On 23 April, the Interstitial Arts Foundation (IAF) hosted a panel at New York City’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA). The panel topic, “Interstitiality and the Creative Artist,” was to be a discussion by comic artists of how their work can (and frequently does) fall between the cracks of genres or categories; thus the term “interstitial.” The organizers of this two-part event (the second panel will be 30 April) expected the participants to cover the issue from the creative side, with the following panel to focus more on the business end of things. However, the artists did cover both sides of the issue.
It was a fascinating discussion of the fact that artists really have trouble being creative within the strictures of traditional genre or marketing boundaries. Writer and former comic store manager Doselle Young started with a definition of comics in general. “The magic of the comic,” he said, “is not what is on the page. The magic is when you put what’s on the page together with what’s in your mind.”
Noting that comics are becoming more mainstream, Colleen AF Venable—who works in the marketing department of Roaring Brook and First Second Books, in addition to creating her own comic—remembered her recent appearance at the Texas Library Association. “I was at the convention with First Second, promoting American Born Chinese (which had just won the Printz Award, basically, the Newberry for older readers), and several librarians came up to me asking ‘teach me how to read this.'”
Though comics are becoming more mainstream, mainstream constraints may also be imposed. Megan Kelso, who is now drawing a weekly strip for the New York Times Magazine, said there are many guidelines working for the mainstream press she wasn’t used to. For instance, “I wanted to write a character saying ‘I’m not planning to get knocked up soon.’ I had to change ‘knocked up.’ In the end, since I wanted something slangy, I had to go with ‘P.G.,’ which is so ’50s.” Kelso started in comics self-publishing her own, with far fewer guidelines. She went to Evergreen State College, which she said is “sort of an interstitial college—there are no majors, and I was surrounded by people with the attitude that knowing how to do something was actually a barrier to doing it. Since I didn’t know how to make a comic, I did it.”
Venable continued the theme of freedom versus constraints, noting that “the web offers freedom of style. You don’t have to have four panels everyday; you can have four panels one day, and forty the next. The problem,” she added, “is when you then want to publish it on paper.”
Moderator Justine Larbalestier said that there’s a “hegemonic process going on—the mainstream is gobbling up the interstitials.”
Kelso disagreed: “The mange that’s going mainstream here is the mainstream in Japan. Their fringe is very anemic because” manga is so well-respected in Japan. “You can make a good living with mainstream manga. The stuff that really speaks to me is still fringe; it’s not even translated here.”
IAF Vice President Ellen Kushner wrapped up the evening with an attempt to define the interstitial for those of us new to the concept: “Interstitial is where you read it and say ‘well, it’s kind of this, but it’s kind of this, but it’s kind of this.’ We formed the IAF,” she said, “to help the people writing this stuff get it published and out to an audience.”
MoCCA was a very hospitable environment for the panel, with interesting exhibits of its on in the gallery. The next panel was also described in this article. Again, the museum opens at 6:15 for a scheduled 6:30 start time.