How best to describe Mattie Lubchansky‘s new graphic novel Simplicity? It’s a nestled narrative about how a futuristic society remembers the past; it’s an unsettling account of an academic learning too much about the history of an isolated community; and it’s a psychedelic-infused story where bizarre creatures lurk just out of sight. There’s a lot going on, basically, and Lubchansky deftly balances these seemingly disparate elements throughout. I spoke with her about utopias past and future, the legacy of The Wicker Man, and the follies of jetpacks.
There’s a supporting character in this book with the last name Fourier, which I’m guessing is not a coincidence. Have you always had an interest in utopias? Did this book allow you to explore a long-term interest of yours?
A lot of people have asked about utopias. Nobody has clocked Fourier. So thank you for that.
There was a phalanx, historically, about 10 minutes from where I grew up in Jersey.
I’ve long been obsessed with cults and the idea of utopia. It came from a science fiction place for me. I talked a lot about this when I was on tour for Boys Weekend, but I’m really obsessed with Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. The idea of how utopias function is just fascinating to me. A friend of mine, Andy Warner, did a comic history of utopias called This Land is My Land that I really loved.
When I was developing this book, I had the setting, and I had the vague setting of this town where the cultists left in the 70s, and this like walled city state, and this gentleman who goes up there to do an ethnography. I was really struggling with what the town would look like and what would happen to him. A lot of the thrust of the book was not there yet; I had like him having these ecstatic visions and nothing else.
I was talking to my friend, the novelist Calvin Kasulke, and he told me to get a copy of this book called Paradise Now by an author called Chris Jennings. The book has five segments. It covers the Shakers, the Cabetists, the Fourierists, the Oneidas, and one more that I’m blanking on. I got really, really, really deep on this shit. When I was pitching the book, I had a 20 page Notes document of all the ideas I wanted to get into this thing.
I was curious about how these pre-Marxist socialist utopian communes functioned and why they failed and what about them internally failed, what about them externally caused them to fail, and why someone would go and do this in the first place. The people in the book are sort of like me mashing up the Cabetists, who founded a community called Icaria, and also the Shakers.
It’s interesting that sort of both of your books now have had kind of very different sort of reclusive religious groups. Though the group in Simplicity seems pretty innocuous; unlike the cult in Boys Weekend, they aren’t trying to bring about the end of the world.
If you watch the 1970s Wicker Man and you don’t know much about anything when you watch it the first time, you might think, “These people are scary.” And then you watch it again as an adult and you think, “They might’ve been right, this guy sucks. He’s a cop who won’t have sex.” So much of this book is about history and scholarship and what gets entered into the historical record and by who, and to what end.
So when you hear about a cult or you hear about a separatist group or you hear about terrorists, who’s calling them that and why is so important. The idea that — I’m putting this in scare quotes — the “cult,” are they a cult? I don’t know, but any affinity group looks that way from the outside, and maybe their motivations are actually pretty explicable and not necessarily nefarious.
One of the things I liked about Simplicity was elder of the group was born in 1985. So you have someone who is roughly the age of the people reading this book now…
It’s the year I was born, yeah.
Did you know from the outset that you wanted to have a Gen X/Millennial character who had that role in the group?
When I was developing the book I knew I wanted it to take place in the future. From there I worked out how far in the future it was going to be, because I didn’t want to sit around thinking so much about what happens for the next 300 years of Earth society. I thought the earliest possible moment the United States could fracture would be around 20 years from now, in my mind, so I was working backwards from there.
I wanted this place to have been there for a while. The whole thing about these utopian societies, the ones that I was thinking about specifically in the 19th century, was that the encroaching Industrial Revolution was so disruptive to people’s lives and their philosophies and the way they saw the world. Everyone thought the world was ending because everyone was moving around in a way that they had never done before. People were becoming alienated for the first time from their own labor in a way that was completely new; it was like capitalism as we know it was forming, and it was this massively disruptive thing.
Separatism is on the tips of a lot people’s tongues, because things are bad, but I didn’t want it to be like, “And we all left in 2025,” because that feels corny. So: what was the last massive upheaval of society? It was the early seventies, late sixties. I think about this inflection point of 1969 so much and what we missed happening in the same way that there was a big inflection point in the late 1910s that we missed. Society could have looked a lot different than it does now, right?
Then it actually worked out that the person that remembers now would be someone my age who would be really quite close to dying by then. I wanted there to be some touch point to the founding of this place, but I couldn’t have the founder still be alive because he would have been around 110 and living in an abandoned summer camp.
Was Simplicity originally just going to tell the story of a morally compromised researcher going out to do field work, or did you always have the framing device of the museum even further into the fugture in mind?
One of the first things that came to me was this frame and it looked a lot of different ways before I settled on the museum. I was at the American Museum of Natural History, and I was really taken with one diorama where the Lenni Lenape are famously trading the string of wampum beads to the Dutch settlers for Manhattan. They didn’t get rid of it, but it’s covered in these stickers that say, “What did we get wrong?” that are pointing to stuff in the diorama.
I think this is a good mode for museums to operate under, which is to not get rid of everything they’ve ever had that is culturally insensitive, but to explain it, because now that’s part of history, too. That’s part of anthropological history that this was so wrong and was in the public imagination. But I was really taken with that, and then this idea of a museum sprung on me.
The other big inspiration for it was Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow? It’s one of my favorite movies in the last 10 years, and maybe one of my favorite movies ever. I’m very much paying homage to the framing device of that movie. I wanted to have this context of you watching somebody watch this thing, an have that hang over the whole proceedings. I wanted it ever-present in people’s minds that you are witnessing somebody taking down history and making choices around that.
The protagonist is working with an ethically dubious organization, for which he’s received some pushback from people in his life. Did you know from the outset that there was going to be this additional layer of conflict beyond just the protagonist being an outsider in the community he’s studying?
I wanted to ground him a little more in the place he came from. In the second chapter of the book where there’s a flashback to a couple of weeks before he leaves, I wanted to show what life in the city was like and who this guy was a little more. I was thinking about it: here is a person that is a member of a queer community from somewhere. I wanted to show where he was placed in the people he knows.
So much of the story, to me, is the story of a person getting radicalized. didn’t want it to be: he sees this for the first time and he’s radicalized. He could have just been listening to his friends back home, right? So much of the world is presented to us like it is nuanced and it is not. Some stuff is obviously nuanced.
This book gets into a lot of nuanced questions about strategy, what to do, what is to be done. But the superstructure is there if you step back far enough to look at it. And I was interested in a person that just would not see what was plainly under his nose. This guy lives in Nazi Germany, basically, and refuses to see it.
You mentioned The Dispossessed before. Reading this, I was also reminded of another Le Guin book, Always Coming Home, as well as aspects of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Three Californias trilogy. Were there any other works that informed the story you told here?
I mentioned First Cow. Octavia Butler’s Earthseed books were on my mind in terms of presenting a dystopian future that feels lived in. One of my very favorite books in the world is Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. That book was written in the 1990s and basically predicts the way Silicon Valley operates in a way that is so “Mr. Policeman, I gave you all the clues.” Atwood is so good at taking these two disparate points of where we’re at and drawing a very straight line to a single point in getting there.
There are some weirder ones — the Steve Bissette and Alan Moore Swamp Thing from the 1980s. It was big on my mind in a way that is kind of obvious if you read the Swamp Thing run from the eighties. In those comics, Swamp Thing mostly wants to get high and have sex with his girlfriend. It’s a really beautiful book, about the quietness of nature.
The weirdest one is — actually, it’s the epigraph of the book. Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures.
I was not expecting Sondheim to be in the mix here.
I’ve actually never seen a production of it, but I’ve listened to the original cast recording a bajillion times. But the song, “Someone in a Tree” is basically getting at the same thing I’m getting at, which is that history is this thing that we make because we are observing it.
Pacific Overtures is about the US forcing Japan to open at the end of the Edo period. The song “Someone in a Tree” is set up where there’s the treaty that the Japanese are basically forced to sign because a US naval commander has a bunch of cannons pointed at the island. There’s a little kid in a tree and he is talking to an older version of himself. And this guy is trying to remember, and he’s talking to himself as a little boy in the tree, and the boy can see what’s happening inside the treaty house, but he cannot hear anybody.
These two people are talking to the narrator of the show, as is a samurai who is guarding outside the treaty house who can hear what’s going on, but he can’t see anything. And it’s all these people trying to piece together what happened, and it’s the most beautiful song in the world. Everyone should go listen to it immediately. It was just a big thing in my mind when I was working on this — this idea of the way history is made.
As someone who has written and drawn multiple graphic novels with elements of science fiction as well as the fantastic and horrific and psychedelic, how do you find the right balance of that? That’s always struck me as a hard thing to do well, and I think you’ve done it very well in both of these books.
I feel like it’s pretty intuitive. With the first book, Boys Weekend, it started as an autobiographical thing. And then the sci-fi creeps in and then all the horror creeps in, and by the end it is just a horror movie. That was like a pacing issue for me, more than anything else. Once I had everything, I was setting up all these pieces and then letting them all take care of themselves.
This book was a real challenge to write, honestly. I’ve really struggled with it for a long time. It was the longest time writing it that I’ve ever taken writing anything up to this point. Because so much of it was finding this balance. And I started writing this with these ecstatic visions that Lucius was having. I had this character and the setting, but I mostly had the psychedelia.
I think all the time about an old Tweet from my pal, Gretchen Felker-Martin, which said, “How do you write a story? First, think of a gay little man. Now, give him a problem.” And that’s how I approached writing this book a little more.
With Boys Weekend, I had a plot and I had to find characters to populate it. With this, I had a character and I had to figure out what happens to him? Who does he meet? Who else is there? It just took so much longer to form everything around it. I was mostly working by feel. I didn’t want to have too much of the psychedelic stuff because I didn’t want it to be obvious if it was real or not. I wanted the book to feel dreamy, but not inaccessible. It was trial and error, getting the right balance. It took a long time.
How does the relationship between you as a writer and you as an artist balance out? Are there things you’re doing in terms of storytelling, in terms of the page layouts, where you’re challenging yourself or experimenting in different ways?
When I was drawing this book, I was sick of drawing buildings from doing Boys Weekend. I made up a whole city in that book, and the first shot you see of it is the whole thing from a plane. It was really nailed down where everything was, and I had to refer to it every day of my life for two years while I drew it.
By the end of this book, I vowed I would never draw a tree again as long as I live, but I’m running out of things to draw. Which is why the next book takes place in the wasteland. But not totally, and also in space.
I kind of split myself up into two people. I write the whole thing all the way through before I start drawing with these, generally. When I’m writing the pages, I have a vague idea of pacing, because in my mind, I’m always thinking: here is like the two page spread that the reader is looking at. I’m always trying to time it — make the page turn happen at a place that makes sense.
I’m thinking of that timing for pages, and I’m thinking of the timing for panels, like how many panels do I want on this page? But then when I get to the layout, it is me as the artist now, and I’m looking at it, asking, “How do I best convey this thing that this other person wrote a year ago?”
Often, I think, “Who the fuck wrote this? How am I supposed to draw that?” So I do end up challenging myself by accident all the time. I write a lot faster than I draw. I can pencil, I think two pages in a day, if I’m working really fast. I can write 10 pages a day. More if I’m really cooking. When I’m writing that fast, I’ll say, “Here’s a splash page where this, this, this, this, and this happened.”
I’ll get to drawing it and think, “Whose fucking idea was it to draw all these spaceships?” Or “What do you mean, I have to draw the whole valley with the town at the bottom of it?” It’s my problem now, because there’s no other person to pawn it off on. So the challenge is forgetting what’s in the book. And then I approach it as like an artist that’s been hired, kind of.
In the last year or so, as I heard about right-wing tech bros trying to create these weird city-states, I was thinking about Boys Weekend a lot. As someone who writes about dystopian futures, do you ever look at the headlines and think, “Oh shit, I totally saw that coming”?
I mean, that’s the thing with speculative fiction. You don’t want to be Cassandra, right? It feels bad to be given the gift of prophecy or whatever. But all I’m doing is exaggerating what’s already happening. Right after Boys Weekend is when that submarine imploded with all the rich people on it. And there’s an extended sequence in Boys Weekend where they’re in like a rickety, shitty submarine for rich tourists.
Everyone asked, “How did she know?” It’s because tech people were talking about flying cars for years, and all sorts of transportation stuff that seemed completely unfeasible. If you look in the background of Boys Weekend, there’s a humongous body count of people crashing jetpacks and stuff because they don’t work.
Photo: Sylvie Rosokoff