Danica Novgorodoff
Danica Novgorodoff is a painter, writer, comic book artist and cowgirl from Kentucky. She is the author of A Late Freeze, Neck of the Moon and, with Oana Sanziana Marian, Circus Song. She works as a designer of graphic novels for First Second in New York City, where she currently lives. You can buy her books and see more of her art at her website.
When, where, how did you become a comics reader?
I'm a little embarrassed to say that I didn't become a serious comic book reader until, say, this year, mostly because I now have a much greater resource; I can pick whatever I want off the shelf at my office, whereas previously I couldn’t really afford to buy the kinds of books I was interested in. But my interest in reading comics really started near the end of college when some of my peers in the art major were making comics.
At what point did you decide that you might be interested in creating your own work in this medium? Was that before you'd spent a lot of time as a reader?
I wasn’t at all well read when I started my own work. I spent the year after graduating college living and traveling in South America, and I wanted to have a project that would make me feel like my life wasn’t completely aimless, even if I was a vagabond. So I worked in the two visual media I felt were portable and suited to that lifestyle: photography and comics. The first comic book I made took me two years to complete and is a story about cowboys and gypsies and aimless American youths in the southern U.S. and northern South America, the land of volcanoes. I had no idea what I was doing when I started this book, so it was a fun way to get involved in the medium without having preconceptions of what a comic book should be.
You have experience in a number of different media. How does this one compare to some of the others you've worked in, in terms of the potential for expression? Are there any unique opportunities afforded here, or any particular liabilities?
Comics are compelling for me because I’ve always been interested in narrative art, even in painting and photography. Also, my writing has always been very visual, so combining the two media seems the natural way to get at what I’ve always tried to do with art—tell a story. Within a comic book, you’ve got more time to tell the story than in a painting, and more to look at than in a novel. I think the liabilities lie in relying to heavily on either the words or the pictures; for example, you don’t want to allow the art to be weak because the text will explain it. It’s hard to achieve a good balance between the story and the art.
What about the culture of comics? This community can be challenging; it tends not to be very forgiving of those without sense of history and unfortunately, its unfriendliness towards women, both creators and consumers, is a recurrent problem. What's your impression of the culture? And how do you feel about the way it has responded to your work so far?
No, it’s not the most female-friendly industry, but I think (hope) that’s changing, if slowly. I didn’t grow up reading comics, and like a lot of people, became familiar with the medium through Maus and through seeing Jimmy Corrigan in the Whitney Museum of Art. So in my own work, I’m motivated to make the kind of comics that I, as a non-expert in the field and as a girl, would be interested in seeing on the shelf and reading—work that has a literary and artistic appeal to people who aren’t necessarily immersed in the comics culture. I think through women’s participation in the medium, comics will become a much richer art form (in other words, in my opinion, more people making comics that do not feature spandex-clad women with excessive pectoral amplitude would be a boon to the medium). I also think that the increasing popularity of graphic novels among the general reading public will create more interest in and demand for more literary works that require no deep understanding of the culture of comics, and can stand alone as works of art.
Focusing on your newest book, what was the seed from which the rest of A Late Freeze grew, the first element you had from which you thought you could extrapolate the rest?
It started with the love affair between a robot and a bear, a sad robot and a female bear. It’s the kind of premise that could turn out very clichéd but I wanted to see if it could be strange and surprising and also somehow emotionally touching. I didn’t come up with the idea, though; when I was living in Ecuador a few years ago, I heard a story about a local man who lived in the mountains with a bear. The bear was very jealous and wouldn’t let the man come down into town to visit his wife and kids. I’ve always wanted to write a story based on that.
Despite the curiosity of the premise, the story quickly loses its sense of weirdness. It becomes very easy very fast to understand these characters. Was that something you tried to develop, or was that a natural product of your approach?
I just thought of them as having very human emotions. Anyway, a little weirdness is good in any relationship, right? Or I could say, “Love makes the unlikely and impossible happen.”
…Um. I can’t believe I just said that.
The idea of love is definitely important to the book, with a greater focus, maybe, on the familial over the romantic. How did that theme develop, the idea of different sorts of love and how they come from, respond to, one another?
These characters are all initially strangers who try to help each other out in a rough world, and become close through their shared experiences. Along with caring comes loneliness and worry. I just think these are things that everyone feels at some point or another, from the initial attraction between lovers to the loyalty of friendship to caring for a child. Not that I would know anything about that last one.
Was it a conscious decision to write about relationships of a sort, like parent/child, with which you had no first-hand experience?
No. I mean, I know what it’s like to care about someone, or to be part of a family, even if I’ve never been a parent. I’ve never been a bear or a robot either. But it doesn’t hurt to imagine.
Why did you choose to tell the story (mostly) wordlessly?
It somehow just made sense with these characters, to show how a relationship can develop between individuals who aren’t at all similar to one another; I suppose they wouldn’t speak the same language if they did speak. I wanted to make a story that shows everything, from action to emotion, without telling too much.
A Late Freeze has a very particular visual sensibility to it, fitting given your day job. How much did wanting to maintain the aesthetic affect the storytelling, or even the content of the story?
Oh, it really did affect the story—[it] was not entirely formulated in my mind before I started drawing, and often the plot would take a certain turn primarily because I really wanted to draw a circus tent with a giant bird-woman face coming over it, or a view looking up at the surface of a river from the underwater riverbed polluted with bicycles and shopping carts and trash, or a robot driving an ox-drawn covered wagon like in the Oregon Trail. So I would wrap the story around those images, and I think those scenes—where the imagery came before the plot—are my favorites. The story is, after all, visually dictated rather than driven by text or dialogue.
Are there any specific touchstones, either within comics or without, that influenced the book?
I think the Kentucky landscape influenced it quite a bit—I was living in Kentucky for most of the time I was working on the book, so a lot of the state’s features appear, from the Cracker Barrel to the rolling hills to the highway rest-stop towns. It seems like every month there are more fields and forests being razed for parking lots and suburbs and Banana Republics. A Late Freeze was largely about a changing landscape, and yet extends beyond the present time: the strip malls and motels in the book are mostly deserted and feel almost like artifacts or ruins—the covered wagon rolls through a modern ghost town of sorts.
In terms of color, I was inspired by Chris Ware, and there’s a single panel Frank Miller rip-off: I thought it would be funny to depict the robot in place of some big, tough, scar-faced guy chained to one of Miller’s signature brick-wall-under-spotlight images.
The factory assembly lines and unemployment lines were inspired by those old depression-era WPA photos. And the amusement park—I’ve just always liked drawing roller coasters and Ferris wheels.
What are you reading right now?
Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories, Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat, Sam Shepard’s plays, Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark, David Foster Wallace’s essays, Chip Kidd’s Work: 1986-2006, and Of Mice and Men.
I’m having trouble concentrating on one thing at the moment.
You've got a lot of "How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us" stuff on that list, a lot about the myth of America. Any particular reason for that, or are you just in that mood?
I’m interested in the myth of the American dream, especially now with the immigration debate so hot, and the rising doubts about the war in Iraq. I think it’s important to look at what America means to Americans, both those who have and have not achieved something of that dream, and to people outside of America, both those who are attracted to and those who hate American ideology. It’s complicated; there are people who simultaneously are attracted to it and hate it. And obviously, American ideals are not always ideal. The book I’m working on now is about that, in part: coming to this country for all its incredible opportunities and trying to "make it" and being disappointed, being poorly treated, being homesick, and still knowing that this is the best chance you’ve got.
A Late Freeze isn't overtly political, but there's a fair amount of politicism to be found if examined in the right context (identity persecution, industrial development versus naturalism). Did you intentionally develop this a framework for the hook of robot-loves-bear, or was this something that came about incidentally?
It developed naturally with the relationship of the robot and bear, and again, I think living in Kentucky in the aftermath of Bush’s re-election influenced my feelings about environmentalism. In my town, I began seeing more and more Hummers, and I really started thinking of the yellow Hummer as a symbol of evil, of complete disregard for the environment, of reckless consumerism, and of war paraphernalia-turned-commercial.
Also, the persecution of the little guy by the Man and the struggle for freedom (from slavery and to love whom one will, regardless of race or gender, etc.) seems an essential part of a classic American tale.
You've been able to develop a healthy context for such a point of view through your travels, both within the United States (Kentucky, Virginia, New Haven, New York) and without (Ecuador, Mexico). What influence have these places had on your work? Were there any new ideas of significance introduced, or preconceptions reconfirmed?
These places have had a greater influence on my work than anything else. In the very first book I made, a big theme was being in love with a place; landscape is a big factor in my art and writing. Also, I find that I can write best while traveling because there are always new ideas being introduced by a changing environment, and the significance of those ideas is more apparent because they’re not hidden by familiarity and routine.
I think it’s so important to put yourself outside your realm of comfort (especially by leaving this country) in order to challenge yourself to think more unexpectedly, to have perspective on your own world, and to be able to make something other than comic books about comic book artists making comics.
Can you say anything more about what you're working on now?
I’m working on a full-length book set in Kentucky and involving a tornado, a firefighter named Ursa, and a Mexican immigrant named Rafi who works on horse farms. It’ll be done in a year or two. Just you wait.
This interview was conducted by Chris Tamarri.
When, where, how did you become a comics reader?
I'm a little embarrassed to say that I didn't become a serious comic book reader until, say, this year, mostly because I now have a much greater resource; I can pick whatever I want off the shelf at my office, whereas previously I couldn’t really afford to buy the kinds of books I was interested in. But my interest in reading comics really started near the end of college when some of my peers in the art major were making comics.
At what point did you decide that you might be interested in creating your own work in this medium? Was that before you'd spent a lot of time as a reader?
I wasn’t at all well read when I started my own work. I spent the year after graduating college living and traveling in South America, and I wanted to have a project that would make me feel like my life wasn’t completely aimless, even if I was a vagabond. So I worked in the two visual media I felt were portable and suited to that lifestyle: photography and comics. The first comic book I made took me two years to complete and is a story about cowboys and gypsies and aimless American youths in the southern U.S. and northern South America, the land of volcanoes. I had no idea what I was doing when I started this book, so it was a fun way to get involved in the medium without having preconceptions of what a comic book should be.
You have experience in a number of different media. How does this one compare to some of the others you've worked in, in terms of the potential for expression? Are there any unique opportunities afforded here, or any particular liabilities?
Comics are compelling for me because I’ve always been interested in narrative art, even in painting and photography. Also, my writing has always been very visual, so combining the two media seems the natural way to get at what I’ve always tried to do with art—tell a story. Within a comic book, you’ve got more time to tell the story than in a painting, and more to look at than in a novel. I think the liabilities lie in relying to heavily on either the words or the pictures; for example, you don’t want to allow the art to be weak because the text will explain it. It’s hard to achieve a good balance between the story and the art.
What about the culture of comics? This community can be challenging; it tends not to be very forgiving of those without sense of history and unfortunately, its unfriendliness towards women, both creators and consumers, is a recurrent problem. What's your impression of the culture? And how do you feel about the way it has responded to your work so far?
No, it’s not the most female-friendly industry, but I think (hope) that’s changing, if slowly. I didn’t grow up reading comics, and like a lot of people, became familiar with the medium through Maus and through seeing Jimmy Corrigan in the Whitney Museum of Art. So in my own work, I’m motivated to make the kind of comics that I, as a non-expert in the field and as a girl, would be interested in seeing on the shelf and reading—work that has a literary and artistic appeal to people who aren’t necessarily immersed in the comics culture. I think through women’s participation in the medium, comics will become a much richer art form (in other words, in my opinion, more people making comics that do not feature spandex-clad women with excessive pectoral amplitude would be a boon to the medium). I also think that the increasing popularity of graphic novels among the general reading public will create more interest in and demand for more literary works that require no deep understanding of the culture of comics, and can stand alone as works of art.
Focusing on your newest book, what was the seed from which the rest of A Late Freeze grew, the first element you had from which you thought you could extrapolate the rest?
It started with the love affair between a robot and a bear, a sad robot and a female bear. It’s the kind of premise that could turn out very clichéd but I wanted to see if it could be strange and surprising and also somehow emotionally touching. I didn’t come up with the idea, though; when I was living in Ecuador a few years ago, I heard a story about a local man who lived in the mountains with a bear. The bear was very jealous and wouldn’t let the man come down into town to visit his wife and kids. I’ve always wanted to write a story based on that.
Despite the curiosity of the premise, the story quickly loses its sense of weirdness. It becomes very easy very fast to understand these characters. Was that something you tried to develop, or was that a natural product of your approach?
I just thought of them as having very human emotions. Anyway, a little weirdness is good in any relationship, right? Or I could say, “Love makes the unlikely and impossible happen.”
…Um. I can’t believe I just said that.
The idea of love is definitely important to the book, with a greater focus, maybe, on the familial over the romantic. How did that theme develop, the idea of different sorts of love and how they come from, respond to, one another?
These characters are all initially strangers who try to help each other out in a rough world, and become close through their shared experiences. Along with caring comes loneliness and worry. I just think these are things that everyone feels at some point or another, from the initial attraction between lovers to the loyalty of friendship to caring for a child. Not that I would know anything about that last one.
Was it a conscious decision to write about relationships of a sort, like parent/child, with which you had no first-hand experience?
No. I mean, I know what it’s like to care about someone, or to be part of a family, even if I’ve never been a parent. I’ve never been a bear or a robot either. But it doesn’t hurt to imagine.
Why did you choose to tell the story (mostly) wordlessly?
It somehow just made sense with these characters, to show how a relationship can develop between individuals who aren’t at all similar to one another; I suppose they wouldn’t speak the same language if they did speak. I wanted to make a story that shows everything, from action to emotion, without telling too much.
A Late Freeze has a very particular visual sensibility to it, fitting given your day job. How much did wanting to maintain the aesthetic affect the storytelling, or even the content of the story?
Oh, it really did affect the story—[it] was not entirely formulated in my mind before I started drawing, and often the plot would take a certain turn primarily because I really wanted to draw a circus tent with a giant bird-woman face coming over it, or a view looking up at the surface of a river from the underwater riverbed polluted with bicycles and shopping carts and trash, or a robot driving an ox-drawn covered wagon like in the Oregon Trail. So I would wrap the story around those images, and I think those scenes—where the imagery came before the plot—are my favorites. The story is, after all, visually dictated rather than driven by text or dialogue.
Are there any specific touchstones, either within comics or without, that influenced the book?
I think the Kentucky landscape influenced it quite a bit—I was living in Kentucky for most of the time I was working on the book, so a lot of the state’s features appear, from the Cracker Barrel to the rolling hills to the highway rest-stop towns. It seems like every month there are more fields and forests being razed for parking lots and suburbs and Banana Republics. A Late Freeze was largely about a changing landscape, and yet extends beyond the present time: the strip malls and motels in the book are mostly deserted and feel almost like artifacts or ruins—the covered wagon rolls through a modern ghost town of sorts.
In terms of color, I was inspired by Chris Ware, and there’s a single panel Frank Miller rip-off: I thought it would be funny to depict the robot in place of some big, tough, scar-faced guy chained to one of Miller’s signature brick-wall-under-spotlight images.
The factory assembly lines and unemployment lines were inspired by those old depression-era WPA photos. And the amusement park—I’ve just always liked drawing roller coasters and Ferris wheels.
What are you reading right now?
Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories, Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat, Sam Shepard’s plays, Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark, David Foster Wallace’s essays, Chip Kidd’s Work: 1986-2006, and Of Mice and Men.
I’m having trouble concentrating on one thing at the moment.
You've got a lot of "How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us" stuff on that list, a lot about the myth of America. Any particular reason for that, or are you just in that mood?
I’m interested in the myth of the American dream, especially now with the immigration debate so hot, and the rising doubts about the war in Iraq. I think it’s important to look at what America means to Americans, both those who have and have not achieved something of that dream, and to people outside of America, both those who are attracted to and those who hate American ideology. It’s complicated; there are people who simultaneously are attracted to it and hate it. And obviously, American ideals are not always ideal. The book I’m working on now is about that, in part: coming to this country for all its incredible opportunities and trying to "make it" and being disappointed, being poorly treated, being homesick, and still knowing that this is the best chance you’ve got.
A Late Freeze isn't overtly political, but there's a fair amount of politicism to be found if examined in the right context (identity persecution, industrial development versus naturalism). Did you intentionally develop this a framework for the hook of robot-loves-bear, or was this something that came about incidentally?
It developed naturally with the relationship of the robot and bear, and again, I think living in Kentucky in the aftermath of Bush’s re-election influenced my feelings about environmentalism. In my town, I began seeing more and more Hummers, and I really started thinking of the yellow Hummer as a symbol of evil, of complete disregard for the environment, of reckless consumerism, and of war paraphernalia-turned-commercial.
Also, the persecution of the little guy by the Man and the struggle for freedom (from slavery and to love whom one will, regardless of race or gender, etc.) seems an essential part of a classic American tale.
You've been able to develop a healthy context for such a point of view through your travels, both within the United States (Kentucky, Virginia, New Haven, New York) and without (Ecuador, Mexico). What influence have these places had on your work? Were there any new ideas of significance introduced, or preconceptions reconfirmed?
These places have had a greater influence on my work than anything else. In the very first book I made, a big theme was being in love with a place; landscape is a big factor in my art and writing. Also, I find that I can write best while traveling because there are always new ideas being introduced by a changing environment, and the significance of those ideas is more apparent because they’re not hidden by familiarity and routine.
I think it’s so important to put yourself outside your realm of comfort (especially by leaving this country) in order to challenge yourself to think more unexpectedly, to have perspective on your own world, and to be able to make something other than comic books about comic book artists making comics.
Can you say anything more about what you're working on now?
I’m working on a full-length book set in Kentucky and involving a tornado, a firefighter named Ursa, and a Mexican immigrant named Rafi who works on horse farms. It’ll be done in a year or two. Just you wait.
This interview was conducted by Chris Tamarri.
