The idea for Ali Fitzgerald’s new graphic novel, Squeak Chatter Bark, came to her in a dream. In the middle of the night, at an artist residency in France, Fitzgerald imagined a young girl in a biosphere whose parents had gone missing. To track them down, the girl would have to collaborate and communicate with a fantastic array of critter pals.
The concept checked a lot of boxes for Fitzgerald: animals and animal languages, evolution, feral kids, and biospheres, which she’d always found fascinating. She shelved the project she was supposed to work on and shifted gears to the all-ages eco-mystery.
Squeak Chatter Bark’s unconscious origin story is a fitting genesis for an artist whose work always possesses a surreal quality. The novel’s intended audience skews younger, and the story is invitingly simple, but Fitzgerald has not sacrificed strangeness — or smarts — for accessibility.
We spoke about animal liberation, how comics foster empathy, and the one thing she can’t stand to draw. (This interview has been edited and condensed.)
What was the impetus for Squeak Chatter Bark?
I wanted to create a graphic novel for my childhood self that was like an adventure comic where the main character was a girl adventurer. The first thing I thought of when I started writing the book was The Goonies. I loved The Goonies — I loved the sense of whimsical adventure, and there’s a wholesomeness to it. That was the vibe I was going for with the book.
I went to this residency in France, and I was going to do a pretty serious book about urban animals. But it was the height of the pandemic and I just wanted escapism, and that’s when this idea started forming. There’s something beautiful about a wholesome, escapist adventure story — one that touches on things that are contemporary, like evolution and language — but at the heart is an adventure and a mystery. I thought it would be a great time to make something fun for kids.
How did you decide on the book’s color palette, which is mostly purple in the present and green in the flashbacks?
I wanted the story to be quick and pure, and I wanted the book to be really hand-drawn so that kids could not only see themselves in the book but also drawing the book. Sometimes I think there’s a distance with all these hyper-saturated colors and super-produced, slick, Marvel-y kind of comics. I love a colorful book, but I also think it’s nice for kids to see that they could make a drawing, they could make a book.
It was a long decision process about how simple I wanted the colors to be, but in the end I thought it would be better monochromatic and then to have a difference between the past and present and future, just out of necessity, for the story.
It’s a double-edged sword, choosing a monochromatic palette, because kids are drawn to brighter colors. It makes the book seem a little more serious, it’s also a little harder to discern things. But I’m into the idea of drawing as a form itself without a lot of outside information.
What about the title?
The heart of the book is animal language — the idea that we can communicate with animals. There was a part of me when I finished the book that was like, “Is this a book actually about animal liberation, like a secret animal liberation propagandist book?” I thought about that, and I think that it’s a conversation we’re going to have more and more. There was a court case about whether an elephant has personhood. The idea that all animal life is sentient, or has a certain kind of intelligence. There are all these questions we don’t really know the answers to. It’s also something that I totally thought about as a kid. I would always feed the ducks, and I would think about whether the birds were communicating with each other.
This is the kernel of the book, in the beginning, that I was interested in. Also, when I wrote the book, I was beginning to learn French and thinking about how you build up a knowledge of other languages, and wondering if that could be extended to animals. More and more, I think it can be. It seems like every day there’s an article about AI decoding dolphin language, stuff like that. Squeak Chatter Bark just really made sense to me as the title of the book. It felt right.
Is this a pro-animal liberation book? I read it as very anti-animal experimentation, anti-zoo, anti-keeping-wild-animals-as-pets, but I may have been projecting.
I am against all of those things. In an ideal world, animals would be able to dictate at least some part of their future — whether or not they would prefer to be living amongst us or in the wild. But I didn’t want the book to be propagandistic or didactic about it. I tried to think about different facets of all these questions, not to make the book a treatise. I really don’t like it in books when things are overprescribed or preachy. The character of Dr. Nimick thinks he’s doing good, and in some sense he is. Some form of evolution is necessary to further things or save species, similar to geoengineering, which the book is also a little bit about.
Sometimes I question myself whether some formal geoengineering is going to be needed to save the planet. It’s this paradox. Maybe AI, which I’m mostly not a fan of, will discover things like medical advances and environmental advances that will save the planet. But in the meantime, we’re burning it down and feeding this giant thing. It seems so ridiculous.
I read the scene with the turtle whose shell absorbs ocean trash as a commentary on geoengineering, with science going to great lengths to solve a totally preventable problem.
Exactly. Ninety-five percent of the time, I’m like, “Are you kidding me? All we have to do is enjoy this paradise we’ve been given. That’s it. We just have to stop doing stupid stuff.” It’s not even necessary or good for us or enjoyable for most people, the way that we’re crafting our lives. But there is five percent of me that feels that the impulses of humans can’t be stopped and there needs to be some form of scientific moonshot.
I think you read it the way I would read it, but there are implicit questions in the book about what the right way forward is, or what will save animals. I would love if the dodo was resurrected, or the wooly mammoth. There’s something incredibly cool and redemptive about being able to bring these things back. But it’s a thorny issue, and I don’t think there are easy answers, especially now. We’re living through… something.
There’s a reason that megafauna died out, and a lot of animals are evolving to be smaller. So to bring back the dire wolf, for example, which was a quite big animal that consumed a lot of resources, is sort of the opposite of what would naturally happen now — and what should happen, maybe. That’s why I played with scale a lot in the book.
I’m assuming that was part of the inspiration for Nina, the mini elephant?
Yeah. I was thinking about a lot of different animals. The ones that have been written about the most are songbirds, which are getting smaller. But elephants are among my favorite animals, and the future is so bleak for them, and a big part of that is because of their size. I thought, “What if there’s a tiny elephant?” I think she’s my favorite character, actually. I made a little clay version of her that’s very cute, that lives in a little pot.
Through Hungover Bear, your New Yorker column, and now this book, have you consciously tried to give people a deeper appreciation for the intelligence and complexity of other species, or does that happen naturally because you love animals?
Probably a bit of both. I doubt that that was my goal in the beginning of Hungover Bear, but it’s increasingly part of my interests. When I was writing this book and putting myself in the position of the reader, I remembered the magic of animals — and also the horror of a sensitive, introverted child seeing a dead toad or a dead cow in the road. Yesterday I saw a dead baby bird. The world is so cruel. Having empathy for creatures is something we all could use more of. I think comics are one of the best mediums to do that.
As a kid, comics helped me think about animals in a different way. It’s such a visual medium, and it’s also a medium where you identify with the characters differently than in prose. I think it can be more emotive and empathetic, which is really important. For me it’s interesting to think about the complexities of the animal world, and the parallels, and animals that move through the world with their fleshy, weird bodies. I really at some points understood Hungover Bear as a separate entity, almost like a real person.
You’ve said that your first attempts at drawing comics or cartoons were animal-related. Do you still have any of those or remember what they were?
I still have some, they’re at my mom’s place. The early ones are disturbing, like you would think I was a very disturbed child. Maybe I was. Talking about animal liberation, I remember one that was a cow dressed as a farmer taking some sort of sadistic pleasure in watching a human get milked. It’s not animal-related, but another one in the same notebook was a guy with a sword stuck out of his chest, and the person who stabbed him is saying, “You’re making my sword dirty.” I was six or seven years old when I was drawing these, maybe eight. That was one of my first sketchbooks. When I was around nine, I had a different sketchbook taken away by a teacher, in which I’d drawn all these people having an orgy. I wish I had it back.
Then my work developed a little more. One of my favorite comics was The Far Side, and I went through a period where I tried to develop a comic. I was eleven or twelve at this point, and the comic was called Coolsville. I remember two animal ones. One was a giraffe shaving her legs — I don’t remember what the tagline was, but it was hard, obviously, because she was tall. The other was a teenaged toad who had a wart on her face in the mirror, and she was complaining about that.
For how young you were, these aren’t bad.
They’re not bad, right? I looked at them when I was at my mom’s place a few years ago and I thought, “I’ll take it.”
Around this time, in sixth grade, I also took a theater class, and I wanted to do a skit about a Jeffrey Dahmer cooking show. This makes me sound like such a psychopath kid. But I thought it’d be really funny, and the teacher actually let me do it. I made these T-shirts that said “Jeffrey Dahmer Cooking Show” or whatever. We did the skit, and then I came back after class and I stood behind the door and overheard another student talking to the teacher, and he was like, “Well, why can’t I do this? You let that girl do that Jeffrey Dahmer show.” And the teacher said, “I felt bad for her. She made T-shirts.” I was crushed. I thought I was killing it.
After you finished this wholesome all-ages book, did you feel compelled to do something heavier or more grown-up?
Definitely. There was a little bit of an overlap with a dark, art world murder mystery that I wrote called Shagbark, which is very similar in name to Squeak Chatter Bark. After the kids’ book, I had to go into some adult territory.
I feel like after I finish whatever big project, I have to pivot to something different. The only consistent things that I’ve done in the last decade or so are comics like Hungover Bear or for The New Yorker. Otherwise I’ve done a bunch of different stuff. For a while I was doing arts writing. It’s an impulse that I have, and it’s not always a great impulse, actually. Sometimes it’s good to go deep into a genre or medium, and I find myself pulling back.
But I think in the long run it’s better. It helps maintain your sanity. At this point I’ve known quite a few people who’ve gotten burnt out, and part of that is tunneling in the same direction for so long. I’m not burnt out artistically, I feel very fresh in that way. (I feel burnout in other ways.) When you jump around, you get excited about projects.
What are your favorite and least favorite animals to draw?
I love drawing bears. For Marco in the book, I studied a YouTube video of a Baryshnikov dance, and it was a lot of fun to imagine how a big bear would fly through space like Baryshnikov. Bears are probably my favorite.
I think birds are super hard to draw—I love drawing them, but they’re difficult. You have to understand anatomy in a different way, like wings are interesting but hard. One of the hardest animals to draw that I also really like is a groundhog, because they don’t have any shape. Or a beaver, anything that’s round like that is hard to draw. Horses are also tough, famously. But I like drawing basically all animals.
What I don’t like drawing are cars. I really hate drawing cars. That’s maybe the only thing I hate drawing.
Has there ever been a time when you changed a joke because you didn’t want to draw a car?
Sometimes I’ll adjust the vantage point of a scene based on not wanting to draw an intense row of houses or something. In terms of the joke itself, I doubt it. The joke comes first. It’s immodest to say, but I don’t think there are any physical objects that I couldn’t draw. Sometimes I like to try to challenge myself by making sure I do draw a car.
The inverse of that question is sometimes I’ll do a comic because I want to draw something. Like I want to draw mermaids or witches, so I’ll come up with a concept around that. Or dinosaurs, I love drawing dinosaurs. Sometimes the content comes from the drawing.
If you were to give Squeak Chatter Bark to your younger self, what would you inscribe on the inside of the book?
I would probably say, “You can do this too.” For me personally, as opposed to a lot of other readers — and this is also why Squeak Chatter Bark is linked to my first book, Drawn to Berlin — the book is about drawing. This is a medium that’s super accessible and that can help on a number of levels. It can help kids disseminate information and process their feelings about complex issues.
Little Ali loved to draw and loved to create comics, so I would encourage her. Yes.