Kayla E.: Precious Rubbish | Saturday, June 14, 7 p.m. | Mettlesome Theater, Durham
Kayla E., a comics artist who lives in the Triad area, spent more than a decade on her magnum opus without having any intention to publish it.
The digital comics she was making were a way for her to process childhood abuse, from family dysfunction to incest, amid the pressures of poverty and Pentecostalism in rural Texas. She sugar-coated this harrowing material with the peppy tone and fun format of postwar children’s comics (think Archie), using short gag strips, letter pages, games, puzzles, pinups, paper dolls, and other midcentury minutiae to make lancing passes at her past.
And she lacquered it with the flat, stylized modernist design of high-end contemporary cartooning (think Chris Ware). To be clear, this doesn’t make the book easy to read. But it helps, knowing that such a stunning work came out of the horrors we see, one that can confidently sit alongside the likes of Ware, Alison Bechdel, and Harvey Pekar.
In April, the comics Kayla had long deemed too personal for the public were published in hardcover by Fantagraphics, one of the most esteemed art-comics publishers, as Precious Rubbish. It was excerpted in the New Yorker and reviewed in The New York Times, which called it “a scream as precisely pitched as a middle C from a tuning fork,” with “such an unexpected mixture of control and frankness that it is impossible to ignore.”
In advance of her reading at the Bull City Press Presents series on Saturday, we reached Kayla by phone to explore the layered world of Precious Rubbish and discuss how it changed from a secret she couldn’t tell into a message she had to proclaim, and what it cost and gained her along the way.
INDY: Could we start by talking about your general influences as a comics artist before we move on to the very specific context of Precious Rubbish?
KAYLA E.: I was totally changed by Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. I had read newspaper comics and Archie comics as a kid, and as a teenager, I’d stumbled upon the book Leviathan by Peter Blegvad. It’s a collection of comic strips that were mixed-media and really experimental and literary and incredible. So that was basically my only understanding of the medium.
But in college, I took a seminar called “Alternative American Comics,” and that is where I read all the greats. Jimmy Corrigan impacted me so profoundly—like, it moved things around in my interior in a way that no other encounter with a work of art ever had. I remember grabbing a sketchbook and just putting panels next to each other, trying to make sense of this medium and see what I could do with it. I was already an autobiographical artist, but really a traditional visual artist, painting.
What was it about Ware’s work that hit you so hard?
I think comics are effective at communicating the human experience like no other medium can. Sequential art is able to just shoot straight into the soul of a person. I have a friend who took a picture of two panels in Chris Ware’s Building Stories that he shows people when trying to communicate the magic of comics. This woman is thinking to herself, “No one ever says hi to me.” And in the next panel, it shows her from a bird’s-eye view with someone saying “hi” to her. So it’s like being in the interior of the person and also outside of the person. I had never encountered comics doing that as effectively as Chris Ware does. It was an actual physical response that just shook me to my core. “What is this? What have I found here?”
That’s a great way of describing what comics can uniquely do—the dramatic tension of words and pictures. There’s what’s happening in the panel and what the caption says, but what’s really being said is in the gap between them. And it’s especially powerful in a book like yours, Kayla, that’s so much about saying the unsayable, which you do in clever, painful ways with the crossword puzzles and word searches and things.
Exactly! I’m absolutely obsessed with this form and its potential for communication. It’s really transcendent.
So there’s that universal power of sequential art, but then there’s the particular way Ware and others contrast highly finished rendering with raw, painful subject matter. You do that, and I’m curious if it’s your art style generally or if it was unique to this book, as a way to insulate the trauma.
I read these midcentury children’s comics as a child. While I was experiencing the trauma of my childhood, I was really addicted to Archie comics and would just get lost in these clean, colorful, beautiful worlds and project myself into them. This wasn’t a calculated decision when I started making this work. It came to me when I drew my first Precious Rubbish strip, which is on page 2, the one where I die by suicide. It came out fully formed, in that style, that color palette; I drew the logo, bam, there it was. I think there’s just this web over my child brain of these images, which stood in such direct, painful contrast with the dirty, hideous house that I grew up in. Reading Betty and Veronica, then looking in the mirror.
It makes total sense that the comics that infused your childhood would formally infuse the comics you make about your childhood. You mentioned the first strip—how long have you been working on Precious Rubbish?
I drew the first page in 2012 or 2013, after college. I had moved back to Texas. My life was very, very bad. At the time, I was drinking heavily, and I was spending all of my time with my biological family. I’d been making pen-and-ink comics, but my self-esteem was just so low. I didn’t believe that I deserved to even take up the physical space I occupied. I was interacting so much with my abusers. But I still had this compulsion to make comics, and I used the ingredients that were available to me in that boiling pot of chaos.
I continued making the work, sometimes quickly, sometimes taking years off, because at no point until I was about to pitch the book did I ever think that it was meant to be consumed by the public. It was a completely private practice of trying to make sense of what happened to me, the only way I knew how, pre-therapy and pre-sobriety. I think it’s a very pure representation of a traumatized person trying to understand her life.
Using digital art to write about trauma-impacted memory works incredibly well for me because, as I was healing and integrating what had happened to me, I could go back and rewrite and redraw. For example, some of the stories about my biological father were so clearly written from a place of deep denial. So it was constantly evolving up until it went to the printer, essentially. I think people who are in trauma recovery—we don’t heal completely; it’s a constant process to see ourselves clearly and own our story. The flexibility of digital comics allowed me to have that recovery experience be a part of the art-making.
I want to make sure that people who don’t read comics understand that being published by Fantagraphics is a big deal. Can you tell us about that and the reception that followed?
Fantagraphics has been my favorite comics publisher since I started seriously reading art comics. There’s a cartoonist named Mark Newgarden who’s been my mentor since around 2009. He has an Eisner Award–winning book, How to Read Nancy, which is a Fantagraphics book. He told me I had a book on my hands; I really had no idea. He wrote a letter to Fantagraphics advocating for the book. They acquired it in 2021, and later that year, I got a call from them asking if I wanted to join Fantagraphics as an art director. It was a perfect, wonderful thing that happened.
The reception has been remarkable. It’s really hard to wrap my head around the fact that people are reading this book because of how I understood it for so long as a personal exercise. But once I decided to pitch it to Fantagraphics, something in me completely shifted. I basically made a decision to believe in myself, to speak the truth of what happened to me, a million secrets I’ve held my entire life.
I started excerpting sections in mini-comics to see what it was like sharing the work, and I started to understand the real-life impact it can have on a readership. It was so profound. Like, I didn’t know what I was doing when I made that crossword puzzle, but I’ve had readers tell me, “I’m literally finding the words for what happened to me.” Then I was like “Oh, shit, this is what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. This is my calling.”
Does having the book out there feel cathartic or vulnerable?
The first few years of sharing my work were so painful. Talking about the subject matter and hearing my readers share about their pain was really triggering. I was feeling entirely drained and terrified of the book coming out. It was supposed to be in 2024, but I was like, “I need to wait another year because I’m not ready.”
I’m so glad I did, because in that year, I learned about boundaries and how to take care of myself. It was a year of quiet contemplation about what I was going to embark on, just being in direct communication with—I’m sober, so I speak woo-woo higher-power shit—my higher power, trying to make sure that I felt safe and ready. I had this beautiful transformative experience to be able to relate to my readers and my work in a healthy way, and now it’s a joy to talk about it.
It’s hard to explain how at peace I feel after releasing this book. It’s like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders, and I’m no longer gaslighting myself. When I read a stranger writing in the New York Times, in black and white, exactly what my abusers did to me, I can’t argue with that, you know? The making of the work was pure pain. That was not cathartic. That was not healing. It has been in the sharing of the work that the healing has happened for me.
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