The Poetry of Comics: A Conversation with Collage Artist Mita Mahato

“Comics made the confusion and desperation feel contained. By ‘contained’ I don’t mean controlled—more the feeling of ‘I can deal with this piece of my grief, explore it, turn it around, and add context to it.’”

This is The Poetry of Comics, a series of conversations with artists working at the intersection of comics and poetry.

By layering fragments of discarded newspapers and magazines, Mita Mahato gives lost paper new life as eerie and enchanting poetry comics. While Mahato’s work encompasses comics, poetry, cut paper, and collage, at its center is the singular theme of loss. Within her book In Between, part of Pleiades Press’ Visual Poetry Series, the scale of loss ranges from species extinction to the death of a parent. For the third installment of The Poetry of Comics, I spoke with Mahato about processing grief through collage, critiquing culture through comics, leaving space for surprise, and true collaboration.

This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.

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Eliza Harris: I’d love to know more about how you came to call your work poetry comics.

Mita Mahato: I had not really thought about poetry comics as a category or genre of comics until Pleiades Press approached me in 2016 about publishing a collection. The editor on the project, Kathryn Nuernberger, said, “You’re doing poetry comics.” And I was like, “Oh, I am? What are poetry comics?” [Laughter]. So it’s a term that I didn’t choose, but it’s one that I’ve learned to embrace. I started thinking more about forms and strategies associated with poetry in the creation of my comics. I began asking myself questions like How am I rhyming visually? What might enjambed panels look like? Is this visual alliteration? Stepping back, I thought, I can see why this category fits my work.

The Extinction Limericks was one of the first pieces in which I was really thinking about a poetic form in making it, knowing it would be part of the Pleiades collection. I knew I wanted the work to be about extinction, and the limerick, of all things, came to mind. I know the limerick tends to be a bawdy, funny poetic form—but what kept repeating in my head was that line that often starts these poems: “There once was . . .” And it occurred to me that the limerick could be approached as an elegy.

EH: Speaking of elegies, your poetry comix are often about loss, both environmental and personal. Why this medium for that subject?

MM: I started making comics in response to my mother’s death. They were a way for me to process the loss; a way to make sense of how this person who had had such an impact on my life was no longer physically tangible—just, was gone; a way to understand the disparity between the nothing and the pain and noise in my mind and body. Comics became a way for me to take a small piece of what I was experiencing, see it on the page, and put a frame around it. Comics made the confusion and desperation feel contained. By contained I don’t mean controlled—more the feeling of I can deal with this piece of my grief, explore it, turn it around, and add context to it. There’s something about the process of composing a comic that encourages generative and reflective play—and I think that kind of play can make living with grief possible.

I work with collage in my comics and often use old, discarded papers—taking something that is understood as lost to the world and transforming it into something new. Because of the way form echoes content, I think my work is predisposed to engage themes of loss. Especially in the context of the ongoing climate crisis, I think it’s important to acknowledge that we’re always in a situation of loss and to consider, then, how we live with it. Collage allows me to conceptualize grief as something expansive and transformative rather than limiting or powerless—something that can move us to joy as well as sadness.

EH: Can you talk about why you sometimes spell comix with an x?

I use the x sometimes because I feel aligned with the history of underground, alternative, and independent comix that also uses that spelling—comix that speak to stories that aren’t told in mainstream channels, and in ways that are experimental and subversive. More than that, though, I like the way it emphasizes that comics are about “mixing”—bringing together not just word and image, but also disparate ideas and perspectives that all coexist. It highlights the mixing of source materials and the experimentation with hybrid genres in my work.

EH: In line with the countercultural history of underground comix, your own work often exposes and interrogates capitalist destruction. Do you think there’s something about comics/comix that lends itself to cultural critique?

MM: Yes, I think part of it has to do with the fraught and tense relationship between the different signifiers that the comics medium uses to convey feeling or story—a word and an image bouncing meaning off of each other, for instance, or two different images. Almost by requirement, comics invite us to see the world from different angles and to see those perspectives as simultaneous and coexisting. Where capitalism propagates false beliefs in clear-cut answers, stability, and progress from “wrong” to “right,” the best comics invite nuanced and tangled conversations, whether about justice, identity, or habitat destruction. There is a magic that erupts when word and image come together and express this and this, rather than this or this. Not to romanticize the medium as a whole, though. Comics have been deployed as propaganda too.

EH: Of course I want to talk more about your book In Between. I love that title because of how this book exists between comix, poetry, cut paper, and collage, and the characters within it are also somewhere in between human and animal. What does in between mean for you in relation to this book?

MM: There’s a very literal interpretation of that title. The cover image of the book is made up of these two panels with the gutter separating them. I wanted to call attention to the gutter space because it’s where the magic is. It’s where the reader takes an active role, putting one and two together, imagining the connection between two panels. But the gutter also deliberately fragments our vision and understanding. I love that the gutter both brings together and ruptures.

I think that there’s a discomfort with spaces of in-betweenness—of liminality. For instance, there’s something disturbing about hybrid creatures. When I teach collage workshops, there’s a little bit of a recoiling from students in cutting up images of people or objects that they conceive of as whole and then pasting the fragments together. The results seem monstrous. But then there’s this release that happens and you see their faces light up. They let go of the rigid forms that are institutional inventions anyway and experiment and play. What I want to emphasize in In Between is that we’re all fragmented and we’re all always becoming. We’re all in that in-between space of possibility.

EH: One of my favorite pieces of yours is “IT’SALLOVER And Other Poems on Animals.” In that series of poems, you repeat trite phrases and string the words together in a way that, for me, both emptied them of meaning and somehow also made them feel more sincere. What was your aim with these poems?

MM: I began creating those poems at a time when I was feeling a creative block. They started out as sketches of whales on top of which I wrote the same words over and over. I think I was feeling like, What do I have to offer in the face of planetary global loss and extinction that my own consumer habits are contributing to? Creative gestures feel so small sometimes. I started thinking about the words that we use to express loss and grieving, like “I’m so sorry for your loss”—these phrases that we rattle off ritualistically without thinking about what we mean or accomplish in saying them. Or maybe we know that they’re trite, but it’s all we have.

I wanted the repetition in these poems to feel ritualistic, like a mantra, but in a way that, as you were describing, empties those phrases of meaning in order to recognize the deep grieving that we need to do. I wanted to convey: How can we grieve better? At the same time, that question itself feels really anthropocentric—more about us than the dying animals. In the final version of the piece, I used bold Sharpie over the animals to acknowledge the dominance of my voice in trying to honor their lives. At the same time, some of the words are smudged or covered and the animals are represented in bright, nonrealistic colors in order to scream or demand presence despite the words.

Collage allows me to conceptualize grief as something expansive and transformative rather than limiting or powerless.

EH: I had the pleasure of visiting your installation “We are contaminated by our encounters” at  Common Area Maintenance in Seattle, another work drawing attention to ecological loss. In your description of the installation, you quote Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins:

“The ‘survival’ featured in U.S. television shows or alien-planet stories is a synonym for conquest and expansion. I will not use the term that way. Please open yourself to another usage. . . . [S]taying alive—for every species—requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die” (Tsing 27, 28).

I’d love to hear more about this installation and how you see collaboration as a part of your work.

MM: Common Area Maintenance is an incredible artist-run collective. They invited me to participate in their Second Avenue Sign Project, a rotating installation at their space that involves this giant four-by-six-foot backlit street sign and window display.

The basis of the sign is a sheet of acrylic that slides into a frame in front of a light source. For me, the challenge was how to bring together my cut-paper work with this plastic material. Given the sign’s public location, I decided to use the installation to highlight something about our consumption habits in relation to plastic. Unlike paper, plastic resists adhering to anything but itself. That quality fit well with what I wanted to interrogate around collaboration and contamination. Tsing’s definition of collaboration involves allowing yourself to be vulnerable to another person, animal, concept, or history and vice versa, which opens an opportunity to be transformed or contaminated by the interaction. It’s an entangled way of working and being in the world, which I see echoed in the way the comics medium works. Like we were talking about before, in comics, word and image are in collaboration even when they’re sharply defined against each other.

The invitation from Common Area Maintenance came right around the time when the Covid-19 vaccine was becoming available and we were all thinking about what reemergence and what being together again could look like. That togetherness was, and still is, muddled by political pressures. With the sign, I wanted to offer a kind of expression of solidarity because doing right in this world is confusing and exhausting. The words Eat Me seemed right.

EH: Could you tell me about your process of making cut-paper and collage comix?

MM: The process depends on the kinds of paper materials I’m working with or the subject that I’m approaching. Those elements—material or idea—usually determine the path. Sometimes I’m just sitting with some paper—some maps, let’s say—and eventually, I see how it wants to be cut up or where it makes sense to paste different elements together. Story and feeling sort of emerge from those manipulations.

When the process is more scripted, I’ll be more deliberate about how to translate an idea into cut-paper form, sometimes creating a drawn template that I’ll use like a sewing pattern. In that situation, though, there’s usually a moment when the drawing starts to look totally different from the paper re-creation, and then I start rethinking where I’m going with the piece. I’m constantly shifting. It’s that element of play that I talked about before. The process, whether it’s improvisational or scripted, necessitates an openness to surprise. One of the things that I tell students is, if you go into collage with, I’m looking for this particular word or a photo of this animal, you might never find it—or the image you create from the pieces you do find might not carry the weight you thought it would. Allow for play and surprise to happen.

EH: What artists would you recommend for readers interested in the intersection of poetry and comics?

MM: Sarah Leavitt, a Vancouver-based artist, immediately comes to mind. For the last couple of years, she’s been blowing my mind with these poetry comics about grief that she’s been posting on her Instagram. She uses these fairly straightforward sixteen-panel grids, but she disrupts the organized feel by filling the panels with very loose but intentional watercolor images. The comics are devastatingly beautiful.

Hannah K. Lee’s book Language Barrier is great. There’s some surreal poetics happening in Jul Gordon’s comics that I love. Michael DeForge falls into that category too. I might also mention George Herriman and Charles Schulz. If you go back to their comics, their pacing from panel to panel often feels much more about conveying feeling than telling a story. Sometimes all you’re looking at is Snoopy sleeping on the roof of his doghouse. And that’s all it is. The comic isn’t taking you anywhere; you’re just there. And it’s more than enough [Laughter].

I would also recommend that people read widely, beyond comics. Jane Wong’s new book of word poetry, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, is a gorgeous example of how signifiers can be arranged to disrupt, unsettle, and explode rather than to explain or clarify—same as the comics I love most.

EH: What projects are you working on currently?

MM: I’ve been working on a long-form experimental comic book loosely based on my experiences during an artist residency in the Norwegian Arctic in 2017. It’s my comix version of an expedition log. Conceptually, it’s an indictment of the colonizing voice of the intrepid explorer and the extractive, nonreciprocal systems associated with that discourse. These are systems that encourage harmful relationships with the environment, and they include the systems of travel and leisure that had brought us artists to the Arctic—despite our best intentions. It’s maybe the most challenging work I’ve made—but also the most fun.

It’s very close to being finished. I just need to finish it [Laughter].