The book has been in the works since 2016, I recommended it to Drawn and Quarterly in the summer of 2016.
It took me a year to write it. It took me several years to draw it. In between, there are a few stops and starts. I have two children, and I lost my sister Becky to cancer. Becky is in the book. There were long periods when I wasn’t doing it but it was always on my mind. I’m sure it’s helpful, but it’s also just the way it was.
Does now feel like the right time to tell this story, compared to 2014? Or, perhaps, is that the case you are better equipped to handle it now?
In 2014, I was just in my studio and one day I was forced to start drawing those comics. Then I call them a “test,” but at the time it was just something I was oriented to do for their own good, and as I was doing it, you could see the picture. bigger than what it could be. I guess I always thought this was the book I wanted to do, but it really made it clear to me that I could do it.
But I couldn’t do it right then. I’ve got a picture book that I’m working on; I can’t understand leaving Hark a Vagrant right away. But I started working on it. I mean – I started writing the book in 2016, not long after, so the real issue isn’t 2014 versus 2022, it’s just that it took a long time to make the book.
One of the things that stuck with me about it was how kind it was. I feel it is hard for you to stress that the experience of working in the oil sands dehumanizes everyone to some extent, no matter how they may believe they are reacting to it. . Is that the attitude you always have in this context, or is it something that comes when you look back at things?
I always have it. I don’t go back to thinking only to find that people are human after all, haha. I have lived with these people, they are my friends, my colleagues, my neighbors. And even when things go awry, I can still see what I’m looking at. Even if it hurts.
Of course, I’ve had years to think about that, too, and let myself age, and I’m sure that has made all the difference on a slope – hopefully the slow start of wisdom. But, you care about the people around you, right?
Maybe I’m betraying my short-sightedness, but I don’t know what an oil sand is, or how it works there. The book feels very educational in that respect.
I know many readers won’t know much about oil sands. If you don’t have a connection with it, you might just have a feeling that it’s a place, you know, big and dangerous, full of trucks and environmental problems and money.
Fortunately for those readers, I didn’t know much about it myself when I got there, and everything in the book is from my point of view, and the reader is allowed to drop into those shoes to find out. understand when I find out what they are looking at. So, in that sense, an education gradually works by design and by nature, as it did for me.
