Tension Comes Through
Different Avenues:
Lillie J. Harris on humor, horror,
and making comics at/as work
interview by Tony Wei Ling
Lillie J. Harris: I always warn people—every time I get on Zoom, the first five minutes is me stuck in Teacher Mode.
Tony Wei Ling: Have you done a lot of teaching on Zoom? The body remembers...
Lillie J. Harris: The body certainly keeps the score when it comes to Zoom. Working full time, I've begun to associate the studio with meetings instead of art-making.
TWL: So you've escaped the problem of doing a comics career and burning out that way, but you're still dealing with a version of the same thing?
Lillie J. Harris: Yes—to give an example, yesterday I was trying to print off some zines that Ashanti Fortson and Binglin Hu had made. I thought I could easily print off at least ten—I work at a library! But I wasn't able to troubleshoot, and when you’re printing, sometimes the copies come out backwards, all that fun stuff. While I’m trying to figure that out, I have to be mindful of how much ink I'm using—they watch us for that—and stay in customer service mode. You get snatched out of it every ten seconds.
I miss being able to get immersed in what I’m doing. I think I'm breaking myself out of the burnout, but in all honesty, I've begun to associate art-making with these spurts of twenty seconds, as opposed to having the space to really feel it out and not be interrupted.
TWL: What have you been making in those twenty-second spurts?
Lillie J. Harris: I haven't gone back to it in a few weeks, but currently I’m working on my vampire grief comic, If I Had Known. In any moment of downtime, I'll be at my desk with a little easel propped up, drawing on my tablet. I've also gone back to school online.
Saying this all out loud is helpful. Otherwise when I get home, cook dinner, and don't feel like doing anything, I question what’s up with me—why don’t I want to make comics? And I don't even have any children!
We know that the system isn’t set up for anything like a balanced, fruitful life. But damn, it is taking me a long time to finish a 24-page comic. I don't want that to be self-deprecating. It’s just stating a fact. I think I'm comparing this pace to making Wilderness in such a condensed amount of time—just eight months. I should not ever want to make a comic under those conditions again, but a sick part of my brain is like, “Wouldn't it be great to do that again?”
TWL: Now that you know that you can, at least literally.
Lillie J. Harris: That's what it is.
TWL: Given all the different hats that you wear, how would you introduce someone to your work? What would your short description be?
Lillie J. Harris: I’d say I’m into stories that embody a lot of tension. Years ago, I thought that meant only making horror comics, but tension can come through different avenues: a contentious sibling relationship, or staying at a job that’s unpleasant, not really knowing what else to do. Maybe that comes out visually, too.
TWL: Yeah, you do often have different visual styles and textures in tension with each other. I loved the pages you shared from If I Had Known where you’ve digitally collaged mixed media into the drawing. What made you start experimenting with that?
Lillie J. Harris: In my illustration work from years back, I’d lie on my floor and put together little collages. I don't think I consciously ever put that in a comic—the most I did was in some album artwork. There’s some red yarn I scanned at my job, crayon drawings I scanned in as a background. With illustrations, I like to play around and get tactile.
But for this comic, I did that to avoid drawing things I didn't give a shit about! I had to draw a child in a cave, but I didn’t want to have to perfectly render that setting. So I crunched up some paper towels and scanned those in.
TWL: Are the paper towels from your workplace?
Lillie J. Harris: Yeah, everything from these pages is me at my job!
TWL: So then there’s multiple layers to your relationship between work and comics: using materials from your work, doing it on the clock, using a different drawing technique to avoid adding work you'd dread—or actually, not even to avoid it, but to replace it.
Lillie J. Harris: Strictly speaking, I probably spent the same amount of time trying to configure it, figuring out how to work the colors and hues and shape, as I would have drawing it. The collage took up the same time and brain space, but it was way more fun than drawing rocks.
TWL: I really like that. Obviously making comics is always labor-intensive, but if it also always feels like a grind, I don't know how you’d finish a page.
Lillie J. Harris: No, for real. It became a very intentional thing. I wrote down for myself somewhere that I need to find something on every page that’s fun.
There's one page that I've been stuck on for two weeks. Recently, I told myself that I had to go back to it and face that stressful page. There had to be something in there to enjoy.
I began to use tissue paper for the sisters’ dresses, just to add texture. I think it started with me acknowledging, “I just have to think about this. I can do this, and it'll be fun.” Just gaslighting myself into enjoying myself in order to finish a page.
TWL: I'm curious, what’s your relationship with pleasure and play when it comes to comics? The subject matter of your comics is pretty heavy. But of course Wilderness has its goofy moments, too.
Lillie J. Harris: I’m laughing because I feel so giddy about someone equating a really morose story with moments of goofiness. I never want to seem as if it's all doom and gloom. This is also probably a Black thing, a gallows humor thing—things can be like, really awful, but there’s still someone cracking jokes at a funeral. That's just how it is.
TWL: There is something that feels really real—for lack of a better word—about your comics, I think because you have a tendency not to explain yourself, let alone over-explain. You seem comfortable with your reader not always getting everything. I appreciate that.
Lillie J. Harris: Back in 2020, I was talking to Chuck Forsman briefly, after I sent him the script for Wilderness. He said about the ending, “Well, it didn't seem like anything was resolved.” I replied, “Did that feel unsatisfying?” And he said, “Oh no, I felt okay about it.” That’s cool. If you felt unsatisfied, then I’d want to go back to it. But if you were satisfied not having an answer, then I think my job is done.
TWL: In that way, do you feel like you've moved out of horror, or think about it differently? Horror often seems to invoke a stricter sense of narrative, even though the genre also gets very expansive with narrative structure.
Lillie J. Harris: These days, I don't feel compelled to make stories that scare people in the moment. With If I Had Known, dread is important, but not necessarily in the sense of wondering what's what's going to happen. It’s the dread of already knowing what's going to happen—and still, god, you hope it doesn’t. It’s horror, but maybe not marketable horror.
One thing that interests me is that if you pick up a work of horror, you’re signing up for a particular experience. But if it's at the forefront like that, it's not really all that scary. If you really want to really scare people, maybe you lure them in with a premise of something else, and then, bring that horror in underneath…. Ultimately, I'm not opposed to horror, but if I got an email from an agent asking if I want to make a horror comic, I would wonder if we were talking about the same thing.
TWL: Would you take on a graphic novel project from a publisher?
Lillie J. Harris: I don't know—I would write one. I wouldn't want to draw one.
TWL: Very different jobs!
Lillie J. Harris: I can’t mention their name yet, but I'm actually collaborating on a graphic novel with a friend right now. I’ll be writing it, and they’ll be drawing it—it's all about murder, Catholic guilt, an all-girls school, and transness. This friend has a lot more traditional publishing experience, so we’re going to get the outline, script, and pitch all set, and they’ll do their magic and talk to their people.
Having made comics before, I have a realistic understanding of what a graphic novel collaboration means. No shade, but we writers are not doing 50 percent of the work. Some publishers think of the writer as distilling a novel for their artist-serf, or they think the work is a literal 50-50 split. Just in terms of physical labor and commitment, it's not: once you finalize the script, it might take a year and a half or more for someone to actually draw it.
I would be so down, respectfully, to write a graphic novel for a publisher, but I’m not going to be drawing anything unless it's my own project, and I get to work solo, and it's short. I would not want to be drawing 200 or 300 pages of anything.
TWL: The length of published comics is already arbitrary. I wish novella-length comics were more of a norm in traditional book publishing.
Lillie J. Harris: From what I've heard, it's like once you try something new, and it takes off, that becomes the golden egg. There’s just such a perpetuation of ideas like, “Kids love 500-page graphic novels.” Do the kids really like that, or is that all the kids have? You’d have to try something new to find out.
TWL: Well, you’re on the front lines of finding out what kids actually like, working at a library.
Lillie J. Harris: Not even, not even—who knows what the kids like? If you only have one specific monopoly on what a graphic novel is, of course they’re going to go for it. That's the only thing!
TWL: What kind of readers do you imagine when you write—if any?
Lillie J. Harris: People who want to get really immersed in a specific character. I don't prioritize the story and plot so much as I try to create a character you could be endeared to. From there, then the plot will unfurl.
TWL: Can you tell me about your process with developing characters?
Lillie J. Harris: I tend to start with how a person sounds: when they're trying to express something, how does that come out? If they want to go outside, would they say to someone, passive aggressively, “It’d be nice to go on a walk,” or would they be like, “Can we just go?” It starts with me trying to envision what this person wants, how they externalize that, and how it could be taken the wrong way.
TWL: And how do you get from there to the visual?
Lillie J. Harris: When I was making Wilderness, I researched so-called “feral” children—eighteenth-century texts about kids that were found in the woods and assimilated into society. I wanted to know: did they ever learn to talk? How did they walk? I drew Beau in Wilderness as being chronically hunched over, because he was a feral child, and his back is fucked up. Another character has an amputated arm, so I thought about how someone might counterbalance that when they move.
I’ve never been one to make character sheets, like in animation studios, but if a character is moving across the page, I want them to move in a way that's distinct to them, just like I want them to talk in a way that's distinct to them.
TWL: You’ve talked about getting burned out after graduating in The Broken Heart at the Center of Comics. How do you look back on the whole process of making Wilderness?
Lillie J. Harris: Honestly, the burnout that I got from finishing my thesis didn't come from my actual thesis. It came from leaving my school. Making a whole-ass graphic novella in eight months is not something I would ever want to do again, but I don't feel like that is what cooled me off comics for a year and a half. Though if I hadn’t been cooled off on comics, I think I’d have eventually gotten burnt out anyway, because I would have kept making them in an untenable way. So either way you slice it, the burnout was inevitable.
TWL: Part of your intervention into the burnout discussion was to say that it's not all about the work itself, but who's around you. What are your art community relationships like now?
Lillie J. Harris: I don't live in a super hip arts community. I live in Southern Maryland. It’s been challenging, because a lot of my art connections happen online or when I travel. In my day-to-day life, if I don't consciously carve out a weekend for something, I just won't have access to it. There's a larger conversation to be had about how you keep up an arts community when you're not living in a major city. I even have my own car, so I can get around—I’m definitely not in the position of people who live in more rural areas, who have to rely on transit that goes fucking nowhere.
TWL: What’s it like keeping up those online relationships?
Lillie J. Harris: I try to be curated about it. I don't use Twitter professionally. The communities that I’m a part of and that I share work with are on Discord, so it's more of a curated pocket of interaction rather than free reign. That's chill. I tend to just post art there, sparingly: “I finished this thing. Thanks for the emojis. Okay, bye!” I don't often show work in progress the way I would if I was in physical proximity with other artists. It feels like an appetizer, like I'm missing the entrée of an art community.
TWL: If you had the entrée version, what are some of the little, tangible things you’d wish for?
Lillie J. Harris: Real talk, what I want is to be able to play like we did when we were kids, before there was ego and competition and comparison. Let's all just roll up in a studio, do our own thing, and be really hyped about what we're all making. You know what I mean? I want to get into it and not have to think, “What will this mean? How will people respond to this? What does this say about me and my identity as an artist?” I just want to make stuff without having to think about what it will amount to.
TWL: Yeah, I feel like some of that compulsion to explain or interpret your own work comes from having to pitch your art for jobs and grants—having to make the argument of “this is what it means, this is why it's good, this is how it fulfills the diversity assignment.”
Lillie J. Harris: Having to try to prove the validity of what you're doing, because it can’t suffice to just have fun making art.
TWL: No, your job can't just be to make it. You have to already be interpreting it!
Lillie J. Harris: Ideally, I’d want to feel comfortable just playing around and seeing where it goes. I think I’m still missing that improvisational aspect. When I’m making comics, especially when I'm not collaborating, I already know what's going to happen: draw a square, put something in the square, put words there. Which brings us back to the mixed media thing—that's partly my need to throw a wrench in this process. Otherwise I'm just going from point A to point B for hours. It’s not fun.
TWL: How much do you lay everything out from the very beginning?
Lillie J. Harris: Oh, I’m a double earth sign. Things are very exact. Which might seem oxymoronic if you look at how I draw—I don't want to say it’s haphazard, but maybe there’s a fluidity to it. When I'm writing and planning, though, I need to know exactly what is happening. I try to get the dialog down exactly in script form. It’s the standard process: outline, script, thumbnails. I guess that's why when it's time for me to draw it, it feels like just filling in what’s already been planned.
TWL: You become your own art serf.
Lillie J. Harris: That’s literally it. I change hats from a crown to a jester hat, and then I start drawing.
TWL: I guess I don't know anyone who enjoys the entire process of making comics.
Lillie J. Harris: That's actually really affirming to hear, because a part of me is always thinking, “Am I supposed to be enjoying this more?”
I like brainstorming. I like writing. I even like thumbnailing, but when it’s time to commit, I think, is this supposed to feel as shitty as it does? But then it doesn't, but then it does again—an ebb and a flow.
TWL: When does it feel pleasurable?
Lillie J. Harris: It feels really pleasurable when you hit that flow state. The best way I can describe it is that Paul Rudd GIF where he’s going, “Oh shit, oh shit… wait, I'm fine.” I’ll be like, “I hate this! Wait, this is actually okay. Wait, I hate this.”
Over and over. Then you look up and the page is done.
TWL: And I imagine it’s not easy to find that flow when working in twenty-second bursts. You mentioned that you sometimes do your thing on the weekend. How do you decide whether a weekend of rest or art-making will be more replenishing, more energizing?
Lillie J. Harris: I’ll try for a half hour. If within that half hour I find myself getting frustrated, then I'm just depleting my energy. But if I find myself being interested—and not necessarily that things are going well, but I feel like I’m trying to solve a puzzle—I keep going. If I start feeling like I'm doing it just to knock something off a to-do list, I need to put it down.
TWL: That seems like a healthy balance with the earth sign thing.
Lillie J. Harris: But like I said in the Gladiolus essay, I’m only able to have a healthy balance because drawing isn't my bread and butter. I'm sure there are cartoonists who naturally would work like this, but they have deadlines. I can do this because I'm getting paid somewhere else.
TWL: When comics is the job, you have deadlines, and also editors—who are kind of your boss?
Lillie J. Harris: Horrible. I mean, we love editors. I would not have been able to make Wilderness without Ashanti [Fortson] acting as my editor. But it's important that Ashanti’s also a cartoonist. Not to say that you have to make comics, but having a respect for comics, reading them, knowing about them, is pivotal before you edit a cartoonist. Right now, since I don't have an agent, I tend to straight up ask my cartoonist friends how something looks.
TWL: The thumbnails or the final pages?
Lillie J. Harris: Okay, I'll be so real right now and admit that I tend to show these friends a page in progress, to say, “Oh, y'all, I'm doing it.” And they’ll say, “Hey, have you considered this?” And I’ll be like, “Fuck off. I wanted pats on the back.” But they know me—sometimes I have to be a baby. I wait a day, and then I go back to it. And of course the feedback does help.
It comes down to being open about what you want; that's why I've become more vocal about saying, “I'm proud of myself. Can y'all look at this and gas me up?” Then in two days, I'll be like, “How does this look?” It's a balance.
TWL: I wanted to bring up something else you noted in your contribution to the Gladiolus piece—that it’s not just commodifying a passion that can lead to burnout, but also self-identifying with that passion. That made me curious about how you feel about calling yourself a cartoonist, or even just continuing to make comics. What makes you want to keep making comics, and what makes you want to call yourself the cartoonist?
Lillie J. Harris: That’s wild, I was talking yesterday with a friend—another cartoonist—about this. Technically, I'm a cartoonist, but I don’t feel like a consistent cartoonist.
That’s not just self-deprecating; I feel like I write prose more than I make comics. I feel like I doodle more than I make comics. I might call myself a cartoonist in a marketing way—a thing that you’re saying so that people fill in the right blanks.
Whenever I have looked for agents, I’ve noticed an assumption of what a cartoonist is, and what a cartoonist is interested in doing.
So when I explain that I’ve made comics, but I’m really interested in short narrative generally, I get the question, “Why would you call yourself a cartoonist?”
So technically, I'm a cartoonist. But then I see working artists making comics for money and making comics for fun and leisure, and that looks very different to me. When I make comics, I tend to go through a little checklist: could this be a short story? Could this be something else? If I think the story would be best served as a comic, then I make a comic. It's not necessarily because I love making comics.
TWL: What's your relationship to writing prose like?
Lillie J. Harris: When I worked on Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast, the tabletop roleplay game from Possum Creek Games, I didn't have any experience with tabletop roleplay, but I was familiar with writing roleplay. Having a co-writer to send stuff back and forth added to the whole improvisational aspect of it. When I write, it’s usually with another writer—I do that for fun. Some people make comics for fun; their idea of doodling is making a four-to-six panel comic. To me, that’s brain energy, not my go-to mode of creative expression.
Weekly or daily comics like Drew Lerman's Snake Creek or Adam de Souza’s Blind Alley amaze me. This might be me projecting, but when I read those, I get the sense that the artists really enjoy making them. It’s great. If someone were to tell me to think of a narrative, and then to add onto it weekly, I would love doing that in terms of writing, but not in terms of making a comic.
TWL: So what makes you love comics? If you do love comics, that is.
Lillie J. Harris: Ooh, I can feel it, but I have to put it into words. It’s about being able to witness another person experience something at your own pace. A movie is going at its own pace, but in comics, you can hold on to an image and choose to stay with that moment—or choose to turn the page. You get immersed in what they’re experiencing, and you ask yourself, “How long do I want to personally experience this?”
TWL: I really like that answer. How long do you want to spend with somebody's suffering, with this moment in their narrative?
Lillie J. Harris: So… I know everyone talks about Ari Aster’s Hereditary.
TWL: I'm always down to talk more about Hereditary.
Lillie J. Harris: When I first saw it in theaters—that scene where the mother is grieving—I thought, “Surely we're going to cut away from this soon. Surely we’re not going to spend five minutes on a woman wailing and keening.” But we are. I think that's what you can choose to bring to reading comics. You can choose to be in it with someone, or—and I've done this with a few comics—you can choose to skip a few pages ahead and not sit in that moment. Maybe choosing is not the right word; you’re fleeing from the experience.
The other infamous Hereditary scene that fucked me up so bad is that argument at the dining table, when Toni Collette says, “you’re sitting there with that fucking face on your face.” And then the next shot is the son’s face looking entirely normal. Honing in on facial expressions is something I love about cartooning in general. The older I've gotten, the more I’ve tried to put nuance into expressions, though I still like to get cartoony with it sometimes.
TWL: What does that nuance look like for you?
Lillie J. Harris: This will sound like a wild comparison because we’ve just been talking about Hereditary, but I grew up watching Looney Tunes because I had older parents and grandparents who love Looney Tunes. There’s this famous scene where a man has this frog that can randomly dance and sing, but as soon as other people can see them, the frog stops and pretends like he can’t.
Whenever the frog would start singing, it’s this amazing, absurd thing, and you're expecting the person watching to be wowed and amazed—and the camera would just cut to that person staring with a blank expression. Even as a young kid, something about that absence of a reaction killed me more than any over-the-top expression.
That's what I try to put in my work: something awful can be happening, but you see a neutral expression, or the absence of whatever response you expected.
TWL: That feels accurate to the way people actually react to shocking things happening to them. And it draws a funny comparison between horror and cartoon gags.
Lillie J. Harris: There's probably so many dissertations by now about that closeness of horror and comedy. Just from those two examples of Hereditary and Looney Tunes, they're quite literally using the same kind of reaction shot—disbelief and shock!
TWL: Not to make this about Hereditary, of course.
Lillie J. Harris: I know, I know, we have to stop.
TWL: Are you approaching narrative differently now, while working on If I Had Known?
Lillie J. Harris: Making If I Had Known has been the antithesis to how I made Wilderness. With Wilderness, I started with the characters. With this project, I started with the premise.
If I Had Known is about a young child who turns to vampirism so that she can protect her sister’s body from being stolen by physicians. I was reading a lot about grave robbing at the time, and specifically the grave robbing that was happening even up to the 1960s toward Black corpses. I was interested in this topic, and in this plot—and then in sibling grief too, because my brother passed in 2016. Actually, Keith had passed before I was even working on Wilderness, but that didn't necessarily seem to get injected into the narrative. This time, I was very aware that I was writing about a dead sibling. And by the time all those pieces came together, I hadn’t yet thought of the characters themselves.
TWL: A totally different order of operations.
Lillie J. Harris: Yeah, I would even say this is the most plotted comic I've ever done, though not capital-P plot. It's more like the plot is the world in which they're living, and now these characters are here.
TWL: How long is If I Had Known going to be, and what are your hopes for it?
Lillie J. Harris: It's 24 pages at this moment of recording. I believe 12 are done. So I suppose it’s about halfway done, inked. There's still so many other things to have to do, but I will have it done by SPX 2025! And since I've said it now and this will be archived, this will be true.
TWL: Will you print it yourself?
Lillie J. Harris: In terms of assembly and like all that? No, I don't have the means. If I was in a studio, totally, but it's going straight to Mixam, honestly. In an ideal world, I have thought about having this printed locally and being very hands on with it. Have I told you the full title? It’s an obnoxiously long title, purposely so: IF I HAD KNOWN THEY WOULD ROB YOUR GRAVE, THIS IS WHAT I WOULD HAVE DONE.
I’m really endeared to 1970s exploitation horror movies, which have long titles. And I wanted the title to be economical, in that I would already have introduced someone to some key facts: someone is dead; this is a wishful imagining by someone else; this isn't gonna change the course of history; the dead person isn’t going to be magically reanimated.
If I was able to take the time I wanted to with the cover I imagined, then If I Had Known would be the actual visible text, and the rest would be blind embossed.
TWL: Okay, I know we just said that interpreting the work is not your job, but I think comics scholarship has been on a “tactile reading” kick recently. This might give those people something to get excited about. And now I really want you to have a boutique zine version with the blind embossing. What are the obstacles to getting it printed locally?
Lillie J. Harris: Honestly, it's about convenience. The closest printer that I know of that does screen printing and embossing is an hour away. Which is not a huge deal, but you need to account for that hour on a day you don't work, and—since printing never just goes smoothly—a couple hours of troubleshooting at minimum. I’ve also been out of the game for a long time in terms of putting together my own comics by hand. Part of me feels a lack of trust that I can get back into it.
TWL: That's fair. You want to finish the project. Part of keeping yourself energized and engaged is being able to call something done. You’ve mentioned getting this comic ready for next year’s Small Press Expo—how have your experiences at SPX been? Are you going this year?
Lillie J. Harris: I'm going this year with Radiator Comics. I tabled with them last year too. I believe the year before that, I was at Black Josei Press’s table, subbing in for Jamila [Rowser] because she wasn't able to go in.
I probably enjoy it because I haven’t tabled solo. I don't have to worry about the huge amount of legwork, about paying for everything, about hotel rooms. With Bethesda an hour away, I just roll up. I would deal with it if the stress did fall on me, but it’d probably affect the joy I have doing SPX. As we’ve been saying, that’s in short supply—at least professionally. I need to be honest about these things.
TWL: I always appreciate the honesty. Thanks for talking with me about all this, Lillie.
Lillie J. Harris: I’m thankful we could dig so deep into it.
Lillie J. Harris is a cartoonist and writer from Maryland. Tension and empathy are notable themes throughout Lillie’s artwork, as well as theology, horror, and not “punching down." They are interested in exploring stories that balance the mundanity of everyday life alongside the supernatural unknown.
Tony Wei Ling is a comics researcher at UCLA and an editor at Nat.Brut.
Lillie J. Harris is a cartoonist and writer from Maryland. Tension and empathy are notable themes throughout Lillie’s artwork, as well as theology, horror, and not “punching down". They are interested in exploring stories that balance the mundanity of everyday life alongside the supernatural unknown.
Tony Wei Ling is a comics researcher at UCLA and an editor at Nat.Brut.