By Judah Breitbach
You have a new book scheduled to be finished shortly before you come for your Writer in Residence in April-May, can you talk about that?
Yeah, well let’s say I’m hoping to finish it up, because I wouldn’t want to leave home if I hadn’t. It’s about indigenous people in the northwest territories in Canada, particularly the Dene people. It’s mainly centered around resource extraction and how that intersects with their lives Though it ends up being about a lot of things, which is basically the elephant in the room: residential schools and the effects of colonialism. It ended up being about a lot more than resource extraction. It sort of winds up being about the after effects of colonialism too.
Is this more an historical biography about the region and the people, or is it more first-hand encounters with people you met up there? Is it a cartoon as well?
It’s my normal sort of procedure, which is to go up, see a place, meet people and try to tell their stories in their words as much as possible in a narrative. It’s a complicated issue and you meet indigenous people on both sides of the equation whether they’re pro or against resource extraction. It’s also in comics form. The same old format you might be used to.
Do you prefer the term comics as opposed to cartoons? Or is it just semantics?
I prefer comics when we talk about a long-form thing. You know, I am a cartoonist, but I do comics. Other people would use the word cartoon in a more general fashion than the way I use it, but some of the terminology isn’t exactly precise. Comic books means longer books, multiple panels, pages. A lot of people refer to those as graphic novels and I understand that because people want to think of things in terms of a book. You know, a hardbound book in a bookstore, yes they are, but the word never bothered me it tends to bother other people.
I suppose it is besides the point, but when I think of a comic I think of Garfield, but when I think of a graphic novel of your work, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, not that they’re the same type but in a long-form narrative I think of a graphic novel.
Yeah well, the term graphic novel basically became popularized when my peers and I were doing comic books that were bound in bookstores. So, I didn’t grow up with the term graphic novel, I grew up with the term comic book. Though a lot of my peers feel, as I do, that the term is really a marketing term. My books are not actually novels they are non-fiction. I mean, in very literal sense, the term does not apply to my work. I realize it is just a popularized term now. It is sort of meaningless, in a sense you don’t want to quibble about it too much. I can say graphic novel. That’s the terminology that has basically won at this point.
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