Books: Jessica Abel

Comic Book Heroine

by Pauline Uchmanowicz, September 29, 2008

Cartoonist and writer Jessica Abel began producing comics during the mid 1980s while she was a student at the University of Chicago, where she drew her first full-length one—an outer-space version of Medea—to get out of writing a final paper for Classics 101; she earned an A on it. Gaining acclaim with her illustrated short-story series, Artbabe, first self-published through a Xeric Grant and later compiled as the Fantagraphics title Mirror, Window (2000), Abel rose to prominence with the release of her Harvey Award-winning graphic novel La Perdida (2006, Pantheon), about American expatriates in Mexico City. She is also the author of a textbook about making comics, Drawing Words & Writing Pictures (2008, First Second; written with her husband, Matt Madden, her series co-editor for Houghton Mifflin’s The Best American Comics 2008), and a collaborator with Ira Glass on Radio: An Illustrated Guide (WBEZ Alliance, 1999), a nonfiction comic about Chicago Public Radio's broadcast “This American Life.” Her work was recently featured in "Lit Graphic: The World of the Graphic Novel," an exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Abel has lectured widely, speaking at the University of Ohio’s Wexner Center for the Arts and London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. She currently teaches at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts.


What is the first thing you did in your studio today?
Answered e-mail.

What typically happens after you finish pedestrian chores like that?
If I’m in the middle of something the first thing might be to do a thumbnail, which is a sketch version of a page, or to go straight to a layout with a ruler, or straight to lettering or sketching a layout.

Your drawing and lettering style changed during a sojourn you took in Mexico. How has your work evolved over the years?
The major point of my switch was because I’d grown fairly unhappy with how the work in Artbabe was turning out. The figures seemed fine but the world around them seemed stiff. The style was striving for complete realism. If you draw a room and leave the molding off it’s not real. I knew I was going to fail at perfect realism and make myself crazy. I asked Matt to help by giving me drawing exercises to see what I would do differently. I began drawing pages over and over—larger and smaller—to see what I preferred. I also started modeling and drawing my own version of other people’s comics to see what came out. I made a 16-page mini-comic in this brushy style, which I developed in La Perdida.
The main difference in my newer work is the scale. In Artbabe, there are small, quiet, Midwestern stories. In La Perdida, the larger canvas and range of emotion is more challenging.