The Poetry of Comics: An Interview with Cartoonist Andrew Lorenzi

“Both poetry and comics excel at taking ineffable, hard-to-articulate times in life and making them into something solid.”

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

Poems and comics rely on many of the same mechanisms: an economy of language, negative space, non-linear time, symbolic representation, and the structure of the page. In “The Poetry of Comics,” I speak with artists invested in using this shared machinery to explore the poetic possibilities of comics.

For the first installment of this series, I interviewed cartoonist Andrew Lorenzi. Multo, Lorenzi’s debut book of autobiographical comics, resists easy categorization. Using paint, pencil, and embroidery, Lorenzi transports us to familiar scenes: waking up alone, rushing to work, long car rides as a child, and walking through your hometown as an adult. Against these everyday backdrops, he ruminates on themes ranging from sleep paralysis to Filipino folklore. Lorenzi’s vivid language and surreal colors restore the luster of these mundane moments, urging readers to recognize the splendor and significance of our daily rhythms.

In addition to Multo, Lorenzi and I talked about the affinities between his comics and poetry, sneaking a notebook into your day job, and his new project, Pedestrian, which I’m eagerly awaiting.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Eliza Harris: I read Multo as a series of poems and vignettes that capture memories, sensations, and realizations from your life. Do you see poetry as an element of your comics? How do you define your work?

Andrew Lorenzi: Yes, I’ve long felt my work overlaps into poetry. Comics and graphic novels are so often equated with illustrated prose, and that might be true for a lot of comics artists, but my interest always lies in comics that distill the world into quieter moments, fragmentary moments. Both poetry and comics excel at taking these ineffable, hard-to-articulate times in life and making them into something solid. So, I think of comics as a blend of poetry and drawing. There’s that element of reduction in both, of cutting away to the essential of the subject while also leaving space for ambiguity, pacing, tone, and emotion. One of my favorite parts of comics is just the beauty of a figure moving through space.

I learned to read and write from comics, so I saw the world through cartoons from the youngest age I can remember. I knew that comics were capable of bombast and dynamism in superhero comics, but I was always captivated by the quiet meditations of something like Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. My comics, Multo especially, investigate how the daily rhythms of life accumulate to create our identity and sense of self. Romantic poets like Coleridge, Mary Shelley, and Wordsworth really resonated with me because they were able to view something seemingly simple and mundane in life and have it bloom open into a maze of memories.

So, I define my work as autobiographical and creative nonfiction comics with an emphasis on handmade work, but I see a lot of my comics sharing affinities with the goals and aesthetics of poetry.

EH: I love how you connect the sparseness of poetry and comics. It makes me think about how gutters [the spaces between comic panels] operate similarly to line breaks in poetry. With both, we’re meant to read into that gap.

Could you tell me more about learning to read from comics?

AL: My father grew up reading comic books in the 1960s when they were extraordinarily exciting, and my mom is from the Philippines, but I think she still watched American television like Scooby Doo, so I have memories of them sharing comics with me at a really young age. I remember reading the pictures long before I could grasp the language. When I was a little older, I have this vivid childhood memory of being in a classroom trying to draw the people around me and thinking, People don’t have black outlines around them. Realizing in that moment that real life is different from cartoons. So, cartoons came first and were always my way to interface with the world.

EH: Comics are so often a medium for autobiographical stories. Do you think there is an element of comics that particularly lends itself to personal narrative? I’m especially interested in this question within the context of your approach to representing your life as a collection of everyday experiences rather than a linear story.

AL: I do. In autobiographical comics, you take these distinct snapshots from your life and try to arrange them into a narrative you can tell yourself, which reflects the way we catalog our life as we experience it. When I’m lying awake at night and I’m reviewing my day, I’m not picturing in my head a video in perfect chronology. I’m seeing moments from the day peppered with feelings and impressions of memories from twenty years ago. Similarly, comics allow you to transport very quickly to places and memories separated by years or geography. I love a really densely written plot of fiction, a detective story, but the work that I want to make is not always so neatly summed up in a three-act structure, because I haven’t experienced life as here’s the conflict and here’s the resolution.

EH: I want to get back to your book. Could you talk a bit about how you came to the title Multo [the Tagalog word for ghost]?

AL: I’ve often felt like I’ve kind of lived a ghost life, especially as I get older. I think part of it is my personality. Certainly, another is living in the Midwest. Multo tracks when I moved to central Illinois. In the Midwest, you’re in these wide endless spaces that are so flat you can see the horizon miles down the road, so you have a feeling of absolute solitude.

I also thought of Multo as a ghost because it’s a conjuring of my past, reflecting on the lingering feelings and places that have followed me through my whole life. I wrote about experiences that are always close behind me, like my losing my Catholic faith, my constant sleep paralysis, and the quotidian ways I’ve spent many of my days.

Lastly, Multo was sort of a homonym with multiple because I knew that it was going to be a collection of different stories. I could’ve done one long story in the same style, but I felt it was more authentic to my experience of life that different memories have different colors and drawing styles to help convey the feelings pervading them.

EH: Maybe it was rereading Multo after the isolation of this past year, but I felt like loneliness was a ghost haunting its pages. You capture moments many of us can relate to, from lying awake at night to waking up and realizing your partner has already left for work. What draws you to these scenes of solitude?

AL: I think those are exactly the words. There’s loneliness, and there’s solitude, and I think Multo engages with both, but I’m most interested in solitude as a reprieve, as a place to recharge and to sort the self. When you spend so much time on your own, especially as it’s been shown through the pandemic, your mind acts differently. Suddenly the way you track time changes. Often for me, time kind of dilates and everything becomes loaded with memories from my childhood. We live so much of our lives repeating routines and going over everyday moments, but they accumulate, and I think if you investigate the way they build up, it shows a surprisingly significant part of your life. So Multo is my meditation on how we inhabit the world and how we spend our time, which is often in solitude.

My interest always lies in comics that distill the world into quieter moments, fragmentary moments.

EH: Another haunting presence in Multo is the menacing figure that appears during your sleep paralysis. It’s difficult enough to remember dreams, let alone describe them. How were you able to capture the experience of sleep paralysis in a comic?

AL: My sleep paralysis would always occur when I was waking up, and, suddenly, I’d be locked in my own body. I couldn’t even open my eyes. At most, I could move a finger. When this first happened to me as a teenager, it was horrifying and frightening. It was something I dealt with for years and didn’t write about. When I was writing Multo, my sleep paralysis was worsening, happening almost daily for a time. I thought, I have to engage with this. I have to understand what this is if I’m going to live with it.

A lot of people with sleep paralysis get the hallucination that there’s someone in their room with them. I was finally lucky enough to have that experience [laughter]. I was alone in my apartment and I knew at that moment, unable to open my eyes, that there was someone in my doorway. I could hear it. When I came to depict that experience in a comic, I worked with my partner, Lauren, who was my true collaborator on Multo with a lot of the most important elements. Lauren is a painter and textile artist, and she’s taught me a lot over the years about painting, embroidery, and exploring pattern. For this comic, the pages are painted in almost a flesh tone to reinforce the feeling of being trapped within the body, and I created a pattern similar to TV static to represent this liminal state between wakefulness and sleep. I thought it was a great challenge to try to manifest an experience like sleep paralysis that, like you said, is difficult to describe in words and even imagery.

EH: Part of what makes Multo so striking is your use of nontraditional comic mediums like paint and embroidery. What does your artistic process involve? What do you think about when bringing text and image together?

AL: I’m most interested in the work that has the artifacts of the process, where you can see the way the paint accumulated, streaks across the page, pencil lines that should be erased. I think those imperfections give an immediacy to the work. The comics that interest me emphasize the creator behind the work. And I’m not always as interested in digital work where it seems like every choice the artist made is interpreted through programs and codes. I realized I can look at work I made when I was nineteen that’s marker on paper and still be transported. But I look at the work I did maybe ten years ago where I used Photoshop to make the final text and the colors, and I feel like it’s an incomplete piece. Those are wonderful tools and I use digital tools in my process, but it has become important to me over the years to have physical pages at the end, also because there’s a satisfaction to going into your studio every day and slowly building this work you can hold.

Typically, the word and the image start simultaneously. I develop them through sketches and then I’ll scan it, print it at a bigger size, and cut them up into a collage. Once I have a page that I’m excited about, I begin drawing, painting, or cross-stitching it. And I’ll often leave the writing until the end, because I think when you introduce text to any imagery, especially comics, it’s incredibly heavy and significant. So over time, I’ve kind of shaved away the writing. I try to let the visual carry a lot of the storytelling.

EH: There is a beautiful silent comic at the center of Multo of you skateboarding to and from work. I love this sequence because commuting can be such a significant part of our day, in the time it takes up and all that can play out internally during it. I was excited to learn your current project, Pedestrian, is a “meditation on travel, of being separated from others within metal machines, and the places (real and figurative) we go when traveling on long, dark roads at night.” Can you tell me more about this project? What drew you to it, and what are your plans for it?

AL: Multo is so fixed within my interior world, so as I started to make new work, I wanted to go outside of that. Ironically, I started this comic about connection and venturing into the world at the moment that we could no longer leave or interact with others.

For Pedestrian, I’m interested in the time we spend commuting every day. I wanted to ponder what goes through our minds during those eight hours we can spend a week driving to work. How do we see ourselves in those moments? How are we navigating this world? Living in the Midwest, driving on dark roads at night, you can go hours seeing nothing but the blinking lights of a windmill, maybe some oil refinery, smokestacks smoking the horizon. It very much feels like you’re just a consciousness moving through the dark.

I also have a mixed relationship with cars. They can feel like freedom, escape, and a way to connect to others, but as a skateboarder, they’re also a looming death right around the corner looking for me [laughter]. Especially trying to navigate a country that is obsessed with very large vehicles. So, Pedestrian is just the first in a series of stories that are “cartoon Andrew ventures into the world.”

EH: Speaking of the joys of commuting, many artists have day jobs in order to pursue their creative careers. What jobs have you had outside of your creative work, and how have you balanced them with the time, motivation, and space needed to make art?

AL: I’ve had a series of deliberately quiet jobs that give me time to think and to sneak a sketchbook to work. I’ve worked in bookstores and several public libraries. Looking through the picture books while working in a children’s library had a really big effect on me. I also worked in a movie theater, and walking down those dark hallways I had a sketchbook with me at all times. Your job permitting, incorporate ways to dive into your world, take notes, and continue developing your creative work, because there are always moments there for you.

With work-life balance, that’s difficult. I’ve found it’s helpful to make a routine for myself and make the comics a reward. I try to remind myself, even if it’s difficult to make work, even if I hit a wall, I’m doing exactly what I want to do. I have total freedom to create a world with my hands. Something that the writer Haruki Murakami wrote years ago has stayed with me. He said he will often try to finish his writing for the day in the middle of a paragraph so that he’ll be excited to pick it up the next day. If you’re like me, working a job where you’re not getting home until ten o’clock at night, you’re eating dinner at 11:00 p.m. and trying to get a little drawing done before you go to sleep—try to leave yourself at a place you’re excited to jump back into.

EH: One last question: Who, artists or otherwise, have particularly influenced your work? Are there other people who work at the intersection of poetry and comics you’d recommend for readers interested in this genre?

AL: Red Colored Elegy by manga artist Seiichi Hayashi was just a revelation to me. It tracks the life of a comic artist and the highs, lows, thrills and terrors they’re in [laughter]. Maré Odomo is an autobiographical comic artist working very much at an intersection with poetry. He also has a book out through Retrofit called Late Bloomer. I’ve been following the work of autobiographical comic Gabrielle Bell for about fifteen years. Everything she does is masterful, just an incredible way to engage with memory and the mythology of depicting yourself as a cartoon character. Jerry Moriarty, who also uses paint in his comics and calls himself a paintoonist. Julie Doucet; Drawn & Quarterly finally published a full collection of her work called Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet. Also, graphic novelist and director Dash Shaw. I’ve been lucky over the last few years to work with him on his animated films My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea and, most recently, Cryptozoo. He makes work on another level and is so good at evoking different feelings through his varied drawing styles.

Lastly, I’m interested in comic artists who grow with their character. John Porcellino has been drawing comics for thirty years, and you can watch his life develop in fragments across decades. There’s the series called Love and Rockets, by the cartoonists Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, with characters they created in the eighties who are aging in real time today. There is nothing like it, to follow a character closely for decades and to see them develop with you. It’s something I aspire to.