An interview with artist Raquelle Jac.
Editor Matthew Manos interviews artist Raquelle Jac. about her work, and experience participating in the Comix from the Heart project.
Raquelle Jac. is a comic book artist living and working in San Diego, California. Influenced by the underground comics of the 60s and 70s; comic authors Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Phoebe Gloeckner, Raquelle’s work is interested in “compulsions based on biological and psychological necessity: sex, peeing, pooping, crying, breathing”. Raquelle is currently working on her forthcoming book from Fantagraphics, and participated as an artist in the Comix From The Heart project.
Of all the things you could be doing, why comics?
A few years ago when I got into comics, it just all just clicked! In my non-comic art, I’d try to cram entire stories within a single page, using only visual elements, and while it’s possible for me to do that, it just lacks the thrill of telling the ACTUAL story, describing it in words with unambiguous detail. I’ve always loved telling stories, and ever since I was a kid, I’ve gotten this weird kick out of telling uncomfortably personal stories—stories that leave people saying, “Um, TMI…,” which is like the most annoying thing anyone can ever say to anyone ever, by the way. When I was in the 3rd grade, I was the kid that told everyone how babies were made after making the revelation by reading about it in a WORLDBOOK encyclopedia. Soon, but not soon enough—not before being labeled as a “weirdo” at school—I figured out that my inappropriately personal stories were alienating me and that most people just don’t want to hear about things that take them out of their comfort zone, which totally makes sense…I don’t blame them. You can’t expect everyone to be your therapist. Not only that, as a kid, if you tell people certain things that elicit concern, CPS may get involved, and suddenly you’re not only alienated at school, but BONUS! You’re ALSO alienated at home! However, when you see my comic that I did for “Comix From the Heart” you’ll notice my piece featured in this project is very different from what I usually do.
Telling Katie’s story felt like breath of fresh air. It’s a story full of hope and excitement and it has a happy, heartwarming ending. It’s the kind of story we all REALLY need in these COVID-19 times. Which sounds super cheesy, but it’s totally true!
Editor’s Note: Katie Manos and Raquelle Jac. collaborated on a one page comic about the moment she found out she was pregnant with twins.
Anyway, to answer your question, comics give me an outlet to vomit my stories and trauma out with virtually no consequence. If it’s TMI, you can just not read it! If you find it interesting, you can email me and be my friend. Or, if you don’t wanna do that, just…continue reading my stuff and please tell your friends!
What are you working on these days?
Well, I’ve recently signed a publishing agreement with Fantagraphics for a ~200 page book to be released in the next year (but truthfully, it’ll likely be a little longer), so I’ve had my hands full with working on that! But I’m also rolling out a ton of new products to my store at www.RaquelleJacqueline.com! For example, I’m currently working hard on more editions of my “HEART OF GOLD: Scratch-Off” series! The “HEART OF GOLD: Scratch-Off” series is a project where I’ve taken the concepts and attributes of Lotto/baseball cards, and intermixed it with my drawings and photography . It’s sort of like an interactive “collect them all” situation where you purchase a card or a set of cards, and you get a print covered with scratch-off paint, and what lies beneath the scratch-offs are totally unique photographs and/or drawings! Each one is totally different from the last, so you’ll never run into a duplicate image, regardless of how many cards you buy! But other than that, I’ve also been rolling out even more original pieces, posters, brand-new zines, handmade books, & also some re-issued editions of zines I made years ago that I had previously thought to have been lost!
When I look back at your (amazing!) work on “Misguided Love”, or the content you post on Instagram, I can’t help but think about this genre of Graphic Medicine. Especially when you use your art and storytelling to directly confront mental health, trauma, drugs, sex, therapy, and so on. I’m curious – do you think of your work as Graphic Medicine?
Yeah! I suppose I do think of my work as Graphic Medicine. It also falls into a bunch of other genres like “traum-edy,” “autobiographical,” “underground comics,” “comiXXX,” and probably a few others, but I suppose it could also fall into the category of Graphic Medicine as well! I speak a lot about the human condition, especially as it pertains to me with all my ailments, mental health, STD crises, non-prescription drugs and prescription drugs (including my favorite drugs ZOLOFT and TRAZODONE! Love them! Don’t believe the hippies, antidepressants WORK!). I also like my comix to be informative, so I think it’s fun to set aside panels for giving background education about various things whether it’s anthropology or symptoms of bacterial vaginosis or obscure idiopathic neurological issues or dated Freudian pathologies, etc. I love doing research about random things, and it’s fun to sometimes think of comix as research papers. And thank you so much for the love!! Misguided Love was a total trip to make, I’m so proud of it, and I cant wait to expand on it within my new book, which is also published by Fantagraphics!! There are a bunch of mini-page-long stories within Misguided Love that I squished into small vignettes, and I can’t wait to tell the unabridged versions of those, and pick up where I left off!
Prior to this event, how familiar with the genre were you?
I was not familiar with the term “Graphic Medicine” before working on Comix from the Heart, but I was aware of comic artists with side gigs as medical illustrators, doing work for textbooks, while also creating personal work inspired by gigs like that. A name that automatically comes to mind is Phoebe Gloeckner. She’s one of my all time favorite comic artists. In her book, A Child’s Life, she includes a handful of pieces featuring scientifically correct illustrations of cells and anatomy—stuff that you’d expect to find in a science or medical textbook, but if you flip through a few pages you’ll see mixed into seemingly benign and informative diagrams are pieces that increase in depravity, as Gloeckner mixes medical illustration with pornography. They’re sort-of camouflaged due to their placement next to her standard medical drawings, making it so you might not even notice naughtiness until like the 5th time you flip through the book! The one I’m thinking of right now is a cross-section of a woman’s body, showing her spine, inner musculature, and lungs, with her jaw bone opened wide, almost unhinged, with…well, I’ll let you imagine the rest. It’s naughty! It’s great!
Did your impression of Graphic Medicine as a genre change after the event? Perhaps there was a key takeaway from the process as a whole you could speak to.
In the previous question I mentioned how I was vaguely aware of “Graphic Medicine” being a “thing” but I hadn’t known the term for it. At the event, I learned the name of the genre. Now that I know the name for it, I feel encouraged to make even more stories about my health—particularly about my countless missteps regarding my health…like the time I got my first UTI in college and I hadn’t realized that it was an actual serious thing that necessitated a doctor’s visit (which is like, so dumb, cos I have 5 other sisters, so how in the world did I not know to take a UTI seriously)… So I ended up just accidentally neglecting it until my kidneys were on the brink of failure! I spent a week in the ICU. You may wonder, “Well, Raquelle, that’s crazy! Didn’t the PAIN tip you off that something was very wrong?” and well, the thing is, my body feels pain in a really weird way. I FEEL pain, but I guess my threshold for pain is so high, and my denial skills are SO GOOD, that I’m able to just deny it and put it out of my mind. I definitely DO feel pain, but mild pain just feels like general ‘weirdness’ rather than ACTUAL pain. I don’t really ‘read’ pain as pain until it starts to get so distracting that I can’t focus on anything else. SO ANYWAY, after that, I’ve learned to pay attention to my body, and that when I do feel actual pain, I should take it seriously. Well actually…truthfully, I suppose at that point I actually hadn’t quite successfully learned that lesson yet, cos a few years after that I was hospitalized again for neglecting another different thing, but I can now say confidently that I have DEFINITELY learned my lesson… I think. I hope.
Do you think of comics as a form of healing? How can they create impact in the world, or in individual lives, from your perspective?
Yes! I do think of comics as a form of healing—if used responsibly. Maybe 50% of the time when I draw about myself it feels like I’m picking at an old wound, but during the other 50%, comics have brought me closure when I otherwise would’ve been hung out to dry—but hung out to dry in a room with super high humidity, so the towel (me) never gets dry…it just stays in a state of perpetual dampness, getting moldy till it finally “dries” out, becoming stiff and crunchy and smelly, so that if you use it after you shower you have to shower again, because you’ve rubbed mildew all over yourself and into all your nooks and crannies. Anyway, there’s studies that talk about how picking at traumas over and over isn’t actually always constructive. Which may sound obvious, but when you think about ‘talk therapists’ and the way some of them operate, sometimes their whole methodology is picking at traumas, and identifying new traumas, and then picking at those traumas too, and then doing it all over and over and over again. Of course, sometimes that methodology totally works and is constructive, but if you Google what I’m talking about, you’d see a bunch studies done recently about how that process can actually cause festering and re-traumatization. So yeah. It’s a coin-toss regarding how I feel after making an autobiographical comic. However, sometimes even though it can be really painful, and even though it causes occasional depressive episodes, 100% of the time there is this satisfying feeling of “done-ness” when I finish a piece. Like once I’ve put the story down on paper, and once I slide the finished piece into the clear plastic pocket of one of my portfolio binders, there’s this feeling like ‘the case is closed’—and that maybe there’s a possibility I could stop ruminating about it.
I try to practice brutal honesty in my comics, even if it makes me look bad. That way, it gives me the opportunity to properly access the situation, and maybe even mitigate my guilt. I have this habit of feeling unreasonably guilty about everything in my life. Comics can help me map out the situation to figure out if the amount of guilt I feel actually makes sense.
As far as comics creating an impact in the world, ABSOLUTELY! Believe it or not, some of the most popular comics ever made, are those evangelical “Chick Tracts.” My mother was extremely religious, so growing up, those were my only exposure to comics—well, that, and the newspaper funny pages. I can confidently say that I’ve read every single Chick Tract that’s ever been made (brag). If you look at my body of work you can probably tell that I’m not religious, but regardless of religion, there’s DEFINITELY something to be said about how successful Chick Tracts are. I mean 90% of them are problematic, but at making stale, old, objectively boring, biblical scripture actually interesting, it’s surprisingly effective! I mean there’s devils and ghosts and heroin needles and pills and SINNERS….When my mom slept through the day to work her overnight job at Walmart, there were times when I spent the entire day just flipping through my mom’s like 8 giant boxes of those things. I bring this up because at the event ya’ll talked about how comics are now being used with success to explain medical processes, symptoms, and illnesses to patients, and how comprehension of the same information described in long swaths of text vs. explained in the form of “Graphic Medicine” comics, patients’ comprehension of the concepts totally skyrocketed. I mean, it makes total sense! If comics can make the Bible interesting, I’m convinced that it can make ANYTHING interesting.
When you submitted your work to me, you mentioned: “It was fun doing something so different story-wise! It felt good to make something wholesome.” Can you talk a bit about the piece you made, and your process? Or even just elaborate a bit on that statement?
First things first, regarding my statement about how it felt good to make something wholesome: I usually draw about my traumas and about things that I wasn’t able to talk about growing up. There were so many things I had to keep inside when I was a kid! I wasn’t able to freely express myself. It was so frusturating and isolating! So when I finally moved away from home, for the first time in my life there was no one constraining me and no threats hanging over my head to not say certain things or to not make art about certain things. Making comics allows me to feel free and let things out. Because I use comics in that way, I often find myself making work that’s super heavy: abuse, trauma, addiction, mental illness, stuff like that. It can take a lot of emotional labor to complete a story! Telling Katie’s story was a break from that. Not only is it a happy story, it’s a story that isn’t mine! I was able to take a step outside of myself, which is always nice. Maybe I oughtta do some more work collaborating with people and drawing their stories!
My process started during Katie and I’s Zoom chat, when she told me about her’s and Matthew’s story. After Katie and I finished our chat, I went on Google to find various reference photos of sonogram machines, as well as stock photos of a doctor, woman, and man at a sonogram appointment. I like to have options, so I end up downloading a bunch of photos. I then printed those photos out, as well as some pictures Katie sent to me of her face and of Matthew’s face. I like my characters to share some likeness to the person I’m drawing about—well, unless it’s someone I don’t want the viewer to recognize…and if that’s the case, I end up just drawing a generic face. I also took a few sneaky candid screenshots of Katie on my computer when we Zoomed together just in case they might be useful, and I printed those too. It’s important for me to print my reference photos because it’s just easier to draw from paper than it is to look up from paper, to a bright computer screen, and then down at the drawing, and up and down and so on and so on—it’s a lot of neck moving and eyes adjusting. Then, I measured out the margins for the 9 frames, and started the under-drawing using pencil, and after I was finished with that, I used my Rapidograph pens to ink the drawing! And then I scanned the finished drawing.
The End.
Editor’s Note: You can follow Raquelle Jac on Instagram at @raquellejac; learn more and support the artist via Raquelle’s website at https://www.raquellejacqueline.com/.
