell or a visual idea, and there’s usually a bit of a development process where I’m trying to work out the rules of the book. That often has to do with tone, and colour; frequently it's me settling on what grid I’m going to use. I tend to use a single grid throughout each comic, and I make pretty intentional decisions very early on about whether that’s going to be four or nine or twelve panels or what have you. I feel like once I establish what the look is going to be then I can start working on it. I try not to have too much set in stone about stuff like plot and try to have an impression of the characters involved but to let that be something that develops as I work. I don’t script out my comics very heavily. I try to let it be a little improvised. I find if I script something out too heavily I lose interest really quickly. Comics are a fairly tedious medium, not the most tedious, but they’re time consuming, and if I do have too much scripted out I’ll find myself a year or two later feeling really trapped by decisions I made when I was, you know, basically a different person. 

There’s a really moving dynamic in your comics between contingency and character. Your characters change according to both circumstantial and internal factors. I think that improvisational approach comes through in the narrative as a great deal of surprise, which, as a reader, is really lovely. Could you elaborate a bit on your own relationship to those things in your comics: chance, or everything that is unknown before you begin, and then the characters themselves—do you have an experience of, inside the rules of the world, discovering the characters as you’re writing, or discovering the events that happen to them?

Absolutely. I try to let myself be surprised by the work. I know some writers describe having this fully realized vision of characters and they can just place them in any situation and describe almost transcribing conversations. I never start a project that way. I have an idea of a person or personality, but it’s only writing and drawing them and figuring out what type of clothing they might wear in a situation or what body language they have or how might they react to something, that’s where they reveal themselves to me. I think, too, that’s the interesting part of characterization. They might react in a sort of idiosyncratic way that makes sense in the context of the scene but is maybe not something you’d have been able to plan beforehand. In general, I like digression. I like giving myself a lot of room for digression, especially in some of my very sprawling comics. A few of my comics were initially serialized: my first book, Ant Colony (2014), which is a little embarrassing to think about this many years removed from it, Sticks Angelica (2017), Folk Hero (2017), Leaving Richard's Valley (2019), Birds of Maine (2022), were all serialized, and a comic I did called Brat (2018) was serialized in a different way. Working with a very set schedule meant I would have these overarching threads I wanted to keep following, but there’d be lots of instances where I was kind of sick of that, and would want to follow some side character, some tangent, for a while. I think those are the most interesting parts of those comics. Those really small characters, once I follow them along for a while, would in a very unplanned way start occupying a larger space in the narrative. It happened in Leaving Richard’s Valley with a character called Caroline Frog, who for a while becomes really crucial to the plot, but started out this very small, unnamed role. That only came from the rhythm of doing a daily strip. When I think about daily strips I really like, my favourite part is when you can tell when the artist is just trying out some throw-away experiment for a week. There’s a week of Peanuts, I forget which decade, where it’s just a monologue the wall of a school is delivering. You discover that this inanimate wall has an inner life. It’s not repeated again, but it’s this great, really weird week that stands out so much in the body of work. In a lot of ways it’s very un-Peanuts and violates some of the rules of the strip, but it’s great, it’s perfect. Those tangents are pretty special.  

I love Caroline’s arc in Leaving Richard’s Valley. There’s a feeling in the book of simultaneous occurrence across a really wide field. There’s a lot of overlap of course, but each character has, also, almost their own epic. Caroline’s transformations are great: self-appointed cop, star architect, cult artist, snow shovel mob boss. 

The snow shovel thing came from something that happened in the neighbourhood when I was working on the comic. A bunch of the houses on our street had their snow shovels stolen from the porches and at one point the upstairs neighbour saw a group of kids walking with a bunch of snow shovels, and you know, they’re kids, so I don’t think he confronted them but was like, what are you doing with those? And they offered to sell him back the shovels. I was really impressed by the gall of these kids. 

Genius. 

In Leaving Richard’s Valley, Toronto feels to me like a—or even the—central character. In general you seem really interested in cities as collectively invented, reliant on certain kinds of mythmaking. They’re cobbled together, and in flux, but that cobbling together is also always bounded by capitalism. It’s not like the conditions of labour and market and even the social relations appear spontaneously in the scene. How central is the city to the collectives you’re writing and thinking about? 

It’s a subject I return to a lot. Partly, it’s that most of my adult life I’ve lived in Toronto, at this point twenty-plus years. I’m also interested generally in trying to write about community. How spontaneous versus how intentional does a community have to be, especially under capitalism, in order to sustain itself? I think, with Leaving Richard’s Valley, a lot of it was me directly working that out. It’s very much a Toronto comic and references real and imagined Toronto history—very specific types of histories that would appeal to a nerd of my demographic. Like jokes about Rochdale College, which is pretty well-mined territory. But I also assume people could see other types of North American cities in it. 

But it’s something I grapple with a lot. I’m in a lot of collective projects, and I take seriously what it means to sustain those. I’ve also been around the block long enough to have been in many failed collective projects. Sometimes it feels weirdly inevitable in a way that is very disheartening. We’re in conditions where every apparatus and power is trying to stop you from sustaining collective efforts, whether they’re artistic, political—ideally both—it feels like everything is working against it. That’s sort of what Leaving Richard’s Valley is. You see all these stops and starts, and I think it ends ambiguously on how many of these threads can keep going at the end of the book. I live in a city, and it’s a city I feel extremely committed to, but I also try to be realistic about how...you know, you earn the right to love it, and you earn the right to hate it. I don’t know what the future is for Toronto, and it feels fairly bleak right now, but I don’t think that’s predetermined. 

In your comics we’re often meeting a collective at a moment when it’s about to disintegrate. We watch them, as you describe, splinter and re-form in various iterations. Some are more successful than others, none are permanent, and inside of those collective formations there are all these individual crises of faith. Can you talk a bit more about how your own living in community relates to the writing of those narratives? Do you learn things about collective movement from your own books, or is it a different relationship entirely? 

The type of collective projects that inform Leaving Richard’s Valley, some I had a direct relationship to, but a lot of them were historical. I’ve never been in a cult, for instance, but I like reading about cults. I don’t know if I learn about collectivity from my writing. My inclination as a person is that I gravitate towards solitude. I very much fit the model of a stereotypical cartoonist who is not naturally the most social, and I’ve also had the same kind of liberal brainwashing artists receive of a very individualistic approach to life and practice. But I do have social commitments and political commitments that mean I’m in community with a lot of people, and it has forced me out of my comfort zone in many different ways. I think that shows up in some of the characters in these big communities in my comics, almost reluctantly getting enmeshed in all the messiness of having to live and work with other people. So yeah, a lot of the stuff about the way people live together is me trying to figure out that on my own. Certainly in a lot of political projects, having to mediate conflict has been a difficult thing of like… I’ve committed to learning and I’ve had enough discipline to not put any of that directly on the page, but it has informed how I write about conflict between people. It’s been a weird side benefit of doing that. It does help me understand something about how people fight that I maybe wouldn’t have got to on my own. 

I think for a while I would do two types of books: some were written in (almost) my own voice, about a character who is in their head in a very specific way, usually like a depressed guy, because I’m a depressed person; and then I would have books that were more like the cast of Springfield or something, like Sticks Angelica, Birds of Maine, these really sprawling casts. Holy Lacrimony maybe consolidates those, splits the difference between the books that are this self-narrating suicidal ideation—which is the first half of the book—and brings it to a book about community in the second half. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I loved Holy Lacrimony. The aliens in it are sort of god-like in their omniscience. They have access to Jackie’s whole life, and Jackie’s encounter with them seems almost like an encounter in the afterlife, almost purgatorial. The book has been described as a type of post-alien abduction traumatization story, but it also felt to me like when Jackie is returned to earth, his role apparently fulfilled, he’s returned with renewed capacity for life. Or maybe rather what happens to him in his life afterwards is a sort of renewed capacity for communality. 

I think part of why I found the book so compelling is that his post-abduction experience felt really familiar to me as someone who was a very serious Christian and now is not. Being watched over is terrifying but also deeply comforting. When Jackie is abducted, he discovers that his life has been under the constant supervision of a being who is intensely interested in him, and he enters into conversation with them. That’s not unlike the relationship I experienced myself as having with God. And the loss of that relationship of constant observance is fraught. Jackie’s return to earth is marked by the discovery of his life as a kind of performance for an audience, now made uncertain and ambivalent, as well as the abrupt end of that conversation. I wondered if you yourself have any kind of religious background or connections to religious practice that you drew on for the book. 

It came from a different place—it’s not really something I considered, but it makes sense especially because so much of the comic is about belief and doubt and disbelief, which is also one of the things I find inherently interesting about abduction stories. I’ve talked about this in relation to this comic, but a lot of it is me trying to find a different angle to write about my own experience with mental illness and institutionalization and the way people reacted to my response to struggles with mental illness, or however you want to phrase it. Like, how I relate to other people who have gone through similar experiences, whether that’s useful or not, whether it can be the basis of actual community or solidarity or whether it’s too tenuous. It’s something that I was trying to think through when working on it. Some of the relationships between Jackie and the group are based on how I relate to certain people in my own life. Those are unresolved questions for me still. 

With Holy Lacrimony, one major influence was Communion, which is a Christopher Walken horror-adjacent movie directed by Philippe Morra. It’s based on what was at the time a very popular alien abduction memoir by a guy named Whitley Strieber, and all the usual kind of stuff around a big piece of popular media like that, especially memoir: whether or not he was for real or a scam artist or whatever, there are all these associations people have with this book and with the movie. But what I think was really interesting about the movie is it completely sidesteps whether or not what the protagonist experiences is real. There’s a scene where Christopher Walken’s character goes to a UFO support group, it’s maybe only six or seven minutes in the movie, but it was a huge influence on Holy Lacrimony because in the group they make it really explicit that what concerns them isn’t necessarily whether or not what happened to them is real, because what happened to them is so massive. It’s not like they can even fully understand it. And instead they just have this very frank conversation about things like, if they resent being seen as victims, or resent the idea that it should be empowering. They don’t even necessarily all believe each other, but they can relate to each other because they’ve experienced something that no one else in the world will take seriously. He’s less worried about whether or not it’s real, but knows that it permanently affects things like, how he talks to his wife and child because he knows his wife did not experience this and might not ever believe him, [how this] permanently affects his career, this kind of thing. Obviously there are all these parallels when talking about mental illness that the movie makes very explicit. Walken’s character, for instance, talks about how he’s afraid his son might get visited by aliens—it’s very unsubtle about the parallels. I really love this movie. 

A second influence, when I was in the middle of the book, I had a friend bring up Bethel House, which is a project located in a rural fishing village in Japan. Karen Nakamura wrote a book about it called Disability of the Soul (2017), and made an accompanying documentary. Bethel House is in the tradition of ways of treating mental illness outside of psychiatric norms; there are lots of parallels between other projects, but this one is still going, and the idea is that the “patients” there are living and working outside of an institution. The idea is that to be treated you shouldn’t be sequestered away, but still living in community, with other patients but also the people supposedly “treating” you, and also just generally the people in town. They make a lot of art and music and host a festival every year, and the most famous aspect of the festival is the annual award given for what they call “The Best Delusion.” The best delusion isn’t necessarily just the most interesting one. It’s awarded based on how the community responded to it at the time. The example Nakamura gives in the book and documentary is someone who believed he had received a message from aliens telling him to go out to the middle of the forest, walk inside an alien spacecraft, and pilot it, in order to save the world or something like that. For residents it’s a very common occurrence to be visited by aliens or see a UFO, but it was a really cold night and his fellow residents were afraid that he’d hurt himself or die, walking to this forest alone. So they gathered an emergency meeting—and a lot of these communal meetings would not necessarily even have doctors, they’d be purely led and facilitated by other residents, who might be experiencing something similar—and they problem-solved how to respond to it in a way where he wouldn’t necessarily go out that night and hurt himself. They suggested a bunch of things like, what if we went as a group? And that kind of got rebuffed, well, what if we sent a scouting party and that got rebuffed, so what they settled on was: you don’t actually know how to fly a UFO, you haven’t flown a plane or anything before, so what if we sleep on it and then in the morning we can figure out how to address the fact that, you know, you can’t fly this thing. That was able to deescalate the situation, and a big part of that was how he saw everyone taking his problem as seriously as he did, even though when you see the way they interact and see some of their one-on-one interviews, there are a lot of different opinions. Some people are like: I think everyone else here is crazy—not me, but… So not everyone is aligned on what they are experiencing necessarily, but they do have this common thread and common commitment to taking care of each other. Nakamura doesn’t idealize the situation, it still depends on not believing this person, still assumes that some type of psychiatric intervention is necessary, which might not be the case, but I was really struck by this story. I think another big part of unlocking the book was reading about that whole house.  

I’m gonna look it up, that’s really interesting. You keep it beautifully ambiguous in Holy Lacrimony, for the reader—what has happened. From the start I’d fully bought the story, and then at the moment when Jackie is in the support group saying to himself, well he’s a liar, and she’s a fraud, suddenly I was, like, wait, what should I believe here? What actually has happened? But I love the idea of displacing that concern, just setting it aside to get on with other more interesting questions like, what was the texture of this experience? What has it done to my life or sense of self? And what do I do now that this thing has transformed me in some way? Which is a more interesting and more relevant question than, was it real? 

I have friends who experience things that are pretty far off from what I’m experiencing in my own reality—that’s an inelegant way of articulating it I guess, but, I’ve had things like that myself, and I feel like a lot of the time what is most actionable isn’t necessarily someone saying ‘yes, I totally believe you’ or, ‘I totally understand.’ A lot of the actionable things are way more material than that. It has to do with needing social supports, needing people around you, or, even more than that, needing to keep your job, needing to still pay rent while going through whatever it might be. I am personally agnostic on a lot of stuff around UFOs and aliens, which has been something I’ve engaged with through my life. And I have things that I find more plausible than others with aliens and conspiracy in general, but I wanted to make sure that I could maintain that agnosticism in the text itself, and not feel disrespectful in any way. As someone who has read so many accounts and listened to a lot of late night radio where people are talking about it, obviously it’s a space where there are a ton of grifters and con artists, but, once you set that aside, it’s also a ton of people going out on a limb explaining something they know is going to permanently ostracize them from a lot of respectable society, or something they’re gonna their lose their job by saying, which is a really intense thing to think about. Of course, there’s a ridiculous aspect to, like, UFO conventions and this whole ecosystem, but at its core, that’s just a really intense thing to have forever alter the trajectory of your life.  I don’t think a lot of people do that lightly. 

 

 

 

Unfortunately what the movement calls on isn’t necessarily always me just drawing something…but I’m always very happy to do it. I feel very proud to call myself a propagandist in this context.

 

 

 

Organizing on the left, in some contexts, requires a fairly evangelical approach to convincing people of what is basically a major conspiracy, i.e., the way money and capital move in these hidden, sinister ways. But when trying to engage with people for instance who are anti-vax, it’s like, well that’s a conspiracy theory—don’t lose yourself to the conspiracy! The whole idea of conspiracy is much more complex than we sometimes allow it to be. 

Yeah, I mean it’s almost insulting now how little power feels the need to hide itself—just operates in plain sight. But anti-vax stuff is maybe a good example of where people are movable, because someone who is anti-vax clearly doesn’t understand how vaccines work or how illness and disease works, but, where there’s an earned mistrust of pharmaceutical companies or a mistrust of how the state controls bodies. 

Exactly. 

Or chemtrails are another good example. People aren’t wrong in identifying that our skies are changing in a way that is pretty upsetting, and a lot of people have written about this: the ways we used to be able to quantify what we saw with “our own two eyes” in the sky are changing because of environmental degradation. So there’s always something there, but obviously easier said than done, moving people in those ways. But most people understand that something is wrong. 

Yes, most people have in some form come up against ways in which what is wrong makes them suffer. They’ve at least tried to access healthcare or something. 

I’m gonna lead into my next question with a story. For the last few years, before she passed away, I was seeing this really amazing analyst who had, among other things, been campaigning for decades in the psychoanalytic community in Toronto for a real reckoning with Israel as a genocidal state. That was her baseline, and we spent probably upwards of 70% of our time just talking about conditions of labour, exploitative taxation, state violence… things like this. We’d spend 30 minutes just trading sources on the global arms trade. It was such a relief to be in a therapeutic context where those material conditions were taken for a psychic foreground, rather than background. But, with the assumption that those things can’t be dealt with simply by their recognition. There’s not a therapeutic answer to war, either in a personal or collective sense. Yet they can’t be ignored, at least not without pretty bad consequences. 

I was thinking about this because, in your work, I have the impression that these things (war, exploitation, violence) are worlds—encompassing conditions—even if we’re not on earth in the world of the book, in the comic, if we’re in an adjacent reality. Fiction can’t responsibly do away with those conditions, I don’t think. And that seems to be the approach in the comics that you make, which I respect and appreciate. This is a long-winded way of asking about the No Arms in the Arts campaign you’ve been involved with. I have impressions from the outside about that organizing, and there are continuities between the landscape in Montréal and Toronto, and material connections between the two, but I’m curious to know: what is it like in Toronto currently for artists who are organizing around divestment, not only from complicit Israeli funding, but other funding that relies on militaristic expansion? And what has that organizing been like for you? 

With No Arms in the Arts, I had some experience organizing in other sectors, and a lot of the people who were present for the birth of the campaign were people I knew from organizing in encampments and shelter hotels, for instance. So we had some organizing ideas, at least about what it means to work collectively, and several people had experience in other divestment work—BDS work but also things not solely tied to Israel, like involvement in Amazon divestment campaigns for instance. We saw that there was a lack of focus or coordination, and I hope no one would get offended by me saying this, but in culture-sector organizing in Toronto, organizing frequently ends up being very reactive. You’re responding to one piece of news, or one abhorrent institution will be this flash point for a little while, maybe a boycott gets called, then three months later no one is really thinking about it or working on it anymore, and it just gets replaced by another thing. I felt very tired of organizing from a position of weakness. So, a lot of No Arms, to start with, was trying to actually think through where art workers’ leverage is in their industries, and what could be a considered target across different industries. A lot of the work has been about targeting Scotiabank as an arts sponsor. The targets of the campaign have expanded to include the Azrieli Foundation, which is the charitable arm of the Azrieli Group, an Israeli real estate empire that has had ties to settlements deemed illegal in the West Bank; as well as Indigo Books, owned by Heather Reisman and Gerald Schwartz, who, among other things, are the founders of and sole major contributors to the HESEG Foundation for lone soldiers in Israel. So the idea was to look at what a common target could be and ways that efforts could be combined between film workers, people involved in the gallery world, authors, people involved in publishing, etc.

It’s been difficult, because doing this work is always very difficult. It’s a constant uphill battle, and you will be described as trying to take away opportunities from fellow artists, especially when funding is super tight. But it has also been heartening. There have been actual victories, including the Giller Prize dropping Scotiabank as a sponsor, which was a direct result of these pressure campaigns, and at different moments we’ve had effect on Elbeit Systems stock that Scotiabank is invested in. For any readers not familiar, Scotiabank is a major Canadian bank, and Elbeit Systems is Israel’s largest military company. Also, a big element of the campaign is trying to situate artists as workers, which is very difficult to do, I think. Artists, when responding to a political moment, even very sincerely, are still conditioned to think to respond through their art. Certainly, in organizing conversations we have a lot of difficult ones about trying to get artists to think of themselves as workers who can act and think collectively. But we’ve brought on a lot of people for whom this is kind of their first time out organizing, and it’s been really exciting to see that. While struggling to even wrap our heads around the scope of a genocide, it’s kind of the only thing that has made me feel at all optimistic and connected to other artists. Otherwise I sometimes just feel, like, I hate this world, you know? Why even make art? All the usual questions. I hate this industry, why am I beholden to all of these institutions that I hate? Doing this has felt like, okay, I actually am connected to my peers, because we do have these shared ideals, and there are ways we can make those actionable, and that’s through organizing. 

It reveals a serious vulnerability, to not have this kind of collective labour power, or rather as you’re describing, to not recognize it. The idea of an artists’ union has been largely unfamiliar in the last decades in most Canadian contexts, I think, but it has been really heartening to see cross-disciplinary labour organizing happening, even in the absence of an official union body. 

I feel like there’s been a bit of a course correction, because for a while I think people were approaching boycotts as a question of individual complicity—opting in or opting out—versus a boycott as collective action which can be about withholding labour. These arts institutions aren't anything without the artists actually participating in them. And yet, artists have less and less agency and say over these institutions that our livelihoods have become so entangled with, our work and its distribution has become so reliant on. It’s not the primary goal of the campaign—the primary goal is to try and put a meaningful dent in the Israeli war machine—but a secondary part of the campaign has also been modelling what it might look like to actually wrestle back control over some of these industries. 

Part of your involvement in these campaigns is to make posters—which are really great. What is the postering aspect of your work like, and how is it located in your work as an artist? Are there traditions of design and illustration you feel particularly connected to, either for political or aesthetic reasons, or both? 

Posters have always been a big part of my practice. When I was in high school I’d draw gig posters, usually just in exchange for getting on the guest list for shows, having the promoter turn a blind eye to the fact that I wasn’t allowed to be in the bar or whatever. I still love poster making and, in an ideal world, for commercial illustration I’d only be drawing posters. It’s my favourite kind of form. I feel more suited to that than editorial illustration or other kinds of commercial gigs I pick up. Really early on I was very informed by gig posters, especially punk and noise rock and the aesthetics there, and I was also in high school introduced to revolutionary Cuban poster art, especially Eduardo Muñoz Bachs and Rene Mederos. I was obsessed with looking at those images and breaking them down. Those became a big aesthetic influence, but were also an early introduction to radical political thought. I know there’s a range of opinions on those individual artists and their time making those posters, but what really appealed to me when I was young was the idea that artist practice could include doing, like, a really militant solidarity poster that would get airdropped into the Global South, and then also a public service poster about washing your vegetables, and then also a movie poster, and I thought: this is the dream. Not only is this a visual culture where you can work on something that is really dynamic and interesting and experiential, you can work on this range of messaging that would get out to the public, and people engaged and interacted with this stuff in a real way. I just thought that was amazing. So yeah, I still like doing posters, and for the most part now the poster work I do is for repertory film screenings, or political posters. I don’t like the idea of doing agit-prop for it’s own sake; I like to make sure that it is for campaigns or movements or orgs that I, at least, if I’m not a part of them know a little bit about, versus me just putting stuff out there for the sake of it. But it is a big part of my practice, and I like doing it, and I feel like it’s the movement work I’m most suited to. Unfortunately what the movement calls on isn’t necessarily always me just drawing something…but I’m always very happy to do it. I feel very proud to call myself a propagandist in this context. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s probably sentimental, but I do feel nostalgic for the kind of radical print collectives or print studios of various communist movements of the 20th century. I think one of the things that was maybe distinct about those is that the print production was integrated into, for instance, radical educational experiments or actual labour organizing—strategic campaigns. So I’m excited to see the visual output of something like No Arms in the Arts, because I think that integration is happening there, and we’ve maybe been in a period where, although postering has by no means disappeared, it’s lost some of that coordination with larger organizing efforts. 

Yeah, I agree. I do realize that for me as well that some of it is nostalgia. But I think we’ve been too complacent about allowing online space to be the primary place this stuff circulates. There was a shelter hotel that I was organizing in, for instance, and a lot of the flyers and graphics we’d make would be very immediate. We weren’t allowed inside the shelter hotel because of the service providers’ rules, so we’d table outside and would have a lot of print material, and residents would come and say, like, what would actually be useful for us to speak to our fellow residents is this type of pamphlet, or something that has like Know Your Rights information, or something that explains nearby social services–-or something more charged, more political, and that would change week to week. So we’d have a lot of small pieces of paper that were really made so that residents were able to talk to people we couldn’t themselves and could distribute themselves. You can’t do some of that stuff online. You have to actually have it exist as something you can physically hand to someone. There’s a lot of messaging, too, you either can’t or wouldn’t want to trust an online platform to house. I think it’s a shame if we give that up, because it’s also a medium where we have a lot of control. The poster, the pamphlet, the zine—those could be pretty potent tools depending on the context. I think of some movement graphics I’ve made, it’s stuff that was like, a pamphlet no one outside of maybe 50 people saw, that I had to throw together an hour before hitting a copy machine and bringing it onsite, you know. Those are some of my favourite pieces of movement work I’ve designed because they were the ones that felt most effective or most potent. 

A couple last questions. Film obviously features in your thinking and making, and you’ve talked about this elsewhere, but I’m curious to what degree you consider your comics filmic. And, if there are specific films that have had an outsized influence on your approach. 

I wouldn’t consider my comics filmic. In fact, kind of the opposite. I think they belong more to the tradition of comic strips with a very flat, fixed perspective. Very early comic strips predated film, and the dominant visual medium of the time would have been theatre, which is why when you look at those early comic strips they frequently have a fixed perspective in the same way that you would see characters interact on a stage. Then post-film comics started adapting, incorporating the concept of camera angles, almost. When I look at my own comics, I do have some that would count as more filmic, but, for the most part, what interests me in comics is how they can be such a sharp break from three-dimensional space and can organize information in a very different way to film. 

There are certain filmmakers who are a big influence, and I do love thinking about movies. I watch a lot of movies. Derek Jarman is one of my biggest influences. The way he organizes information temporally and on a screen is a big influence, but also just generally his writing and practice and his life: the way he thought about politics and agitation. He’s made some of my favourite movies. I like a lot of Hong Kong filmmakers like Tsui Hark and Johnnie To, and I think a tradition of Hong Kong filmmaking I’ve always been attracted to is how tonally diverse a single movie can be. I think western audiences, when engaging with this stuff, are always really surprised at like, how you can have a fart joke, and then something really serious, and then something really horrifying, and then an action scene. But I really like that, and I think it shows up in my comics a lot. I really dislike when someone uses tonal inconsistency as a criticism of any piece of art, and I think I lean into that in my comics. I like the idea of something being really silly but taking its emotions seriously. There’s a Johnnie To movie called Running on Karma (2003), it’s one of my favourite movies and is one of the most beautiful, heartbreaking meditations on Zen Buddhism ever written, and also, the lead Andy Lau spends the whole movie in an intentionally artificial-looking muscle suit—just, the whole movie—and I love that. I grew up watching those as a kid when my family would just pick up DVDS from Chinatown sometimes, and I think the influence really wormed its way into my writing. 

It’s really interesting to think about that shift from pre- to post- film comics. Your comics definitely feel theatrical, like scenes in front of painted backdrops, in a way that’s lovely and strange. 

I think about those very big early Sunday strips in the early days of strip cartooning like Krazy Kat or Gasoline Alley. I like the way they look like stage tableaux that characters are just moving around, and I think that’s a sensibility I try to have in a lot of my comics. A lot of my pages I almost think of as a scene unto themselves. I’m interested in organizing space more than I am organizing time, maybe, in comics. 

That’s really interesting. I mean, it seems like that kind of organization of space would produce a book whose time is non-linear also. 

Time is more easily manipulated in a comic, I think. You manipulate time all the time in film, but it calls attention to itself more. I’ve seen it described as comics allowing for an almost cubic representation of time—fractured. If you want to pull a reader out of it and have them really stare at a scene or sequence, it doesn’t necessarily read as stillness like it might in a movie. Or, in a movie it might be more heavy-handed, like, something in slow motion. In comics you can mess around with things more invisibly. I remember reading in sequence some very late-era Dick Tracy strips, long after Chester Gould died. I guess I would have been a kid. That’s a serial strip, but it was still being made long after people wanted to read serials, in a newspaper strip, and I was fascinated by how the first panel or two of each new strip had to recap what had happened the day before. So it meant that reading them in sequence you’d see the same scenes repeated over and over again, and sometimes it would be redrawn from a slightly different angle or some of the text would be omitted for expediency's sake, and it was so fascinating to me as a kid to read something that way. It was like reading time that was stuttering. I loved that, and it really stayed with me as this bizarre way to approach narrative. 

You have an upcoming collection of short comics being released in 2026 with Drawn & Quarterly, All the Cameras in My Room. Can you tell me anything about it? 

Lately, I’ve tried to have my short story collections feel a bit more organized than just stuff I was thinking about during the span I was drawing the comics, and a lot of these ones are organized around surveillance, or being watched. The being watched thing feels like a thread from Holy Lacrimony. So yeah, it’s a collection of shorts and I would, say, on the whole, it’s a bit more paranoid and pessimistic than my last collection, if each book of short stories is a bit of a check-in on me, and to a certain extent me checking in on what I’m seeing around me. I think my last book, Heaven No Hell (2011), maybe as the title implies, some of it is dystopian, some of it utopian, and a lot of the stories are in dialogue with each other that way. This one is a bit bleaker. I think it shows a world that is a lot more immobilized. It’s a very paranoid book, I’d say. The short story its title comes from is about surveillance, and the longest story in the book is about someone infiltrating an activist movement. 

One last question: what are you reading or watching currently?

I really like Joe Sacco’s new book, The Once and Future Riot. It’s weird to say because Joe Sacco is so canonized and venerated and has cross-medium success, but I think he’s an author that the comics and literary world is starting to take for granted, just because he’s so consistently good. It’s just a really excellent piece of graphic reporting. The other day I saw The Gulf of Silence by Mina Rhodes, who I don’t know a lot about, but the movie is about someone’s experience seeing a UFO, and I was grateful that I saw it after I did my book because I think it would have influenced it. It’s excellent. A lot of it is about professional fallout from having this sighting and talking about it. And I’m on the third book of Peter Weiss’ Aesthetics of Resistance trilogy. They’re all very good, and it’s subject-matter that’s on my mind a lot. I sometimes feel ambivalent about the role art can have in resistance, and they’re novels that talk about potency versus the way art can be part of a containment strategy.  

Thanks so much.