Nick Drnaso: ‘Something about comics attracts people who have anxiety’
The Guardian | Sam Leith | August 6, 2022
The Guardian interviews Nick Drnaso!
Nick Drnaso finds himself in a disconcerting position. His hobby has become his job. He is still struggling to get used to a world in which it makes more financial sense for him to sit at his drawing board from the moment he wakes up until 2am. He feels, he admits when he speaks to me from his home studio in Chicago, like an “impostor”. Until 2016 he was working behind a pressing machine in a factory that made tin badges. “You would kind of assemble the pieces. It just felt like cartooning,” he says, “problem solving and repetitive motion and working delicately with your hands. So I loved it.”
The mundanity of ordinary work, and its way of anchoring people in their lives, is a theme that runs through his new book, Acting Class. As well as the button badges, Drnaso, 33, has done nine-to-fives as a janitor, and painting slogans on to dolls at “a weird ornament company” – both jobs that are faithfully (and wanly) reproduced on the page.
Acting Class follows the intersecting stories of a collection of people who sign up for a free drama class at a community centre. As the book progresses, the imaginative exercises of the class start to bleed alarmingly and in sinister ways into real life. The characters find themselves losing track of time, sliding sideways out of their jobs and their families, losing their bearings – and the genial acting teacher starts to give off faint but noticeable cult-leader vibes. It’s trippy and disconcerting, but it’s also rooted in the stuff of everyday reality. “I was wanting to avoid some turns that a book like this could certainly take – when you have a situation where people are being manipulated and pushed in a certain direction by this charismatic leader. I think the thing I was holding in my mind was, like, restraint.”
Restraint is perhaps a defining characteristic of Drnaso’s style as a writer and cartoonist – just as diffidence and courteous self-doubt seem to be his hallmarks as a conversationalist. He has a long, mournful face, light facial hair and a thin beanie topping his dark hair. “I can only speak for myself,” he says cautiously when I ask why literary cartoonists seem to be such a tortured bunch, “but I have found that there’s something in the [comics] form that does attract people who maybe have anxiety or OCD-type tendencies.” He points to the extraordinary disjunction between the time an artist will work on a panel or a page, the painstakingly detailed work, and the speed with which the reader will skip over it. “There’s something therapeutic about the problem solving, figuring out how a sequence is going to unfold and be structured and paced. So many practical things to focus on.”
Born in 1989 in Illinois, Drnaso grew up in a suburb of Chicago where he was a “fairly average” kid until “puberty and kind of depression took over – alienation, I think, by the time I was becoming a young person”. The younger of two brothers, he came from a happy and loving middle-class family – his father worked for the telecoms company Comcast and his mother was a teaching assistant in elementary school. He struggled at school, though. “I couldn’t really function in that environment. The pressure of having to perform and be among my peers was unbearable.” He is married to fellow cartoonist Sarah Leitten. “I was just talking to my wife the other day,” he says, “and we were just realising that we completely blocked out huge chunks of our lives. It’s like a blur. I don’t remember anybody’s names, or I don’t remember what the school felt like. It’s just completely forgotten.”
Read the full article here!
The mundanity of ordinary work, and its way of anchoring people in their lives, is a theme that runs through his new book, Acting Class. As well as the button badges, Drnaso, 33, has done nine-to-fives as a janitor, and painting slogans on to dolls at “a weird ornament company” – both jobs that are faithfully (and wanly) reproduced on the page.
Acting Class follows the intersecting stories of a collection of people who sign up for a free drama class at a community centre. As the book progresses, the imaginative exercises of the class start to bleed alarmingly and in sinister ways into real life. The characters find themselves losing track of time, sliding sideways out of their jobs and their families, losing their bearings – and the genial acting teacher starts to give off faint but noticeable cult-leader vibes. It’s trippy and disconcerting, but it’s also rooted in the stuff of everyday reality. “I was wanting to avoid some turns that a book like this could certainly take – when you have a situation where people are being manipulated and pushed in a certain direction by this charismatic leader. I think the thing I was holding in my mind was, like, restraint.”
Restraint is perhaps a defining characteristic of Drnaso’s style as a writer and cartoonist – just as diffidence and courteous self-doubt seem to be his hallmarks as a conversationalist. He has a long, mournful face, light facial hair and a thin beanie topping his dark hair. “I can only speak for myself,” he says cautiously when I ask why literary cartoonists seem to be such a tortured bunch, “but I have found that there’s something in the [comics] form that does attract people who maybe have anxiety or OCD-type tendencies.” He points to the extraordinary disjunction between the time an artist will work on a panel or a page, the painstakingly detailed work, and the speed with which the reader will skip over it. “There’s something therapeutic about the problem solving, figuring out how a sequence is going to unfold and be structured and paced. So many practical things to focus on.”
Born in 1989 in Illinois, Drnaso grew up in a suburb of Chicago where he was a “fairly average” kid until “puberty and kind of depression took over – alienation, I think, by the time I was becoming a young person”. The younger of two brothers, he came from a happy and loving middle-class family – his father worked for the telecoms company Comcast and his mother was a teaching assistant in elementary school. He struggled at school, though. “I couldn’t really function in that environment. The pressure of having to perform and be among my peers was unbearable.” He is married to fellow cartoonist Sarah Leitten. “I was just talking to my wife the other day,” he says, “and we were just realising that we completely blocked out huge chunks of our lives. It’s like a blur. I don’t remember anybody’s names, or I don’t remember what the school felt like. It’s just completely forgotten.”
Read the full article here!