Author photo by Sylvie Rosokoff
On a semi-regular basis, I interview authors about their writing processes and the craft behind their books. You can find previous entries here. This week, I’m excited to share an interview with the author and illustrator Mattie Lubchansky, whose new gorgeous new graphic novel Simplicity is out today! Like Lubchasnky’s previous book, Boy’s Weekend—and her regular comic strips—Simplicity combines lush illustrations and science fiction settings to examine very real world issues. Simplicity takes place in a not-too-distant future America where an anthropologist, Lucius Pasternak, is hired to study an upstate commune that lives outside of the corporate-controlled “New York City Administrative and Security Territory.” The novel combines ecohorror, cyberpunk, and utopian fiction to tell a story about the ways we live and the ways we could be living.
I talked to Lubchansky over email about Ursula K. Le Guin, political separatism, and science fiction satire.
As a prose writer, I’m always curious how the process of creating a novel with both illustrations and text differs from a novel that is only text. Do you write a script first and draw from that? Or thumbnail out pages first and write the text after? A bit of both?
So if you ask five cartoonists, you'll give five different processes for how they work. Personally, I like to go completely through each part of the process 100% of the way before moving on—especially if I'm getting edited in the case of a big book like this. It's, for obvious reasons, a lot easier to make changes in the script than it is during the pencils, which is easier than the inks, which is easier than the colors. Something like moving a scene around would be close to impossible the further I get along. So I outline really heavily, I work off something like a 20-page outline, where I break each book into its scenes, and even the outcomes of conversations. Once that's in order I'll write a script, which sort of looks like a screenplay. From there I'll get into drawing. I don't "thumbnail" per se because I sort of hate doing it, but I take a long time with my pencils and am basically thumbnailing and penciling at the same time.
You regularly put out some of the best satirical comic strips—formerly at The Nib (RIP) and now on your Patreon and Instagram—that comment directly on contemporary topics in the news and media but often do so through a science-fiction lens. The reader knows you’re talking about Elon Musk or ChatGPT or what not, but what they’re seeing is mutant cyborgs in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. My question is how these four-panel comics prepared you (and how they didn’t prepare you) for the long-form science-fiction narratives of Boys Weekend and Simplicity?
Thank you!! I started doing political strips through the sci-fi lens because, frankly, I hate drawing caricature, and it was more interesting to me (in terms of where I come from politically) to talk about structural issues. And I'm such a dork about genre fiction, that's just where my mind went when trying to generate metaphors. So I think it really prepared me for getting in a "speculative fiction" mindset, where I was already so trained to sublimate these thoughts of mine about current events into big metaphors and wacky settings. The big artistic problem I had to struggle through was to make the fiction more character-focused, and worry more about who the people we're following are and why we care about them, not just vessels for my incredible and perfect ideas that everyone should be listening to.
One thing I love about Simplicity is how it explores ideological and political resistance to a future dystopia that is an extension of our reality—climate destruction, wealth inequality, rule by the whims of billionaires, etc.—but doesn’t present that resistance as entirely rosy or effective. This is especially true of the cult or group at the center of the novel. Can you talk about the inspirations behind the Simplicity group and how you wanted to portray them?
Yeah, I mean what resistance ever has been! So much of this book to me is about history—what makes the historical record and what doesn't, and more specifically who is making it. And specifically, with the Spiritual Association of Peers (the group at the center of the book), I've been thinking a lot lately about political separatism, which if you talk to people it's been bubbling up a little bit. You want to move to the middle of nowhere with your friends and start a farm, where there are less exterior pressures from our present fascistic moment. But that won't stop climate change from ruining your farm, you know? But on the other hand, community life is so important and we've been experiencing a massive breakdown of that over the course of basically my entire lifetime in America—so I wanted to engage with why someone would live that life in an honest way.
Can you talk about the role of research in creating Simplicity? Was the cult inspired by historical groups?
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