Julia Gfrörer’s World Within the World (Fantagraphics, Nov.) collects a decade’s worth of comics from the Ignatz nominee.
How did you get started as a comics artist?
I majored in fine art—painting and printmaking. My work was representational, drawing things that look like things, which, at least at the time when I was in school, was considered a little gauche. I also made quintessential ’90s zines and I started going to art shows, where I kept running into the same cartoonists, and they were like, “Come join us!” The comics community I found to be much more welcoming, maybe because the stakes are much lower [laughs]. I was completely seduced by it.
What’s the earliest comic in this collection?
“Flesh and Bone,” which came out in 2010, was the first comic I made in the style that I ultimately settled into. I started drawing it while I was pregnant and finished it when my son was an infant. I was entering a new phase of my life. I feel like I fully came into who I was at that time. My earlier comics were looser, narratively; I resisted planning them. [The late] Dylan Williams asked me to do a minicomic for Sparkplug and he said, “I want you to plan it out ahead of time, pencil the drawings, script it.” I felt attacked and I probably wouldn’t have done it out of spite, but I liked Dylan. I made it about stuff I knew he would enjoy: romance, suicide, Satanism.
What drives you in writing horror?
I’m one of those people inexorably drawn toward horrible things. When I was little, I wanted to read about torture, witch trials, the Titanic, human sacrifice. Anything morbid. I enjoyed the thrill of freaking myself out.
Most of the pain we encounter in our day-to-day lives is interpersonal. People are mean to us, they insult us, they cut us off in traffic. But it’s difficult to convey that pain. If I tell you my friend hurt my feelings, that doesn’t mean a lot. But if I tell you I slammed my hand in a car door, that’s visceral. That’s how I approach horror, as part of the human experience. Pain and fear are inevitable in life, even though maybe getting stalked by a ghost is not.
What’s a story that was especially important for you to include?
“World Within the World,” the piece the anthology is named after, is more like my older, looser style of comic.
In that one, I tour the world underground with Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scholar who wrote a lot of books about things he couldn’t possibly have known about, like what’s inside the earth. The world he takes me to underground is all terrifying metaphors for various darknesses of the soul. He tells me that I’m obliged to keep going because not everyone is able to explore that way, and I have to report back. I feel that’s an accurate description of the mandate I put on myself.
