Keiler Roberts on Evanston Life and midwestern comics legacy

About 12 years ago when Aaron Renier first started teaching comics to college students, he would look out on his class at DePaul University and see Keiler Roberts sitting patiently. He already knew her because she taught drawing at DePaul. Her husband, Scott Roberts, who runs the school’s animation department, hired Renier. This being his first teaching job, it became “slightly intense” seeing her in the class. But Roberts “is a very calm person, and I think having her in class being calm for me was pretty reassuring.” It didn’t hurt that her comics for the course — which were the first she ever made seriously, having spent her career as a painter — arrived “perfectly formed.”

I heard a similar thing from the Fiffer family.

Sharon Fiffer, a mystery writer based in Evanston, once took an art class with Roberts and was so taken by her disarming easiness and casual honesty, she told her daughter, actor Nora Fiffer, that she really wanted to become friends with her new art teacher but how does one go about doing that? So Nora volunteered to sit for Roberts as a portrait model, and soon enough, all three women became close friends.

Keiler Roberts has this effect.

Knowing her primarily through her comics — which are serene, detached, prosaic and seemingly about nothing more than whatever’s going on with her that day, eating ice cream in a Dairy Queen parking lot, messing up her online shopping order, sitting on the couch with her head thrown back as her daughter reads a book in her lap — I can vouch that her work gives off a kind of radical stillness. It always lowers my blood pressure. “Which is the best effect I could hope for,” she told me.

Not that your comics are therapeutic, I clarified.

“No, no, but calming is good,” she said.

Calming is good, I agreed. And I don’t feel particularly calm reading, oh, say, the headier, calibrated comics of Chris Ware. Not that tranquillity is what he’s going after.

“He is incredibly impressive,” she said. “But you can’t have a casual response. A lot of things, you kind of have to show a little reverence. And maybe you should, right? You know when ‘Hamilton’ showed up on TV? My family, we all watched it and I said no one talk, don’t get up for the bathroom, don’t even chew anything — just don’t move, OK? But my daughter kept talking. My husband got annoyed. These aren’t live performers! Yet we felt this way! So we kind of gave up and watched ‘The Simpsons.’ Dear God, I enjoyed it so much more. There was no awe! I find Chris Ware calming, in the sense you feel good having read him. My comics? Read every seventh page, I’m fine with it.”

Keiler Roberts is my new hero. By the time you’re done reading this, she’ll be yours, too. There’s a page in her terrifically touching new book, “My Begging Chart,” where a child mistakenly hugs and calls her Mommy, so Roberts leans over to Xia, her actual daughter, and asks if she’s ever seen that girl’s mother before. She has seen her mother before. “Is she good looking?” Roberts wonders. That’s as close to gag comics as she gets, partly because everything in her work comes from her generally recognizable life in Evanston.

Which, like your life, is full of routine, the days and weeks and months coming and going. Nearly any page of her books could be mistaken as a page from any other of her seven books. And that’s not bad. That’s genuine, unvarnished autobiography, minus the self-curated, personal PR work we perform online — or while moving through the day. It may be harder to find a cartoonist these days who isn’t writing autobiographical comics than one who is. “Still, I think most people who do comics for a living are trying so hard to control how they come across,” said cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt, best known as designer and producer of the acclaimed series “BoJack Horseman.” “Keiler, she is just like nope, no, here’s what’s happening to me, here’s who I really am. And that’s enough. It’s also pretty brave. Voices like hers — she’s a mother, aging, with chronic illness — get easily sidelined, but I read her comics and wonder, am I being this direct and honest?”

Read the full article at the link above.