DAVE JUSTUS and LILAH STURGES Delivery Democracy One Page at a Time in STUDENT GOVERNMENT

Interviews Editor, Andrew Irvin, is joined by Dave Justus and Lilah Sturges to discuss their deeply entertaining and amusing graphic novel, Student Government, out through Maverick!

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COMIC BOOK YETI: Dave and Lilah, thanks for dropping by the Yeti Cave today! How are things going in Austin and Portland, respectively? 

DAVE JUSTUS: Hello! Love what you’ve done with the cave. You’re catching me at an absolutely tremendous time to ask this question: I had my first-ever bout with Covid back in December, sleepwalked through four months of long Covid effects, and right now I’m bookending it with another round of Covid. So as far as the past week is concerned, the only parts of Austin I can give you any sort of accurate first-person report on are:

• My couch: More rabbit gymnasium than human furniture by now; scene of multiple daily naps soundtracked by old 30 Rock episodes; repository of untold hidden poops (mostly rabbit)

• The local Walgreens pharmacy counter: Where I show up so often, and buy so many pills, that the techs surely think by now that I’m propping a middle-school stage production of Less Than Zero

• The “Small Pet” section of PetSmart: Those poops aren’t gonna poop themselves

LILAH STURGES: Things in Portland are going swimmingly! We just got a new black cat and named him Martin after Martin Gore from Depeche Mode, so we’re having a goth kitty summer over here! Without Covid, thankfully!

CBY: Sorry to hear about the recurring COVID bout, but I’m glad small pets are keeping everyone company. (My son is going into middle school, and I’ll now invariably be disappointed when their annual production isn’t Less Than Zero now.) So, to start with the setting of this comic, you’ve placed everything at the fictitious Halcyon Burke University, which is introduced as “the second-oldest institution of higher learning” in America. A great premise, because the claim over which University came first is highly contested. You’ve set it in Rhode Island (home to Brown University), and with an enormous amount of media focused on the trials and tropes of east coast university life, what did you most readily draw upon to build the space needed for this graphic novel?

DJ: I think, in a great many cases when Lilah and I are writing comedy, we like to employ real-world facts right up to the point where they land a joke for us, and abandon them the second they get in the way of that joke. So when we started to envision Halcyon Burke, I believe we went to exactly that page, and did exactly that reading. We wanted HBU to have the veneer of colonial New England and the ivied halls of higher learning, while also feeling like an also-ran, a “safety school” for a lot of these kids, clearly far behind the times in many areas of thinking. And so it felt very right that they should make the claim of being America’s “second-oldest” university. Let Harvard and William & Mary duke it out for the tiara; who’s going to bother googling to see whether HBU can actually back up their boast?

LS: I feel like in the world of Student Government, it’s very clearly documented that they are the second-oldest, and they wear it like a badge of pride. Like those old Avis commercials that everyone who is reading this will remember: “We’re Number Two–We Try Harder.” Which is funny, because in a way, they were calling themselves poop.

DJ: Although Halcyon Burke is necessarily an east coast school, the campus size and layout, and I think our characters’ overall college experience, is most heavily based on my time in the mid-1990s at Austin College, which is a very small liberal arts school in Sherman, Texas, about an hour north of Dallas. When I was there, the entire student body was around 1,100. (To compare, Lilah went to the University of Texas at Austin, whose student population is roughly fifty times that.) Austin College is the oldest institution of higher learning in Texas operating under its original charter—a fact that clearly lodged in my brain when we were concocting the wheels of yellowed manuscript by which our plot turns.

So much of what ended up in Student Government came from my very specific experiences during my time at a tiny private college. From the one-to-one relationship Parker is able to build with Professor Pagemaker, to the escape of the beach campus, to the DIY nature of an underfunded but beloved theatre department, to the overarching fact that I was encountering viewpoints and diversity and levels of inebriation and regret that I’d never approached before… there are many, many moments in the book that are almost word-for-word from my college transcripts. And because Lilah and Joe had both had very different college experiences to mine, I trusted that if they ran up against anything I’d written that didn’t ring true for them, that didn’t feel right for our characters to be going through, that they would flag it. But, as James Joyce said, “in the particular is contained the universal.” (I think I specifically learned that at Austin College.)

LILAH STURGES: I went to the University of Texas at Austin which, when I went there, was the second-largest school in the U.S., by enrollment. So you can kind of see a theme building here. Are Dave and I the second-best writing team in comics? You can’t prove that we aren’t!

CBY: Challenge acceded! I went to a tiny liberal arts school with plenty of archaic lore, so I understand a similar, parallel experience. I also understand you met Student Government’s artist, Joe Eisma, over fifteen years ago, and this graphic novel has been years in the making. You’ve both worked together previously on Public Relations, Fables: The Wolf Among Us and Everafter: From the Pages of Fables which ran for 60 issues based upon the Telltale Games series. We’ve talked a bit about your respective collegiate experiences influencing this comic - how did the two of you meet? How has your working relationship evolved over the course of your time knowing each other?  

DJ: I have a mind like a steel colander, so I’ll ask Lilah to correct me here as needed, but I know she and I met in 2008. I was working at Austin Books & Comics (a world-class shop and still my weekly stop) and had become friendly with a couple of the customers, Paul Benjamin and Alan J. Porter, who had decided to start up a writing group alongside Lilah and who were looking for a fourth member. Somehow, each of them thought one of the others knew me much better than they actually did. So I showed up to the first meeting eager to please, zero published credits to my name, way out of my depth but willing to paddle hard to catch up.

And really, our working relationship has been a series of hard paddlings, ever since.

LS: This is true. Nobody actually knew Dave at all. It’s funny how these things happen because obviously Dave and I have become each other’s second-best friends and it all started with a misunderstanding. Although I will say that I thought Dave seemed pretty cool at the time because he worked at the comic book store.

DJ: The group quickly became known as “Army,” in a nod to a shared love of Arrested Development—and in fact, the more we talked, the more Lilah and I realized that we had a huge number of comedy touchstones in common, and that we took the idea of comedy very seriously. What makes great comedy work? What makes bad comedy fail? Why do we kind of enjoy both? And then one day, probably almost in passing, she said, “You know, I always thought it would be fun to do something like Arrested Development, but in a medieval fantasy kingdom.” And then she drove off, and my brain started boiling, and we still have the first email the two of us ever exchanged, which is about “something like Arrested Development, but in a medieval fantasy kingdom.” And almost overnight, seven years later, our comic Public Relations premiered.

LS: I still have that first email I sent to Dave, from way back in 2008, and it is indeed regarding the book that would become Public Relations. That book was sort of the spine of our friendship for a while and it was all we talked about for a long time. Fortunately, we found other things to be friends about over time, so when Public Relations stopped being a going concern, it wasn’t just long icy silences between us.

It’s been an extremely rewarding thing, writing with Dave. It’s almost like having a second brain, a slightly funnier second brain, that can do essentially all the things my brain can do, and do them equally as well. It’s wild when we are working on a book together and Dave will go off and write his pages and I’ll go off and write mine, and then later I will be completely unable to determine who wrote what. Dave probably knows who wrote what–he is also slightly better at remembering things. 

DJ: Wait, didn’t I start this section by saying I have a terrible memory? I can’t recall.

CBY: One of the best things about being a writer is the trail of evidence left in posterity. You’ve also brought Michael E. Wiggam on as colorist, with lettering by Simon Bowland & Charles Pritchett, logo design by Tim Daniel, book design by Jack Levesque, and editing by Lauren Hitzhusen. How did you meet the rest of the team, and when did you bring them onto the project?

DJ: I was first introduced to Michael back in 2016, via the fantastic artist Travis Moore, who had been absolutely killing it on his sections of our Fables: The Wolf Among Us digital comic. Travis and I had been working up another pitch for a miniseries, and he had really loved the look of Michael’s colors over his art on a short Vertigo story, and was looking to work with him again. Of course, that miniseries never got a chance because Travis and Michael were both immediately poached by a couple of asshole writers to provide gorgeous work together on Everafter.

(Incidentally, around that time, Lilah, Joe, and I started putting together a pitch for a dramatic SF series whose sample pages are the first example of pure Eisma/Wiggam harmony, played in a totally different key than Student Government. What ever became of that pitch? Uh, the book centered on a global pandemic. Guess how interested people suddenly were in hearing about that? Hey comics publishers, give us a call and be the first to boldly assert that America is ready to heal!)

LS: We should publish the sample pages for that along with this interview. They’re really quite good and, as Dave points out, the pitch is pretty much dead in the water until everyone forgets about that global pandemic. At least people would be able to see that excellent artwork!

Seriously, though, we’re a very lucky pair of writers to be able to work with Joe and Michael more than once, and there’s no way this book would have been anywhere near as good as it is if it weren’t for Lauren. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t exist at all without Lauren, so credit where credit is due.

DJ: Lauren is also responsible for bringing Charles, Tim, and Jack to the project; Mad Cave/Maverick have a stable of amazing folks who make their books stand out on the shelves. Simon is part of that stable too, but we’d already worked with him – on my pitch with Travis, and on that pandemic pitch – after Lilah had met him on her Dynamite Mermaids book back in 2013. We tend to make friends for the long term.

CBY: Drawing deeply from a well which offers reliable refreshment is never a bad idea. It certainly paid off in Student Government, as from the character introduction page before the very first line of dialogue, it’s clear the humor is omnipresent in this book. Turns of phrase come fast and frequently, and there are plenty of references to decades worth of other media. When you’re working to move the story forward, what goes into material making the cut for inclusion in the final script? What principles underpin getting the most utility out of each line of text?

LS: It would be great if we could say that there is a formula one could use in order to seamlessly blend comedy and character development and plot momentum for any story, but if there is we have yet to find it. What we do is we try things and see what happens, and when that doesn’t work we try something else and we keep doing that until we have something that seems to work, and then we go with that. 

We honestly beat our heads against the wall for quite some time trying to start the script for this book and I recall no small amount of angst and frustration as a result. It seems like every new story has to teach us how to write it, and we are agonizingly slow learners. That said, I like to think that we eventually get there every time, and the things we make together tend to be exactly what they need to be. Part of that is that we demand it of each other, part of it is that each of us wants to impress the other (and possibly outdo the other!), and part of it is that it’s just a lot of fun for us!

DJ: If a line doesn’t move the plot forward, work as character development, or function as part of a joke – or preferably do more than one of those jobs – then it doesn’t make the final cut. When we’re working together, the amount of tangents we create is pretty staggering. We both keep “yes, and”-ing long past the point where good sense and good taste would suggest that we stop, mostly because we’re trying to crack one another up. And like I said earlier, we’re fans of both high and low comedy, so we’ll explore in all directions to find punchlines. What makes it to the printed page – as hard as this will be to believe – is the result of judicious cutting on our part. Imagine the godawful dreck we don’t show you.

As you point out, we like to pull references from a wide swath of history, because it lets the material speak to a larger audience. Not everyone is going to get every nod (unless I miss my guess, and Gen Z is really hip to Mummenschanz), but as comedy fans ourselves, we’ve always found joy in the “Google joke,” the thing that you don’t get immediately but you’re sure must mean something, so you look it up… and you’re rewarded with a solid laugh, and a deeper understanding of the character or the story or the ancient, cobweb-strewn authors.

CBY: It’s certainly worth the payoff if you’re the sort of reader curious enough to investigate punchlines. While you’ve both worked through DC, both directly and under the Vertigo imprint, Student Government is available through the Maverick imprint of Mad Cave Studios. We’ve talked a bit about the creative team, but not the publishing side of the equation. It sounds like you’ve had years of consideration and thought behind the production of this graphic novel, so can you tell us a bit about how this publishing arrangement came into being? What did Mad Cave bring to the table that made it a done deal?

DJ: In this case, Mad Cave had asked Joe to send them any pitches that he thought might be a good fit, so that’s how we wound up in their inboxes. I’ve said since the day we met that Joe is The Nicest Guy In Comics, and nobody ever argues that point; he’s genuinely someone that everybody wants to work with, and – fortunately for Lilah and me – that was true here. Mad Cave liked the pitch, but more than that, they fixed the pitch. Because what we had sent them was a Mature Readers book, a black comedy very much in the vein of our book Public Relations. But what they saw was a perfect Young Adult story, the kind of coal that their Maverick imprint could polish into a diamond. They asked if we could picture what they were picturing, and when they walked us through their reasoning, it made all the sense in the world.

LS: The great thing about Mad Cave, and Maverick in particular, is that when they saw the pitch for Student Government, they really grasped what we were trying to do on a deep level. And more importantly, what we were trying to do with Student Government is what they are trying to do at Maverick. They want to publish smart, interesting books for young people that don’t pander and don’t talk down, and we love that. They also really seemed to appreciate that we wanted to do something that didn’t have any genre elements to it: it’s not a romance, it’s not fantasy, not sci-fi. It’s just a story about people, and I think those stories can really connect with younger readers in a different way because the characters feel more real and what the characters are doing feels actually achievable. Anyone can and should do what Parker does: care about government and take that power into their own hands to use for good.

CBY: As a graduate student I inadvertently ended up involved in student government (by checking the wrong box on a form). I’ve found it to be highly procedural with the focus on rule-following as a non-trivial barrier to having larger impact on the campus. What sort of experience with student government, either direct or indirect, has helped inform the dynamics you’ve created between the characters of Student Government?

LS: My daughter was involved in Student Government at her college during her first year and to hear her tell it, it was a huge soap opera. And that is honestly kind of what the student government situation is at Halcyon-Burke. 

My own career in Student Government did not go particularly well. In ninth grade, I decided to run for class president based solely on the belief that I was smarter than anyone else and therefore the ideal candidate. When it was time for the candidates to give speeches, I stood up and said, “Well, I am a genius, so I think I’m the obvious choice.” I got exactly one vote–my own.

DJ: I can’t say that I had any real involvement in student government. I can say that I didn’t vote for Lilah. I mean, we were a few grade levels apart, and I didn’t go to her school, but I just want to make it very clear that – having heard that speech – I did not vote for her.

CBY: Campaigning as little as possible seems to have worked in my favour, it would seem. Connecting the plot of Student Government to the governance of other, very real universities, in an environment where academic freedom is being curtailed by external pressures, we’ve seen Ivy League institutions of similar vintage to the fictitious Halcyon Burke take very different approaches to these external pressures. While some have conformed, executing self-censorship exercises and undermining the safety of students to express ideas, others have taken a stand against efforts to infringe upon the impartiality of scientific inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge without undue pressure from vested interests. The financialization of higher education has been ongoing since long before you began working on this project years ago, but in light of the current climate for academics at the tertiary level, what timely lessons do you think readers will take away from reading your graphic novel?

DJ: It’s always time to worry when we’re witnessing multipronged attacks on higher education – and on intellectualism in general. That wasn’t particularly on our mind while we were writing, but the book has certainly emerged to a fraught atmosphere in that regard. And let’s be realistic: What we’ve produced here is a funnybook, not some sort of treatise on how to remedy the current situation. But Student Government is unabashedly in favor of higher education – not just the education part, but the whole experience. Parker is certainly fueled by what she’s learning in her classes, but she and the other characters are also benefiting from the social aspects of the school. Halcyon Burke, like any good university, is acting as a microcosm for the real world, preparing its students for the real world’s hierarchies and inequities… and, occasionally, its little victories too.

LS: Clearly, yes, none of this was going on when we wrote the book, but my hope for the book hasn’t changed one bit; it’s only gotten stronger. My hope is that young people will read Student Government and think: “I can do that!” The more involved the student body is–whether it’s through student government, student associations, campus protests, what have you–the healthier the institution is, and the less likely bad actors are to be able to get away with mischief.

CBY: No university can stand without its students in the same manner no country can persist without its citizens. Without giving away any spoilers, constituent representation, institutional sovereignty, and informed decision-making are all core concepts explored across the story of Student Government. Given the ongoing constitutional crisis in the United States that has resulted from a multi-generational failure of civic education nationwide, who do you think would benefit from reading this story? If you could drop a copy of this graphic novel on anyone’s desk, who needs to internalize its lessons?

DJ: You make our comic sound so much smarter than I thought it was. Are we secret geniuses?

I think the not-so-secret geniuses at Maverick did us a huge solid by helping us turn this into a Young Adult book, because it’s genuinely accessible to pretty much anyone tweenage and up. Civic education, ideally, begins at a young age, when we instill in students the idea that government is something they can learn about and affect throughout their entire lives. If the failure, as you said, is multigenerational, then the remedy needs to be, too. So I’d love to see our book in middle school libraries and classrooms, as a sort of silly on-ramp to more serious discussions.

LS: On anyone’s desk? I’d probably start with the members of Congress and work my way down from there.

CBY: Covering all your bases with a wide target market is very sensible. On that topic of diversity, there is an entertaining ensemble of characters featured throughout this story. Who do each of you have greatest affinity for within the cast, and why?

DJ: As I mentioned up top, I live my life with a thick carpeting of rabbit poop underfoot. Right now, we’ve got six bunnies, plus a couple of cats who feel as overwhelmed by the rabbit crap as I do. So it’s not hard to draw a line between me and Hutch, whose lifelong love for vulnerable animals has gotten a little out of control by the time we meet him here. I think Lilah can attest that I tend toward the cynical on most topics, but I’m made of butter when it comes to pets.

LS: I really like Malakai, a lot. He’s a reader, like me, and he just enjoys knowing things. Also, he really loved all the geology puns I made in the scene in the cave, and that really endeared me to him. When a character shares my terrible sense of humor, I find that to be a deeply winning trait. I think in some ways, Dave and I are both a little bit of Hutch and a little bit of Malakai, just in different situations. Sometimes I’m the clueless nerd and Dave is the social animal, and sometimes it’s vice versa. The secret, of course, is that there’s a little bit of each of us in every one of these characters, and so we love them all very much.

CBY: To close, after our readers check out Student Government, what unrelated creative work should they check out? What other comics, films, music, art, and literature has been keeping your attention and inspiring you lately?

DJ: I’ve become the kind of scattered person who has a different book in every room of the house, which is a fantastic way not to make progress in any of them. But as far as inspiration goes, I recently tore through The War Of Art by Stephen Pressfield, a thin volume that spoke to me about defeating creative block in a way that nothing else has quite been able to. So I’m making a concerted effort to apply its lessons to my writing projects that need a jumpstart. As far as comics, I’m in the middle of The Hero Trade by Matt Kindt and David Lapham, and really loving what they’re doing; it’s like a look at the parts of Astro City that their tourism bureau doesn’t want you to hear about. Musically, a recent episode of Scott Aukerman’s podcast CBB-FM reminded me that I hadn’t listened to synth-punk band The Faint in ages, so I’ve been dipping back into them, and supplementing with recent local (Austin) discovery Urban Heat. All of these things are gasoline when my creative fires feel low; all of them come with the highest possible recommendation.

LS: I’ll be honest: I haven’t been able to read more than a few pages of any book, watch more than an episode of any show, or even make it through a lot of movies lately. The world is in such a frightening and precarious state, and that honestly makes it really, really hard to concentrate. The last book I finished was Gary Numan’s autobiography, (R)evolution, which Dave recommended to me. Other than that, I can’t even think of the last book I read all the way through. I will say that I enjoyed the new Superman movie quite a lot! If I’d ever had the chance to write Superman at DC, it would have been something not too dissimilar to that. 

CBY: Dave and Lilah, thanks for joining us today! If you’ve got any portfolio, publication, and social media links you’d like to share with our readers, now is the time!

LS: I can be found on Bluesky and Bluesky only, at @lilahsturges.com. I’ve abandoned all the other social media platforms. So if you see someone on X or Facebook that claims to be me, it ain’t me! What are they doing there, anyway, huh? Trying to impersonate me! Well, I never!

DJ: I’m on Bluesky at @davejustus.bsky.social, so please follow me if you think you can handle upwards of three (3) posts a year from me. And I’m also going to shout out our Peter Smurfy page on Soundcloud – a tie-in we made years ago for Public Relations where we did goth and industrial covers of cartoon theme songs – because I just checked and Lilah is still paying to keep it going, so why not?

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