Contemporary Authors

• School Spirits ( graphic novel) PictureBox (Brooklyn, NY), 2013

• FCBD World's Greatest Cartoonists - May 31, 2017 Fantagraphics, https://www.amazon.com/FCBD-Worlds-Greatest-Cartoonists-Davidson-ebook/dp/B071SG89JQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499460758&sr=1-1
• Lovers in the Garden - November 9, 2016 Retrofit Comics / Big Planet Comics, https://www.amazon.com/Lovers-Garden-Anya-Davidson/dp/1940398614/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499460758&sr=1-3
• Anya Davidson: School Spirits - October 31, 2013 PictureBox, https://www.amazon.com/Anya-Davidson-School-Spirits/dp/1939799023/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499460758&sr=1-5

• The Comics Journal - http://www.tcj.com/a-chat-with-anya-davidson/

  Quoted in Sidelights:
  She makes incredibly observant, funny, and generous comics,” “That last part is important. In all her many comics and zines, Anya seeks the best and most interesting of us and the world, though with an eye out for all that’s fucked up and mortifying. It’s a very delicate balance, and she never fails.”
  “Moreover, her comics are a joy to look at. Her thick-thin strokes dance on the page and her characters are always-recognizable graphic icons.I did very consciously set up a rivalry between Annimal, the drummer in my book, and Linda, the frontwoman. I’ve always hated the Rolling Stones, but I find the rivalry between [Keith] Richards and [Mick] Jagger really entertaining in a camp way. So I sprinkled some of that in. But it’s just a fact that bands have conflict.”
  “the best band name ever.”
  “some of the coolest people on the planet,”
  “so I drew this proto-Band for Life strip and that’s how it started.”
  wonderful book”
  “is really an armature for [Davidson’s] musings on culture, sex, money, love, and the weather.”
  I love it

  A Chat with Anya Davidson
  BY DAN NADEL NOV 2, 2016
  band-for-life-1

  I am an unabashed fan of Anya Davidson’s work, which I first read in 2007. I loved working with her as an author, and published her first book, School Spirits, in 2013. Then, as now, she makes incredibly observant, funny, and generous comics. That last part is important. In all her many comics and zines, Anya seeks the best and most interesting of us and the world, though with an eye out for all that’s fucked up and mortifying. It’s a very delicate balance, and she never fails (no pressure there). Anyhow, I’m always amazed at how much she has to say, and doesn’t mind us listening, about her seemingly omnivorous set of interests. Moreover, her comics are a joy to look at. Her thick-thin strokes dance on the page and her characters are always-recognizable graphic icons. Hers is a Kurtzman-esque cartooning technique that she can apply to any scenario of her choosing, though often with a SF undertone.

  I read her new and wonderful book, Band for Life, in a few giant gulps. It charts the fortunes of the band Gun Tit, which is really an armature for her musings on culture, sex, money, love, and the weather. I love it. Anya will be at this week’s Comic Arts Brooklyn with a new zine, Golden Chimes and a new comic book, Lovers in the Garden. Go out and get her books.

  Since we began talking about it a few weeks back in Chicago, I want to hear more. Tell me about your horse in Nova Scotia. And that lady, the one who looked after you.

  I grew up on Prince Edward Island, which is near Nova Scotia-similar vibe but even smaller. Telling a Canadian you grew up on PEI is like telling an American you grew up in Arkansas. It’s not cool. I met a woman named Yogi Gamester. Actually, my parents must have met her and I’m not sure how. She’s incredible. She grew up exercising racehorses, traveled all over Canada. Ended up on PEI with a young child in a bad marriage. Got a divorce, was given some land in the settlement and built her own house. Then she started rescuing horses. On PEI, harness racing is a big deal, but any kind of racing is really brutal on horses. They start them too young, when their bones and tendons aren’t fully mature. They get terrible injuries and are sent to the slaughterhouse. Yogi started rescuing horses from the track, and taking in all kinds of unwanted horses and ponies. Last I knew she had over twenty. She teaches kids in the community to handle and ride the horses for practically nothing. My friends and I would ride all over the island on trails and dirt roads. We had complete freedom by age 9. We’d fall, we’d get fucked up, all the girls I met at Yogi’s grew up to be tough as nails. Yogi funds the whole thing with her own money, and a few donations. She works at the vet college in the shipping department, and I remember her taking us to the college to learn about horse parasites. We’d look at these giant jars full of parasites in formaldehyde, and watch movies about animal husbandry and eat pizza. She would often take in Dutch vet students. The Dutch are really serious about agriculture I think, which is why a lot of them come over to Canada. I’m starting to dredge up really old weird memories. Goddamn it, Dan. I’m conjuring up a handsome Dutch icthyologist and now I’m going to move on to another question. Oh, but you can check out her website here.

  When did you discover music and begin performing?

  I grew up crazy about music. First it was oldies, then it was ’70s hard rock, then it was grunge. Once I hit grunge, around age 12, I started reading about the bands I loved and learning that they’d been heavily influenced by punk. There was a record shop on the Island, Back Alley Discs. Chaz who ran the place started recommending me punk records. I had a best friend, Erin, who was obsessed too. Her mom worked at a nature store, and I remember we went down in the basement of the shop, where Erin would often hang out, and we put on Plastic Surgery Disasters. That was the first time I heard the Dead Kennedys. After that we went to a lot of shows, and started ordering 7-inches that sounded cool from distro catalogs. The zine Slug & Lettuce was huge for me. There was a small but active scene on the island. I didn’t start playing in a band (although I’d had some guitar lessons) until I was 18, and I moved to Chicago (from Nashville Tennessee. Long story.) for school. I met the members of Coughs, the band I was in throughout most of my 20s, at Food Not Bombs. They had a try-out and I became their singer.

  What was the arc of Coughs? Sometimes people tell me Coughs was/is legendary. Tell me more.

  27338-500I’m not sure who you’ve been talking to. Did Ethan D’Ercole (killer screenprinter!) tell you Coughs was legendary? We were around for about six years, and we definitely had fans in Chicago, who were mostly other musicians who played in bands that we were fans of. We were on Load Records, with great bands like Lightning Bolt, Brainbombs, Sightings and Scissor Girls. We did two LPs with Load. LPs I’m still pretty proud of. We started out practicing in this basement at a place called the Creative Resistance Artist Collective and playing places like the A-Zone (Autonomous Zone), which was an anarchist space with a zine library, to playing clubs and more traditional venues. We toured a fair amount, east and West Coast, and right as we were breaking up we toured the UK. I’m so thankful for my time in that band. I got to see the world and meet people in contexts I never could have imagined. There were six of us, all really strong personalities. The members of Coughs are wilder, weirder and more brilliant than any fictional characters I could create. We were all really young when we joined the band, and some of us needed to leave Chicago and try other things. We’ve mostly all kept playing music.

  I first heard of your work from CF and Carlos Gonzales back in 2007. How did you encounter those guys?

  I met those guys on tour. Our first tour, I think, was the East Coast. Providence, New York, Boston. It’s very very foggy. I didn’t book the shows so I don’t know who the original contact was. All I know is that we showed up to Providence and I’d never heard of Fort Thunder and I had no idea that Olneyville was home to so many of the world’s most brilliant cartoonists. It was probably the single most formative experience of my life. I had brought a bunch of my own shitty zines on tour and they were so gracious. They were like “oh cool, you make comics. We make comics too.” They treated me like an equal, even though they were leaps and bounds ahead of me. It meant everything. If someone comes up to you with their shitty zine, treat them kindly, for fuck’s sake.

  You are, despite your personal shyness, a natural performer. Do you miss the stage? What is the best show you ever saw?

  I did miss it terribly but I’m in a new band With Conor Stechschulte and Chris Day, two amazing artists, and our pal Kenny Rasmussen on drums. I think we’re gonna be called Lilac. Fuck you, Kenny, we’re called Lilac now, OK? Deal with it. Just kidding. Kenny’s not gonna read this. He’s lucky–he’s not a cartoonist. It’s really really hard to find a group of people you connect with personally and musically. When you do it’s precious. It’s really hard to let go, and there’s a grieving process when you break up. Dude that “best show you ever saw” shit is impossible. I have favorite moments. I remember CF hanging from the rafters of the Che Cafe in San Diego. I remember Mindflayer playing at the Texas Ballroom, and XBXRX at the Fireside Bowl and Neptune at some club in Boston and the USA is a Monster in the basement at Mister City and Sisterfucker at the Mopery and the White Mice at some bizarre frat house in Philly and Tinsel Teeth at a warehouse space in Providence-not sure which one. Those are some stand-out moments.

  band-for-life-181I somehow don’t think Guntit is actually based on your own bands (or maybe….), but the member do fit some rock archetypes. Are you a reader of rock bios? If so, which is your fave?

  The name Guntit is taken from a real band. Lale Westvind, Thomas Toye and Laura Perez Harris were all living in New York (Lale’s since moved to Philly) and they started a band. When I heard they were called Guntit I was like, “that’s the best band name ever.” You know, the reason most of us start cartooning is we’re in grade school and we draw our teachers boning or something and our classmates think it’s hilarious so we keep at it. I wanted to make Lale, Tom and Laura chuckle, because they’re some of the coolest people on the planet, so I drew this proto-Band For Life strip and that’s how it started. But all the characters are fictional in the sense that they’re 95% me, a sprinkle of my friends and a sprinkle of observation out in the world. As far as band bios, yeah, I read Come as You Are, the Story of Nirvana when I was a kid and that was a big deal, and Confusion is Next, the Sonic Youth Story. Get in the Van, the Rollins one, is great. I read White Line Fever, by Lemmy, while I was on tour once. That’s a great one for reading in the car cause the type is huge. And Patti Smith’s memoirs. I don’t know if I have a favorite, although the Nirvana one turned me on to a lot of other music. I did very consciously set up a rivalry between Annimal, the drummer in my book, and Linda, the frontwoman. I’ve always hated the Rolling Stones, but I find the rivalry between Richards and Jagger really entertaining in a camp way. So I sprinkled some of that in. But it’s just a fact that bands have conflict. I don’t know if collaboration can exist without conflict.

  I assume you like hippies and punks, but if you had to choose, which would you take, and body aside, which cultural parts?

  r-1984967-1256753789-gifMy philosophy is perfectly illustrated by the cover of the LP by the band Uncurbed. It’s a picture of a bunch of half-clothed hippies in a commune, but the music on the record is just super nasty and crusty metallic hardcore. They have a song called Liberation Hippies and one called Party Punx. They got it right. Since the turn of the century there’s been an unbroken thread of counter-cultural activity and awareness. It takes different forms but the differences are mostly aesthetic. Progressives know that those boundaries are arbitrary, and divisive. Yeah-I get it-punks are supposed to hate hippies ‘cause hippies were all about doing drugs and burning out and they didn’t effect the social change they were supposed to, and it’s punk to hate your parents etc…The fact is, I hate all codified subcultures. I do and say and think what the fuck I want, and I dress however I want, and I recognize that everyone involved in any countercultural struggle is an ally. Janis Joplin was punk as fuck. Aesthetically I have to say my favorite decade is the 70’s.

  Dogs. Tell me about dogs.

  Dogs are disgusting and I wish I didn’t love them so much. Mine is getting old, which is really hard on a big dog. Her hind legs are getting weak. Pets are tragic.

  Who do you think draws the best animals in comics?

  I’ll tell you who draws the best animals but she’s not specifically a cartoonist. Kathleen Hale, author of the Orlando the Marmalade Cat series from the 1930-3-70’s. Her illustrations are stunning. Also, I’ve been reading about Jack Yeats, WB Yeats’ brother. He was an illustrator and cartoonist. He did a lot of drawings for this magazine called Paddock Life. His horses are amazing. So are Lautrec’s. There’s the whole school of “half animal, half people” cartooning. Crumb’s Fritz the Cat wins that contest. Brian Blomerth’s “Pups in Trouble” comics are lovely. Gilbert Shelton’s Wonder Warthog is great. Leslie Weibeler draws really good animals too.

  Kathleen Hale, A Bicycle Made for Five, circa 1938.
  Kathleen Hale, A Bicycle Made for Five, circa 1938.
  Do you have any experience with the prison system?

  No, and I felt a little weird about representing it, even briefly, in my book. I was institutionalized as a teen after a suicide attempt. That was my only experience of being held against my will, and having no autonomy whatsoever. Being told what to wear, being physically restrained etc… But I know it’s far different-I would never compare that experience to what people deal with in prison. I think our prison system is racist and irreparably flawed, and that it needs to be dismantled. I had my characters meet in prison because I wanted to illustrate their inability to function in conventional society, but one is coming from a place of uncontrolled, self- destructive anger and the other is acting specifically in protest. And there’s a B movie “women in prison” trope that I wanted to explore, because the book is very much about loving trash culture. Specifically Reform School Girls with Wendy O Williams, who’s a hero of mine.

  band-for-life-215Do you care about artistic communities? Do they matter?

  Yeah. I’ve always been interested in the idea of intentional communities. I’ve never tried living in a communal setting but I can tell you my personality really wouldn’t jive with it. I love hearing about Ida, for instance, the intentional queer community in Tennessee. I have some friends in New Mexico who all bought land right next to each other and are building Earth ships. They’re heroes. I’m an only child and I grew up pretty solitary. I’m not great at sharing, and I like to work alone. But I live within walking distance of friends, and I love being in close proximity to them. It’s a fact that I would have nothing without the artists I’ve met over the years. Artistic community has really been everything to me.

  Do you think we need a more robust ecosystem for comics? You seem pretty self-sufficient — always have — but do you feel like there’s a place where your work goes and reaches an audience?

  I don’t know Dan. I mean, it’s easy to romanticize the days when print was stronger and there were more paying venues for cartoonists and illustrators. I’m really wary of nostalgia, and I can’t say if that was a better time because I wasn’t there. But yeah, I wish there was more distribution for comics these days, and I wish there were more newspapers and magazines that paid artists. I don’t think there’s much of an audience for my work, and I don’t care. You know what there is an audience for? Books about weddings and food. Pictures of cats in funny costumes. Pictures of celebrities at the beach. That’s OK. This world is absolutely, unconscionably terrifying. If you’ve had a hard day and you want to look at a picture of a butt in a thong, I’ll be the last person to criticize. The people who appreciate my work seem to find it. That’s amazing, and I’m very thankful. I’m obsessed with the book No Hidden Meanings by Sheldon Kopp. It’s kind of an atheist’s bible. It’s a list of precepts. 12, 13 and 14 say it all. “It is a random universe to which we bring meaning.” “You don’t really control anything.” “You can’t make anyone love you.”

  bandfinal178Is page 178 basically your daily dilemma?

  Yes 100%. Being an artist can seem frivolous in light of how much healing the world needs. And I’m constantly being reminded of how insignificant I am, and how small the audience is for my work, and agonizing over whether I should have become a therapist or a teacher or a ceramicist. But I do think art is a necessity. I think it’s a spiritual need for human beings. I mean, there was a lot going on thirty-thousand years ago. You wouldn’t think that Paleolithic people would have a pressing need to paint horses and rhinos in the Chauvet cave but there they are. They had religious significance, they were an attempt to understand and influence the natural world. Am I comparing the success of my work to that of the Chauvet cave? Fuck no. I’m just saying that some people are compelled to make art and I’m one of them and I wish I could stop but I can’t. There’s also a part in the book where Linda says “sometimes I feel like I’m not living up to my full potential and other times I’m just thankful I’m not lying in a ditch drinking paint thinner.” That’s me too. Sometimes I’m just amazed I didn’t have to be institutionalized for my entire life. My psyche is kinda fragile. I think I’m doing the best I can.

  Your comics have always been amazingly hopeful right alongside the crotchety humor. What gives you such optimism?

  I’m very privileged. I’ve had so much love and support from family and friends. I truly know what it feels like to give and receive love. I know the power of love. Plus, check out Kopp’s precepts #23, 24 and 25: “Progress is an illusion” “Evil can be displaced but never eradicated, as all solutions breed new problems.” “Yet it is necessary to keep on struggling toward solution.” “

  band-for-life-162It strikes me that you’re doing a kind of slice o’ life comics almost like American Splendor or something. Whatever comes to mind comes out of the character’s mouths. They are distinctly characters, but you channel your observations through them. They all can’t help but comment on everything from age to sex to urban life. Why funnel that through these monster/SF characters?

  Ha! I’ve been asking myself the same thing. I thought for a while that it was more interesting to draw monsters than people, but I’m starting to change my tune. I wanted it to be a visual joke, really deadpan. I thought the incongruity would be funny-that you see these outrageous looking characters talking about really mundane shit. I was influenced by Melvin Monster, which you turned me onto, where there’s a monster world and a human world and the fabric between them is really thin and porous, and you can kind of step back and forth between them. And I was tremendously influenced by Brinkman and Chippendale, who do a lot of that. And I wanted to make a joke about the B movie “monsters and babes” trope, where the slimy monster carries off this gorgeous babe. I thought, “what if the monster and the babe lived happily ever after, in a really egalitarian relationship?” And then I got frustrated, ‘cause I was like “how can I address these really pressing, real-world issues like killer racist cops, if everyone’s green and orange etc…” That’s why I chose to try a different approach with Lovers in the Garden, my book that’s coming out from Retrofit in November.

  band-for-life-89I was struck that by how casually you set up relationships between different species/same sexes, etc. And that they are all based on intense conversations and proclamations. It brings to mind, actually. Philip Roth, who you reference. Tell me about depicting love/sex/devotion. And Roth, too?

  I often wish that I was better at depicting sex explicitly. You know who’s incredible at that? Conor Stechschulte. His Generous Bosom comics depict the weirdness and mechanics of sex so explicitly and brilliantly. Relationships and sex always surprise me. The way you can find yourself profoundly attracted to someone with whom you have nothing in common. The way you can be madly in love with someone you’re not attracted to. How you can end up in bed with someone unexpectedly. How you can be tormented for years with dreams about an ex, even in a happy relationship. It was important to me to try and depict devotion because capitalist culture always wants you to be looking at young flesh, new flesh. It’s kind of subversive to try and figure out how non-traditional couples can survive and thrive over the long term. I read some Philip Roth right after college. Portnoy’s Complaint, Exit Ghost, Goodbye Columbus. I tried to read Our Gang but couldn’t get into it. I liked Portnoy’s Complaint a lot but the Breast is my favorite. It’s such a stupid idea-this man physically becomes a breast. It’s in the tradition of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Gogol’s The Nose, so there’s definitely a precedent, but it’s so outrageous and he plays it so straight and it ends up being profoundly affecting. He takes his outrageous premise seriously and pushes it as far as it can possibly go. That’s what great sci-fi writers do. And I applaud his agenda-I read that he was really into busting up the stereotype of the effete Jewish intellectual man. He wanted to give Jewish men their sexuality back. That’s hot.

  band-for-life-142Tell me about your SF love. It’s been present the last few years in force. It seems both literary and visual and musical. What regions does it space? Like, concept records, Star Trek, LeGuin, etc?

  My Sci-Fi love is deep and wide and all-encompassing, and has been ever since I can remember. David Cronenberg is probably my favorite director. His movies have this incredibly astute psychological sensibility-Movies like The Brood and Dead Ringers really tackle the horror of living in a female body in a way that few directors can match. I love Rodney Matthews and Roger Dean as psychedelic sci-fi album cover artists, and Robert Beatty is carrying on that tradition. I love Space is the Place, the Sun Ra movie, and everything about George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic and the artists they worked with like Pedro Bell, Overton Lloyd and Ronald “Stozo” Edwards. Star Trek is perfect-As a kid I watched the original series. Battlestar Galactica is a huge favorite. Farscape is the best. I like the Left Hand of Darkness a lot. I was really into Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy and the Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk as a teenager. The Fifth Sacred Thing is interesting because it’s one of the few novels that imagines what a utopian futuristic community would look like. It’s a lot of guilt-free group sex and crystal healing which, come on, who doesn’t want that? I’m fascinated with Martine Rothblatt and other transhumanists, even though I think transhumanism is fatally flawed for reasons I won’t go into here. I’m not so much into hard sci-fi like Asimov and stuff. I can appreciate that stuff but I’m more into the psychological drama of space travel, and the ways we can use sci-fi to better understand our present. And I’m in love with Lane Milburn, who’s a sci-fi cartoonist. Sometimes he wakes up and tells me he’s dreamt about space colonies, or just flying through the vastness of space. I think he might have traveled here from another dimension.

  This book is a collection of serialized strips — so nearly every strip has a punchline. Was that a challenge you made for yourself? To tell complete vignettes in each strip rather than focus exclusively on serialization?

  No no that was all dictated to me by Nick Gazin, the comics editor at VICE, where the strip first appeared. He explicitly stated that every strip should end with a cliffhanger or a punchline. The whole form of the book-the fact that the story is told in strips, is because of the parameters around that gig. Even after the strip got axed from VICE I maintained that format because it was a really interesting challenge. I still don’t know if I’m funny, but I entertain myself. Sheldon Kopp, precept #30: “We have only ourselves, and one another. That might not be much, but that’s all there is.”

  band-for-life-27

  Your palette reminds me in some ways of all things great and glorious about our lord and savior Karl Wirsum. You come to color (I guess) as a print maker. How’s the difference like between printing color and using markers?

  Karl Wirsum is a divine being, and I think he was super influenced by advertising, sign painting and other mass-distributed print media. I definitely come to my palette through printmaking, specifically 4 color process printing, or CMYK printing. CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, key. Key is usually black. And then you get great secondary colors when you overlap those primary colors. Markers don’t have the same flatness, and I cheated. I had, like, a few different blues, I had a red marker and a magenta marker. I didn’t limit my palette quite as much as I do when I’m printmaking, but it’s still pretty limited.

  Also: Replacements or Husker Du or both? There’s no wrong answer.

  Husker Du. Zen Arcade is such a genius record. This might be controversial, but I just can’t get into the Replacements.

• Fantagraphics - http://www.fantagraphics.com/artists/anya-davidson/

  Anya Davidson

  Anya Davidson is a wild animal. She draws comics in the attic of a derelict building full of racoons on Chicago's South Side. Her graphic novels are School Spirits (2013), Band for Life (2016), and Lovers in the Garden (2016).

• Paste Magazine - https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/10/band-for-life-cartoonist-anya-davidson-on-being-cr.html

  Band for Life Cartoonist Anya Davidson on Being Creative for the Love of It and Making Noisy, Weird Art
  By Shea Hennum | October 21, 2016 | 9:30am
  COMICS FEATURES ANYA DAVIDSON
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  Band for Life Cartoonist Anya Davidson on Being Creative for the Love of It and Making Noisy, Weird Art
  For the last few years, Chicago-based cartoonist Anya Davidson has quietly been making waves in alternative comics circles. Her work, which evokes the bombastic action of Jack Kirby as immediately as it does a riot grrrl zine, is bold and brash. Her bulky, blocky figures clash and collide with one another in a cacophony of pen and ink. It’s the kind of genre-busting, high- and low-culture-blending comic perfectly at home in a post-Fort Thunder alternative comics scene, and for those in the know, Davidson has been a cartoonist to follow. Her first book-length work, School Spirit, was published by the legendary PictureBox back in 2013, and her most recent work, Band for Life, was released by Fantagraphics in comic stores last week before its bookstore debut next week.

  band for life-COVER.jpg

  Paste exchanged a few emails with Davidson to discuss the upcoming graphic novel, covering everything from the book’s beginning to her recent work as a comics critic.
  1linebreakdiamond.png

  Paste: To start with: can you tell me a little about where Band for Life came from?

  Anya Davidson: I was in two different bands throughout my 20s. I was the singer (I screamed—there was no singing) in a band called Coughs for six years, starting when I was about 18. That band was hugely formative for me. After Coughs broke up, I played guitar and screamed in a band called Cacaw for a few years. And I’m doing the same thing in a new band now with some amazing dudes, a couple of whom are also cartoonists and illustrators. We’re trying to decide on a name. Maybe Lilac? I wanted Old Hag but the dudes shot it down.

  Most (pretty much all) stories about artists and musicians start with the artist struggling, and then show their meteoric rise to fame and then, often, their tragic decline. None of the bands I’ve been in were ever going to be huge. We were too noisy, too weird. We were making music for our friends, and for the experience of working together, recording, touring, just spending time with each other. I wasn’t seeing any stories about creative people who just do what they do, year after year, and just keep plugging away under the radar. I wanted to examine that—being creative for the love of it. And I wanted an outlet to cope with my feelings of fear about getting older and never wanting any of the things adults are supposed to want. I heard that VICE wanted weekly comics and I’ve always idolized dudes who could knock out weekly strips—I wanted that challenge. So that’s why it took that form.

  Paste: Was this something you approached VICE with?

  Davidson: Working with VICE was a Faustian bargain and honestly the less said about it the better. I hate to be cryptic, but I just don’t want to get too deep into that. I have to acknowledge that more people saw my work because of them, and I can’t deny I wanted people to see my work.

  BAND-01.jpg
  Band for Life Interior Art by Anya Davidson

  Paste: I know that they did stop serializing it, though, and then you kept up with it on your Tumblr. Why did you keep up with the strip like that? Or, let me rephrase: what about the strip compelled you to continue it past a point where, I think, many people would’ve shelved it?

  Davidson: I can’t imagine who would shelve their own project because it wasn’t getting enough clicks to sell advertising to Hot Topic or BP or whoever. That person would have to be severely lacking self-confidence. I make comics from a place of desperate, personal need. If I went down the laundry list of disappointments and setbacks I’ve experienced as an artist, it would take all day. It’s never stopped me from making the work I want to make. I’m not laboring under any kind of illusion that I’m a misunderstood genius or that people don’t “get” my work. My comics are meant to entertain. But I do understand that they’re not for everyone. And that’s fine. The end goal is not about money. The people who do enjoy them let me know, so I don’t feel alone or alienated. It’s pretty meta because the strip is about artists making art for a small audience, and the joys and setbacks they encounter, and their inability to do anything else with their lives. So it gave me an outlet to express the frustrations and disappointments I encountered in real time. And I love my characters so much. Not because I think I’m a great artist, but because I drew life into their little bodies and gave them personalities and worked really hard to understand who they were.

  Also—and this is important to mention—by the time VICE dropped it, Fantagraphics had already agreed to publish Band for Life, and they maintained their support the whole time. At that point there was no signed contract, so they could have backed off, but Eric Reynolds, my editor, was very encouraging, which meant a lot to me. I’ve always had tremendous respect and admiration for Fantagraphics and the artists they publish, and it was a dream of mine to work with them. So that gave me courage, too. In my years as an artist, throughout the setbacks, I’ve always been buoyed by so much support from friends and editors. I feel really lucky that way, and it’s helped to keep me going.

  Paste: I think that love for your characters really shows in the work. A lot of these characters—and it was what really struck me about School Spirit, which was the first work of yours that I encountered—already feel distinct and fully formed when you first meet them. I’d be curious to know more about your process, especially for something serialized like this. How much do you plan, how much just comes from working with them for a few strips, etc.?

  Davidson: I had a story arc for Band for Life, but I wrote the strips week to week. It kept the project fresh and spontaneous. Sometimes I’d write a few weeks ahead when I knew there was a thread I wanted to draw out. I had a lot of fun working that way. Lovers in the Garden, the book I just finished for Retrofit Comics, was scripted start to finish before I put pen to paper. And my next book is going to be fully scripted, too. For a graphic novel, in my case, just so I can keep everything straight, and so I can hone dialogue, I really prefer scripting. But the strip form uniquely gave me the freedom to improvise. Every cartoonist has their preferred methods—there’s no right way. As far as character development, all my characters are me. I went to see George Saunders speak and a woman asked him how he was able to write the adolescent girl so well in his short story “Victory Lap,” and he said, “Because she’s me.” I also think about people I know: their mannerisms and speech patterns and personal histories. So all of my characters have elements of friends, acquaintances and myself put in a blender. And I like to drop people into stories as they’re happening. I want people to feel like they’ve been dropped in a world that is fully formed—like the story started before they got there. I think that’s most engaging, most surprising.

  BAND-06.jpg
  Band for Life Interior Art by Anya Davidson

  Paste: You’ve always had a ‘70s hard-rock gig poster aesthetic to your coloring, but the palette in Band for Life feels like it’s that turned up to 11—super loud and garish and bold. It’s obviously not a “realistic” color palette; where do the color choices here come from/how do you make them?

  Davidson: The number one influence on my color choices has always been the CMYK screen-printing process. That stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, key (key is usually black). You print those colors in that order and you can layer them to make secondary colors—green, orange and purple. And even tertiary colors if you want, but I usually stick with those seven colors, with slight variations, no matter what medium I’m coloring in. I love having limitations. It keeps me from being overwhelmed with choices, and it forces me to make weird choices sometimes, which I like.

  Paste: And do you usually color digitally? The colors on Band for Life almost feel like you did them with felt pens, or those fat Crayola pens—they have this really wonderful lurid texture to them.

  Davidson: Band for Life is colored with Faber-Castell markers, so yep, they definitely have a lot of texture. I avoid coloring digitally as much as possible, but sometimes it looks best. I try to pick the coloring method that makes the most sense for any given project. I knew coloring Band For Life was going to be a huge amount of work, and I’m able to color more quickly with markers, so that factored into my decision, but I do really love those Faber-Castell colors.

  BAND-07.jpg
  Band for Life Interior Art by Anya Davidson

  Paste: That’s interesting. It’s easy to see why certain palettes may be chosen, but I don’t think I’ve seen many people talking about purposefully choosing certain coloring methods. How do you make that decision about what’s best for the project?

  Davidson: I think most sane people stick with one coloring method. I’m always wanting to experiment. But I just feel it out. I have a vibe in mind that I want to convey. Like my book Lovers in the Garden is set in ‘70s New York, and it’s kind of a novella, so I thought that would be a good project to try a combination of different types of markers and colored pencils. It has kind of a gritty vibe, and it’s shorter and the original pages are smaller, so I had the luxury of going all out on the hand coloring. If I want something to look slicker, I color it digitally. I’m still working it all out. I probably always will be.

  Paste: I know you’ve written about comics for The Comics Journal. I know a few cartoonists do it for them, but it’s still uncommon. What compelled you to start doing that?

  Davidson: Oh man, yeah, so reviewing other peoples’ work is really hard if you’re in the field. I know, for instance, that a lot of famous authors worked as reviewers to help pay the bills, but it’s so hard to write critically about your peers. I use the term peers loosely, because Dan Clowes, who I wrote about, is my better, not my peer. In any case, Dan Nadel asked me, kind of out of the blue, to do some writing and it was a really interesting challenge. Thinking critically about the work of others helps me better articulate my own tastes and goals, and think more critically about my own work. I’ll write more for TCJ if Dan asks me back, but my primary focus is definitely on making my own work, not reviewing other people.

• Comics Beat - http://www.comicsbeat.com/interview-anya-davidson-on-rebellion-punk-rock-and-band-for-life/

  Quoted in Sidelights: “It really is a parallel version of my life,” s“There’s a lot of things in it about how it is to do shows, to tour, to deal with musical equipment. All of that comes from personal experience. None of the characters come from any one person in particular; they’re all composite of different people I know.” “all have different aspects of my personality,”
  I guess I wasn’t generating enough clicks and advertising revenue to justify the space I had.”
  “Since I already had an idea of where that story began and ended, I floated it by them and they were interested,” So a lot of good did come out of the whole thing.”
  Interview: Anya Davidson on rebellion, punk rock and ‘Band for Life’
  one of the boldest graphic novels of the year
  Anya Davidson's 'Band for Life' is one of the boldest graphic novels of the year, an eye splitting trip into the lives of am indie punk rock band and their misadventures. Call it Josie and the Pussycats for the post-iTunes generation. Here Davidson talks about her own music tastes and band as well as the history of the strip and her use of color.
  Interview: Anya Davidson on rebellion, punk rock and ‘Band for Life’
  YOU ARE HERE: HOME / PUBLISHERS / FANTAGRAPHICS / INTERVIEW: ANYA DAVIDSON ON REBELLION, PUNK ROCK AND ‘BAND FOR LIFE’
  10/27/2016 1:00 AM BY PHILIPPE LEBLANC 1 COMMENT

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  Anya Davidson is an artist, musician and cartoonist residing in Chicago. Her first graphic novel School Spirits was published in 2013 by the now defunct publisher Picturebox. She’s been busy since the release of this first graphic novel with shows, art and working on a new serialized comic strip called Band for Life, the tale of a noise rock band in Chicago, their woes and issues as they try to make their music career work. A collection of her serialized comics Band for Life has recently been released by Fantagraphics. I’ve had the chance to discuss with Anya about Band for Life, her career in comics, her first graphic novel School Spirits, music and colour in her work.

  —

  band_for_life_coverPhilippe Leblanc: For those readers who may not be familiar with you and your work, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

  Anya Davidson: My work isn’t about any one particular thing, but I do think that the unifying factor is it deals with leftist political and progressive politics within character-driven stories. I think a lot of my work has a political aspect. It’s really personal, but it’s also really lefty. I’m trying not to make it too didactic; I don’t want to be preachy. I’m not interested in that at all.

  PL: When looking at your previous work, and in particular School Spirits, you can see that there is a recurring theme of anti-conformity, of a rebellion against the massive systems your characters are in, whether it’s school or office work or factory work. How do you see your work?

  AD: I’m not sure. It’s impossible for me as the artist to say for sure. One of the things that I struggle with, or at least that frustrates me, is that I don’t have an objective idea of myself. None of us can, really. Diane Arbus, and I’m not quoting her directly, said something like “people who seem the most eccentric are the ones whose view of themselves differs the most from how the outside world views who they are.” I’m not sure I know, but I like hearing how other people perceive the work.

  PL: I first encountered your work in the anthology Believed Behavior back in 2013 for which you did a fantastic story about factory workers and their broken dreams.

  AD: I really like Andy Rench, the publisher of that newspaper anthology, and his work. He’s really good at finding ways to showcase cartoonists and he’s really active in Chicago. The story was only two pages, but it was a lot of fun to make. If anybody hasn’t seen that anthology they should look it up. Then they should look into the work of the artist from that anthology and see what these artists like and what else they’ve done.

  I think it’s interesting that people, whether it’s in music or comics, have this impulse once they find something they like, to do research and figure out who influenced that artist or author and just keep digging deeper to figure out the movement or history of where this comes from. There’s a great drive in those that like comics to understand where the work they like is coming from, to research and educate themselves about the things they like and I find that great, it’s what makes being a creative person exciting.

  PL: Is there anything in particular you would recommend people look into?

  AD: I think everyone should look into the comics published by Breakdown Press. They’re doing some of the best contemporary comics being published right now in the world. Tom Oldham, one of the publishers, is really into classic sci-fi from the 60’s and 70’s. Beyond that, he appreciates a wide range of work and loves the history of comics as well as contemporary work. The artists Breakdown is publishing have that same reverence for the medium-people like Lale Westvind, Antoine Cosse, Conor Stechschulte and Lando.

  There’s so much good work right now being done by smaller publishers, like Retrofit Comics or 2dCloud, but sometimes I worry about their financial stability. A lot of people are relying on Kickstarter now and I really hope they remain successful because their work is vital.

  PL: Your previous work, I’m thinking in particular of School Spirits, is very interested in music and the world of heavy metal and rock music. The narrative and theatricals around heavy metal music in particular seems to be a cornerstone of your work. When you approached Band for Life, how did you manage to distill sound into your images?

  AD: I think it’s hard to capture the energy of a musical performance on the page. One of my primary concerns as a cartoonist is to make work that’s lively and captures motion really well. Having a free flowing line is important. I don’t want my work to look stiff. So I try to draw panels with a lot of movement in them. Another way is with colour. I’m also fascinated by the power dynamics in rock and funk music. The showmanship in those genres, the costumes, the poses, are so iconic and evocative. It’s something I try to capture as well. I’ve watched so many performance of the Plasmatics, and Wendy O Williams, their front woman, is just really owning these strong images of female empowerment. Same with the funk singer Betty Davis. She’s always dressed in these outrageous futuristic sci-fi outfits and she’s this tall statuesque woman. She just looks like a goddess.

  In Band for Life, I wanted the two primary characters to have an antagonistic relationship. See, I’m not a fan of the Rolling Stones. In fact, I hate their music, but Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have this legendary rock relationship and I’ve read that they were always at odds. I wanted my protagonists to just be constantly at odds. It seems like such a male music archetype you know, these two leads just disagreeing with each other about the music they’re making and trying to outdo each other, battling for supremacy. I wanted to turn that around by having female protagonists. My primary protagonists I dressed really high heels, ridiculously so, with outfits that are a little bit sci-fi, a little bit 50’s. It’s silly. Sometimes I worry these outfits are too silly, but they’re also power images. Those character designs aren’t directly related to the sound itself, but they evoke the feeling and essence of rock music.

  I never formally studied music. I took a few classes here and there, but I never learned to write music. When I’m in a band and we’re playing instruments, if someone told me “play this in a different key” or anything technical, I’m just completely untrained. The great thing about meeting my musician friends in Chicago is that they taught me that punk ethos: that if you want to do something, do it. If you want to make a comic, make a comic. If you want to play music, play music. Everyone can do what they want and that was a great democratic thing. So as far as integrating songwriting into the work, I do, but not in a formal way.

  PL: Can you tell us about Band for life? It was originally serialized online on Vice, is that correct?

  AD: It was originally a weekly comic I did for Vice. I was Facebook friends with the comics editor at Vice and I saw that he was looking for new people to do weekly strips. I had just finished School Spirits and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. I thought doing a weekly strip would be a good opportunity to force myself to generate material. I had done a strip about a band that I submitted to a local newspaper as part of a competition they had for weekly comics and it had been rejected, maybe it was too weird for them. As a cartoonist, I’m used to rejection, so I didn’t let it get me down. I liked the idea of exploring the life of a band and I submitted it to VICE and they liked it.

  I did it for about 9 months and, unfortunately, we had a difficult relationship. I think Vice really relies on numbers and clicks, for advertising, as a money-making tool. They have a certain “Vice-style” and an editorial tone [that is reflected in] most of their content. Since I wasn’t truly riding that line and I wasn’t generating enough advertising revenue, it didn’t work out. Initially, I was going to do a weekly comic strip for as long as I could, but after 9 months, I guess I wasn’t generating enough clicks and advertising revenue to justify the space I had. In a way, it was an interesting look into what it takes to survive in the media landscape right now. There’s not a lot of money and the chances to get paid for any kind of cartooning, especially weekly, are slim.

  A few months after I started the strip, I had been in touch with Fantagraphics. When I left off with Vice, they seemed to like the idea of Band for Life. Since I already had an idea of where that story began and ended, I floated it by them and they were interested. So a lot of good did come out of the whole thing. I think the thing about being a cartoonist is that you have to be flexible. One minute is a disappointment the other you find a good opportunity. You have to keep moving forward and that’s what I did.

  PL: When you started this webcomic, were you working for the screen, or had you envisioned it would be ever be collected as a book?band1

  AD: Everything I do I want to get printed at some point. I think I heard Michael Deforge say something similar: that everything he makes will be printed eventually, and I really agree with that. I love books. Like most cartoonists, I hate reading things online. I love books, so having a printed book is like the ultimate reward in a way.

  PL: You said you knew how the story was going to end. Was Band for Life plotted from the start and did that change over time? At what point did you know “This is where I’m going with this book”?

  AD: I did. I was in a noise rock band that was together for six years. I met them when I was eighteen years old when I moved to Chicago. It was an incredible experience with people I loved very dearly. There was a beginning, middle and end in the trajectory of our lives together. I kind of knew that the strip was going to follow a similar path. I didn’t want it to be autobiographical. It’s not a memoir, but I liked the idea of lending this structure to the book.

  PL: When you started doing Band for Life, was your initial motivation in creating it to address that part of your life. Or did you want to just use that structure to make a parallel version of your life?

  AD: Yeah, it really is a parallel version of my life. There’s a lot of things in it about how it is to do shows, to tour, to deal with musical equipment. All of that comes from personal experience. None of the characters come from any one person in particular; they’re all composite of different people I know. I think my friends are a lot wilder and even more exceptional and fascinating than any characters I can come up with. Real life is stranger and more glorious than fiction.

  It comes from a lot of experience, but it’s very fictitious. The characters are reflections of me in a way. They all have different aspects of my personality.

  PL: How do you recombine your own life into different characters to mirror your own experiences?

  AD: I think you have to give yourself some distance. School Spirits was the same way. It was a way to come to terms with the difficult time I had in high school and come to an understanding about that. None of the characters were entirely me or filled with my own experiences, but they were all imbued with my own life in a way. How I saw people, how I was. I had to split those experiences, I’m not sure how it turned out, but I wanted characters to have such or such experience and extrapolate from there.

  PL: Is Band for Life addressing the adulthood of your characters from School Spirits?

  AD: For sure. I don’t think there’s any way to get around that. I think my job as an older artist now, is to get away from that. My next comic that I’m making for Retrofit has some elements of my personality and my sense of humour, but it’s set in the 70’s. It’s a crime story, the protagonists are criminals. I feel like now that I’ve done Band for Life and School Spirits, it’s time for me to push myself away from things that I know personally. But I did need to cope with what I know and understand about my own life somehow. Get it out of me and onto a page. Reconcile with it. Some of it was painful, some of it was joyful, but it felt good just to kind of work through it and be finished with that chapter of my life. Since each strip was done weekly, I’d include some elements of whatever was going on with me at the time in the pages I was doing. For instance, if I was really upset about some article I had read about climate change, I’d reference global warming in the strip. The characters were grappling with things I was dealing with at the time of writing, and struggling with elements of my past. I do miss having that kind of outlet. Maybe I’ll do a daily personal diary comic that no one can see until I die.

  PL: Did you enjoy working on a weekly comic? I know it can challenge people because of the speed you have to work at and trying to figure out ways around time limitations on your page. I remember reading Michel Fiffe talking about Copra, a comic for which he does everything from the story, to the art, all the way to the printing and shipping, saying that the challenge was to find innovative ways to work out your problems about the page onto the page.

  AD: I did, and that’s the thing about cartooning, okay first of all, it’s so fucking hard. Michel Fiffe is an incredible craftsman. Doing what he does is so hard. I mean you have to be juggling so many things in the air when you’re cartooning. Pacing, plot, character development, art, panel design, all of these and more and you have to master it and you have to do it so fast. Sometimes, it seems like an impossible task. It is good to work regularly and quickly, so you can learn how to do things. Sometimes, I feel like I should just write a novel. There’s so many things you have to leave out in comics. A lot of cartooning is figuring out what is crucial information and what can be left out. Sometimes, I just want to pile it all in, I just want to spend 4 pages on, I don’t know, a sock with a hole in it how it happened and why that character would still be wearing it. It’s hard to do in comics and sometimes I get frustrated with that. But I do think that learning to do it efficiently and quickly is important. I know people like Chris Wares can work a whole week on a page. I don’t want to say I don’t have the discipline, I consider myself a fairly disciplined person. I can sit and focus on a task for many hours at a time, but when I draw, I feel like stuff just comes rushing out of me and my mind is racing to catch all that I want to do. It might be a fault of mine, but sometimes I think, this is good enough. I needed to get this out in the world and if something isn’t absolutely pristine, like a hand is drawn a little weird or that car looks a little messed up, as long as it’s still comprehensible, I think it’s good enough. It’s my attitude. Some artists will redo something until it’s perfect, but I sometimes feel so overwhelmed with information that I need to convey and so pressed that I need to get it out quickly even if it isn’t pristine.

  PL: I wanted to ask you about the book itself. Do you like the end product you came up with? Is that final edition of Band for Life satisfactory?

  AD: I do. The attitude I have about my work is that it is exactly what it needed to be. Everything I make is exactly what it needed to be. I have to believe that. I just reconcile myself to the fact that this thing exists. It didn’t before and now it does and that’s a positive thing and everything else I ignore.

  I loved Fantagraphics ever since I discovered underground comics. To me, they were the premiere publisher of underground comics in America. I was born in 1983 and the stuff I looked to first growing up was stuff they published. They were the be-all end-all of underground comics publishers. It was a huge dream come true to work with them. I know it sounds like a cliche, but it really was. I had always wanted to work with them and having that opportunity was incredible. I felt that they wouldn’t allow something that was complete crap to be printed. I took a leap of faith and gave them material and I felt that they wouldn’t allow me to get away with complete shit and garbage. They’ve done this for so long. They have people who understand how comics work, how printing works and I trusted that they would make something that looked nice and they did. I made a thing and it exists now. I appreciate it and I’m moving on because I’ll always be able to find fault with what I made. I’m proud of the book.

  Early copies will be coming out at SPX and then shortly after that it will be officially widely released.

  PL: Was there anything you held back in the story? Something you wanted to tell and didn’t?

  AD: There was a concept I wanted to explore which was the aspect of touring with a band. That’s something that was huge for me. We never toured mainland Europe, but we toured the UK and the US. If ever there was a sequel, a lot of it would happen on the road. That’s something I could have explored, but there’s so many things to explore.

  PL: And since you mentioned you wanted to move away from exploring this in subsequent books, maybe you could go even further back and recount your life in Prince Edward Island? (in Canada, where Davidson grew up)?

  AD: Then I’d have to go all the way back to childhood. I don’t think I can do it. I’m not ready to go that far back

  PL: Or Band for Life: Touring Prince Edward Island

  AD: You know one thing about the Island, every time I tell Canadians I grew up in PEI, people look at me funny and have nothing to say because PEI is like the Arkansas of Canada. It’s like a backwater island in the mind of city dwellers. What I realized in corresponding with other cartoonists is that there were underground cartoonists there. I found out about Tyler Landry, he’s an incredible cartoonist and just an incredibly nice guy. He’s just had one of his comics published by Study Group called Vile. I think I saw his work on the comic workbook blog. I couldn’t believe that this movement exists there.

  PL: There’s another cartoonist from there called Liam McKenna who did a great sci-fi comic called Termination Shock. You are not the only cartoonist from PEI.

  AD: It’s exciting, I should go back there sometime.

  band_for_life_back_coverPL: The Fantagraphics page details of the book mention that Band for Life “is the story (…) of a noise rock band and their community of friends and acquaintances based in an alternate reality version of Chicago.” Why choose noise rock as a starting point? It feels like an awfully specific music style to explore.

  AD: My whole life, I’ve always wanted to champion art making and creative pursuits that weren’t getting a lot of recognition or weren’t getting their creators a lot of money. I think I wanted to be antagonistic. I wanted them to play a type of music that wasn’t popular, and that wasn’t going to make them popular. I knew they were going to be struggling with questions about their day jobs. I wanted it to not have any resolutions for them, they were not gonna become famous playing this type of music. They were never going to be suddenly picked up by a big label and become successful like in the movies. The lives of musicians as portrayed in the media are either tragedies or rags-to-riches stories; someone’s struggling and then they get a big break. I knew my characters were never gonna get a break, so by picking that genre of music, I was closing that narrative avenue. That’s why I picked an unpopular type of music for the book.

  PL: And was picking Chicago inspired by the same reasoning?

  AD: In a way, yes. Picking Chicago was antagonistic. It’s not New York or L.A. But it’s where I live and I love it here.

  The comics community is so fragmented. There are literary comics, there’s these gross-out guys comics about balls getting ripped off, there’s indie comics, there’s a manga crowd and it starts to feel really torn as to who your audience is, and who it could be. I would like to appeal broadly and do something that is universally enjoyable, but I’m not interested in making something that is just candy, something that people want to eat up with no substance. First of all, I’m not a good enough draftsman to make something that only looks good but isn’t smart. Some people can afford to make a purely aesthetic comic with no substance, but I’m not good enough to pull that off so it’s not an option. With Band for Life, if you like it, you like it, if you get it, you get it. If you agree with me, awesome. It’s about a noise rock band in Chicago. If you don’t think rock music is cool and if you think Chicago is a terrible city, maybe it isn’t for you or maybe it is in spite of all of that.

  PL: You can still derive some universal truth when looking at something specific too. I don’t think you’re too far off the mark.

  AD: I believe in that wholeheartedly. I think it’s one of the most important tips I’d give to a fiction writer: you can find universality in the specific. I hope that Band for Life does that. I hope people who don’t like music or who don’t live in Chicago can enjoy it and find things about the creative experience and the human experience that they can relate to. It feels almost contradictory, in a way, I don’t care about making something appealing, but I still hope that my work, with all of it’s flaws and quirks, is appealing and relatable.

  PL: Speaking of universality and the human experience, does Band for Life, and to a certain extent your comic book output help you make sense of the world, or at least more of it than you did before you started creating it?

  AD: Absolutely, For one thing I’m really interested in dialogue, in verbal interaction and how to convey this in comics. I think first and foremost, Band for Life is a work of humour. I embellished it in some ways to make it funny, but a lot of the conversations are almost word for word conversations that I’ve had with people. I address issues in the book that were worrying me and my friends that we would constantly go back to in our interactions. There’s a lot of references to vegetarianism, and veganism, lots of contemporary issues that were sort of exploding at the time I was writing the book, like police brutality. It makes me wonder if my work is too preachy. If my work is too preachy, will it be an entertaining read? I felt it was important to address these issues in my work, to take the basis of dialogue and conversations I’ve had and let others explore it further. I feel I’d betray myself if I didn’t.

  I almost feel annoyed that I set this story in a parallel universe. All my characters are, well, humans really, but they’re depicted as monsters. I found myself thinking it was hard to address police brutality and real life issues in the book. You’re meant to think that those characters look outrageous, but they’re really people. I think that’s why with Retrofit, I just want to do people. It’s harder and harder to integrate humour and real life issues efficiently when everyone looks like a monster. I hope I pulled it off in the book.

  The interesting thing with Band for Life was that, because it was serialized online, I was receiving feedback as I went along. With School Spirits, I had no feedback at all and no one read it until it was finished. I think people understand that Band for Life is essentially a comic about the real world, but with hideous-looking monsters.

  PL: You’ve previously published work both in colour (Believed Behavior) and in black and white (School Spirits). How do you approach making a comic book in colour and is that approach different for a work in black and white?

  AD: The approach is quite different with colour. You can do a lot of form and volume that you can’t do in black and white, or at least that I can’t do in black and white. Better artists than me, like Mike Mignola and the Hernandez brothers, can do it. When I draw something I know will be coloured, I change my approach. I don’t do as many flat blacks, I don’t do as much hatching. I draw it more sparsely, because I know my colours will come in and bring an extra depth later. With black and white, you have to make the depth with value. I draw differently basically.

  With colour though, I feel like I’m a late bloomer and I’ll probably always be learning my craft. I’ve done all kinds of different colouring techniques. I’m trying to find out what’s best. I’ve done flat colour in Photoshop before, but mostly I like coloured pencils, markers and paints. I feel the Photoshop colour looks too flat and I wanted something that looked a little more naturalistic and had more depth. Marker colour is cool because you can work really quickly. It prints okay, but I think paint prints better. I have yet to see how coloured pencil prints. I don’t know how that’s going to look. I enjoy colouring by hand a lot more than I do colouring in photoshop. I don’t like staring at a computer screen.

  lovers_in_the_garden_coverPL: I believe you’ve recently been experimenting with gouache for colours. Is this a different process than what you’ve used to Band for Life?

  AD: I did for the cover of Lovers in the Garden, my brand new comic. It’s hard to say how it turned out, I didn’t see how that looks printed. The inside of the book is all done with a combination of coloured pencils and markers and the cover is gouache. But I haven’t seen the final prints yet, so I don’t know. The marker colours look very light on a computer screen and it looks darker printed. I’m curious to see how the gouache will look. I don’t know. I’m still learning. I’ve just done a story for an anthology that Breakdown Press is releasing and I coloured that in Photoshop.

  Every method has it’s advantages and disadvantages. Nothing is without hassle, it’s all difficult and therefore you have to do the thing that you enjoy the most because life is short. You have to enjoy your work. In cartoons more than anything because it’s so time consuming. If you like colouring something with coloured pencil, do it. Julie Delporte and Eleanor Davis do it and it looks amazing.

  Lorrenzo Mattotti’s work looks incredible too. I don’t know how he does it, how he scans it or any of his tricks to brighten up the pages. I’m learning and developing some tricks, but a lot is from looking at other artists and seeing what they’re doing and thinking “damn this looks amazing, I want to try something like that” and then playing around with the material and finding what feels right.

  Part of me thinks I’m too old to keep experimenting and I should be finding one thing and get really good at it. I was reading about this famous portrait photographer, Gertrude Käsebier, around the turn of the century and she didn’t start Art School until she was 37, with 3 kids and a domineering husband and she went on to become one of the most famous photographers in America. It’s inspiring.

  PL: Now that Band for Life is going to be released soon, what’s next for you? Can you tell us more about your upcoming projects? You mentioned a new comic that will be published by Retrofit Comics. Is there any exciting project coming soon?

  AD: There’s a biographical project I’m working on, but I don’t want to talk too much about it now. I’m kind of superstitious and I feel like it’s really important to do stuff rather than talk about it. I’m in the research stuff right now. It’s about an artist from the early 1900’s who’s been forgotten and I’m researching her right now. I don’t want to say more until I draw the first page, I don’t want to jinx it. Before I start blabbing about I want to have a chapter done at least. It’s been hard because there hasn’t been a lot written about her, so I have to keep digging. It’s going to be a labour of love.

  PL: What would you recommend we listen to as we’re reading the book?

  AD: I could list off bands all day. When I first moved to Chicago at eighteen, I was only really familiar with punk and hardcore. I loved soul music too. My friends in Chicago turned me onto world music, noise music, early industrial stuff, obscure psych stuff from the ‘70’s. Stockhausen is a great composer people should look into. He’s a precursor to industrial music. He was doing composition with objects and non-traditional musical instruments. God is My Copilot and Scissor Girls are two Chicago noise rock bands I really love. There are women in both these groups which is important to me. The Jesus Lizard for sure. There’s a music label called Amphetamine Reptile that had a lot of really abrasive noise rock bands on it. Today is the Day was one of those good bands. Black Widow is a pagan folk band from the 70’s I’d recommend. I listen to a lot of Parliament-Funkadelics, I love all their albums but Maggot Brain and Take it to the Stage are two amazing albums. Betty Davis is an incredible singer. Hawkwind I love. Sir Lord Baltimore, Atomic Rooster.

  As I got older I realized that there’s no right way to be a creative person. I’m glad I moved past my narrow punk and hardcore phase, because now I can enjoy Tuvan throat singing and Indonesian Gamelan music and I’ve had tons of experiences I wouldn’t have had if I’d been locked into one particular subculture.

• Bad At Sports - http://badatsports.com/2013/meanwhile-anya-davidson/

  Meanwhile. . . Anya Davidson
  by Sara Drake | Oct 13, 2013 | Blog |
  Picture 33
  Chicago-based artist and musician, Anya Davidson, has recently debuted her first full-length comic book, School Spirits. Up until now, her modest print editions make her work difficult to come by outside of the defiantly small world of alternative comics. Davidson is probably one of the few artists for which it is appropriate to combine words like brush pen and bad-ass in the same gust. Her stories are often eclectic mash-ups of metal fantasies, female overlords, science fiction, collected vernacular and whatever else gets whirl-pooled away into her consciousness. Her newest creation, a high school story that follows the friendship of two teen girls and their fanatical love of a metal band, is a keen understanding of comics as an art form synthesized with Davidson’s own radical tendencies.
  She graciously took the time to give me a tour of her studio and working process and shed some light into the zany world(s) of School Spirits.
  ———————————————————————————————————–
  How do you describe School Spirits to people unfamiliar with your work?
  School Spirits is a story about two very unusual girls. Most of the narrative takes place over the course of a single school day. There’s a large supporting cast of characters, some fantasy and some inter-dimensional travel as well
  Why did you want to make a high school narrative?
  I wanted to examine the friendship between women. I had done a zine called School Spirits years and years ago and it was basically the same idea. The comic was pretty crude. I was still figuring out how to draw and cartoon but the idea was very similar. It just didn’t go away – that desire to explore gender and female friendships. That’s something that has always felt alien to me. In terms of gender, I’m happy to be a woman I just feel like it was really hard for me to relate to other women growing up. I don’t know how I missed a lot of the messages that other girls were getting. I grew up in rural Canada and I was always out riding horses and stuff. Really being confronted with, oh this is the norm, this is how women are supposed to behave. It just didn’t jive with my personal experience. I think the friendships that I had as a kid, really intense friendships with other weird women, were very formative. So I wanted to delve into that.
  Do you think of your characters as surrogates for yourself?
  In fiction for sure. I’m not interested in making autobiographical work. They definitely are all surrogates for me. When it comes to making characters, part of it is because it’s cathartic and part of it is that I don’t know anyone else. I’m curious to examine all aspects of my personality and delve into them, create nasty characters out of the nasty parts. I heard George Saunders lecture and someone asked him if he wrote the characters of young girls so well in his book, the 10th of December, because he had two young daughters. And he said, “no, that young girl is an aspect of my personality.”
  excerpt from Barbarian Bitch
  excerpt from Barbarian Bitch
  How long did you work on School Spirits?
  Two years.
  I have a good friend of mine from high school who always wanted to be a Latin teacher. She’s in a masters program right now to teach, but I watched her get thrown into a couple situations while she was in undergrad. She had a couple teaching jobs that were really really stressful and didn’t feel ready or supported to teach at that moment. So I was thinking about her a lot too when I wrote the teacher characters.
  Did she form the basis for the art teacher in the book?
  Yea. Loves to teach, loves her subject, and loves her students but doesn’t feel equipped to do the discipline stuff. I really like teenagers. I really care about them. In addition to not ever feeling that comfortable with gender norms, I really don’t feel comfortable with norms in general in terms of how adults are supposed to behave. I feel like our culture is really stifling. I was big into punk and hardcore music as a teenager. I think that that ethos carried over. I do feel that society is fucked and you should do what you love. As tough as teenagers are, it’s sort of socially acceptable for them to manifest dissatisfaction with power and just be a little moody, or on a voyage of self-discovery. But at a point that it’s not socially acceptable to be on a voyage of self-discovery anymore. I think I will be on a voyage of self-discovery until I die.
  What were you making as student work at SAIC? There were probably no comics classes when you were there.
  I was in the painting department. I’m still a nut for painting. A good painting drives me crazy in a way that nothing else can. I’m a really big fan of painting and painters.
  You can totally see that in your line work too.
  Yea, it’s really all over the place. It’s really big. I work huge, and I’ve been obsessed with asking other cartoonists how big their originals are.
  My boyfriend’s work, Lane Milburn, is real tiny. He’s part of a group of cartoonists originally from Baltimore. They all went to Mica together. They were putting out anthologies as Closed Caption Comics. Then recently, they are all branching out and becoming more independent with the stuff that they are making. He works tiny and he uses a tiny little nib pen. Everything is just so detailed and his pen control is so spectacular. And I’m just like making giant brush marks with a giant brush pen. I really envy people who have that kind of detail. But I don’t think that will ever really work for me.
  How big are you working?
  The pages from my book were 13×18. I did a zine recently, that was maybe, 15×20. Pretty big!
  The narrative of School Spirits is really unstable in an exciting way. While I was reading it, I wasn’t sure when reality was happening or when the reader was in the realm of fantasy. Adolescence comes across as a fantastical space, which, I think it is for a lot of people.
  The logic of the book is my own internal logic. The first three chapters are staging for the final chapter. You are meeting the characters and getting to know them. I think of it as one story, but the few short pieces are just build-up.
  I was curious to experiment. The one narrative thing that I tried that is unlike the rest of the book, is the 30 page silent battle story. I was really curious to know how people would react to that because I thought, oh this is like playing a guitar solo alone in your room. It sounds cool and interesting to you but if anyone else were listening they would just be like, oh why is this person dicking around. It’s fun while you’re in it but not fun to listen to. I was wondering if that silent part of the story, if I would just lose people.
  I wanted to do a piece where Oola and Garf visit the natural history museum and we see the entire creation myth of the peoples that they are coming to see. When you’re in a place like a museum, you can see these totems that are just radiating power and energy and people are just like, where’s the snack bar! I also worked at the planetarium for a while, so I’m pretty fascinated by museum culture or what putting something into a museum does to an object and wanted to examine that. But wasn’t sure if anyone else would have any idea what it was about.
  excerpt from School Spirits
  excerpt from School Spirits
  In School Spirits the reader is waiting for a magic love ritual to be performed. But the ritual never happens.
  That was something that happened in the original School Spirits zine. I wanted to examine that. It’s a laugh at the characters’ expense. Grover is clearly unavailable to anyone. I wanted to magnify that. To make one character who was not giving off any sexual cues, totally off in their own world and this other character who’s a puppy dog following them around. Grover is really unsexy.
  You seem to have two distinctly different ways of approaching comics. You have a crazy, unstructured, stream of consciousness style of setting up a page and a more straight forward linear approach to comics like in School Spirits. I was wondering how you make the decision to set up a story?
  For the more experimental stuff, it can take ten pages to tell a few pages of story because it’s more of a stream of consciousness with me working around a theme. For Barbarian Bitch – I love like Kung Fu movies, I love trash cinema and I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of the righteous warrior. Somebody who has carte blanche from above to exterminate their foes in the name of something greater. How does that work? Because they seem so antithetical. I’ve been really fascinated with warrior priests. I’m really obsessed with discipline, what it takes for someone to master a craft. That piece in Kramers 8 was a meditation on that. It was me pulling threads of that all together. Whereas School Spirits is me attempting a storytelling approach. Even if I were to approach School Spirits in that way, it would have been a mediation on female friendship and then I just would have been pulling from my source material different threads but I wouldn’t have been able to have those moments where characters have sustained conversations and I wouldn’t have been able to develop the characters.
  I like both of those ways of working, and I still reserve the right to work in both of those ways.
  For the CAKE (Chicago Alternative Comics Expo) zine, I just googled The worst experience of my entire life, and it was fascinating and not what you’d expect. It was really weird. One person’s rant about how they slept in a hotel room that was really dirty and they found a crack pipe in the ventilation system. Some angry bitch ranting about how, like a Motel Six or something, how the cleaning staff did a lousy job, and it’s like, really? That’s the worst experience of your entire life? Sleeping in an unclean motel room? There was one that was someone’s middle school experience, but it was really evocatively written. The language was really fascinating. I just like those kinds of sources and pulling them together. For a graphic novel, I don’t think that would really work. But for short story writing I think that’s a fun avenue to explore.
  Do you consider art making and discipline going hand in hand?
  Absolutely. Creativity is a muscle. Also-cartooning is a craft. You have to be extremely disciplined to hone it.
  Have you always been interested in writing dialogue? Your characters come across as very real.
  I took some creative writing classes. I’ve never been able to keep a journal but I was always I’m really into listening to people speak and recording conversations.
  You’re a collector?
  Yea, maybe at the cost of plot. That stuff interests me a lot more. Character development and dialogue more than building the skeleton of a story. What I will do is, I’ll have scenes and scenarios in mind that are unconnected by a story. Then I will weave them together. I will have a character and I’ll know more who they are than exactly what they are supposed to be doing. It grows organically out of knowing I want a scene.
  There is a scene in School Spirits where Garf is at her job at a fast food restaurant with her co-worker who is complaining about his toe. He tells a story about how it was injured when he was young. That’s the story that one of my co-workers told me. I thought, this is an incredible story, and I knew I wanted to incorporate it in the book and I knew I wanted to show this character at her after school job, because I had these vivid memories of my after school jobs. How weird they were and what a strange training ground it is for the real world. Your weird mall job that you have when you’re 15. That’s a lot of my process – collecting those moments, paying attention to the way people speak, and listening to other people’s stories.
  Are you worried about repeating yourself?
  I repeat myself a lot. What I realized about most of the fiction writers that I love, is that they really like to riff on a theme. Sometimes it gets frustrating. John Irving has written the same book like 15 times. I really don’t have the patience for that anymore. There is definitely a danger, but I do think that we live in our own bodies and our own minds.

  excerpt from Wandering Crust Lord
  excerpt from Wandering Crust Lord
  You’re also a very dedicated screen printer?
  I do my screen printing at Spudnik Press. I do a lot of screen printing. That’s my favorite thing to do. It sucks because they are so labor intensive. I can make 50 or 100 if I’m really busting my ass and then they’re gone.I love Spudnik. I was on their board of directors for about four years. Angee Lennard, who runs the shop, was in the same year of college as me. She could charge like two times what she does for studio access, but it’s really part of the mission to make screen-printing accessible to everyone.
  You seem really excited about the prospect of teaching.
  Yes I am. and I feel like Spudnik gave me the foundation to start doing that. I’m really pro Spudnik. I feel very grateful that I got a lot of the skills that I have. They gave me a lot of opportunities. I thanked them in the book.
  In terms of influences, not necessarily limited to comics, who are you looking at?
  The old masters. John Stanley, Milt Gross, Harvey Kurtzman, Wally Wood. A ton of E.C war, sci-fi and horror comics. The underground heroes too: Crumb, Spain, S. Clay Wilson, Dori Seyda. Some French Heavy Metal artists: Caza and Philippe Druillet. Gilbert Hernandez. Osamu Tezuka and Jack Kirby. I looooove Carlos Ezquerra’s Judge Dredd. Ross Andru and Mike Esposito.
  Is there a soundtrack for School Spirits? What would be on it?
  Yeah, it’s pretty much the soundtrack of a gore obsessed kid in the early 90’s. Carcass, Death, Morbid Angel, Cancer, the Misfits.
  Where are you going next?
  I do know where I’m going. I think it will be based on another zine that I made in my early 20s. I feel like, those ideas are ideas that I have not explored fully. And now that I have more discipline and focus I can flush them into full, bigger stories. I do want to play with color a lot. I’m committed to making the next thing exactly what I want and if someone will publish it that’s great, and if not, I will publish it myself.
  Updates about Anya’s work can be found on her website.
  School Spirits can be obtained through the PictureBox website.
  School Spirits
  PictureBox Inc. 2013
  144 pages
  8.5 x 10.75, b&w hardcover
  ISBN 978-1-939799-02-9
  *Many thank yous to Brian Nicholson.

• Believed Behavior - http://believedbehavior.com/project/anya-davidson/

  ANYA DAVIDSON
  Anja Davidson is a cartoonist, printmaker and musician living and working in Chicago. Her comics often work as fantasy/adventure, but in a mind-blowing, hallucinogenic, rock n’ roll style that puts them in a realm of their own. Over the years Anya has self-published many zines and mini comics and recently has been featured in Kramer’s Ergot 8 and had her first full-length book School Spirits published by PictureBox.

• CBR - http://www.cbr.com/anya-davidson-has-school-spirits/

  Quoted in Sidelights:
  because I loved it,”
  “an incredible place for cartoonists,”
  “I always had a hard time growing up with other women, other girls, because gender norms disgust me and I hate the way girls are brainwashed from such a young age. So I wanted to do a story about unconventional girls. Very unconventional girls.” \“structured around the friendship of two weirdo girls who maybe do some dimensional traveling,”
  “a beautiful book,” “one that’s hard to describe.”
  Anya Davidson Has “School Spirits”
  11.04.2013
  by Alex Dueben
  in Comic News
  Comment
  Anya Davidson Has “School Spirits”

  Anya Davidson is a musician and printmaker who has been making comics for several years now. While she’s worked on a number of comics, many readers were first introduced to her work in the pages of last year’s “Kramers Ergot 8,” which included her short comic “Barbarian Bitch.”

  Picturebox has just published her debut graphic novel, “School Spirits,” a book whose plot is easy to describe, and yet that doesn’t accurately convey what the book is or how she manages to tell the story. The book revolves around the friendship between two teenage girls, life in high school and trying to get tickets to see a concert — but the plot isn’t Davidson’s primary concern. She’s much more interested in exploring the girls’ friendship and trying to capture a certain mindset and stream of consciousness. The way music transports us, the way our classroom daydreams take on a different, vivid shape at when we’re stuck there. It’s a beautiful book, but it’s also one that’s hard to describe.

  CBR News recently spoke with Davidson about “School Spirits,” her short form past work and what the future holds.

  Story continues below

  CBR News: Since this is your first book and some of our readers might not know your work, could you tell us a little bit about your background and work to this point?

  Anya Davidson: I would pretty much guarantee that most people don’t know my work. My name is Anya. I live in Chicago, which is an incredible place for cartoonists right now. I moved here to go to college and stayed after graduation because I loved it. I studied painting but started cartooning one summer in college when I felt like I was really about to lose it. I struggled a lot with anxiety and depression as a teenager and into my early twenties. Not so much anymore, but sometimes those monsters resurface. Anyway, I’d had a tough-break up and I kept having these anxious, obsessive thoughts. At one point I convinced myself that I was pregnant even though that was impossible. So I drew a story about a girl who takes an herbal abortion concoction and travels to another dimension. And I was totally hooked on comics.

  I took that first zine with me on the road when my old band went on tour. We played in Providence and I met Brian Chippendale and C.F. and Matt Brinkman. I didn’t know who they were at the time but I was like, “Whoa, you guys draw comics? I draw comics too,” and instead of laughing in my face and throwing my crazy, crude zine in the recycling, they were infinitely kind and supportive and so I kept making crazy, crude zines. I’ve made a really active effort to hone my cartooning skills in the intervening years — opinions will differ as to the success of that enterprise, I’m sure.

  Also, I’m dating a man, Lane Milburn, who I think is one of the best cartoonists in the universe. His sci-fi epic “Twelve Gems” is coming out from Fantagraphics in the Spring. My personal proclivities are toward maximalism and narrative, even if that narrative is non-linear. Lane’s work is like that and I hope mine is too.

  Where did “School Spirits” first start for you?

  “School Spirits” started as a zine called “School Spirits.” It was probably my third zine. I’m a little fuzzy, but I drew it ages ago in maybe 2006? The characters had different names and looked different. I knew I wanted to explore female friendship in a story. I always had a hard time growing up with other women, other girls, because gender norms disgust me and I hate the way girls are brainwashed from such a young age. So I wanted to do a story about unconventional girls. Very unconventional girls.

  What was the “School Spirits” zine like? If we read the two back to back, would we see the similarities?

  The zine was definitely much more crudely drawn but the relationships between characters are the same — it’s structured around the friendship of two weirdo girls who maybe do some dimensional traveling. The “spirit” of the thing, if you will, hasn’t changed much.

  When you started working on this new “School Spirits,” did you know this would be a book-length story? Or did that change as you worked on it?

  I had SO many ideas for stories in my early twenties, themes I wanted to explore at great length, but I just couldn’t execute longer stories — I didn’t have the technical chops and I was so distracted by other life stuff. So now that I’m a bit older and, as I said, I’ve made a really concerted effort to develop those skills — although they’re still far from where I’d like them to be — I can tackle those same ideas, those themes that have always fascinated me, and really put some meat on their bones.

  How much of the character of Oola did you know when you started, and did she change much as you progressed?

  I went to see George Saunders speak and someone asked him if he was able to write the characters of young girls so well because he had daughters and he responded that no, all of his characters are based on some aspect of his own personality. And that’s how I do characters too-it’s what has always made sense to me. You just mine yourself. And of course you have to amplify everything to make interesting fiction. Also, Bukowski is one of my heroes — I know most folks grow out of Bukowski but I’m crazy about him, I guess ’cause I’m a perpetual teenager. But what he does is just hold himself under a magnifying glass and amplify everything to great comic effect. I want to give my characters a ton of pathos without being in the slightest way saccharine. I have zero tolerance for that. I didn’t intend for her to change at all really — she’s just an angry weirdo the whole time and I wanted readers to be unsure, at the end, if she would ever pull herself out of the muck or if she’d just keep digging herself in deeper. But I think there’s definitely hope for her. I love her very much. I think it was it in an interview with Sam Simon that he said one of the foremost rules about writing fiction is you have to love your characters.

  How did you end up publishing this with Picturebox?

  They’ve distributed everything I’ve made for years, including all my shorter zines. The thing is, I’d work for months on those zines and then only print like, twenty copies, because I didn’t have the self confidence to do any self promotion. The first thing by me that they distributed was a split zine I did with Carlos Gonzalez. I had a story called “Lung Damage” and I can’t remember the name of Carlos’ story but it was amazing because Carlos is a genius. Anyway, they carried the “School Spirits” zine, “Real People” #1 and 2, “Consciousness 3,” which was an enormous portfolio of screen printed comics (there was no 1 or 2). I might be forgetting something. Of which I only made about twenty copies each. But all that time I was working. And I knew that if Dan Nadel saw that I was ready he would publish me. He was so supportive the entire time, and I knew he was waiting to see that I could sustain a book.

  Will we see a collection of your zines and comics one of these years?

  I think that’s extremely unlikely. I still respond to elements of those stories when I read them for sure. I think my writing matured a lot faster than my drawing, so as I’ve been saying-at that point I had a lot of ideas but not the ability to execute them the way I knew I wanted to. I’m a nut for John Stanley, Milt Gross, Jack Cole, Kurtzman — all the “Mad” artists. I’ve always been obsessed with the perfect simplicity of those dudes’ execution. I’ll never get to their level, but they’re my driving obsession. I look back on all those early stories as formative work and the goal is to keep drawing until I can’t hold a pen anymore and always keep looking ahead towards the next new story.

  You’re also a printmaker and musician — is there a relationship between those and your comics?

  I think the relationship is just that I need to make stuff to stay sane. Music is really cathartic in a way that cartooning can’t be, which is one reason so many cartoonists are also in bands. As far as the printmaking, I’ve always been an extreme Luddite. I wanted to print my work in color and I didn’t like the way color photocopies looked so I started screen printing my comics. It’s ridiculously labor intensive but I love doing it. At this point I’d like to do much bigger print runs of my stuff in color. I’m not sure what the magic solution is. I’m trying to get my shit together-learn Photoshop, be on Tumblr, enter the digital age, but my heart will never be in it.

  What are you planning next?

  I have an idea for my next book-length project, but in preparation I’d like to do a series of full-color shorts. Between 12-24 pages. Maybe featuring some of the characters I’d like to develop. I’m not ready to plunge into a new book just yet, but I’m really excited right now about doing more work in color, and experimenting with hand-coloring my work. It’s an exciting time — I’m ready to do a lot of reading and a lot of sketching!

Quoted in Sidelights: “lives are a mess, but her portrayal is deeply compassionate.”
Band for Life
Publishers Weekly.
263.45 (Nov. 7, 2016): p49.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Band for Life
Anya Davidson. Fantagraphics, $29.99 (256p) ISBN 978-1-60699-954-7
Originally serialized online, this webcomic is the psychedelically drawn tale of a group of misfits pursuing their musical career on Chicago's
South Side. Portraying sound in comics is always tricky, but Davidson (School Spirits) has cleverly substituted color for noise. The pages are a
blazing riot of purple against yellow, splashed with turquoise, brick red, and acid green. The effect is as loud and harsh as the band's music, a
perfect fit with the narrative. In the opening pages, the rock group Guntit secure their first gig. This could be their big break--if Linda can get the
night off work, if Animal can find a babysitter, Krang can borrow a van for the gear, Renatos amp is working, and Zot can remember any of their
songs. Davidson is intimately acquainted with the struggles of fitting a music career around the commitments of family, friends, work, and
relationships. Her character's lives are a mess, but her portrayal is deeply compassionate. Unfortunately this collection ends essentially mid-scene,
with no explanation about the lack of conclusion. (Nov.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Band for Life." Publishers Weekly, 7 Nov. 2016, p. 49. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469757514&it=r&asid=bda34104e828b187373ab4711cddc59c. Accessed 7 July
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469757514

---
Quoted in Sidelights: “eminently readable”
“presents a story that allows the author to give full range to her imagination,”
7/7/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1499460459755 2/2
School Spirits
Publishers Weekly.
260.36 (Sept. 9, 2013): p44.
COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
School Spirits
Anya Davidson. PictureBox (D.A.P., dist.) $19.95 (152p) ISBN 978-1-939799-02-9
Chicago-based artist and musician Davidson is known for her underground zines and minicomics; her first full-length graphic novel continues in
this vein of surreal, pulp-inspired, absurdist adventures. This book follows fanatical metal girl Oola and her bizarre supernatural connections to
the things around her--most notably the intense metal musician Hrothgar. Listening to his music inspires lengthy dream visions that drift beyond
the strange to the seemingly incomprehensible. Yet for all this, Davidson's graphic novel is eminently readable; it presents a story that allows the
author to give full range to her imagination. Her drawings defy straightforward categorization, sometimes feeling like the artwork of golden age
science fiction comics and sometimes in the tradition of punk pioneer Gary Panter or raunchmeister Johnny Ryan. Davidson uses a different style
for each of the four chapters, including long wordless sequences. Unconventional as it all is, Davidson's narrative invention and visual
imagination never waver. In terms of its storytelling and as a work of art, School Spirits is an inspired debut effort. (Oct.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"School Spirits." Publishers Weekly, 9 Sept. 2013, p. 44. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA342766188&it=r&asid=93da48ba0ea0f885fb14cdcb4a411ec8. Accessed 7 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A342766188

• The Globe and Mail
  https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/review-anya-davidsons-band-for-life-three-chord-punk-rock-in-comic-form/article33094322/
  Word count: 260

  brief, perfect stories
  generous, empathetic attention to the rhythms of life.
  Review: Anya Davidson's Band for Life – three-chord punk rock in comic form
  SEAN ROGERS
  Special to The Globe and Mail
  Published Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2016 4:53PM EST
  Last updated Thursday, Dec. 01, 2016 4:54PM EST
  0 Comments Print

  Title Band for Life
  Author Anya Davidson
  Genre graphica
  Publisher Fantagraphics
  Pages 260
  Price $39.99
  It’s fitting that a short tribute to the Ramones appears partway into Band for Life: Anya Davidson’s brief, perfect stories about a group of struggling noise musicians are the comic-book equivalent of three-chord punk rock. Pared down and subtly philosophical, Davidson’s strips – many of them serialized online at Vice – chug along in four-four time, telling tightly paced, true-to-life stories about the freaks in the band. (Davidson draws people like midnight-movie monsters, colours them with highlighter-marker hues and cartoons with an easy-to-read classicism – the results resemble a radioactive Josie and the Pussycats.) There’s Linda, who serves as the band’s stable centre, when she’s not overtaken with despair about militarized police or animal testing; there’s upper-class dropout Krang, trying to balance rehearsal time and his new boyfriend; or there’s Annimal, the drummer, who needs to find a steady sitter for her twins almost as much as she needs to stop getting blackout drunk. Davidson nails the dynamics that make up this band, but it’s her generous, empathetic attention to the rhythms of life that truly sets these comics apart.

• Comics Journal
  http://www.tcj.com/reviews/school-spirits/
  Word count: 1244

  Quoted in Sidelights: “immediately remarkable for the surprisingly fluid (if sudden) transitions between ragged slice-of-life naturalism and over-the-top, surreal, metal-inspired fantasy craziness.”
  “takes a wrecking ball to every cliched and stale portrayal of life as a teenager,”
  “a rock-solid narrative and even visual structure, as even the weirder drawings never get too psychedelic to track across the page.”
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  REVIEWS
  School Spirits
  Anya Davidson
  PictureBox
  $19.95, 144 pages
  BUY IT NOW

  REVIEWED BY ROB CLOUGH JUL 10, 2014
  700In her debut book School Spirits, Anya Davidson carries over the raw energy and power of her zines into a longer loose narrative. Following a few days in the high school lives of best friends Oola and Garf, the book is immediately remarkable for the surprisingly fluid (if sudden) transitions between ragged slice-of-life naturalism and over-the-top, surreal, metal-inspired fantasy craziness. Davidson’s project here seems to be a complete demolition of rigid gender roles, as her alienated but fiercely feminist duo battle against conformity, misogyny, and boredom while also grappling with more familiar issues like identity and love.

  On the page, these battles often play out in a literal sense. Oola is kind of a doom metal Walter Mitty, transforming her immediate surroundings into stream-of-consciousness fantasy sequences that are heavy on epic, visceral battle sequences and mythological vision quests. Hearing the first notes from their metal god Hrothgar at the local record store sends her into the 7th dimensional home of her hero, who attempts to aid her with her existential crisis. Seeing some relics in a museum creates the “Battle for the Atoll,” wherein a brutally efficient society of women forms on an island and must fight off hordes of cruel and vicious invading men with superior firepower. Playing on themes of gender and identity, both Oola and Garf spend several pages imagining what they would be like if they were men, opening up crazy fantasies involving Hollywood, adventuring, and bedding women.

  school4
  The best fantasy sequences are the hilarious one-panel takes on Oola’s sexual fantasies regarding her crush on her friend Grover. These are three pages worth of tender, violent, and only vaguely erotic (in a conventional sense) acts that range from Oola as clown juggling his head to being a gondolier in Venice, languidly taking him on a romantic boat ride. There are more frank images as well, like Oola squatting and pissing in his shoes or lifting up her dress and flashing him. One senses a tremendous amount of affection and empathy from Davidson for her characters, no matter how bizarre they might be. Indeed, their quirks and kinks are part of what makes them lovable, even if Davidson finds ways to make them accountable for their actions.

  school3
  In the story that takes up the bulk of the narrative, “No Class”, we enter in medias res as Oola is being chased by a cop. It’s hard to pin down a lot of direct influences on Davidson’s work, but her self-professed love for the likes of Milt Gross and other classic cartoonists is obvious here. The slightly ragged line creates characters who are “missing” certain connecting lines (except in some highly-charged action sequences). The lines that aren’t there drive the action as much as the lines that are actually drawn on paper. The artist she reminds me most of is Steve Lafler, who uses a similarly thick line with plenty of gaps and combines balls-out trippiness with a solid, naturalistic tendency. Ted May is another touchstone, especially the high school metal stories he does that are written by Jeff Wilson. May and Davidson share the same kind of deadpan storytelling quality that treat even the most ridiculous of set-ups with deadly seriousness, heightening the impact of their stories.

  school2
  “No Class” then flashes back to Oola at the beginning of her school day, as she negotiates her crush on Grover, offensive sexism, and the gauntlet that is high school. Each of her teachers takes on an oddly mythological quality. Some are monsters (and are even drawn as things like werewolves, which may or may not be related to the Halloween themes of ritual as a means to effect transformation), but each teacher is his or her own unique entity. Indeed, the seemingly cheery art teacher who snaps and flees from the school winds up having her own subplot involving an English teacher who’s assigned Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to the class. That book touches on some themes that Davidson explores in the book, namely the fluidity of sexual identity and how it plays out in society. Davidson’s sympathy for her characters extends even to the teachers in the story, seeing them as people who have to deal with students who don’t care.

  Davidson refuses to let Oola off lightly throughout the book, and her more antisocial tendencies (like stealing stuff from a grocery store and stabbing a security guard) are directly confronted in her own subconscious fantasies. This all culminates in Hrothgar’s concert, an astounding visual spectacle. Once again, fantasy blurs with reality as the security guards outside the venue confiscate drugs and weapons, disarming concert-goers with swords and maces. The ticket for the show is a particular kind of dead rat. When the show starts, Hrothgar’s back-up band consists of hulking, twelve-foot tall naked women. Each gives “birth” to their musical instruments, pulling them out of their vaginas and playing these living guitars, drums, and bass, umbilical cords still attached. It’s an outrageous, hilarious image once again portrayed in an absolutely matter-of-fact manner. The more important consequence of the show is Oola fantasizing that she’s being confronted by her idol Hrothgar for being out of control, but he takes pity on her and teaches her a mindfulness trick.

  Even though Oola’s inner life reveals her as a vulnerable, sensitive, and even tender person who is wracked with guilt for not being a good enough person, she still projects an aura of being tough and unapproachable. At the end of the story, after she’s gone through a transformative experience in her fantasy life, she shrugs off a concerned Garf. Davidson indicates that while Oola may have learned some lessons, her development and eventual maturity into a fully-centered person are far from over and far from certain. It’s a nuanced portrayal of a high school girl that transcends the reductive qualities of depicting a “freak” and instead lays bare her complicated feelings, her emotional and intellectual sense of confusion and wonder, and her rich inner life. This book takes a wrecking ball to every cliched and stale portrayal of life as a teenager. There is just enough structure and organization in its narrative to keep the book from flying away on its tangential fancies, and the mix of whimsy and viciousness in those fantasies prevents a sense of dull sameness from weighing the book down. Indeed, for a book intent on exploring the chaos of one girl’s life, the book is supported by a rock-solid narrative and even visual structure, as even the weirder drawings never get too psychedelic to track across the page.