In an expansive graphic novel, Kenny Wroten crafts a world both bizarre and familiar, with conflicts both massive and mundane. Dig into this Fantagraphics release, out now!
COMIC BOOK YETI: Kenny, thanks for joining us in the Yeti Cave today! How are things back on the east coast?
KENNY WROTEN: It’s so humid today, I feel like I’m swimming. I apologize in advance for the wordiness of my responses. I can’t escape my long-windedness, haha. Thank you for your thoughtful questions!
CBY: Thoughtful questions are my specialty, and you are quite welcome! Now, Eden II is epic in scope, and is one of the longer graphic novels I’ve had the opportunity to read lately. It took me a little while to digest everything, and so I have to ask, when did you start working on this project, and what was the point of inception for the story?
KW: Eden II is a project that began simply and then got increasingly more complex in the process of its creation. The catalyst for the book came from a combination of a few experiential things in my life, which I will tell you about specifically, then it moved to a place of philosophy and spirituality. A place of seeking. This was the beginning of a journey I am still on.
Let’s take a few steps back to Cannonball, my last full length graphic novel. Cannonball, if you are familiar with it, ends when the artist protagonist Caroline (thinly-veiled self-insert) achieves material success but is left existentially empty by it. Throughout the book, she held a firm belief that material success and the recognition it brought her would fulfill her. The book ends with her loss of faith.
I had no real answer to the huge question, “what is all this Art for? What is it doing? Why am I doing it?” The conclusion is meant to make the reader uneasy. Because I was uneasy! That is how the book had to end in order to be truthful. I did not have another answer, and I wasn’t interested in slapping on an unconfirmed self-regulating platitude in service of pleasing an audience.
When I started CannonballI, I was 25 or so, I had just graduated from KCAI (Kansas City Art Institute) and I was working as a freelance editorial illustrator. That’s a great way to make a living as an artist if you can manage it, but the hours are sporadic to put it lightly. You have to have a willingness to suffer severe financial insecurity to even attempt it. Of all the necessary skills, thrift and blind faith are the most important.
Fast forward to 2020; I’m still doing freelance illustration as my day job, and I’m impulsively writing a bunch of short stories that feel like they are related. They are all surreal and strange. I decide they need something to contain them. Set them up all nice. So I try to come up with a framing narrative that could tie them all together. I’ll describe that more in a moment. But first an example: a short story about a narcissistic artist having a conversation with his equally narcissistic model/muse became The Sufficiency of Aiden.
For the frame, I considered something of interest to me; the aspects of the hidden, ideal self touched upon in massive online games like Second Life. Places which allow us to interact with others in any Mask we choose. Appear as our Dream Self. What if we became only our Dreams and not our Selves? What if Second Life was Only Life?
The short stories all had something to do with this longing for the fantastic, the transportative, the true. Something Carl Jung might call numinous. By numinous, I mean something that radiates a kind of transcendent, awe-inspiring energy. You’ve encountered it, I'm sure. It can be found in a self-sacrificial act, the feats of athleticism on the World Stage found at the Olympics, but it can also be found in mundane sources. A sudden rain. A slice of sunlight. A great work of Art.
Think about a film you’ve seen that felt like it was speaking directly to you. A film that you were made different by. Anything that makes you weep, makes your heart race and you can’t say why... That’s what I’m talking about. It’s mysterious, and irrational, but it's also a physical sensation! And it has something to do with the resonance in this shared imaginary world. Because that’s where the acts are reflecting in waves of awe. That's where the Art lives on long after we encounter it. Lord of the Rings did this for a lot of people, including me.
I looked at my everyday life for examples of places where humans might be looking for this type of experience. Videogames were one (heroism? Check. Feats of skill? Check. Beautiful landscapes? Check.) Social media was another. Social media was a palace built of Fantasy and Masks. And it was transportative, like Narnia! But Neurotic! A little world you could step in and out of. It’s emergently complex, has developed its own unique hyper-speed culture; memes become part of everyday language, but if you haven’t seen them in their intended context they are often meaningless. Even a week of absence can make the images indecipherable! But when neurotic Narnia is responding to your post, it is thrilling. Heroic.
This is a separate reality for all intents and purposes, and we don’t even think about what it does to us to step in and out of it. And what happens to the “us” we leave behind when we are in this other reality. Body consciousness. You can see this explored in my book in the ability for the Pandaemonium to control bodies of users who are currently in Eden. Their minds are captured in hell’s playground, essentially, bodies are left vacant. Predatory behavior ensues.
Okay, so that’s like social media. That’s happening now. And it is certainly owned by a handful of grotesquely rich feudal lords. I’ve “left my body” for almost an hour before on one of these jaunts. I’ve heard of people losing days. Time moves faster in a perceptible way when we use this stuff. The “present” is so fleeting it is hardly even perceptible, and we often have no memory of the hour. Compare that hour to 6 minutes spent jogging (if you don’t enjoy jogging. I don’t, haha). Your life is becoming perceptively shorter by doing this for no real gain! It’s like a trash can for attention! Why are so many of us hooked on it?
Which brings the next factor in, the never-enough pleasure found in “content engagement.” Aiden here becomes a post-modern Adam. I changed his name to be a more “millennial flavored” version of Adam, but he was just called Adam in earlier drafts. The question of “the Sufficiency of Adam '' is discussed briefly by Hap earlier in the book in the context of Paradise Lost which she is doing a book report on. (the Pandaemonium itself is also a reference). Essentially, it's a theological question about free will and its relationship to God's omnipotence. If God is omnipotent, Adam doesn’t have free will. And vice versa. A paradox. The question resonates into now when you replace God with Capital.
Man (the paradox) is tempted by total content immersion (the concept is called Total Contentment in the book. Content being the operative part of the word, as well as a great pun!). It is a way to be one with Capital and in its image, and eschew the living world.
As the story goes along, Eden II (the eponymous ‘virtual reality game’) becomes more than a Skinner Box pleasure button. This Imagination, this Generator of Fantasy is not just a toy in my story. It behooves the users to question something deeper. Something terrifying. The Pandaemonium wants to shut this subconscious questioning down. This anxiety is what produces The Dragon in the narrative that upsets everyone. The forgone conclusion no one wants to know.
So, what if there was a way to ‘reverse’ the ‘events of Eden?’ Enter a “deknowing” process. To be unaware and ignorant of our Selves, asleep. I myself am Hell, as Otis quotes. Because at this point, Knowing has become too much. You are helpless. You hide from it. It just hurts and leads to all sorts of trouble. “The Lantern grows tired of being Lit.”
This is the “hardware update” being offered by Paul and the gang at the climax of the book. Give up autonomy, give up Selfness. Give up period! Live in a synthetic reality manufactured by a narcissistic demiurge for its own ends. We can call this Option A. It amounts to letting your consciousness be seized and rented back to you by a small handful of all-powerful demon men.
Lots of misconceptions happen here with readers. No one dies at the end of my book. At least, not in the sense of being Hollywood-climax murdered. It’s worse than that. They die in the sense of forfeiting a quintessential component of being truly alive. Option A is philosophical Stockholm syndrome, loving the vampiric captor that keeps you from ever fully actualizing yourself. Distracted from The Real by the eternal hamster wheel of fleeting pleasure. Fulfillment is always just out of reach. Whiling away the centuries grinding for E-coin and loot. After all, nothing lives in your head rent free any more, not even you!
This is what Aiden chooses. If you believe in his sufficiency.
Now, this all sounds very pessimistic, and I was pessimistic at the time of writing it. Aiden’s story is by far the most pessimistic. But in art making I was working to process this pessimism. It is overcome in other characters.
Which brings us to an observation that seems obvious only in retrospect: each work of art is for the artist an act of powerful internal transformation. It happened after Cannonball when I chose to leave editorial to focus on comics (the art I knew I was really wanting to spend my life making, a first step to finding The Answer Cannonball didn’t have), and it’s happened in the time since I completed Eden II. I had to leave behind a trademark-millennial ironic nihilistic positivistic doomed atheism for something more empowering far beyond my own making, understanding, or ability to sufficiently describe.
So back to 2020: I was sickening myself with fantasies and comparisons about what my life would be if I were “more productive” (read: sinless). Had more time. More talent. More money. More love. Etc. So, naturally, I played a lot of video games where those things were possible. My partner at the time did, too.
This was the beginning of the pandemic, and she was playing a lot of Animal Crossing because she couldn't go see her friends in real life. The amount of time she spent creating a virtual world, accruing debt to a megalomaniac capitalist (and his turnip markets??) was immense. And practically useful in its own way! It brought her actual pleasure when the “real world” was too unsafe to explore. It was just another example of that quaint, everyday reality-disavowal we’ve grown to depend on in some capacity. This realization got built into Eden as well. It practically IS Eden!
So those are the big things that I was struggling with in my life at the time of writing; a scatterplot of crises. I wanted a throughline, and I didn’t know this, but the book was going to be ABOUT that throughline. The thing I was left seeking after finishing Cannonball, became The Monad.
To begin with, I imagined the concept using a general term. The word monad is used many times throughout history. Beginning with the Ancient Greeks (the Pythagorians specifically, Ellis might be part Pythagorian), the Gnostics, and Enlightenment thinkers like Liebnitz to name a few. I had a big interest in Gnosticism at that time, and sacred knowledge in general. Gnosis just means “knowledge” or “awareness.”
The Monad is used differently by each, but for me I went back to the beginning. I think of it as the indivisible essence of being. An Energy. It's represented by the Greek letter Phi. This is an allusion to two things: 1. The symbol that is generally used to represent The Golden Ratio, something that perked up my ears as a teenager (and incidentally I have a tattoo of, just like Ellis), and 2. The symbol chosen to represent the real life exploration into discovering the mathematical value of “beingness” called Integrated Information Theory. Something you can look into if you want, but is a little too unpoetic for me these days.
The Monad in Eden II is an equation representing the axis of connection to the transcendental energy that is found within every person, indeed every thing. This energy is why it exists at all. It's a property like Mass. It's not about abandoning the material for the metaphysical. It's about the connections, the relationships between these things, how we can participate fully with the chaos of reality, give birth to dancing stars, etc. Not an either/or approach. Our consciousness likely isn't an accidental windfall of electrified meat anymore than the evolution of thumbs is accidental - it serves a purpose. But it’s also likely not just an ephemeral ghost possession, amounting to the briefest of cosmic sneezes.
I am a fiction writer, so I live to imagine what this could really be. But I am still a fiction writer. What I provide are just some interesting thoughts to think if you enjoy thinking. Some theorize consciousness to be a somewhat flawed receptor of Ultimate reality, some think it's a partial generator of that reality. It's a fascinating theoretical place to speculate about. In my book, I liked to think of it as the emergent property of a very, very complex system, in that way Dreams, Myths, Imaginings, etc. are just as “part of Reality” as an acorn.
So I made up a character named Ellis, the thinly-veiled self-insert of Eden II, to ”discover” The Monad. They quickly became the protagonists of the video-game “frame narrative.” Their personal pathos is that they “systematize” this connection using mathematics (yay?) but they are then left stupefied in Hamlet-like indecisive confusion! The numinous sensation for them is, “a bitterness in the solar plexus.” They are afraid of the information! It shouldn’t exist! (yikes!)
From this basic premise, I began exploration. Allowing the book to take form as I went, the “ship built at sea” approach. Very exciting! Over time, it has become clear to me that this numinous presence I longed for, this mysterious indivisible essence that had the ability to make all things beautiful and alive, and the mode of thought that allows us to identify with our true selves and not an egoic mask, was more than just an impotent fantasy, or contrived toxic positivity: The connection I was seeking was God.
This is where the blind faith I mentioned earlier came in. Faith is a useful skill. I had already been practicing it without realizing. But my faith was in the wrong thing. Namely, a belief that material success and recognition brings self-fulfillment. I just hadn’t had “enough” yet.
So this leads to Option B at the end of our story. The option Caroline didn’t have. Another kind of un-knowing; a faith-based agnosticism, if you can wrap your head around it. The people who go with Option B are choosing something unknown to them, you have to remember. Hollow Earth is not a God-filled place. And their only mode of avoiding their total spiritual annihilation is to follow mystical instructions given by A Clown.
This is the “leap of faith” described by Kierkegaard; it's a noble place of profound humility. A surrender not to be controlled but to lack expectation of control. An understanding that in exchange for surrender, each moment from then on would be totally and completely your own. This is the path of Actualization.
As exhausting as that sounds, the energy is there. The connection to this “source” in the broadest sense breeds it like gangbusters. If you can let go of resistance. What I’m describing is what the Quakers call Walking in the Light. It’s a powerful, rapturous feeling. It can come from anywhere, if you are open. William Blake famously found heaven in a wildflower.
To my complete shock, this thing wasn’t just a nice poetic idea, it’s real. And its complex. And it fills your heart to the brim to be on the path, even when it's difficult. It’s a kind of Work.
I began this project and called it Eden II ironically, as an atheist. Ellis even makes the joke that the title is “trite.” I didn’t know on a conscious level I'd spend the whole book trying to find what God was to me. I thought I was writing a silly comic book about digital culture. It’s funny too, I should mention that. I didn’t really know what this connection actually was.
Eventually, as I wrote and wrote, I came to name the connection Love. Romantic Love had been the closest experience to what I thought God must be like at that time. I wasn’t far off. It is a highly energized, often numinous connection between consciousnesses. I wish the word love wasn’t so diminished in today’s usage. I blame Friends.
Eden is a connection facilitator, something deeply longed for in an spiritually alienated population (social media appears here again.) It plugs you into this unifying net of minds. Love and connection is at the center of the story in every way. There is Otis’s love for Hap and jilted love for Bunny. Bunny’s Lust for Paul. The broken friendship between Margot and Vicky. Ellis’ love for who Spider could be. Spider’s inability to Love. And Hap’s love for Everyone. (Hap’s name is short for Happiness.)
This is all to say, broken/neglected/unrealized connection repaired or transformed is the core. Love is incredibly powerful when treated as a verb and not a noun. bell hooks says it better than I can. She defines Love as, “a sincere commitment to your own spiritual growth and/or that of another person.”
This Love could extend not just to people we know, but to our planet in a real sense. You could love Time itself if you wanted! For this path you need a modicum of Faith and the bravery to walk through whatever doors open up for you. Reaffirming faith through dedicated practice is the essence of spiritual growth. To quote Joseph Campbell, "follow your bliss (and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls" - Ed.). Whatever that is. This is not an empty platitude. This is how you come on-line as a human. From here you can do wondrous things.
In Option A, you sacrifice what it means to be alive, in Option B, all you sacrifice is your resistance to being fully alive.
B is depicted as The Pleroma. This totally numinous reality where the Self can be spiritually actualized and all that entails (take a look at the Blackfoot/First Nations Hierarchy of Needs, not Maslow’s, and you’ll see what I mean by this. Maslow has it dead backwards.) Earth is alive and not corpsefying. Green. Not Colorless. Gone are the days of the attention trash can, and constant helpless exhaustion, they are no longer on a path of alienation that makes them strangers to themselves. They are no longer competing for the love of The Demiurge. They have a new, unknown path. The Human path, not “whatever comes after.”
But not everyone is here…yet.
All real Joy is tinged with sorrow.
However, this is not the end. It’s a new beginning. With new questions. Ellis chooses to “go deeper” at this point. They don’t have the answers around what just happened. Or what happens next. They don’t stop at the feel-good-palooza. They keep turning over rocks. This transformation has reignited their seeking nature which they have denied the entire book! This is who they really are. And now they have the energy to fully be it.
As for me, I don’t have the answers either. My next story is a continuation of a few threads from Eden II. Its current title is The Leviathan. Eden II drops a lot of red threads for exploration, and due to its limited scope (even if it is lengthy!) not all are explored. I may spend my career exploring what Eden II is about! Or I may disagree with myself in six months. That's the beauty of this process.
CBY: You've spared me the opportunity to indulge in many spoilers with your thorough introduction to the themes involved! Following your 2018 68-page title, Crimes, you released your aforementioned 272-page 2019 graphic novel, Cannonball, which won the LAMBDA Literary award for Best LGBTQ Graphic Novel. You’ve created an even longer, more ambitious project in the 452-page Eden II. Is your forthcoming graphic novel, Everyone Sux But You going to be >800 pages? What sort of shifts have you made in your illustration process and workflow to increase your output and meet your own productivity expectations over the past five years?
KW: Haha! Well as you can see (for better or worse) I am never wanting for words. ESBY is actually shorter than Eden II. All future books will most likely be shorter, only because I’m refining my craft. Page count is impressive, but it can be a hindrance if it stops people from reading the book! I’ve noticed a trend that it's simply understood that a graphic novel is meant to be read in one sitting. Not in several sittings like a novel. My book takes around 4-6 hours to read, it's better if you take it in doses so you can keep following it. It requires a lot of concentration.
So I’m trying to think a little differently to adapt my stories, say more with less. A lot of Eden was a process of “discovery writing,” meaning I wrote it as I went. I had the short stories, I had a script, but those were completely malleable. I listened to my intuition, or tried to. Other times I ignored it, ran away from it. To keep up with this, I adopted a very quick and efficient art style. I could draw five pages a day this way. This was during the Pandemic. Eden II was all I did! Eden II was my Eden II! The place I went to to find peace in a time of endless, terrifying and identical days. I worked until exhaustion most days.
As for increasing output, I was white-knuckling it then. And not taking good care of myself. I don’t know how I did it! Now, it all comes from this Source Energy I’m describing.
One practical way to encounter it is through meditation, yoga, prayer etc. But a fun way is to look into Active Imagination, a Jungian guided meditation technique. Its like tripping (if you’ve experienced the Oneness of Mushrooms, you’ll like my book and active imagination!) but in shorter doses and with direction.
This extra energy allows me to take better care of myself and my little world. Through this focused energy, when I’m really in a flow-state (I can describe this if you want) drawing/writing ceases to feel like Labor and starts to feel like Work, as in the thing that I’m meant to do on Earth. Editorial illustration was Labor. I think Hannah Arendt first uses these terms this way, which I liked. Work can be meaning-enriching, just like acts of ritual devotion.
I’m toying with the idea of calling art making (and I mean this very broadly) our collective “devotional immortality project.” Isn’t that a great answer to the final question of Cannonball!
There is a joy to be found in working, doing real Self-aligned work. It’s not always possible, some days it's really difficult, but when it's there I feel like the luckiest person alive. Like I can make a difference, even if it’s small.
CBY: Yeah, I read Eden II in about three different sittings, so I'm glad that was the intent, and hearing your exploration of process strikes familiar chords (I've been exploring Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's Flow Theory in my doctoral work a bit). In the cover illustration for Everyone Sux But You, there’s a reference to Sherilyn Fenn’s Twin Peaks character, Audrey Horne, and (I presume) the contemporaneous 1991 zombie film, The Boneyard. Eden II delivers a similar character-driven story within a landscape of otherworldly horror. There were a number of pop cultural references hinted at within Eden II, so I’m curious - what influences were at the forefront of your mind as you developed the aesthetic and tone of the book?
KW: I haven’t seen The Boneyard! But it's a location in the book that is run by a cult horror fan, so I’m glad there just happened to be a correspondence! How fabulous! As for Twin Peaks, yup. Twin Peaks is one of my favorite series ever. That's transformative Work! I have a tattoo of Lynch’s Angriest Dog in The World on my arm.
If I were more Lynch-like I would have made the in-story Eden II oneiric and a-causal but I lack his vision. I can talk a lot about the soaring heights of what Eden has meant to me, and hopefully to a receptive reader. But it is also just a book. It adheres to those restrictions. I imagine Eden in motion as a kind of Deep Dream landscape, undulating and feverish. Especially the area around the Amygdala. But for the book, I went with a desert littered with the bones of giants.
The aesthetic choices in the book were mostly intuitive. I knew I wanted to do a color/bw thing. It is an indication of numinosity. Initially I was thinking about The Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The plot of Stalker to me is a metaphor for the creative process, and faith’s involved in a big way. The Zone, in all its quiet horror, is something like the collective unconscious. A world of fluctuating symbols, as Eden II is. It is a rare example of an artist talking about the danger present when exploring the unconscious. You can get lost.
I also have been thinking about Ursula K. Le Guin a lot lately. She was a pioneer of this philosophical speculative fiction thing. I think she’s really ignited something in me. I hadn’t read her pre-Eden.
CBY: Lynch, Tarkovsky, and Le Guin are all indispensable figures in the media landscape, and it's good to know how they'll inform a read of Eden II for our audience members who have yet to check out your graphic novel. As metaversal concepts and pocket realities are increasingly prevalent across the cultural landscape, I don’t want to draw inferences of my own, but as someone who has clearly been putting a lot of thought into construction of layered worlds-within-worlds, what other examples in media would you say you admire for their architecture or narrative treatment?
KW: You can absolutely draw inferences on your own!
Something that explores nested reality in a very lovely way, and that is an inspiration that I haven’t mentioned yet is Charlie Kauffmans Synecdoche, New York. The artist recreates his world as a play on a gigantic indoor set, in which everyone he’s ever met is cast by him, and given lines by him. Time passes as he lives through this massive play. He is the only audience member and the director. This work engulfs him. His “real life” withers (his daughter literally) and fades away due to his negligence. I’m Thinking of Ending Things does this too, but in an even more psychologically jarring way. I credit this film with my specific use of the word rabies by Spider.
Another great example, and wonderful film about Art and Danger and Realities both disavowed and transcendent, is the classic My Dinner with Andre. You may not think it at first, but you are looking at two distinctive realities having a moving, intensely connected conversation with one and other within the reality of a film, which you are watching in your reality. Their realities overlap with your own (you are either a Wally or an Andre, or somewhere in between). It's a great experience if you can open yourself to believing both men are telling the truth. You can hop into each person's world.
Another book that influenced the story (and is alluded to in the names of both Desdemona and the Game Cat) is Vurt by Jeff Noons. I read this many years ago and without it (even though my story is completely different, less druggie) I imagine the idea for Eden wouldn’t have formed. I’d have been too bogged down by The Matrix or something. Only looking at hardware, not software. Option A goes hardware. It is the most Matrix-y option. Eden II can be looked at in a post-matrix pop culture world as, “how could something like the matrix be formed, and how/why was it so massively populated?”
CBY: There’s a heavy attention paid towards concepts of identity, public perception, and the opportunity individuals have to construct their personas in society. You don’t shy away from the philosophy of morality, the self, and the idea of moral obligation to act on behalf of the greater good. For our readers, what sort of primer texts on philosophy fed into your development of the characters and conflicts you raise in Eden II?
KW: Once you begin the seeking process the philosophy begins to find you. The process is entirely, and beautifully natural. And totally self initiated. That's when you begin what is really being talked about in the archetypal “hero's journey”, as laid out by Joseph Campbell. It’s not the handsome hyper-individualistic, will-based, godlike super-heroism, which is the thing modern saga flooding has warped it into in the media. It’s much more complex and deep and important.
Campbell’s Power of Myth series which is easy to watch and understand and is fully on Youtube really dips you into the purpose of Story and Myth. I return to this series in times of doubt. If the wild mystical/metaphysical stuff I’m talking about here appeals to you at all, watch this series. Campbell is very influenced by Carl Jung, who I’ve mentioned. Both Campell and Jung would call the hero's journey an individuation process, and one that is repeated throughout life several times! A “life-death-life” cycle, to quote another Jungian, Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Jung might not be for everyone though, he’s just my current guy and super useful when talking about art and creativity. Which I find myself thinking about very often, this is my path.
I began my journey by looking to lecture series and podcasts on philosophy in general. Philosophy doesn’t have to be this elitist, University thing - you can access it anywhere. I know there are bad actors in this arena, but with a solid sense of discernment you can navigate it and not “throw the baby out with the bath water.” The Great Courses/Wondrium have some excellent general courses (many on Youtube, though I had a subscription for a while. Much better than Netflix!) then you find out what appeals to you and explore it more in-depth. I obviously like considering the metaphysical, it makes my brain happy (read:nourishment), so philosophies that speak on that with reverence appeal to me.
I tend to explore these things piecemeal, as a hobbyist/enthusiast and not any kind of instructor. Whatever rings your bell and feels natural to you will work for you. Some thinkers I’ve been reading and listening to lectures on recently: Henri Bergson, Owen Barfield, William James, Soren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, William Blake, Meister Eckhart, and CS Peirce. These are just some from my notes, and not all directly relate to Eden, but I likely wouldn’t have explored them without Eden.
The feeling of expansion is my guide while being mindful in the pulling up of tares. This process requires humility, patience, kindness and responsibility. And mental flexibility.
CBY: Staying pliable, staying curious - the older I get, the more I value retaining these traits in my approach. Without giving too much away, there’s a critique of market dynamics and the ramifications of consumer behavior regarding what we consume, how we consume it, and the detrimental effects of unexamined habits. You’ve exaggerated many of the worst aspects of Western capitalism to a devilish extreme - were there any specific points of reference or figures in the modern market system you were drawing reference from when you came up with your characters?
KW: With Eden II, I tried to keep everything allegorical while setting the story on an Earth not entirely dissimilar to our own. I call it Hollow Earth, which I realize is a name for a certain paranormal concept, but I like the name just the same. We can think of it as the Ego in this story. Or even Hell. Sometimes these are synonymous.
I don’t want to cast specific judgments or make specific predictions. However, some of my choices as far as setting goes are obviously connected to postmodern anxieties. Climate change, powerlessness, alienation, waste, pollution, poverty, meaningless labor, addiction, televised resource wars. I cast these in extremes in the tradition of satire, I suppose. To me, I was writing satire, not horror.
When I started writing, AI was not painting, ChatGPT was not yet performing its transformer block gematria that dazzled us all, including its trainers! Those appeared (or more accurately became exponentially more proficient) after the book was long completed. The debate hit its stride after Eden II had been out for months. I think this is in part why it got nominated for an Eisner.
That AI is massively energetically wasteful on top of everything is just heartbreaking. You don’t even need it. You can learn to paint. You can learn to write. Learning one craft helps you appreciate others more deeply. But people are dying on this hill! Why? Because they don’t feel like learning? It seems like it's more than that. A sufficiency-like question.
Their time is eaten by a deadly machine every day and they want to feed it more. I’m fascinated by the cult that seems to be springing up around AI. Maybe I’ll write about that some day. God-shaped holes are always filled somehow.
The metaverse itself could become the most aligned with Eden II, from what I’ve seen so far. I saw someone doing the virtual reality thing, and I asked her what she was doing. She told me, “Working at McDonald's.”
CBY: Yeah, that reminds me of a strip of The Parking Lot is Full from 1994; subtitled, "Virtual Reality for the stupid," the user is saying, "Wow, it's like I'm REALLY doing the dishes!" It's bleak how prescient that comic has become. On a less bleak note, another important aspect of your characterization is the approach you take towards gender fluidity and exploration of the full spectrum of sexuality. Your treatment of this social dimension has garnered you award-winning attention, and I’m curious (as someone who also grew up in the Midwest, with a younger sibling who has recently been exploring their non-binary identity) how your approach to gender and sexuality in the narratives you control has been informed by your own perspective growing up in a social environment beyond your control? How have you attuned your character relationships to draw upon your lived experience and what sort of conscious decisions do you make to meet the needs of your narratives that diverge from the broader social climate around both these aspects of human identity and interaction?
KW: Cannonball won a LAMBDA to my complete surprise. Before it won, the only feedback I had gotten was from Goodreads. A notoriously kind place. I got pushback from readers saying Caroline was, “bad queer representation” because she was flawed. Unlikable. They would have preferred her to triumph, become good. This felt so creatively restrictive and a little judgmental. And not at all an accurate reflection of the human condition!
Since then, a lot has changed really quickly. I think people are able to allow themselves to identify with Caroline. She isn’t perfect. No one is. She’s just a person. I’m just a person.
To go back to my upbringing and its relationship to Eden II and sexuality: I grew up in a conservative, religious, and deeply homophobic family. Naturally, I grew up thinking it was God vs The Gays. I am immediately reminded of the line the hillbilly family says in the opening of Mean Girls, “And on the third day, God created the Remington bolt-action rifle, so that Man could fight the dinosaurs. And the homosexuals.” The hilarity of their ignorance was clear, but so was a second subtextual message: God was not on my side.
Ellis becomes the spokesperson in Eden II for the conflict of God vs The Gays. They go through a lot of turmoil, not due to their identity alone, though that is certainly part of it. It’s more complex. God has been discovered, and it is not exactly as it was explained to them to be. It’s not Some Perfect Guy. This can be true of the self-discovery process found in exploring sexuality and gender identity. You have to forge new paths for yourself. You don’t always know where you are going.
The most notable scene of this “confrontation” is in the chapter called Judgment. Jesus appears in a vision as an oblivious beatnik praising Ellis for all they have achieved. Jesus makes them a Saint for what Ellis perceives as the total destruction of life on Earth.
So Ellis is once again stricken with despair. They take on a Hamlet-like role again. Which makes them a “sap” according to Spider (the resident Doomer). I agree. But they are a Promethean Sap. They yearn to be perpetually devoured as a punishment! Poor kid!
I also discovered my own nonbinary identity moving through this process with Ellis. Among many other things I’ve already mentioned.
CBY: You've certainly created a depiction with nuance that can't be accused of tokenization. I’d like to step away from the world of Eden II for a bit and discuss how you came to work with Fantagraphics for its publication. Gary Groth is listed as editor in addition to his role as publisher. How did you meet and what did the process of coming to an arrangement for the publication of Eden II look like?
KW: I hadn’t met Gary before this project. And he let me have a lot of free rein, a LOT in retrospect. I’m grateful for that, or the process I had making the book would not have worked. If I had an editor who hovered or something, for instance, they might have freaked out when I said things like, “I don't know how many pages I’ve done, or how many are left.” I haven’t experienced that yet, but I’m sure helicopter editors are out there. Maybe I could benefit by that relationship? Who knows!
Gary is someone I enjoyed talking to about the project. He was supportive. This book, by its somewhat allegorical nature, is not really about itself. It's about the person reading it, and the world they exist in. It’s not even about me. Or my intentions. I like to talk about Cannonball as the “exorcism of a demon” named Caroline. Eden II was another kind of extraction. One that is still resonating for me and I hope to continue exploring for a while.
CBY: To that end, you’ll be putting out Everyone Sux But You with Holt. Can you speak a bit to the process of auctioning the rights, what role your agent, Edward Maxwell, has played in that process, and why the follow-up to your phenomenal Fantagraphics outing set to also come out on its heels in next year’s Fantagraphics line-up? If you’re able to provide some insight around the publication options, what sort of considerations went into shopping it around and making different choices for its release?
KW: Ed is the reason both Eden II and Everyone Sux but You have publishers. Without him, they wouldn’t exist. Full stop. As far as publishing schedules, I don’t decide that. That’s more of a publisher decision. I just make the book, wish it luck, and try to detach. Easier said than done!
Everyone Sux but You is a different kind of exploration entirely than Eden II. One that is more down to earth, linear, slice-of-life like Cannonball. It focuses on grief, depression and heartbreak, as well as Emo music (naturally!)
CBY: As an Emo kid (who has grown into an Emo man) I am keen to see how it all plays out! Now, we’ve dug into a lot of the influences on your work, both within media and from your lived experience. To digress, can you share with our readers, beyond the scope of your own work, some of your favorite comics, films, literature, music, and other media that you’ve been enjoying lately?
KW: Wow I think we’ve covered a lot here. Maybe too much? The only other influence off the top that I think is worth mentioning is the exploration of Tarot. I’m currently working on a Tarot deck as part of this “seeking” and “deepening” process. there is a real, living world, inside each card if you open your mind to it. I’ve been painting them traditionally with gouache. It's been a long and difficult process. Much harder than I anticipated! But a good breather from comics.
CBY: Gouache is not the easiest paint to work with, so I'm keen to see the fruits of your labor when completed! Kenny, thanks for making time to enlighten our readers today. If you have any portfolio material or social media links you’d like to share, please drop anything you’d like below and we’ll include it upon publication.
KW: Thank you so much for letting me talk about my book! I have a lot to say about it, and you have been the first to ask! My work can be viewed @jukeboxcomix on Instagram and on Twitter. I have a website too www.kelseywroten.com - one day I will change this URL, lol.
As a send off: Another early research topic for Eden was a pioneer of Virtual Reality systems, Jaron Lanier. He has an entire book about the importance of logging off for those interested. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I’ve heard it useful. Also I’m currently watching the PBS special on Human Creativity that just came out. Its so fabulous and on-topic, if you’d like to look at more ‘why art?” talk.
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