ALL Review: I understand you’re primarily a visual artist. How did you get your start doing comics?
Rhea Ewing: Comics actually drew me to the arts from the beginning. Back in my late high school/early college days, I was like, What do I want to major in? I was interested in science, but then there was this art thing, and I thought, Maybe that’s going to sweep me away. I was reading a lot of graphic novels—Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Blankets by Craig Thompson both stand out strongly in my mind. I read independent comics like the webcomic Liliane, Bi-Dyke fairly religiously at the time also. I loved what you could do with comics, the amount of information you could convey in a pretty dense way without it feeling dense, whether that was in a work of nonfiction like with Persepolis or, if it was fiction, the amount of emotional nuance and complexity that you could convey. Both those things made me think, hey, I want to do comics. And so, I did comics. I self-published graphic novels, and zines, and stuff like that from the beginning, all throughout the time I was studying fine arts at UW-Madison. When it came time to start thinking about Fine and how to structure that, I immediately knew that I wanted to do it as a comic, that the ideal resource I wanted for myself was a comic. I wanted to be able to see people speak through these drawings. I wanted to have something that took gender, this very dense, emotionally fraught topic, and conveyed it in a way that was digestible, and to me that made comics the obvious choice. Of course, when I started, I thought it was going to be another little 30-page zine. I didn’t think it would be the giant graphic novel and decade-long project it turned into, but, you know, sometimes projects surprise you.
ALL Review: You spoke a bit about your early influences. What’s influencing you lately (either in art, writing, or both)?
Rhea: Alison Bechdel’s work…Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele’s Queer: A Graphic History—I’m literally looking at my bookshelf right now. Also, a lot of science communication work has been influencing me lately, particularly things like Evolution’s Rainbow by Dr. Joan Roughgarden. That talks about how the ways in which the natural world, plants and animals, operate is very challenging if you have a strictly cis-heteronormative view of things, if you assume that that’s the only thing that can be natural. I’ve always been a science nerd, like I said. I thought I was going to be a scientist before I wound up being an artist. Looking forward to projects I want to work on next, there are those themes of looking for queerness in the natural world, how that can be both very empowering and also ultimately irrelevant in this scale. We’re talking about human beings with autonomy, so it shouldn’t matter if nature does or does not do whatever.
ALL Review: What does your process look like at the beginning of a project, in the middle of a project, and as you near the end of a project?
Rhea: With my artwork, it’s a long process. It starts with writing. I have a kind of extended art process with a lot of nitty-gritty work, so to keep myself motivated, it’s really helpful for me to know why making a particular image is important to me. A lot of my fine arts pieces have these long artist’s statements, and usually I’ve at least written a draft of that before I’ve even started the image. With Fine it was much more the opposite. I had my basic question of, What is gender? I had my idea of I’m going to talk to people. And then the container that I thought it was going to fit into, this little 30-page zine, adapted and expanded as I went through the process into something much bigger. A lot of that process was just realizing how the scope of the work needed to change.
[T]he work that I do is so broad, and every project has been so different that I don’t feel like I really have a set process. I guess the thing that unites my process through all my different projects is that they all start with an underlying inquiry or question. With Fine it was, what is gender? How can I navigate that in a practical way? With my fine arts pieces, if, for example, I’m thinking about the study of human evolution—we are humans studying that, so how are all of our biases and assumptions about what it means to be human influencing that study? With the projects I’m working on now, I’m thinking about what does it mean to see the world in different ways? What does it mean to be seen as a queer person? How do the ways we see and are seen impact our relationships? I find the underlying inquiry and explore it from there, usually with a fair amount of research because I’m a nerd. I love talking to people. I love researching. I love learning. I love getting that information.
So, we have our inquiry. We have research and gathering information. Then there’s the process of drawing that into something that can then be enjoyed by a viewer or a reader. That is where things really differ depending on the project and what it needs. I like to think that something I do well is to allow the work to adapt in scope as I’m made aware of what the project needs.
AR: In the introduction to Fine, you say you had a big binder filled with all the interviews and materials for the project. Something I really admired about it was how seamlessly everything flowed (the sections, the interview pieces, the blending of the interviews with your own experiences). Can you tell me a little bit about what the editing process was like?
Rhea: I’m going to paint a word picture for you. Picture me in 2013. I’m living in an apartment in Madison. My roommate comes home and finds all of these interview transcripts printed out, spread over every surface of the apartment. And there’s me with five highlighters in different colors. And I’m going through, and I’m highlighting things that stand out to me, and the colors are coded based on different themes as I’m thinking about how I might pair things, or how what this person said seems like it could be in dialogue with what this other person said. I had this moment of feeling like…you know all those memes where there’s the conspiracy theorist with a board full of stuff? That was me for a while, just making these connections.
I chose the structure of the book to follow the inquiry of gender that I had followed in my own journey, starting out with what does it mean to be masculine and feminine? Oh no, now I have to think about my body! And actually, there’s this broader community! And there’s the way we operate with gender on a social level and a larger societal level! If I were to try to write the same book again as the person I am now, it might look different. It would be a very different book.
A few years later when I was shopping the book to agents, I connected with my wonderful agent Anjali Singh who had the brilliant suggestion that I needed to put more of my own story in there. She really had to push me on this. I was very hesitant in part because with trans and queer narratives in general, it is easier to find folks who look like me, who are relatively privileged. I’m white. I can pass as cis if I want to. I’m assigned female at birth, so there are a lot fewer social taboos about people who are perceived as women wearing pants than the other way around. I thought I don’t want to take up any more space in this conversation. I just want to fade into the background and let my participants be front and center. What Anjali pointed out is that 1) readers might be interested to know what would drive a human to spend years and years on this absurdly ambitious project, and 2) regardless of how visible or invisible I was in the narrative, who I am and the choices I made were going to inform the story, so being upfront about who I am and where I’m coming from would make the book better.
AR: Fine has been very well received. What is it like for you to see people react so positively to your work?
Rhea: It’s been deeply moving and kind of wild. When I started out, I thought I would be self-publishing it. I figured maybe a couple people would read it and then have a slightly more informed conversation about gender with someone in their lives, or maybe they’ll be like, hey, I am trans, and that’s okay! Like maybe it will help a couple of people. Then as the project grew out into a full book, my hopes were to reach a wider audience since this is more of my labor, and also there’s more content that could potentially help more people. I feel like I was pretty modest in my expectations, and the reception that the book has had has been beyond anything that I had imagined.
I received an email from someone in Berlin who was like “Hey, I recently came out as trans, and your book really helped me not to feel like I had to be a particular way or fit a strict definition to be who I am.” I also recently ran into a friend of a friend who I’d met once at a birthday party. I ran into this person later, and he came up to me and said, “I checked out your book after I met you. Just last month, my daughter came out to me as trans, and because I read this book, I felt ready to receive her in a way that I don’t think I would have before.” Those moments are really cool.
Of course, in our current political environment, there’s also part of me that’s always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve had people reach out to me asking if the book has been banned or challenged. As far as I know, Fine specifically hasn’t been challenged, but it does fall under a lot of blanket book bans and content restrictions in, say, Florida. I’m trying to enjoy being in this sweet spot of having the book out there enough to impact people and under the radar enough to not be getting a lot of the scarier pushback that authors like Maia Kobabe of Genderqueer have received. Even though I feel that fear of book bans, or censorship, or harassment, there’s a part of me that is like, yeah, I do want to be well-known enough that if someone’s going to raise a stink about it, they raise a stink about it! because I want my book and books like it to reach as many people as possible and help as many people as possible. And it’s okay to be afraid, but you still want to get it out there.
AR: What is bringing you joy right now? Where do you find hope?
Rhea: I saw that Dane County recently voted to become a sanctuary for trans folks. That’s given me a lot of hope. I follow a wonderful array of trans and genderqueer artists and activists on social media, and they give me hope every day. And just…when I go out and I’m walking around, and I see other gender non-conforming folks, other trans folks, other queer folks just living their lives, that gives me a lot of hope. So, you know, if you’re out there, and you’re not sure if you’re having any kind of impact on the world, and you’re just out there living your life and surviving, you are having an impact on the world, and I’m really glad that you’re alive and getting out there every day because we need you!
