In this episode Julian and Jennifer stop by to talk their AMAZING books from Top Shelf!

Topics include choosing your next longform work, being “childless by choice”, helicopter parenting, being diagnosed by breast cancer, needing to write the story of your life, heading to the desert to get more into Ginger, moving on after losing your partner, surrealism, not dead yet but belonging to death, forming the world of Tim Ginger, graphic novels as your “record”, family not reading your books, conspiracy theorems, realizing a different perspective after the fact, and also what they’re reading.

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Transcription:

Matt: Kara, welcome back to the show.

Kara: Thanks, Matt.

Matt: This is comiXology: Conversations. We talk with creators that we love as people.

Kara: All the time. It’s such a rewarding experience, because we get to share with our listeners the innermost thoughts of the best creators on the market.

Matt: That’s what it’s all about. We’re here…

Kara: Or creators with books on the market. That sounded weird.

Matt: Hopefully, you’re going to have books on the market. We’re here with two creators, Julian Hanshaw, “Tim Ginger”, and Jennifer Haden, of “The Story of My Tits”. Welcome to the show.

Jennifer Hayden: Thank you.

Julian Hanshaw: Much good to be here.

Matt: This is a really big interview for us, because it’s the first time that we’re having a book that…

Kara: Books.

Matt: …books, really, that connect with the reader on a huge emotional level, I think, differently than the monthly comic book of a Superman or a Batman. It’s different. They both overlap in themes but maybe not in content, but they’re both deep in thinking about family, loss, and rebirth.

Julian, yours with the retired pilot who grudgingly goes on the conspiracy circuit and then has the opportunity to be reborn.

Jennifer, your autobiographical journey through cancer and the effect on family and self, which were hugely impactful. But what guided both of you on that journey to put that as your next or first large graphic novel?

Julian: Would you like to go first?

Jennifer: You go first. Men first today.

Julian: I guess with Tim Ginger is a long process to be honest. Tim Ginger is me. That’s the bottom line. Balding, cricket-obsessed, likes conspiracy theories, I can’t see out of one eye. It’s me dressed up as somebody else.

I’m 43 years old and just beginning to…not having a midlife crisis yet but take stock of where I am and the decisions I and especially my wife have made. So it was all forming into that.

Especially then I holidayed in the southwest of the States and that’s when it really began to come together. I was staying in a trailer. Tim Ginger lives in a trailer. It moved from there really. I just wrote down on a piece of paper what I wanted to talk about.

I really did want to talk about the main theme, the first scene that came up, was being childless by choice. For me, that’s quite an important decision I’ve made, we, my wife and myself, have made, and I thought it needed addressing, really. I haven’t read anything in any comic book about.

Matt: Yeah, me neither.

Julian: I don’t dislike children, I just don’t want children.

Matt: Why do you hate children?

Julian: Yeah.

Matt: Can we get to the bottom of it? That’s my only question for you.

Julian: They’re noisy, attention-seeking, time-monopolizing, little senseis.

Jennifer: Rug rats.

Julian: Yeah.

Matt: I’m jumping into some of my questions…

Julian: Please do.

Matt: …but since we’re talking about it, you have a line in your book, let me see if I can find it, which cut to the core of that decision. You didn’t want your relationship shared with anyone else, which I had never heard that before, as a decision for not having children before.

But it’s a big choice. You have something so great, “I don’t want to share that. I don’t want it to be diluted by anyone else, whether that’s a child, or someone else.”

Julian: Yeah, I’m so in love with, it sounds so dreary and sentimental, but I’m so in love with my wife. It’s not in my genes to want children. My brother doesn’t have children, so the family line, the Hanshaw name, which is an odd name in itself, it stops.

That’s the end of it. I’m OK with that, my brother’s OK with it, my parents, in a very English way, we don’t talk about it. It’s swept under the carpet, a little bit.

I think there’s a phrase, “helicopter parenting,” or something, where if I get it right, when a child comes along, and then the father begins resenting the child, because the mother’s doting on the child, and being motherly towards the child, and the relationship deteriorates.

Not to say that would happen, I just didn’t want children. And it was always something I felt like I have to explain and justify. “Oh, have you got kids?” No. And especially my wife, she gets the sympathy, “Ah,” or “Gee, I perhaps shouldn’t ask..”

Jennifer: She’s barren.

Julian: Yeah, exactly, a husk of a woman.

I wanted to, with Tim Ginger’s…I’m not spoiling anything in the book…his dead wife, and how she felt. I wanted to bring my wife’s feelings into it and how, when she attends social gatherings, how she’s judged for not having a child, not continuing.

Matt: What about you Jennifer? What guided you to want to make this large project, finally, about the story that you had, over several years?

Jennifer: My answer’s easy, because I wouldn’t have gotten into comics, I don’t think, if I hadn’t had breast cancer, which was what propelled me to write this story. Actually, the first panels in my book are the first panels I ever drew in comics.

I was never asked to change them, or edit them, because Top Shelf is just my dream-come-true publishing company. Have to put that in there.

Matt: Cha-ching.

Jennifer: Basically, at 43 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had to lose one boob. I decided to go for the whole thing, and have them both taken off because it was in my family.

In the course of doing that, as I was recuperating, believe it or not, I read a New York Times article about graphic novels, and I started reading them.

I read everything I could get my hands on for about a year straight. Julie Doucet, and Lynda Barry, and I read “Clumsy” by Jeffrey Brown, and I just said “This is it. This is how I’m going to tell the story.”

In fact, I had done illustration. I had done terrible novels. I’d written some real god-awful novels that never got published. Thank you Lord. I realized this was the blended medium that I had been looking for.

Of course, what I wanted to do was tell my story to comfort other women who were about to go through it, or had just gone through it, or were going through it, but also there’s always closure after an episode like that.

You really are sitting there going, “Well, that sucked. What did I learn from it, and how can I turn this into something good.”

I also have said many times in the course of doing this that every middle aged person should be given a grant to not work for a year, and write the story of their life, because it would give them such a chance to evaluate the choices they’ve made, and look at the patterns that they might not even realize were there, so you can take a breath, and go on.

Now I’m 54. This took a while for me to do this book. This has been 10 years in the making, 8 years working on it. It did do that. It did help me detect the patterns.

Jennifer: Recently my daughter, like two days ago, said “I’m so glad you ended up doing this because you wouldn’t be the solid mother that you are if you hadn’t, and I would have the courage to try things that I’m trying now if I hadn’t seen you do this.”

I was space mom. You can have kids, and pretend you don’t have them. That’s a third option you may not have considered, Julian.

Kara: This book took you, as you said, 10 years, and you said it was the first time you’d really done a comic book format type thing. What was your process like, or learning how to make a process for creating this work?

Jennifer: I dove in there. Step one, pick a format because I knew the story, I knew the facts, I knew the feelings. Everybody has a different way of laying out comics on the page, and I just stole the way that Lynda Barry was doing it.

I confessed. I met her at SPX, met her in the bar, and I said, “Lynda, I stole your boxes to make my book, and I hope you don’t mind.” She gave me a huge hug, and she said, “Of course you did. That’s stuff’s not copyrighted. I don’t give a shit.”

Now I can say, “Thank God. I ignored the hell out of her while I was working on this.” I’m more in love with her than ever. I told myself, “Don’t get bogged down in format. Just pick a way to do this and start drawing.”

I never had a question about who to draw a picture that said something because I’d been doing that on the walls, and on my pants since I was little. I then did not allow myself to go backwards.

I said, “No editing, no changing. The panel’s finished if it’s emotionally true. If there’s an arm that’s too long, or a leg that looks funny, don’t worry about it now.” In the long run, none of those things bothered me. I just kept moving forward because that, to me, that’s how you get these things done.

Matt: I’m going to refer to you as Tim, just because you’re the same person now, Tim slash Julian.

I saw a really great, I think a director’s commentary you had done in the early going, where you were pretty much in the desert as the character. Maybe your wife took the photos. It was pretty funny.

Seeing you as the character in real life was, I thought, a really funny connection between you and the character, which now, as you say, officially you’re pretty much the same person.

Julian: I think that photo, that was in the, you guys say trailer, we say caravan, a caravan park in Bisbee, Arizona. That’s me sitting, drawing, there the first few pages taking shape. What I’d done, I’d had before I moved to Top Shelf, I’d had two books with Jonathan Cape in the UK, and I pitched this idea to Cape.

It was declined. They thought the subject matter was a bit odd, and they didn’t want it. I’d always wanted to, like yourself, I’d wanted to work with Top Shelf for a long time.

I’d been in contact with Chris for a number of years. Approached Chris, suggested “This is what I want to do” and he was kind of interested in it. That was me beginning to really chew through the pages and get the idea down.

Matt: As I was reading I had this question to you because it follows Tim. He loses his wife, he’s living in the trailer caravan that he has by himself, plays cricket with his friends, and he meets up with a woman from his past as the pilot.

He’s met with these thoughts of “How do I move on from my wife? Do I move on from my wife with this other women?” It’s really difficult and powerful for him. While I was reading it, I was thinking to myself, “Does Julian see this as a potential…? How do you see your future in Tim?”

Do you see, God forbid something happens, “What is my future like? Would I ever just leave, and go into a caravan, and play cricket with my friends and then just wait, and hope that nothing comes down the line because would I want to move on?” Those are crazy questions to ask someone 30 years down the line, something happens.

Julian: I am a dreadful romantic. I think part of me would disappear into a trailer and mourn. Like a lovesick animal. Elephants, don’t know, they disappear into the wilderness. I think that probably…

Matt: That’s probably what I would do. I’d probably like poop myself if a woman came along 20 years later.

Julian: How did you deal with the cricket aspect? As an American?

Matt: As an American? You weren’t thick in cricket. It wasn’t like, “Do I need to know everything about cricket to get his kind of escape into the sport?” I thought it was perfect.

I loved how he progresses into the conspiracy circuit and meets up with this hard-core nut that wants to get to the bottom of his work and his next book. He tells this guy that he’s going to do a book about cricket…

Kara: And he’s devastated. “How dare you! I am looking forward to this.”

I loved when he tweeted, “The next book is about #cricket,” and he gets so mad later. I actually really enjoyed the incorporation of the cricket team at the beginning because I felt like that gave me more of a sense of the character and how he was choosing to deal with his choices.

I felt like in joining the cricket team, he was showing me as a reader that he didn’t really want to be ALONE alone, but he wanted to be able to manage his interaction with the world.

Julian: Absolutely. He was kind of diluting his pain, really. He was also using cricket, set here in the States, to show his outsider-ness. Obviously cricket played by expats then is a marginal sport. The fact that he’s kind of holding on to something from the past, he still feels like there’s a structure in his life, if he’s playing cricket.

It’s pretty much his only social relationship, really. I think the only other person he talks to is the guy who runs the RV park, who sells the caravan to at the end. That’s pretty much it. He doesn’t really have any interactions with anybody else. His asshole agent, and that’s pretty much it.

Matt: He fails in the dates with the women. He fails several times to go out, and then he retreats back alone. Like, he can’t handle it even though it’s been decades, he still hasn’t moved on from that time frame. You can see it. He just crumbles emotionally.

Julian: I’ve got an aunt at the moment in the UK whose husband, they didn’t have children either. He died two years ago and she’s deteriorating in front of us. She’s pining for him and she’s on the way out, basically. She won’t do anything. She’s not going to go and meet anybody. It’s really sad.

I really want to also explore older people in a comic as well. Again, not something that you see a lot of. It has been touched on, but it’s not something that I…you know, I’m 43 years old.

Matt: You look great.

Julian: Thank you. It’s this New York sunshine.

Kara: You do, you look fabulous.

Matt: It is. It has to be.

Kara: I had a question for the both of you because you both used surrealist elements in your story telling as a way to…I saw it as looking inside the character’s minds, almost, to get a better sense of what they were thinking. What drew you to using surrealist elements in your story telling?

Jennifer: I had no idea from panel to panel what I was going to do. I didn’t think about much of what I did. After I’d done it, I thought about it, like “Should I have drawn that picture of my father?” But, before I drew it, I didn’t.

I noticed that the most surrealism I used, I use it as a way of being symbolic – turning people into animals which – it was like a shorthand. It helped me get the story out.

I noticed that in the chapter where I’m living in Philadelphia with my husband and we’re not married, and we’re just being complete idiots…That was a horrible time, but it’s not Philadelphia’s fault.

Matt: Thank you.

Jennifer: A little bit, but not all the way. I noticed that’s when I had the most surrealism. I’m writing horrible shit and there are balled up wastebasket paper, rough drafts that are dancing around me telling me how much I suck. That’s just exactly the way it was.

I noticed that, for instance if you read Julie Doucet, you’ll see she’s got a lot of comics where like a slab of meat has legs and it’s running around chasing her because she’s having to be a vegetarian and she wants to eat meat. I realized she was young when she was doing those things.

I wonder if there’s a period of our lives that is more about surrealism than other parts of our lives. I think that when you’re in your 20s, you are so disoriented by life and your identity is so tiny compared to the world around you, that it does seem to me – in my memory – as though I was more affected by the objects in my life.

They had a personality because there were so few other personalities. We were very lonely at that time. Maybe if I’d had a few friends I wouldn’t have seen the pieces of paper dancing around. But, on the other hand…

Anyway that’s a thought I’ve had and I am very grateful now to feel so attached to the earth, and to the world, and to the people around me. I feel less of a need for that surrealism, even though there are times when it’s a vehicle for expressing that alienation that all artists, I’m sure, feel.

Matt: The attachment you talk about, I think, is super strong in this book. It might be different for people reading it, obviously breast cancer is the main thrust of the book, but for myself cancer runs in my family.

You communicated in ways that I’d never vocalized before. You had a visage of your mother kind of tied down, and you had said, “She wasn’t dead yet, but she belonged to death.” That described how you felt, and I’ve never thought of it that way but it’s true.

You don’t know how to act around that person, you don’t know what to do right or wrong, but that thought in the back of your head of death being ever so close and is irreparably holding on to that person, was amazing. I’d never felt that before in a book before.

Jennifer: Thank you. I’m sure it’s not original. I’m sure soon they’ll find I stole most of this stuff. That, I kept making myself express it. I kept making myself re-write things, I do have a notebook next to me.

I wanted to tell the truth as best I could and that seemed to express that it’s as if the person’s been taken from you, but they’re not gone yet, but they’ve been reserved or something.

That was a thing that really bothered me. It was my mother. I don’t know how much my kids felt that about me, but it’s a very weird thing for the people around you.

Matt: The other one point, too, that really intrigued me about the book was when you were trying to figure out why your parents weren’t as lovey-dovey during her process. You couldn’t really put your finger on about why your father wasn’t really there for her.

The infidelity came as a shock to the reader, at the time. I was like, “Wow. I can’t believe that this just came out of nowhere” that the father is being this way. Then I realized, “You idiot. This is how it felt for her growing up.”

Nothing could even be possible in that realm that that was happening. Even though your boyfriend at the time was going through the list of things, like, “I think he chases skirts a lot.” He lists like five things and you’re like, “No, no, no. That can’t possibly be it.” But, that’s how it feels at the time. It’s unknown to you.

Jennifer: Didn’t I plant something where I’m explaining to the people at a cocktail party that my dad likes women, but my mother still trusts him?

Matt: Yeah, you were telling the story to your boyfriend after that.

Jennifer: I’m like a foot off the floor with the little bangs and stuff. What a fucked up scene, man.

Matt: It’s funny saying… Even your boyfriend in the book, but it’s his real life, he tells the story about how he drove him home one night and made him go to the backseat while this other woman sat in the front seat. I’m thinking to myself, “Oh my God. Why did he ever not bring that up before to you.” It’s just so crazy.

Jennifer: I did artfully arrange things and there were some white lies there in terms of timing and pacing. What you said is exactly what I wanted.

What I wanted, when I sat down to write this book, was not to say, “And this is the day that it happened, and here’s the other thing that happened, then can you believe this shit happened?” I did not want to write the book like that, like a lot of memoirs are written.

I wanted it to be, “Here’s the day that my life came apart, and here are all the ripples once that pebble was thrown in the pond. Here are all the ripples that came out from that.”

I wanted the reader to get to the point of my diagnosis and go, “Oh. Right, right, right, right. I remember. Oh, this thing. Right,” so that they would do what I did. I’m just manipulating all of you, here. That’s the whole point.

Matt: I feel manipulated.

Kara: I had a question about Tim Ginger.

Matt: Tim’s here with us. Refer to him as Tim.

Kara: In the flesh.

Jennifer: Mr. Ginger’s in the corner.

Kara: Touching on something you said earlier about feeling the need to explain to people your choice to be childless, or the character’s choice to be childless.

There was almost a comic within a comic where many people were sharing their perspective on that, in the book. What made you decide to choose that method of explanation in the story?

Julian: When I was beginning to branch out and form the world that he was going to exist in, and the subject matters that I wanted to touch upon, I then looked around my world and realized pretty much all of my friends don’t have children.

Whether that’s because those who have, have disappeared into their own social circles or whatever, there just seem to be six or seven of us without children. A lot of those quotes, of the comics within the comic, that’s how they feel about not having children.

Most of them didn’t want to be drawn, or named personally, their kind of caricatures of them. I just thought it will be a nice little, as Anna says in the book – I think it was Anna or Tim – it’s kind of like an arc.

They’re storing, they’re coming together all these thoughts and ideas will soon be lost because they’s got no children to pass them on to. These are their expressions and this is the record for them.

I thought it’d be nice, simple, plain pages. Nine panels, nothing fancy going on, really simplistic. Blind drawing, no color involved, obviously just set it apart from the rest of the story, but I just want it to be very stark. These are people’s decisions, this is how they feel, and this is a little time capsule for them.

Matt: Do you view graphic novels as your record?

Julian: Yes. I guess I do because it’s shooting my life experience through the prism of sequential art. Yeah, for me it’s a record of how I…This, for Tim Ginger and previous books, it’s how I feel about things. The next book is going to be set in space, but it’ll still be about me and how I perceive…

Matt: Tim Ginger in space?

Julian: Watch this space, as they say.

Yeah. I guess it will always be about me. That sounds quite narcissistic, but it’s how I can be honest about what I’m writing about, I think. The core will be there and it will be me.

Jennifer: That was a very insightful question, I’d like to say, and something that links both of us, I think, is this desire to tell our story. You’re telling it, you’re saying, because you feel as if you are going to be the last of your line, and so you’re going to tell your stories.

I know I’ve heard that Harvey Pekar told many of his stories because his parents had Alzheimer’s and he was sure he was going to go out that way. I can’t disguise that when I started my book, I didn’t know if I would…I mean I’d been told that I would be fine, and I have been fine for 11 years.

At the time, I’m sure I thought I was writing my story so that someone would know. Not only that, I think having been an artist my whole life, wanting to tell my stories but never quite getting it together, man. I just couldn’t quite get the right medium, the right feel, the right voice.

Of course it had to be a life-threatening experience that would finally break me open and make it come out, because it was my last chance was how it felt.

Matt: The other thought that I had while reading it, because it’s this kind of graphic novel that you have that explains so many situations that you’ve gone through during your entire life and how you deal with it.

Like the way you viewed your father, why didn’t you kick him out right away, how you deal with these crises in life – I feel like that’s immensely beneficial to share that with not just other people but your direct family, like your children.

If I created this book, I’d be waiting for the moment where they were ready to read it, and experience it, and have that kind of life experience through you in a different way than can just be told and explained to them.

Jennifer: They did read it. It was accidentally on the coffee table. My mom got a hold of a review copy, and when I got up to the family reunion spot on Cape Cod this summer, there were some friendly faces and some angry faces, and some people who hadn’t read it and weren’t going to.

My kids haven’t read it and won’t for many years, and my husband’s read like a page or two. You know what? It hasn’t quite worked out like that.

Matt: Why doesn’t your husband want to read it?

Jennifer: I understand that. He’s a composer, and I haven’t listened to every symphony that he’s composed, or string quartet, or wind octet, and I like music, you know what I mean? And I love you, honey.

But anyway.

Julian: It’s good you said it, because my mom hasn’t finished this book yet. The other two books she read and she talked to me about over the phone, and blah blah blah. This one, I don’t ask about it anymore. I sent her the copy. She said, “I’m starting your book this week,” and that’s the last I’ve heard.

Jennifer: I keep seeing my mother and she’s so proud. She is so proud. She puts this huge heavy book, she drags it onto her lap, and she gets to the back pages and she’s like, “What’s happening?”

There’s nothing more agonizing than having to explain your comics to someone, because if it’s like “If you didn’t do it, you didn’t do it, and that’s it. Throw it out.” That’s my attitude. I throw out so much and it’s just like, it’s gone.

Julian: Well I know I’ve done bad because the other two books are on the bookshelf in the back room in the dining room. If I go home and it’s not on there…

Matt: It’s under a chair. It’s like balancing the kitchen table.

Jennifer: That’s your new rating system now.

Julian: That’s pretty much it, yeah.

Kara: Of the people in your family who did read the book, did any of them come up to you and say, “Oh, I remember this differently”?

Jennifer: No, but I expect that reaction. In fact, I put a disclaimer in the beginning. It says something like, “I manipulated the hell out of these events.” They wanted…

Matt: “Dramatic comedy sewn together from real events and real emotions. Names, et cetera, even people have changed to protect the integrity of the tale.”

Jennifer: That’s my feeling is that the tale is primary. The truth of the tale is also primary, but there are many ways to tell that truth. If I’m remembering something and my siblings would remember it another way, but there’s a reason I remember it my way.

We’re all fiction writers in our heads. We’re not remembering things accurately. The truth, for me that I took from the experience, will be what the memory now is that I’ve re-written in my head.

That’s what I’ve put down on paper. I’ve talked over a lot of this stuff with my family members, and we always surprise each other with details. “Oh, I didn’t know that. Really?”

That’s how it always is when you’re comparing things. Everyone’s truth is everyone’s book. Everyone can go and write their book. This is just mine and I don’t really mean it to be the final version of this. It’s the one I would give the court.

It’s very weird to do a family story and have so much dirt in it. There are some people who really got dragged through it in there, who I love so much, and they know who they are. I’m going to be doing a lot of apologizing for number of years.

Matt: Apologizing tour.

Jennifer: That’s just how it goes. I wish I’d disguised things a little better, but it’s not in my nature.

Kara: You were being honest.

Jennifer: That’s right.

Matt: That’s right. The first family revelation that ever happened in my side was…All our relatives get together every holiday, or we did. My brother discovered that during the nightly trivial pursuit game, that my parents had been cheating for decades.

The men and women would play each other, and my dad would give signals to my mom if she had offered a guess. He’d like signal to her and be like, “You’re right. Go with that one.” It almost destroyed the family, it was huge.

Jennifer: Oh no.

Kara: Nothing quite so dramatic in my family that I know of yet.

Matt: So why conspiracy theorism as the backdrop for…Obviously, I would assume that that’s a big part of your life, maybe?

Julian: Yeah, it is. I’m borderline obsessed by them. When I’m drawing, not necessarily if I’m having to start inking in, I’ll draw in silence or have Brian Eno in in the background, something just to waft away.

But when I’m actually doing the coloring or the cross-hatching, then I’ll go on YouTube and just listen reams and reams of crackpots talking about whatever you want to be talking about.

I’m kind of well versed in conspiracy theories. I talked about it a little in the piece you described earlier, my director’s commentary. It’s when I saw a UFO as a child. It all kind of started from there.

Matt: Really? I didn’t see that part.

Julian: My whole family saw it. Yes, quite a weird bonding experience to have that.

Matt: Holy smokes. How old were you?

Julian: I was 10, brother 9.

Matt: Was this in your backyard?

Julian: No, we were driving along a lane in the UK late at night. My father used to work for Rolls Royce, so he was very familiar with engines and things.

We were driving along, and this thing the size of a football field – it kind of was the size of a football field – hovered above our car about 80, 90 feet, above our car. Brothers in the back screaming his head off, there’s all dust blowing around our car, and then it just pinged off into the night.

Matt: Oh my God.

Julian: We reported it to police-nothing, ya know? I then started reading, going to the public library and getting myself versed in UFOlogy and things like that.

I’m interested in conspiracies. There’s things going on out in that desert.

Matt: It’s reminded me of the band Blink 182. I’m not sure if it’s the lead singer or the lead guitarist, he’s also a conspiracy nut. He’s had people taken to area 51 late at night, and he’s been there…

Julian: I’ve taken my wife there, when we been to desert. We’re going to white sands, we’re going to area 51. “Can’t we go to a flea market or something?” No, no, no, no.

We’re going to conspiratorial hot spots.

Kara: Is the UFO thing your favorite conspiracy theory, or do you have another one?

Jennifer: JFK? Come on.

Julian: JFK is good. I’m enjoying the secret space program at the moment, that something’s been going on with that. Which is tied into UFOlogy as well. The UFOlogy thing doesn’t hurt anybody.

When you start digging into JFK or 9/11, or any of those kind of things, then it becomes messy because the whole construct of power and society gets a light shone on it. If you’re just thinking about weird propulsion systems out in the desert, it’s quite interesting.

Matt: It’s easy enough.

Julian: Yeah, exactly. There’s some other stuff out there which is pretty brutal.

Matt: So Tim in space, he probably hops on to that UFO and that’s what we find out in the next graphic novel?

Julian: Yeah, because he kind of goes up there and hears God and see the face of God.

Matt: Exactly, right. The end of the book, you dig into why exactly he has the eye patch. Obviously there’s a different path that that book can go, or even like a prequel of what happened to him in space would be very interesting to read.

Julian: I’m fascinated by he was a test pilot and the fact that you could bump into him in the street or he’s in the supermarket, standing in front of the milk aisle when you want to get your milk. Real pain in the ass, however, his back-story, this old man, the fantastical things he might have seen.

That’s kind of what we do though, with people, we just dismiss them as grumbling old farting idiots. But, some of them have led wonderful and exceptional lives, and won’t talk about it.

Matt: Right, and if they do, you even said, it could rock your world what they know. It could destroy your thought process of what life is.

Julian: Absolutely. So the idea of this man is sitting on this kind of secret and he doesn’t want to tell anyone. His overriding concern is of his wife. It’s weird.

He’s kind of experienced the universe up close, but it’s just that one relationship, that one spec of time, that has absolutely destroyed him. He can’t quite see the bigger picture.

Matt: We’ll find out next book.

In your book, constructing the story, specifically about how your family dealt with the pain of everything, did you ever get a different perspective in putting that to paper? Or get a different viewpoint than you had growing up?

Jennifer: I had worked with this story as a novel that had sucked, and I do know that the great thing about writing these things out is all the forgiveness that happens.

You suddenly see everybody in three dimensions, as if it’s a play happening in front of you but you have to be every character. You have to get in character. As soon as you do that, you see things differently.

My father’s behavior was something I didn’t get over for about seven years and I was mad at him. As soon as I started writing and I had to include him as a character – because it’s no fun to have just paper characters who don’t have any dimension to them and you certainly want a villain with good dimension.

He’s only a villain for a period and then it changes. I would say the process of writing about him was great. Also, we were very silent. Kind of like the Brits, stiff upper-lip family. A lot of things don’t get said that should get said.

It was a lot of fun to put words that he wasn’t even saying, just throwing them into his mouth and having me externalize things that I think he wished he could have said, but I would never have listened to at the time. There’s all this rewriting you can do and maybe that’s why it meant a lot to me to do it.

To not completely fictionalize it because I wanted to stick as much as I could to the truth, but then put this extra stuff around it that was almost a translation of the truth so that people would really…I, in particular, would understand what had happened.

I don’t know if it did change me to do this, but I would say yes. I was a pretty different person by the time I had thought through a lot of this stuff dramatically.

Matt: I was reading Watchmen and something happens in that book where a father can never connect with his daughter because of something that happened.

In reading this, it was fascinating to me to see how the father behaved in front of his children, whereas something could irreparably damage that relationship forever. Your relationship with your daughter has changed. It will never be the same.

I think about that with my son. I would never do anything to change that relationship, but when we see it happen, you put yourself in their shoes – at least in my respect, as a father – and I think about just how different their life is at that point.

Jennifer: But the great thing about doing this, and doing it over a long period of time probably too, is this sense that time does heal most things. I can think of stunningly shitty things I’ve done to my kids, and they have forgiven me. That time my kid had diaper rash, and I put the Crest toothpaste on his butt.

He was screaming his head off. No it was my daughter, and she had really bad diaper rash. I’m just in a hurry, and I’m blind, and I’m not looking, and I’m wiping this stuff on her, and he’s in the background and he’s going “Mom, that’s the toothpaste.”

And I keep going, “Shut up, stop screaming, I’m fixing it now.” Oh my god.

And I’ve done worse. Anyway, in the hall of…

Matt: Julian, does this change your mind-set at all?

Julian: I have a look on my face at the moment.

Jennifer: In the end, the wonderful thing is to see how she trusts me. She does trust me now, I think, honey. There’s a sense of forgiveness and no spoilers, but I feel very differently towards my father now and very differently towards his wife than I once did. Let’s just leave it there.

Kara: I had one last question for the both of you that’s potentially kind of a heavy question.

In working on your respective stories, was there a moment during the creative process where you just paused and you were like, “This is just too much,” either because of the content or the scope of what you were trying to tackle, and you said “I can’t do this”? Was there a moment like that?

Julian: Why don’t you go first?

Jennifer: Oh, I feel like all I’m hearing is my voice. Sorry. This happens so much.

I definitely felt that way a lot, which is part of why it took eight years for me to complete this book. I would walk away when I couldn’t handle it creatively or emotionally. The one that will always stick out in my mind is the first picture I drew of my mother-in-law, who I adored.

I drew it, and it’s very rudimentary but it looked enough like her, and I was listening to music in my studio when I drew it. Alison Krauss’ song came on. The line is like, “Hello old friend, you know it’s nice to see you again.”

Something like that. The tears just sort of went horizontally out of my eyes at that moment. I was just like, “Oh! There she is! Oh my God, she’s here, and she’s in my book, and I haven’t seen her in a long time.” I was just undone.

It’s funny, it was more with people I had lost than it was my breasts that I was weepy about when I was working on this. There were times when I just had to head out and get over it before I could really draw it.

Julian: With me, as I was moving further into the story and the childless by choice thing was coming – which just really does sound a clunky old phrase – as I was coming more and more to the front I did have to sit down with my wife and have a chat about it.

She was cool about it, but she was very much pained to kind of say, “It’s not been easy for us.” There have been times, my wife’s a little bit older than myself, the decisions had to be made a few years back. Time, all that kind of stuff.

She was just kind of said, “Don’t be flippant about it. Whatever you do, don’t be flippant because we haven’t been flippant about it.” It’s a big fucking decision. You spoke about ripples earlier on? Not the fall out but how it affects families and everything else.

Jennifer: Flippant, great word. I always try not to be flippant about these topics because somebody out there is hurting from the same stuff.

Julian: I was very careful. Tried to be careful and hopefully it’s come across that it’s a heavy decision. We’ve made it, we’re OK. There are still times when I get kind of, “Have I made the right decision?”

But, I cannot live my with any kind of regret or think about what could have been, whereas Tim kind of is a little bit. Yes, I had to just be upfront with my wife and say, “Are you happy with this?” Then, of course, ignore her.

Jennifer: Then you knocked her around a little, because “Jesus Christ woman, what do you think?”

Julian: Exactly. I can do the dishes.

Matt: Jennifer, what’s on your reading list? What would you recommend to us, or what are you reading that you love?

Jennifer: Right now I’m reading Agatha Christie. I’m going through a huge Agatha Christie jag, but that’s abnormal. I only do that when I’m waiting to give birth. I did that with both of my kids, and this book. It gets to a point where all I can do is eat and read Agatha.

Kara: I get that every summer.

Jennifer: Every summer?

Kara: Every summer I go through a Agatha Christie phase and it’s real.

Jennifer: I’ve only done it three times, but I do every year go through, in February when everybody wants to kill themselves, I usually pick up “365 Days” by Julie Doucet and I re-read it. That’s been an annual re-read for as long as I’ve owned the book.

This year, it’s funny. My daughter is a huge reader – well, we all are – but she keeps handing me books that she’s done with saying, “You have got to read this.” That’s fiction and literature. I’m reading fewer graphic novels right now just because she’s been handing me so many books this summer.

So I read Kate Atkinson’s book, and now that you pinned me down I’m going to forget the names of all these things. Kate Atkinson’s very popular. She’s very, very good. Oh! “Life After Life”, crazy book. I still want to talk to Kate Atkinson. If you’re out there, I have some questions. Shoot me an email and we’ll talk.

Matt: We know she listens. She listens every week.

Jennifer: I know! I’m sure she’s on. Yeah. I read Derf Backderf’s Trashed and I enjoyed it. That was a clever book. “Kill My Mother” was great. That was last year? Yeah, Jules Feiffer. I can’t wait to read Tim Ginger. I’m not just saying that.

Jennifer: I have heard great things about it.

Julian: I think we’re going to get along, aren’t we?

Jennifer: And I love the artwork. I’m sort of straddling the fiction and graphic fiction world in the stuff that I read. There’s a lot of great stuff coming out this fall. I can’t wait for Kate Beaton’s book, I can’t wait for so many books. Peter Cooper’s book. Yeah.

Julian: I’m reading David Burns’ “Bicycle Diaries” at the moment which I’m really enjoying. Started that on the plane on the way over here, only because it’s broken down in sections of the cities that he cycled around. Nice bit of New York, always kind of nice to connect with where you are at the moment in reading.

I’m going down to SPX on Saturday, so I’m keeping my powder dry, what I’ve bought recently, comics. I want to go down there and spend a few dollars. A friend of mine, Krent Able, I’ve started re-reading his stuff again because it’s absolutely filthy and it’s hilarious.

I’ve really enjoyed that as a tonic of just kind of grotty filth.

Matt: I’m glad that Kara and I were able to sit and chat today. We loved the books, The Story of My Tits and Tim Ginger. Both emotionally gripping, so I recommend them to everybody. Good luck on the rest of the week, and the tour, and I hope everyone else buys it.

Jennifer: Thank you very much.

Julian: Thank you for having me.

Matt: Any time.

(Source: SoundCloud / comiXology)