words by
Kathy Wise
words by
Kathy Wise
words by
Kathy Wise
ayla E. experienced unspeakable abuse growing up in a Dallas suburb. A junior high art teacher and Booker T. helped save her life.
ayla E. experienced unspeakable abuse growing up in a Dallas suburb. A junior high art teacher and Booker T. helped save her life.
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starring
starring
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fter graduating in 2013 from Harvard, where she served as the art director for the Harvard Lampoon, Kayla E. felt a pull to return to her family back in Dallas. She wanted to help take care of her mother, who told her she had recently been diagnosed with cancer, and make up for lost time with her father and brother. Drowning in trauma, self-medicating with booze and drugs, she had no idea she was an alcoholic and addict, let alone an incest survivor. Home was nowhere she needed to be.
What she needed, she says, was to draw an image that was stuck in her head.
It appears on Page 2 of Precious Rubbish, her first book, which was published by Fantagraphics in April and has already caught the attention of such tastemaking publications as the New York Times and The New Yorker. “It’s this one here, where Li’l Kayla has died by suicide,” grown Kayla says, holding up a copy of her book to her computer camera and pointing at the bright, primary-colored page.
Cartoon Kayla is a seeming mash-up of a big-nosed Jimmy Durante caricature and a plumper, frizzier Little Lulu from the 1935 comic strip, flat and distorted. Grown Kayla, on the other hand, sitting in her cozy North Carolina bungalow where she lives with her wife, Laura, and two dogs, is perfectly proportioned, lively and delightful. She has stylishly short, curly hair; bright, engaging eyes; and a tattoo of a partial chain across the front of her neck, with three drops of rain, or tears, falling below it. She is eight years sober and counting. She talks with her hands and looks up and off to her right when she is deep in thought, which is often; when she does, the sunlight from her living room window illuminates her whole face.
fter graduating in 2013 from Harvard, where she served as the art director for the Harvard Lampoon, Kayla E. felt a pull to return to her family back in Dallas. She wanted to help take care of her mother, who told her she had recently been diagnosed with cancer, and make up for lost time with her father and brother. Drowning in trauma, self-medicating with booze and drugs, she had no idea she was an alcoholic and addict, let alone an incest survivor. Home was nowhere she needed to be.
What she needed, she says, was to draw an image that was stuck in her head.
It appears on Page 2 of Precious Rubbish, her first book, which was published by Fantagraphics in April and has already caught the attention of such tastemaking publications as the New York Times and The New Yorker. “It’s this one here, where Li’l Kayla has died by suicide,” grown Kayla says, holding up a copy of her book to her computer camera and pointing at the bright, primary-colored page.
Cartoon Kayla is a seeming mash-up of a big-nosed Jimmy Durante caricature and a plumper, frizzier Little Lulu from the 1935 comic strip, flat and distorted. Grown Kayla, on the other hand, sitting in her cozy North Carolina bungalow where she lives with her wife, Laura, and two dogs, is perfectly proportioned, lively and delightful. She has stylishly short, curly hair; bright, engaging eyes; and a tattoo of a partial chain across the front of her neck, with three drops of rain, or tears, falling below it. She is eight years sober and counting. She talks with her hands and looks up and off to her right when she is deep in thought, which is often; when she does, the sunlight from her living room window illuminates her whole face.
We asked Kayla E. to illustrate this feature. The result is an epilogue to Precious Rubbish that demonstrates a new level of healing for the author.
Note: the square frames held up by Li'l Kayla throughout are excerpts from the book ($30, 181 pages, Fantagraphics Books).
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“That’s the first page of Precious Rubbish I ever drew,” she says. “And it came out of me at a time when I had never even really reckoned with my attempted suicide the first time, when I was 10 years old. And that’s what this piece is about. I had never considered my relationship with my parents as being particularly traumatic, which is insane.”
In the panel, cartoon Kayla lies in bed, her eyes crossed out, drool spilling from her lip. A bottle of pills is emptied across the blanket. A priest, a doctor, a police officer, and her mother stand bedside, offering no help. “Shame,” says the cop. “She woulda had a nice pair!”
“I was just in such a deep denial,” she says of the years of abuse. “And I think that a part of me was trying to make sense of what happened to me without any language, without any support, without any therapy—just the tools that I had, which were my creativity, I suppose.”
At Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and while working on her B.A. in visual arts at Harvard, Kayla was mostly into traditional art forms: tactile, physical, big. But this book, especially before she realized it was a book, needed to be something else entirely. It needed to be small, private, with a certain level of remove. So she made it digital. Untouchable.
“That’s the first page of Precious Rubbish I ever drew,” she says. “And it came out of me at a time when I had never even really reckoned with my attempted suicide the first time, when I was 10 years old. And that’s what this piece is about. I had never considered my relationship with my parents as being particularly traumatic, which is insane.”
In the panel, cartoon Kayla lies in bed, her eyes crossed out, drool spilling from her lip. A bottle of pills is emptied across the blanket. A priest, a doctor, a police officer, and her mother stand bedside, offering no help. “Shame,” says the cop. “She woulda had a nice pair!”
“I was just in such a deep denial,” she says of the years of abuse. “And I think that a part of me was trying to make sense of what happened to me without any language, without any support, without any therapy—just the tools that I had, which were my creativity, I suppose.”
At Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and while working on her B.A. in visual arts at Harvard, Kayla was mostly into traditional art forms: tactile, physical, big. But this book, especially before she realized it was a book, needed to be something else entirely. It needed to be small, private, with a certain level of remove. So she made it digital. Untouchable.
Her process for the graphic novel was something she calls “mining through the public domain.” She’d start with an idea she couldn’t quite articulate, a flash of memory, and dig through old and forgotten children’s comics. “Oh, this random, crappy little 1943 Super Duck comic that no one’s ever read? That’s how I’ll tell the story of this horrific, traumatic memory,” she says. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like a sparkle, like a hideous sparkle. I just start literally drawing over it and inserting my child self into this narrative.”
The digital nature of the project allowed her to step away and come back. Write and rewrite. Slowly get closer and closer to the truth.
If she felt like a frame was missing something—a view from another angle, the peeling back of another layer—then she’d take another pass. Sometimes even retelling events through cartoon Kayla was too much, and she would have to introduce another character to see things more clearly. Because, as a survivor with PTSD who had been gaslit by her family for years, Kayla understood she had also been gaslighting herself.
“Looking back, I think that what this work was was a very earnest attempt to just pull the memories from my mind and use words and pictures and sequential art to help fill in the gaps and clarify what I felt in an unnameable way,” she says. “It’s taken me years to really be able to understand what this book is, and even what it was that happened to me. This was my first attempt.”
Her process for the graphic novel was something she calls “mining through the public domain.” She’d start with an idea she couldn’t quite articulate, a flash of memory, and dig through old and forgotten children’s comics. “Oh, this random, crappy little 1943 Super Duck comic that no one’s ever read? That’s how I’ll tell the story of this horrific, traumatic memory,” she says. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like a sparkle, like a hideous sparkle. I just start literally drawing over it and inserting my child self into this narrative.”
The digital nature of the project allowed her to step away and come back. Write and rewrite. Slowly get closer and closer to the truth.
If she felt like a frame was missing something—a view from another angle, the peeling back of another layer—then she’d take another pass. Sometimes even retelling events through cartoon Kayla was too much, and she would have to introduce another character to see things more clearly. Because, as a survivor with PTSD who had been gaslit by her family for years, Kayla understood she had also been gaslighting herself.
“Looking back, I think that what this work was was a very earnest attempt to just pull the memories from my mind and use words and pictures and sequential art to help fill in the gaps and clarify what I felt in an unnameable way,” she says. “It’s taken me years to really be able to understand what this book is, and even what it was that happened to me. This was my first attempt.”
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ayla grew up in a small suburb of Dallas (she’d rather not name it), splitting time between her mom’s trailer and wherever her dad and older brother were living at the time. In junior high, she wore dirty hand-me-downs and started growing her bangs to cover her face. “I was just this emotionally disturbed young person,” she says. “I was a mess. I clearly looked like a battered child, but I didn’t know. I thought I looked artsy.”
Tim Eads, her junior high art teacher, let her hang out in his classroom after school and play with clay. He and his wife have since moved to Philadelphia, where they run Tuft the World, a carpet and craft business. But they both attended Kayla’s Harvard graduation and recently caught up with her when she stopped in the City of Brotherly Love on her book tour.
“I remember that she was very—how should I say this—driven,” Eads says. “She was very focused and passionate. She wanted something more.” He knew there was trouble at home, but he had no idea the extent of it. “When you’re teaching seventh and eighth grade, you don’t really know what your students are going through. What I can say is that I had 150 or 160 students, and 20 of them were in my [advanced] art class in eighth grade. And she was the only one that asked to do work after school.”
He’d had many talented students over the years, but he saw something unique in Kayla. “He was my first major ‘enlightened witness,’ ” she says, using the term first coined by child abuse expert and psychologist Alice Miller. “The person who really told me I was special, believed in me, and actually moved mountains to make my life better.”
ayla grew up in a small suburb of Dallas (she’d rather not name it), splitting time between her mom’s trailer and wherever her dad and older brother were living at the time. In junior high, she wore dirty hand-me-downs and started growing her bangs to cover her face. “I was just this emotionally disturbed young person,” she says. “I was a mess. I clearly looked like a battered child, but I didn’t know. I thought I looked artsy.”
Tim Eads, her junior high art teacher, let her hang out in his classroom after school and play with clay. He and his wife have since moved to Philadelphia, where they run Tuft the World, a carpet and craft business. But they both attended Kayla’s Harvard graduation and recently caught up with her when she stopped in the City of Brotherly Love on her book tour.
“I remember that she was very—how should I say this—driven,” Eads says. “She was very focused and passionate. She wanted something more.” He knew there was trouble at home, but he had no idea the extent of it. “When you’re teaching seventh and eighth grade, you don’t really know what your students are going through. What I can say is that I had 150 or 160 students, and 20 of them were in my [advanced] art class in eighth grade. And she was the only one that asked to do work after school.”
He’d had many talented students over the years, but he saw something unique in Kayla. “He was my first major ‘enlightened witness,’ ” she says, using the term first coined by child abuse expert and psychologist Alice Miller. “The person who really told me I was special, believed in me, and actually moved mountains to make my life better.”
Eads told Kayla about Booker T. and encouraged her to apply. “I think I’d been to downtown Dallas twice in my whole life,” she says. “I didn’t know anything about it. I am just a kid in a trailer. What do I know about an arts magnet?” Eads helped her fill out the paperwork and create a portfolio. She initially ended up on the waitlist but managed to make it in.
By that point, her mom had moved closer to Fort Worth, so she had to take the TRE and then DART to class every day. Despite the long commute, she would wait for the last train because she didn’t want to go home. “I spent a lot of time on the streets of Dallas as a kid,” she says, laughing. “But that high school experience was really remarkable. And I know for a fact that it saved my life.”
Another enlightened witness helped her find her way to Harvard. Nash Flores founded Ceres Capital Partners and spearheaded the $55 million campaign to upgrade Booker T. He also served as chair of the Arts Magnet Advisory Board for more than three decades. One day, he came to talk to the top 10 percent of the class as a representative of Harvard, where he had graduated and served as the national chair of the Harvard Schools Committee. That was the first time Kayla learned she was at the top of her class.
“I was just a precocious, very polite Southern gal,” she says. “And this gentleman is coming to talk about Harvard, which had nothing to do with me, of course. I didn’t think I was going to college. Who was going to pay for it? But I was really engaged in what he was saying and how he was describing the school. And so I just connected with the man in a way that my peers weren’t engaged. They were all ready to go to conservatories. Booker T. wasn’t really an Ivy pipeline.”
Flores invited Kayla to visit him at his office. “I never get to meet fancy people,” Kayla says. “So I’m just a scrappy, rough kid going to this very classy gentleman’s high-rise and his very nice office in Dallas overlooking the Arts District. And we talked for hours.”
At the end of the meeting, Flores asked Kayla to make him a promise that she would apply to his alma mater. She told him she couldn’t because she was effectively homeless, couch surfing at friends’ houses. She didn’t have access to a computer, let alone the internet. She had no money. She was stealing food to eat after school.
Flores gave her a key to his office and told her she could come by anytime and use a computer in a break room. He paid for her SAT subject matter tests and got her part-time jobs as an assistant in his office and at a local gallery so she could make a little money over the summer. One day after school, she stopped in to check her email. She started screaming.
Eads told Kayla about Booker T. and encouraged her to apply. “I think I’d been to downtown Dallas twice in my whole life,” she says. “I didn’t know anything about it. I am just a kid in a trailer. What do I know about an arts magnet?” Eads helped her fill out the paperwork and create a portfolio. She initially ended up on the waitlist but managed to make it in.
By that point, her mom had moved closer to Fort Worth, so she had to take the TRE and then DART to class every day. Despite the long commute, she would wait for the last train because she didn’t want to go home. “I spent a lot of time on the streets of Dallas as a kid,” she says, laughing. “But that high school experience was really remarkable. And I know for a fact that it saved my life.”
Another enlightened witness helped her find her way to Harvard. Nash Flores founded Ceres Capital Partners and spearheaded the $55 million campaign to upgrade Booker T. He also served as chair of the Arts Magnet Advisory Board for more than three decades. One day, he came to talk to the top 10 percent of the class as a representative of Harvard, where he had graduated and served as the national chair of the Harvard Schools Committee. That was the first time Kayla learned she was at the top of her class.
“I was just a precocious, very polite Southern gal,” she says. “And this gentleman is coming to talk about Harvard, which had nothing to do with me, of course. I didn’t think I was going to college. Who was going to pay for it? But I was really engaged in what he was saying and how he was describing the school. And so I just connected with the man in a way that my peers weren’t engaged. They were all ready to go to conservatories. Booker T. wasn’t really an Ivy pipeline.”
Flores invited Kayla to visit him at his office. “I never get to meet fancy people,” Kayla says. “So I’m just a scrappy, rough kid going to this very classy gentleman’s high-rise and his very nice office in Dallas overlooking the Arts District. And we talked for hours.”
At the end of the meeting, Flores asked Kayla to make him a promise that she would apply to his alma mater. She told him she couldn’t because she was effectively homeless, couch surfing at friends’ houses. She didn’t have access to a computer, let alone the internet. She had no money. She was stealing food to eat after school.
Flores gave her a key to his office and told her she could come by anytime and use a computer in a break room. He paid for her SAT subject matter tests and got her part-time jobs as an assistant in his office and at a local gallery so she could make a little money over the summer. One day after school, she stopped in to check her email. She started screaming.
“It was after hours,” Kayla says. “It was just me and him in the office. And I remember I was running out of his office, down the hall, and I saw him, and I was able to give him a big hug and tell him I got in. And he just wrapped me in his arms.”
Surprised by the memory, which hasn’t come up before during her standard book tour Q&As, Kayla starts to cry; it is the only time during our interview that she does.
“I don’t even want to speak what I had in mind for my life after high school,” she says. “It wasn’t a life. So it was extraordinary. He saved my life, and he came to my graduation. That was the last time I saw him, at my Harvard graduation in 2013, and then he died very shortly after that.”
“It was after hours,” Kayla says. “It was just me and him in the office. And I remember I was running out of his office, down the hall, and I saw him, and I was able to give him a big hug and tell him I got in. And he just wrapped me in his arms.”
Surprised by the memory, which hasn’t come up before during her standard book tour Q&As, Kayla starts to cry; it is the only time during our interview that she does.
“I don’t even want to speak what I had in mind for my life after high school,” she says. “It wasn’t a life. So it was extraordinary. He saved my life, and he came to my graduation. That was the last time I saw him, at my Harvard graduation in 2013, and then he died very shortly after that.”
bulbous nose and a big head seemed like a good place to start.
Toward the end of Precious Rubbish, there is a heartbreakingly sweet photo of little Kayla, maybe age 5. She seems tiny and fragile for any age, with an unruly tuft of hair held back with a satin bow; the cartoonishly cute, oversize eyes and ears of Vanellope von Schweetz from Wreck-It Ralph; a columnar nose; and thin, pursed lips.
To portray a ravaged child who was forced to see, hear, and experience unspeakable things, one might choose to exaggerate the eyes. Or the ears. Or the sealed mouth.
Kayla chose the nose.
It is her dad’s nose.
“I have a very fraught relationship with my heritage,” she says. “I’m Mexican American, and I also have severe body dysmorphia. So if I’m going to draw or depict the way I look, I can probably guess it’s not going to be accurate.”
Her senior thesis at Harvard was called Kayla TV. It was a multimedia medley of 3D comics, GIFs, paintings, masks, and video intended to explore the idea of a cartoon self. Cartoon Kayla began with a huge head, because artist Kayla was deeply immersed in the work of Paul McCarthy, a controversial, scatological artist from Salt Lake City whose giant-headed figures were twisted, tortured, and sick in a way she found wonderful. She was also reading a lot of Mark Newgarden comics.
“He basically does this sort of a close reading of the nose, the big nose, as sort of a motif in gag comics,” Kayla says of her longtime mentor. “In his book We All Die Alone, he explores this sort of trope. There’s one panel where he draws a character with a nose so big it fills the entire frame of the panel. It’s this little body and this giant, ridiculously oversize cartoon nose.”
Newgarden is an acclaimed experimental cartoonist whose work—which includes the Garbage Pail Kids, an insanely popular series of trading stickers from the 1980s that were an irreverant (and gross) parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls—has been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and at the Picasso Museum in Lucerne, Switzerland. He says the big nose was a “schlock humor trope” from mid-20th-century America.
“It basically communicated big nose equals big laughs, spelled L-A-F-F-S,” he says. “I was doing a lot of work that played with that sort of iconography, juxtaposing it with personal and dark content, though not as specifically personal, I think, as Kayla’s. Mine tended to be more abstracted. I wasn’t ever aiming specifically for autobiography in the way that she does.”
The gross and the difficult, he says, have gone hand-in-hand with caricature and cartooning for centuries. “Cartooning has always been a medium to sort of express grotesque images and transgressive ideas,” he says. “That’s long, long been baked into the cake. But more personal autobiographical work really didn’t start happening in comics until the 1970s, with cartoonists like Justin Green, with his Binky Brown book. And then he influenced the whole wave of underground cartoonists like Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Robert Crumb, who subsequently influenced a whole other generation of people making comics over the years. So there’s a great tradition to all of this. I feel like Kayla definitely fits in that tradition herself.”
Although Kayla had been sending some of her self-published mini-comics to Newgarden for feedback during college, and continued to do so even after she finished her thesis and returned to Dallas, she says she never intended to become a cartoonist. The cartoons were just the form her work took whenever she felt the terrible pull to sit down and draw the things she couldn’t understand. “I was very protective over my biological family,” she says. “I felt defensive of them and had to protect them at all costs and keep them in my life at all costs. Who am I without a mom and dad? Will I cease to exist?”
Yet the frames kept coming. Of Li’l Kayla binge eating Honey Buns from the Mrs. Baird’s Bakery Outlet and then being starved by her father. Of Li’l Kayla being beaten by her mother with a boat oar. Of Li’l Kayla trying to lock her door against her brother only to be told by her father, “Your brother is in love with you.” Of Li’l Kayla purposely walking barefoot on broken glass.
bulbous nose and a big head seemed like a good place to start.
Toward the end of Precious Rubbish, there is a heartbreakingly sweet photo of little Kayla, maybe age 5. She seems tiny and fragile for any age, with an unruly tuft of hair held back with a satin bow; the cartoonishly cute, oversize eyes and ears of Vanellope von Schweetz from Wreck-It Ralph; a columnar nose; and thin, pursed lips.
To portray a ravaged child who was forced to see, hear, and experience unspeakable things, one might choose to exaggerate the eyes. Or the ears. Or the sealed mouth.
Kayla chose the nose.
It is her dad’s nose.
“I have a very fraught relationship with my heritage,” she says. “I’m Mexican American, and I also have severe body dysmorphia. So if I’m going to draw or depict the way I look, I can probably guess it’s not going to be accurate.”
Her senior thesis at Harvard was called Kayla TV. It was a multimedia medley of 3D comics, GIFs, paintings, masks, and video intended to explore the idea of a cartoon self. Cartoon Kayla began with a huge head, because artist Kayla was deeply immersed in the work of Paul McCarthy, a controversial, scatological artist from Salt Lake City whose giant-headed figures were twisted, tortured, and sick in a way she found wonderful. She was also reading a lot of Mark Newgarden comics.
“He basically does this sort of a close reading of the nose, the big nose, as sort of a motif in gag comics,” Kayla says of her longtime mentor. “In his book We All Die Alone, he explores this sort of trope. There’s one panel where he draws a character with a nose so big it fills the entire frame of the panel. It’s this little body and this giant, ridiculously oversize cartoon nose.”
Newgarden is an acclaimed experimental cartoonist whose work—which includes the Garbage Pail Kids, an insanely popular series of trading stickers from the 1980s that were an irreverant (and gross) parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls—has been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and at the Picasso Museum in Lucerne, Switzerland. He says the big nose was a “schlock humor trope” from mid-20th-century America.
“It basically communicated big nose equals big laughs, spelled L-A-F-F-S,” he says. “I was doing a lot of work that played with that sort of iconography, juxtaposing it with personal and dark content, though not as specifically personal, I think, as Kayla’s. Mine tended to be more abstracted. I wasn’t ever aiming specifically for autobiography in the way that she does.”
The gross and the difficult, he says, have gone hand-in-hand with caricature and cartooning for centuries. “Cartooning has always been a medium to sort of express grotesque images and transgressive ideas,” he says. “That’s long, long been baked into the cake. But more personal autobiographical work really didn’t start happening in comics until the 1970s, with cartoonists like Justin Green, with his Binky Brown book. And then he influenced the whole wave of underground cartoonists like Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Robert Crumb, who subsequently influenced a whole other generation of people making comics over the years. So there’s a great tradition to all of this. I feel like Kayla definitely fits in that tradition herself.”
Although Kayla had been sending some of her self-published mini-comics to Newgarden for feedback during college, and continued to do so even after she finished her thesis and returned to Dallas, she says she never intended to become a cartoonist. The cartoons were just the form her work took whenever she felt the terrible pull to sit down and draw the things she couldn’t understand. “I was very protective over my biological family,” she says. “I felt defensive of them and had to protect them at all costs and keep them in my life at all costs. Who am I without a mom and dad? Will I cease to exist?”
Yet the frames kept coming. Of Li’l Kayla binge eating Honey Buns from the Mrs. Baird’s Bakery Outlet and then being starved by her father. Of Li’l Kayla being beaten by her mother with a boat oar. Of Li’l Kayla trying to lock her door against her brother only to be told by her father, “Your brother is in love with you.” Of Li’l Kayla purposely walking barefoot on broken glass.
A
It wasn’t until InTouch broke the story in 2015 that Josh Duggar, of the TLC show 19 Kids and Counting fame, had been accused of molesting numerous girls, including some of his sisters, that Kayla began to understand. “I was sitting in my car in Plano, Texas, listening to NPR,” she says. “And when I heard on the radio that what he had done to his sisters was criminal, that was the first time I’d ever—ever—put two and two together in my mind.”
Within a year, she says, she blew up her life and put her comics on pause. She got sober. She moved away from her family and out of Texas. She reconnected with Laura, whom she had met on a bus eight years earlier, and the two started dating. “I just wasn’t making art,” she says of that time. “I was building this life, a life away from my family, a life out of the closet, a life sober. It was incredible.”
She started therapy, putting the energy and time that she had previously spent on her art into recovery. Then, in 2018, Newgarden came to North Carolina on his book tour for How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels, and the two met up. He encouraged her to combine the Li’l Kayla comics into a collection and pitch them as a book to Fantagraphics, his publisher.
“It had never occurred to me,” Kayla says. “I didn’t see it as publishable material. I didn’t make it for an audience. I didn’t think there was an audience.”
Newgarden disagreed. He thought she had something special. “She’s not so much telling stories as making a series of little messages in bottles, which is an interesting way to think about it,” he says. “It’s a very serial use of the medium. I mean, she’s literally making a list of personal transgressions in comic strip form.”
It wasn’t until InTouch broke the story in 2015 that Josh Duggar, of the TLC show 19 Kids and Counting fame, had been accused of molesting numerous girls, including some of his sisters, that Kayla began to understand. “I was sitting in my car in Plano, Texas, listening to NPR,” she says. “And when I heard on the radio that what he had done to his sisters was criminal, that was the first time I’d ever—ever—put two and two together in my mind.”
Within a year, she says, she blew up her life and put her comics on pause. She got sober. She moved away from her family and out of Texas. She reconnected with Laura, whom she had met on a bus eight years earlier, and the two started dating. “I just wasn’t making art,” she says of that time. “I was building this life, a life away from my family, a life out of the closet, a life sober. It was incredible.”
She started therapy, putting the energy and time that she had previously spent on her art into recovery. Then, in 2018, Newgarden came to North Carolina on his book tour for How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels, and the two met up. He encouraged her to combine the Li’l Kayla comics into a collection and pitch them as a book to Fantagraphics, his publisher.
“It had never occurred to me,” Kayla says. “I didn’t see it as publishable material. I didn’t make it for an audience. I didn’t think there was an audience.”
Newgarden disagreed. He thought she had something special. “She’s not so much telling stories as making a series of little messages in bottles, which is an interesting way to think about it,” he says. “It’s a very serial use of the medium. I mean, she’s literally making a list of personal transgressions in comic strip form.”
hen I ask Kayla why she chose Precious Rubbish, a mouthful, instead of Precious Trash for her title, she refers me to a book of the same name published in 1956 by Theodore L. Shaw.
“It’s basically this little humorous piece of criticism that eviscerates the contemporary art world,” she says. “He just cuts it down to size. He examines it for its pretension and its exclusivity.” Shaw believed the art world needed to take itself less seriously and instead open itself up to the value of art that appeals to the masses.
“Those are all ideals that are very close to my heart,” Kayla says. “So when I found this book, I was so delighted to just see these sort of abstract thoughts articulated so clearly and so humorously. And I loved the title. It’s so difficult to say—I still have a hard time saying it. Precious Trash would also have the two instances of the shh, but it’s such a wall the way that you have to shape your mouth to say Precious Rubbish. It just feels like you’re hitting a wall and then another wall, which I find so fascinating. It is not a neutral combination of words.
“There are a lot of connections that I have made—and I think more connections I could make down the line—between the thought of the child as precious but also as disposable. And comics as a medium: is it art or is it trash? There are all these different ways of looking at what it is that I’m doing from different perspectives and pointing at different things and saying, ‘Oh, that’s precious.’ ‘That’s rubbish.’ ‘That’s precious.’ ‘Rubbish.’ There’s a lot of possibility in that title. And I am using a form that I celebrate because of its ability to, I think, lose self-seriousness, which is so difficult to do when you’re writing about trauma, when you’re writing a memoir at all.
“How many memoirs are really all that funny? Especially if they’re about incest, they’re pretty heavy. There’s barely a chuckle to be found.”
hen I ask Kayla why she chose Precious Rubbish, a mouthful, instead of Precious Trash for her title, she refers me to a book of the same name published in 1956 by Theodore L. Shaw.
“It’s basically this little humorous piece of criticism that eviscerates the contemporary art world,” she says. “He just cuts it down to size. He examines it for its pretension and its exclusivity.” Shaw believed the art world needed to take itself less seriously and instead open itself up to the value of art that appeals to the masses.
“Those are all ideals that are very close to my heart,” Kayla says. “So when I found this book, I was so delighted to just see these sort of abstract thoughts articulated so clearly and so humorously. And I loved the title. It’s so difficult to say—I still have a hard time saying it. Precious Trash would also have the two instances of the shh, but it’s such a wall the way that you have to shape your mouth to say Precious Rubbish. It just feels like you’re hitting a wall and then another wall, which I find so fascinating. It is not a neutral combination of words.
“There are a lot of connections that I have made—and I think more connections I could make down the line—between the thought of the child as precious but also as disposable. And comics as a medium: is it art or is it trash? There are all these different ways of looking at what it is that I’m doing from different perspectives and pointing at different things and saying, ‘Oh, that’s precious.’ ‘That’s rubbish.’ ‘That’s precious.’ ‘Rubbish.’ There’s a lot of possibility in that title. And I am using a form that I celebrate because of its ability to, I think, lose self-seriousness, which is so difficult to do when you’re writing about trauma, when you’re writing a memoir at all.
“How many memoirs are really all that funny? Especially if they’re about incest, they’re pretty heavy. There’s barely a chuckle to be found.”
W
experience another intentional wall when it comes to the pages of puzzles, recipes, and fake advertisements that are interspersed throughout the book. Designed with gold type and images on a yellow background, they at first appear to be a cheeky, cheerful break. But the pages aren’t breathers; they aren’t fun. The monochromatic color-on-color means one has to expend extra energy to simply read the words. And then comes the realization that the words and images are simply a different way to express the pain.
What I don’t notice, until Kayla points it out, is the lack of a particular color. “There isn’t a single instance of black until you get to the last page,” she tells me. “Not even a vector. Nothing.”
The result is no visual rest, as there was no rest for Li’l Kayla from the abuse. “It’s one of the things that makes it such a disorienting experience,” she says. “You can’t sink anywhere. It’s like you’re constantly sliding over the pages.”
To add to that sense of no handrails, she also purposely excludes right angles and sharp points. Even the letters and frames have rounded edges. Nothing comes to a defined end. Nothing is fixed. Nothing is safe. “It creates this visual environment where there’s no depth,” she says. “There’s no corners, there’s no place to rest, nothing to cling to.”
Then there’s her use of a sort of looping. On certain series of frames there is a two-tiered narrative, one in speech bubbles and one in text boxes. They may be cacophonous if read together; the better tactic is to read through one format and then the other. But in doing so, the reader is forced back through the muck in an increasingly uncomfortable way.
The looping also occurs in terms of the narratives themselves. A scene may be described and then, pages later, return, but this time with an extra kick to the gut. You thought it was bad, but then the story is retold with a piece that had been missing. The scene didn’t end there; it ended when Li’l Kayla’s mother removed the plastic bag from her head. It is a conceit that arose from many of the vignettes being drawn separately over time before being knit together as a cohesive whole.
The combined result means that reading the book is a physical experience. It is nauseating. It hurts. It makes you look away, throw it down, pick it back up.
I want to wrap Li’l Kayla in my arms. I want to have the grown-up artist over for dinner. I want to never look at this book again, and I want to spend hours mining it for the meaning between all of the non-black, rounded lines.
For fellow survivors of abuse, Kayla has discovered, her Li’l Kayla comics can also be physical in a different way. It can give survivors who experienced abuse in isolation the profound sense that Kayla was an in-person witness to what they suffered, the witness they—and she—never had.
“Sometimes they’ll tell me they’ve never even said it out loud before when they disclose [the abuse] to me,” Kayla says. “It’s so intense. And it gutted me for a long time. I remember thinking, I don’t even know if I should be doing this. I don’t know if I can handle it. I’m so sad hearing this and knowing this and having to contend with just the sheer number of random people that have this trauma, this violence in their past.”
When she first went to comic book festivals, selling mini-comics and individual panels, she found that the substance of her work pulled in people who weren’t normally consumers of experimental comics. It took her three years of working tables to be able to build up the skills to hear people’s stories and be there with them without integrating their abuse into hers.
It was her friend Noah Van Sciver, who also makes autobiographical comics about his rough childhood, who told her at HeroesCon last year that she was there to just sell her comics, and that was OK. As her wife put it, her work could be the vessel for others; she didn’t need to be the vessel.
“And so I really internalized that,” she says. “But God, it is really sad. It’s so much more prevalent than even I thought, and I was a very pessimistic person. I certainly didn’t think that the world was a good place. And then I’ve just been totally devastated by the reality of childhood trauma. But it makes this work accessible to anyone, which is a miracle to me.”
experience another intentional wall when it comes to the pages of puzzles, recipes, and fake advertisements that are interspersed throughout the book. Designed with gold type and images on a yellow background, they at first appear to be a cheeky, cheerful break. But the pages aren’t breathers; they aren’t fun. The monochromatic color-on-color means one has to expend extra energy to simply read the words. And then comes the realization that the words and images are simply a different way to express the pain.
What I don’t notice, until Kayla points it out, is the lack of a particular color. “There isn’t a single instance of black until you get to the last page,” she tells me. “Not even a vector. Nothing.”
The result is no visual rest, as there was no rest for Li’l Kayla from the abuse. “It’s one of the things that makes it such a disorienting experience,” she says. “You can’t sink anywhere. It’s like you’re constantly sliding over the pages.”
To add to that sense of no handrails, she also purposely excludes right angles and sharp points. Even the letters and frames have rounded edges. Nothing comes to a defined end. Nothing is fixed. Nothing is safe. “It creates this visual environment where there’s no depth,” she says. “There’s no corners, there’s no place to rest, nothing to cling to.”
Then there’s her use of a sort of looping. On certain series of frames there is a two-tiered narrative, one in speech bubbles and one in text boxes. They may be cacophonous if read together; the better tactic is to read through one format and then the other. But in doing so, the reader is forced back through the muck in an increasingly uncomfortable way.
The looping also occurs in terms of the narratives themselves. A scene may be described and then, pages later, return, but this time with an extra kick to the gut. You thought it was bad, but then the story is retold with a piece that had been missing. The scene didn’t end there; it ended when Li’l Kayla’s mother removed the plastic bag from her head. It is a conceit that arose from many of the vignettes being drawn separately over time before being knit together as a cohesive whole.
The combined result means that reading the book is a physical experience. It is nauseating. It hurts. It makes you look away, throw it down, pick it back up.
I want to wrap Li’l Kayla in my arms. I want to have the grown-up artist over for dinner. I want to never look at this book again, and I want to spend hours mining it for the meaning between all of the non-black, rounded lines.
For fellow survivors of abuse, Kayla has discovered, her Li’l Kayla comics can also be physical in a different way. It can give survivors who experienced abuse in isolation the profound sense that Kayla was an in-person witness to what they suffered, the witness they—and she—never had.
“Sometimes they’ll tell me they’ve never even said it out loud before when they disclose [the abuse] to me,” Kayla says. “It’s so intense. And it gutted me for a long time. I remember thinking, I don’t even know if I should be doing this. I don’t know if I can handle it. I’m so sad hearing this and knowing this and having to contend with just the sheer number of random people that have this trauma, this violence in their past.”
When she first went to comic book festivals, selling mini-comics and individual panels, she found that the substance of her work pulled in people who weren’t normally consumers of experimental comics. It took her three years of working tables to be able to build up the skills to hear people’s stories and be there with them without integrating their abuse into hers.
It was her friend Noah Van Sciver, who also makes autobiographical comics about his rough childhood, who told her at HeroesCon last year that she was there to just sell her comics, and that was OK. As her wife put it, her work could be the vessel for others; she didn’t need to be the vessel.
“And so I really internalized that,” she says. “But God, it is really sad. It’s so much more prevalent than even I thought, and I was a very pessimistic person. I certainly didn’t think that the world was a good place. And then I’ve just been totally devastated by the reality of childhood trauma. But it makes this work accessible to anyone, which is a miracle to me.”
experience another intentional wall when it comes to the pages of puzzles, recipes, and fake advertisements that are interspersed throughout the book. Designed with gold type and images on a yellow background, they at first appear to be a cheeky, cheerful break. But the pages aren’t breathers; they aren’t fun. The monochromatic color-on-color means one has to expend extra energy to simply read the words. And then comes the realization that the words and images are simply a different way to express the pain.
What I don’t notice, until Kayla points it out, is the lack of a particular color. “There isn’t a single instance of black until you get to the last page,” she tells me. “Not even a vector. Nothing.”
The result is no visual rest, as there was no rest for Li’l Kayla from the abuse. “It’s one of the things that makes it such a disorienting experience,” she says. “You can’t sink anywhere. It’s like you’re constantly sliding over the pages.”
To add to that sense of no handrails, she also purposely excludes right angles and sharp points. Even the letters and frames have rounded edges. Nothing comes to a defined end. Nothing is fixed. Nothing is safe. “It creates this visual environment where there’s no depth,” she says. “There’s no corners, there’s no place to rest, nothing to cling to.”
Then there’s her use of a sort of looping. On certain series of frames there is a two-tiered narrative, one in speech bubbles and one in text boxes. They may be cacophonous if read together; the better tactic is to read through one format and then the other. But in doing so, the reader is forced back through the muck in an increasingly uncomfortable way.
The looping also occurs in terms of the narratives themselves. A scene may be described and then, pages later, return, but this time with an extra kick to the gut. You thought it was bad, but then the story is retold with a piece that had been missing. The scene didn’t end there; it ended when Li’l Kayla’s mother removed the plastic bag from her head. It is a conceit that arose from many of the vignettes being drawn separately over time before being knit together as a cohesive whole.
The combined result means that reading the book is a physical experience. It is nauseating. It hurts. It makes you look away, throw it down, pick it back up.
I want to wrap Li’l Kayla in my arms. I want to have the grown-up artist over for dinner. I want to never look at this book again, and I want to spend hours mining it for the meaning between all of the non-black, rounded lines.
For fellow survivors of abuse, Kayla has discovered, her Li’l Kayla comics can also be physical in a different way. It can give survivors who experienced abuse in isolation the profound sense that Kayla was an in-person witness to what they suffered, the witness they—and she—never had.
“Sometimes they’ll tell me they’ve never even said it out loud before when they disclose [the abuse] to me,” Kayla says. “It’s so intense. And it gutted me for a long time. I remember thinking, I don’t even know if I should be doing this. I don’t know if I can handle it. I’m so sad hearing this and knowing this and having to contend with just the sheer number of random people that have this trauma, this violence in their past.”
When she first went to comic book festivals, selling mini-comics and individual panels, she found that the substance of her work pulled in people who weren’t normally consumers of experimental comics. It took her three years of working tables to be able to build up the skills to hear people’s stories and be there with them without integrating their abuse into hers.
It was her friend Noah Van Sciver, who also makes autobiographical comics about his rough childhood, who told her at HeroesCon last year that she was there to just sell her comics, and that was OK. As her wife put it, her work could be the vessel for others; she didn’t need to be the vessel.
“And so I really internalized that,” she says. “But God, it is really sad. It’s so much more prevalent than even I thought, and I was a very pessimistic person. I certainly didn’t think that the world was a good place. And then I’ve just been totally devastated by the reality of childhood trauma. But it makes this work accessible to anyone, which is a miracle to me.”
I
This story originally appeared in the July issue of D Magazine. Write to kathy.wise@dmagazine.com.
This story originally appeared in the July issue of
D Magazine. Write to kathy.wise@dmagazine.com.
