“It was intentionally kind of a stupid concept,” the artist Jillian Tamaki told me on the phone from California last week. She had just appeared at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books to promote SuperMutant Magic Academy, the collection of a popular webcomic she began posting on Tumblr in 2010.

The setting is a satirical melange of X-Men, Harry Potter and teen dramas like Degrassi, all of which Tamaki cheerfully admits only passing familiarity with. “I had just done Strange Tales,” she recalled, a Marvel Comics anthology of cartoonists who would never otherwise draw any Marvel comic. Finishing a story about the disco-themed superhero Dazzler, Tamaki realized that her “dumb daily life” was the main appeal. “I didn’t really care about what happened after she used her powers,” she laughed. “I was more interested in the fact that she had some weird older boyfriend man.”

If a character in SuperMutant Magic Academy uses her powers, the reason is invariably petty or needy. Nobody saves the world; they have more direct concerns. The initiate Marsha develops a hapless, all-consuming crush on her friend Wendy, blurting out “you have such nice hair”. When she finally manages to come out to her, Wendy declares “I’m going to be the best ally a girl ever had”, then asks: “Did I do something wrong? The internet said to be ‘supportive but non-invasive’.” The comic’s jokes often hinge on discrepancy, those gaps between our self-image and what the world sees. A character will say something casually manipulative before revealing clueless, tone-deaf, touching earnestness. Tamaki lingers on their anxious and unspoken monologues, like the humanoid lizard-girl Trixie studying her reflection: “Pretty from certain angles. Cute from most angles. There’s still time … to be hot from more angles. I believe in me!”

“I’m totally fascinated by the interior versus the exterior,” Tamaki said. “That’s why I think it connects with that time in your life where it’s just a monsoon happening inside, and everything is fucking going crazy, but from the outside you’re just a zitty teenager. Other people are left to put the pieces together, what you’re presenting versus what is reality, what you think it means and what it actually looks like.” Or, she added, your base desire crashing against your intellectual structures. “Wanting to be kissed is the most natural thing in the world.”

Tamaki herself went through a public high school in Calgary as the kind of teenager who makes their own zines to give away.

“It’s so funny,” she told me, “because there were other weird kids there, but we just never made it to the point where we were, like, in a band or doing anything together. We were all so isolated in little pods of friends.” Tamaki’s family is sprawled over most of the continent. Back when Montreal revelled in being the country’s least boring city, her grandmother Fawzia Amir ran nightclubs there, sometimes performing as a belly dancer. Tamaki worked at the video game company BioWare after graduating from the Alberta College of Art & Design, eventually gravitating towards freelance illustration. But to those who aren’t art directors at the New York Times or Penguin books, she is best known for the young-adult comics she created with her cousin Mariko.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, with its bouncy castle and puppet shows, felt unfamiliar to Tamaki; she joked that she’s been going to a lot of librarian conferences. Last year’s This One Summer, a graphic novel about two friends in the ambiguous space between childhood and something else, won the first Caldecott Honor ever given for cartooning. It also garnered Jillian a Governor-General’s Award, one of Canada’s three major literary prizes, which was a bit ironic due to Tamaki’s history with the prize. When the previous Tamaki/Tamaki collaboration, Skim, came out, only Mariko got nominated, prompting various comics figures to sign an open letter in protest.

This time the artist and her cousin, who prefer to call themselves co-creators, shared the prize money. She seems merely bemused by the fallacy that whoever scripts a comic must be its lone author: “I do realize just from doing stuff where you’re meeting a more general audience, people who aren’t involved with comics, reading them intensely or making them, it really is quite mysterious, the process.”

SuperMutant Magic Academy was in part a way to dissect that process. “I was looking for something to replace my sketch blog,” Tamaki explained, “and also trying to make comics that weren’t graphic novels. Or images that weren’t super-pretty, full-color, beautiful things. I just wanted to learn how to write, basically.” Although the collected edition has a more expansive new coda, the typical Magic Academy strip fills a single six-panel grid – arbitrary dimensions determined by the size of Tumblr’s dashboard, but Tamaki thrilled at the rigor of those constraints. You can feel her punchlines sharpening as the book goes on, like Marsha’s response to Wendy marveling at a child’s wonder: “You know little kids literally have the IQ of house cats, right?”

Tamaki’s expressionistic brushstrokes made the Ontario forest of This One Summer look vast and forbidding, with elements of the landscape rendered so ethereally you could gather the milkweed in your hands. In SuperMutant Magic Academy, her line is rougher, though still lustrously black, and she uses more visual shorthand. The budding performance artist Frances – who dumps BBQ all over her American flag swimsuit at a Fourth of July picnic – always has two little dashes beneath her eyes, perfectly blasé. “They’re not polished drawings,” Tamaki said. “They’re much more akin to my own handwriting, and a lot of them were made in direct result of what was going on in my life. It’s obviously the most personal work I’ve done, even more so, probably, than the autobiographical short things I’ve done here and there.”

The closest thing to a superhero here is Everlasting Boy, whose power – if that is the word – allows Tamaki to draw multiple sequences where his flesh and bones slough away before surreally regenerating. His form collapses into dust and peels back like a cocoon. In another strip, Trixie offers to do makeup for a comically morbid classmate: “Paint and powder: armor for my desiccating body and sense of self.”

Tamaki told me how amazing it was (“good amazing and bad amazing”) to be dating again since her divorce last year, able to redefine what she seeks in a relationship. “To take control over your face is really hard, you know what I mean? I’ve started growing out my facial hair, growing out some body hair, over the past year, and that has felt really, really hard at times. But I just couldn’t ever see myself being – am I going to be a 75-year-old woman and I’m plucking my eyebrows? Really?”



The Magic Academy has a few marginal teachers, but parents seem to fade from view there. Like Skim and This One Summer, it’s mostly a world of young women. “I need to spend less time in the minds of straight men, especially now,” Tamaki laughed. “It’s funny, because people will ask, like, ‘you’re a feminist, you’re making a feminist book’, and I’m like: ‘I guess?’ That’s just my lens. That’s my filter, that’s my medium that I exist in, every day. It’s not at all subconscious. That’s what I’m interested in – female experience.”