“Get inside the whale. Or rather, admit you are inside the whale.”

George Orwell’s Inside the Whale was an essay I spent a lot of time thinking about while making Angie Bongiolatti.

For a long time I felt like I wasn’t reading overtly political comic work. Not like “Political Cartoons”, more in the sense that the bulk of what I’d call “Indie” or Alternative Comics felt very apolitical. An emphasis on realism, or verisimilitude. Finding value in accurately recording the world around you. Especially in autobio or Diary Comics. I don’t know if the way I perceived things was right, but it was the way things felt to me at the time.

I don’t think I feel that way anymore. A lot of the comics I read online are political. There are a lot of comics like the ones I’ve been making in the past year or two - comics essays, doing their best to articulate a perspective on the wider world.

I wonder how I fell into this mode of making things. It feels very unplanned. I used to care more about the autobiographical aspects of my work. It used to be important to me that the details be accurate to how things really happened. Technically a lot of my short comics are still autobiographical, but I don’t think of myself as an autobio cartoonist while I make them. The details of my actual life feel irrelevant. This feels like progress.