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Screen capture from Zoom chat
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by Mike Rhode
Ten years ago, I interviewed Jason Little for the Washington
City Paper. Jason returns to talk about what he’s been doing in the
intervening years, and his new NSFW webcomic, The Vagina.
"Jason Little discusses The Vagina, his NSFW
webcomic," that title is a bare minimum of information, a brief attempt to
draw your attention to this article. With more space, I might have named it
"Jason Little chats about his pornographic, totally bonkers, science
fiction, full-color, free, Not-Safe-For-Work webcomic sex farce The Vagina,
and why you should give it a read, as well covering as his other works from the
past ten years."
Mike Rhode: The last time I talked to
you formally was 10 years ago, even though we might've seen each other at SPX a
couple of years ago. So what have you been up to for the last decade? You've
done at least two graphic novels since then…
Jason Little: Yeah, my most recent work, The Vagina, sort of grew out of Borb in a way. I did Borb for Uncivilized Books and I'll give
you a little background on that in case your readers don't know about it. I had
been working in animation. I worked for Augenblick Studios, which was doing a TV show
called Ugly Americans at the time. It was a
pretty successful TV show for college age males. That was the target audience, around
2010, on Comedy Central. I enjoyed that initially, but the more I worked at
that job, the more I started to really not thrive. And by the end of it, I was
like, “I gotta get back to my comics career.” The hours were really long. I was
not spending enough time with my family. My teaching was suffering. And I just
thought, “If I stick to this, I'm never going to draw comics again.” So I had
to get out of it. And then when I was done with it, I was like, “Okay, I got to
get a comic going superfast, because I feel like it's been like three years and
I haven't drawn any comics and my readers don't know that I'm still alive.” So
I said, “Okay, a daily strip.”
I
had had this idea for a daily percolating that was about a homeless guy. Initially
I was going to do all the backgrounds as photographs - go into the New York
subway and like take a lot of black and white photos and then use those for the
backgrounds and then draw the characters in front of it. But I abandoned that
because it was just too fussy. I wanted to tap into sort of the Happy Hooligan vagabond archetype a bit, but I also wanted to address issues of
horrible grinding poverty and misfortune. And so I started, and made a laundry
list of everything horrible that could happen to a homeless person, just a few
words each, like beaten up, diarrhea, gonorrhea, losing all his teeth... It was
just relentless. And then each of those germs became either a whole week of
continuity or a single daily strip.
Mike Rhode: It was a black and white
strip from what I recall with four panels and a really classic look to it.
Jason Little: Yeah. And I looked at Harold Gray a lot and Herriman and Segar and inked it with a nib, which I hadn't really done in
two years. I've been inking mostly with brush previous to that. And I really
got into a groove and I was posting it on Act-i-vate every day as a real daily. I took Sunday off. I didn't do a
Sunday strip. I got a lot of really great response from people who understood
what I was doing. And then I got a little bit of negative response from people
who were like, “Hey, you're making fun of homeless people. That's not right.
That's cruel.” My whole agenda was to make the reader feel uncomfortable
because it was like slapstick humor at the expense of this destitute person.
And then over time, the parts of the humor started to be replaced by just
tragedy and pathos until the tragedy and pathos took over and the humor dropped
away. And then the people who had been unhappy with it initially figured out
what I was doing.
Mike Rhode: It was planned from the
beginning. It wasn't an evolution of where you decided to go after starting the
strip. And Act-i-vate was a web comics
collective for a little while.
Jason Little: Exactly. Sadly, not around
anymore, but spearheaded by Dean Haspiel and Simon Fraser. So that was an
intense four months of work, which is the fastest that I had ever started and
finished a project before. Usually a book takes like five years for me to do. So
I shopped it around and amusingly, I showed it to Fantagraphics and Gary Groth
said, “I really liked the beginning where it's relentlessly cruel and humorous,
but then when the pathos kicked in, I kind of lost interest in it.” And then I
showed it to Drawn and Quarterly and Chris Oliveros said, “I was really made
uncomfortable by all that intense, cruel stuff in the beginning, but I felt so
much better when the pathos kicked in.” It was funny when the editorial vision
for those two houses is … we could call it complimentary in that way.
Complimentary is a good word. So then in the back of my mind, I'd really been
thinking about Tom Kaczynski, at Uncivilized
Books. And
I just felt like he would get it, and I showed it to him and he instantly liked
it. And it came out as an Uncivilized book in 2015. It’s on sale it right now at Uncivilized Books.
Mike Rhode: Then on your publications
list, you had a small book that's out of print.
Jason Little: That's called Gimmick Illustrated. I was in the middle
of Motel Art Improvement Service and
also in the throes of early parenthood, so with little studio time. That
project was really dragging, and so I needed to do something else just to
refresh myself. So I did a project that was as completely different from Motel Art Improvement Service as I could
make it. It was visually more experimental and in black and white, and much
more spontaneous in terms of drawing. And I thought I would finish it, but I
think that's sort of an abandoned project at this point.
Mike Rhode: Did you self-publish that, or was that
published with somebody else?
Jason Little: I just did it as a self-printed
mini-comic thing.
Mike Rhode: Then we'll get onto the book that we're here
to talk about today, the aptly-titled The
Vagina. You’ve been serializing it in English as a webcomic,
described as:
Meet Polly and Molly.
Polly Amorous, a
burlesque performer, lives in Brooklyn. True to her name, she lives a wild,
hyper-sexual life. Molly Morris's life, however, is mild by comparison; she
runs a café in Oakland and lives in a monogamous lesbian relationship.
But—happiness eludes both women. Polly keeps taking the wrong men to bed.
Meanwhile, Molly’s wife wants to get pregnant...but Molly is repulsed by the
idea.
Though these
women are strangers to one-another, their destinies are inextricably linked.
This bizarre story takes place somewhere on the frontier between porno-land and
the real world. As you read The Vagina, you’ll experience tears of laughter,
tears of sorrow, and an assortment of other bodily fluids as well.
Jason Little: I can actually tie it all
into Borb too. So while I'm at Uncivilized,
Tom Kaczynski introduced me to Nicholas Grivel, who's a French agent and he
specializes in international rights and he managed to help me sell Borb to Aaarg!, which is a now-defunct
magazine that also was doing French albums. And so the French Borb came out from Aaarg! and they really seemed to
like working with me. So they solicited another project from me. I pitched some
thoughtful, sensitive intelligent projects to them, all of which they rejected.
And then I pitched them a stupid, dirty project idea, which they loved. And so
I started doing “The Vagina” as a
serialized thing in Aaarg! Magazine. I turned in six pages every month at first, and
then they switched to a bi-monthly format, and then to a quarterly. So the
schedule kept changing.
The
genesis of The Vagina came out of
research that I'd been doing for another book which required that I read a lot
of books about the universe and black holes and the space-time continuum. I was
reading Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan and all these wonderful sort of popular
science books. And then I got this stupid idea about another potential
completely absurd application of the Einstein-Rosen Bridge concept in which two
women - women who are strangers to each other - have their vaginas connected
via essentially a wormhole and how much slapstick could come out of that. So I
pitched that idea to Aaarg! and they went with it. I started delivering episodes and
that continued for a while, but then their magazine went belly up and I ended
up finishing it as Le Vagin, an album
for La Boîte à Bulles and a lovely hardcover came out in 2019. I've gotten some good
reviews on French websites to have translated by Google. Since then I’ve been
working to acquire English-language readers by serializing a page a week at https://vaginacomic.com/ . I’m also posting a panel
or two a day on social media, in sync with the weekly updates.
I
was really excited about the stupid premise – ‘stupid’ being sort of synonymous
with funny in my mind. I would test out the premise by describing the plot and
the first few scenes to my friends. And it seemed to go over well so then I
began to set goals. I wanted it to be really porny and explicit in its
eroticism and, and exist in the same kind of universe with the porn that we
have today, with all these niches and archetypes, like the BBW (big, beautiful
woman) and the BBC (the big black cock). But to also draw attention to these as
vile stereotypes, that are like completely unacceptable to discuss in normal
conversation or normal existence, while fetishization of things like race, body
size, and sexual orientation is just part of the anything goes attitude in the
porn universe.
I
wanted to try to have this porn universe setting collide with real life
expectations and see what came out of it. Initially I wanted it to seem really
sort of crass, and stupid, and very germane to what I call ‘the porniverse’
with the rules of that space in effect. And then I wanted it to evolve in the
same way that I had Borb evolve into something sensitive and
psychologically complex that had something valuable to say about society. So I was
giving myself a challenge in the same way that I did with Borb.
Mike Rhode: Okay. So, an example of that that type of
thinking perhaps would be Polly and her compulsive pursuit of smaller Asian men
and their attraction to her. It's kind of hard to talk about this in some ways,
because it's being serialized here in America, so we have to be a little bit
wary of spoilers as most people won't have read the French version.
In
an age when even the New York Times runs articles about sex toys, The Vagina is still somewhat shocking
and definitely not safe for work. It's a little hard to discuss the comic
without giving spoilers, but it's basically about two women whose vaginas work
as a portal between each other, a fact discovered via masturbation. You explained
that you had what you considered a stupid idea, and this is the one that the
French magazine ran with, but this is still a very weird idea that wouldn't
occur to probably 99.99% of the universe. Even with doing research on black
holes, can you look a little deeper into why you thought of, or how you thought
of, this idea? Is this a daydream idea, or a sketching idea, or an “I’m reading
about black holes. Oh my God, wouldn't this be a very odd idea?”
Jason Little: It was one of these things
where I had initial plans, like I wanted to do something really erotic --
because in my past work, the innocent and the erotic have blended a little bit
in a way that really interfered with the marketability of my books. My Bee
books (Shutterbug Follies and Motel Art Improvement Service) look
like young adult graphic novels and, then 80 pages into it suddenly there's
frontal nudity or something like that. I really did not have a smart sense of
how to segregate adult considerations and youthful considerations, especially
since so much of my style is derived from the European graphic album
sensibility, like Tintin, so it just looks like it's for kids. So, I
decided, “Okay, why don't I just do something dirty. That's unabashedly dirty
and is dirty from beginning to end.”
It
helped me to just get that out of my system a little bit, and maybe I can move
on from that and do something a little bit more cerebral in the future. So that
was the first goal. And then I hit on the space-time aberration premise, and
then I just thought about it. Then I started to add characters to the premise.
And then, if I'm going to do something like this, it's really about vaginas and
that is not native territory for a male cartoonists to pursue. So I'm
definitely going in where I'm not necessarily invited. I knew then that I had
to build something. I had to take my stupid idea and then try to spackle as
much smart stuff onto the outside of it as I possibly could.
That
meant I had new goals, one of which was to pass the Bechdel test, which was important, but quite easy. The other was that I wanted
to have all the characters be different from me. I wanted to explore sexual
orientation, and racial identity, and gender different from me. So there are no
white male straight characters in the book. And that's been an interesting
journey too, because I feel like that's a controversial topic today, in that
younger writers and readers tend to be defensive and protective of their
identities, and not want outsiders exploring those identities. Older writers,
on the other hand, tend to really embrace the concept of writing characters
that are very different from themselves just to enrich the book, but also as an
empathy thing. The more we write about people that are different from
ourselves, the more we can begin to understand them better, just through the
act of imaging ourselves into their shoes. I had to write everybody different from
me and so I had to really try to write well, as well as I possibly can, in
order to bring those characters to life in a way that was believable to the
readers.
Mike Rhode: Once you started writing these characters,
were they based on real people? Did you seek out real people that would
possibly be reflected in the characters, and ask them to give your script a
reading too?
Jason Little: I would say that all of
them are composites. All of them have a little bit of me in them though.
Especially Molly.
Mike Rhode: But did you find some gay women or some
burlesque performers to look at some pages and see if they thought you were
being fair?
Jason Little: Yeah, sensitivity readers.
Which is a fairly new term and very popular term, but it's something that I do.
It's a big thing among cartoonists and editors nowadays. I've always done that,
but previous to this book, I did not necessarily seek out readers that had
specific identities that match the identities of the characters in the book. This
time I totally made sure that I did and it was a really interesting experience.
In the earlier drafts of the book, the beginning of the story came on much more
strongly with a porniverse setting and character was much weaker. That didn't
go over well. In a way, I was trying to use the same method that I used with Borb, because Borb is not really a
fleshed-out character in the beginning. He's just the archetype or the stereotype.
Mike Rhode: Slapstick, I guess, would be the main type of
humor in Borb.
Jason Little: As it turns out I had a few complaints about that approach with Borb, but no one who really got in my
face about it. What I did with The Vagina
is I put it up as a slide show. I did chapter one as a slide show with Bob Sikoryak’s Carousel. It’s a crass version of chapter one. Afterwards this
woman came up to me and just started yelling at me. She felt that I was the
enemy and that I had done something completely unconscionable. I'm pathetically
responding, “But if you 
were to read chapters two and three, you would see that
the empathy part kicks in as does the character development and the internal
psychology…” So it turned out serializing The
Vagina in that form, where I was really leading with crass porny stuff in
the beginning, just wasn't working out. So I totally reworked chapter one and
redrew the whole thing from scratch. I
feel it now leads with empathy and more complex characters. It still plays a little bit with archetypes as
the main characters manifest in very archetypical ways, and their backstories
that shaped them into who they are at the beginning of the story, don’t come
out until later chapters. That comes up gradually along the way.
Mike Rhode: Honestly, I'm not sure you can tell a story of
this type with truly deep, thoughtful introspective characters. If only, in
part because their heads would explode by what was happening to them.
Jason Little: Right. It’s a comedy work,
and so it exists in a comedic space where ridiculous things happen. We have to
accept a certain amount of, or hope for a certain amount of suspension of
disbelief. The way viewers would watch a Wayne's
World or Bill and Ted's Excellent
Adventure or the Marx Brothers movies even.
Mike Rhode: You were talking a little bit about the way
you were trying to purposely plot and design this book. I think that's been
something that has been very true of your entire career, going all the way back
to Jack's Luck. I remember when it
came out at SPX, where everybody was really struck by the formalism and the
interesting choice of the art style that you'd made. Can you talk a little bit
about your interest in experimentation and formalism? Would you call yourself a
thinking man's cartoonist?
Jason Little: Yeah, definitely.
Definitely. Everything has a plan. I don't like repeating myself, which made
doing the second Bee book difficult for me, because I felt like it was
repeating myself a little bit. I desperately want to learn something from any
process. Jack's Luck was about
tricks, trying to play to my weaknesses in a way, and suppress my strengths, so
that I can use other skills or develop other skills. And then Bee (aka Shutterbug Follies) was, I guess, an
attempt to emulate Hergé as much as I could with my own interests and to create
something that had that same sort of reading experience. And then Motel Art Improvement Service felt like
just doing the same thing over again, which is why it was hard. We talked about
the comic strip constraint in Borb, so
looking at The Vagina, I look at it
and I say, “Oh, this looks just like Bee! It's full color. It's pretty, it's
the same sort of cartoony style.” And I thought, “Well, am I not repeating
myself with that too?” But then I reminded myself, “Oh yeah, I drew the whole
book digitally.” So that was my sacrifice book that would allow me to bone up
on my digital practice. Which I had to do because at SVA,
where I teach cartooning, they had just built the cartooning and illustration
department, a computer lab for the first time. We had not had our own lab. And
so we had suddenly had this beautiful facility with like 30 Cintiqs and Power Macs,
but then nobody signed on to teach the ‘how to draw comics digitally’ class.
“Uh-oh. We need that class. Nobody's stepping up. I guess I have to do it
except I don't have a digital practice in place.” So I used that book as an
on-the-job-learning thing.
Mike Rhode: Did you write out a script first? Write a
script, thumbnail it, and then go ahead and do the full pages?
Jason Little: For The Vagina, since it started as a serial at Aaarg! magazine, I pitched it as a text and then wrote it all out
as a script, which I need to do for myself anyway. I definitely went through a
period when I was younger when I thought, “Well, I guess I'm an alternative
cartoonist and alternative cartoonists are intuitive and impulsive and they
don't use [scripts].” I realized that that just doesn't match my personality
and my neurotransmitter supply. I needed to have the organizing element of the
script, and also wanted to really make sure the writing was tight. And so I
always do a script. That said, I didn't for Borb.
That was more impulsive, but I always usually do a script. Then the script gets
read by my writer friends, and they give me notes on it. That goes through a
lot of drafts before I even start drawing layouts for it. Then once it's
written, once it's made visual, then my cartoonist friends read it and give me
notes on it too.
I
made a point of showing The Vagina to
as many colleagues as I could that matched the different characters, or identity
descriptors. And it was really interesting. I showed it to my African-American
studio mates, and they were very satisfied with the characterization of Stephen,
the Black British character, but they were nervous about the Asian-American
characters. So then I showed it to my Asian-American colleagues. I showed it to
Jason Shiga and asked him for his
opinion in particular on the Asian-American character. And he was fine with the
Asian-American character, but he was nervous about how African-American readers
would react to it. It seemed like everybody was okay with the depiction of
their own identity, but they were having an empathetic anxiety about the
depiction of the other characters with other identities.
Mike Rhode: I'll go ahead and fill in a little bit about
that anxiety. You've depicted Nelson, the Asian-American characters as being
somewhat a small man. And one is specifically referred to as having a smaller
penis by one of Polly’s friends, and the Black man, Stephen, is portrayed
respectfully, but then there's the large size of his penis, which plays into
that stereotype. However, it's also an important plot point. So you've asked
people about that, people of color, but are you worried about reaction when
that part of the strip hits online?
Jason Little: It will be interesting. So
far so good. That part of the serialization passed without complaint. The way
that I've described it is that everybody in the story who has a penis has a
penis that's proportional to their body size. So Polly is deliberately seeking
out small men. Yes. If you bring out your ruler and compare, Valentino who is
white and has a penis, his penis is the same size as proportionally as Nelson’s
penis is. And then Stephen is super tall - he's like six’ three,” or something
like that. Polly towers over Nelson and Stephen towers over Polly. And so
everybody's penis is proportional to his body size.
Mike Rhode: How did it end up in French? Did the publisher
translate it? Did you translate it?
Jason Little: I do not speak French although
I wish I did because there are so many incredible comics coming out of France.
My wishlist is mostly from Amazon.fr. The translator for Borb was a wonderful editor at Aaarg!
named Léa Guidi, and she was really fun to work with. And as far as I can
tell the translation was great. She asked a lot of fascinating questions about
sound effects, which are always difficult things to translate. She did much of
the translation of The Vagina too,
but also in collaboration with a French guy named Donald Rasambo. Vincent Henry
did the last few chapters, that weren’t in Aaarg!
magazine. So I think Vincent did the final translation.
Mike Rhode: I’m continuing to look at
the books’ credits. What the heck did Tim
Kreider do
for you?
Jason Little: He's one of
the people that I told this story to, and then I think I had him read the thing
later on too, and he gave me notes on it.
Mike Rhode: I always enjoyed his cartooning. I enjoy his
essays too, but when he was at the Baltimore
City Paper, I really enjoyed his cartooning. So The Vagina basically has had three lives. It was in a French
magazine as a serialized comic. It was a French album, and now it's becoming an
American web comic. I was wondering why you decided to make it a web comic in
the States.
Jason Little: Everything that I've done
previously appeared on the web before it was a print volume. That served me
well, although I definitely have been interested in other models. I was very
interested in Jason Shiga’s Demon model, where he would do a booklet that
he printed himself on a Risograph machine that he bought, and then send that to
his Patreon subscribers. Then once that had been taken care of, then he would
put it up on the web. And then finally it came out as a First Second three-volume
book. Back in the day when I was doing the Bee books, for example, editorial
was really nervous about the notion of webcomics. It seemed like the readers
wouldn't buy the book if they had already seen it on their computer screens.
But I think new editors are realizing that the webcomic is this advanced
publicity for the eventual print version. Though I have not yet really shopped The Vagina around in earnest to American
publishers. I just want readers; I want people to see this book.
Mike Rhode: I think 10, 15 years ago, you would have had a
lot of publishers that wanted to just serialize it, back when Eros Comix,
Playboy Comics, and Hustler Comics existed. But that genre has faded in
American comics at the moment. The idea of launching a not-safe-for-work web
comic that is pornographic, but not particularly arousing, seems as though you
made it about as hard for yourself (sorry, one can't avoid the puns) … made it
as difficult for yourself as you possibly could. That's just an observation - you
can respond or not.
Jason Little: I seem to be good at that.
Basically much of this is me operating from a fairly luxurious position in that
I’m middle-aged, I have self-knowledge, I know what I'm interested in, and I
have a really nice steady job. I feel like I'm the luckiest cartooning teacher
in the tri-state area. I have this cartoon coordinator position at SVA so I
make a full-time living off my teaching. It’s a job I love, and the fact that
it pays my bills means that the comics that I make are just sort of like a
bonus and I don't need to worry about being profitable with the comics. I don't
have to make any compromises in terms of content in pursuit of survival.
Mike Rhode: Did you get any pushback
from your students at SVA about the existence of this work?
Jason Little: A number of them are
following it on Instagram. I get a number of likes from, from those students. I
have a policy of not following my students on social media until after they
graduate. It's reassuring because some of my black male students or former
students tend to like the posts where Stephen appears and some of my butch
female students and colleagues tend to do a lot of liking of panels where Molly
appears. So I think they just really like to see themselves or their cultural
or gender or orientation identity depicted in comics.
Mike Rhode: I looked at it on the
website.
Is the Instagram parallel with the website or are you ahead on one platform?
Jason Little: Each page is about 11
panels, so I have to divide 11 by 7 so that I can post the panels so that they're
in sync with the weekly page up on the WordPress site.
Mike Rhode: Let me ask about Instagram then, since on
Instagram we're seeing a lot of cartoonists. I know Liana
Finck at
least has gotten a book out of it. Why did you choose to serialize this on
Instagram? At seven times a week?
Jason Little: I'm actually doing it on
Twitter and Facebook and even Tumblr at the same time too.
Mike Rhode: I see. It's a multi-platform attempt, but it
is panel by panel on most of those. And then you capture the whole thing on
your website at the end of the week. Are you seeing more engagement on one
platform than another?
Jason Little: I get most of my response
on Instagram and I get a decent amount on Facebook. I get a few, like maybe one
a day, on Twitter, even though Twitter is the only place where I run the panels
uncensored. On the other platforms, I use pixelation to blur out any sort of
nudity or sexual acts.
Mike Rhode: Because otherwise they would push you off the
platforms immediately.
Jason Little: Definitely. For a while, I
was blurring genitals and buttocks and nipples and stuff like that on Tumblr
and Instagram and Facebook. But then there were situations that could be
interpreted as sex acts, even though I thought of them as just situations with
nudity in them. So then I got stern warnings from all three of those -
Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. I feel like then I became much more draconian
about my pixelation of anything where a character is naked and that character
is touching another human being. I have to blur out both characters’ entire
bodies.
Mike Rhode: Wow. So in some ways it's a very different
experience for people depending on which platform they're looking at it on.
One, a full page is cut into a panel. Two, it's pixilated. Three, you're not
getting a full page of story at one time like you do in a comic book.
Jason Little: It's interesting because
right now the page that I just finished putting up is mostly silent. The reader
would probably have taken in that page maybe in like 10 seconds total. It's
funny to be serializing that over an entire week, so the pacing of it now has
become glacial.
Mike Rhode: Who controls the timing in comics - this goes
back way back in comics - back to Will Eisner in the ‘40s; the fact that the
page layout helps set the pace, even though the reader sets the overall pace
themselves. You are upending that relationship, after having created a standard
pacing, you are taking it and upending it completely. Wow. Are you finding
people are not happy that it's not moving fast enough?
Jason Little: I'm not too worried about
it. When it's slow, people's attention drifts, and then when funny things
happen, their attention is captured. Again, I'm not worried about losing
anybody completely.
Mike Rhode: What are your thoughts about getting this
published in America in print? There's still people like me that much prefer to
buy a print thing that we know will last and the cartoonist hopefully will make
money on.
Jason Little: I'm hoping that it is now
is a good time for me to start looking again. I feel like I have hard data now
that I can bring to the conversation and there does seem to be an online
audience for it. When I did the Bee books years ago, I was somehow assuming
that most of the readers who would be attracted to that project would be young
women, as the main character’s an 18-year-old woman. But I really found that
most of the readers were middle-aged men, or at least adult men. That was kind
of a bummer because I thought, “Oh, I'm trying to be proactive and have this
female protagonist to try expand the readership of comics.” We're talking about
20 years ago when the readership of comics was still majority male.
Now
I'm putting The Vagina up online and
I feel like the majority of the likes that I got on Instagram are from female
readers. I think that's pretty cool. It surprises me because this is even more
nakedly erotic in a way that I associate with a male gaze. I expected more male
readers for this project, but I think the crucial differences in the title. I'm
really proud of the title as it’s confrontational, but also clinical and
anatomical. It's a word that men avoid using generally, but in my own personal
vocabulary, my choice of words for that organ has dwindled to just vagina. That's
the only word that I really use anymore to describe that organ. I think when women
see The Vagina, that's a frank
expression of a female reality. I think women see that and say, “Oh, they're
talking about something that I understand.”
Mike Rhode: My impression also is that Instagram tends to
be a more female-friendly, or a female-populated platform perhaps, than some of
the others. But that's just an impression that I have (it’s apparently true as of this writing).
I
reached out and got some questions from a few of your long-term readers (who also
happen to be my friends). One person wants to know if there were changes in the
current online version compared to the published French version. And if so,
what changes did you make and why?
Jason Little: There was a sequence in the
first chapter that spelled out the space-time aberration as though it had a
concrete explanation in the French edition, but then in the US edition, I
replaced that with silent panels.
Mike Rhode: We were just seeing the
glowing balls of energy floating in the women.
Jason Little: Chakras. I'm envisioning a
four-dimensional, hyperspheres that you can't see in our three-dimensional
space. I think that makes it a little more enigmatic, and also more of a
mystery for the reader to sort of puzzle through.
Mike Rhode: Question number two was from
a reader who wanted to know about the book’s deep ties to the burlesque world
and how you did the research for the burlesque parts?
Jason Little: I was privileged when I
went to Oberlin College back in my late teens, early twenties, to meet a
schoolmate named Julie Atlas Muz. She was a freshman when I
was a senior and she was a dance major. I would see her performances and hang
out with her in the cafeteria with my friends. When I moved to New York, I was
excited to discover that she had also come here and had become one of the
founding performers in the neo-burlesque movement. I saw a number of her
performances, all of which integrated elements of classic burlesque striptease,
but also performance art. All of her performances were about something and had
a conceptual hook in some way. So that deeply informed Polly's integration of performance
art and burlesque stuff. But her appearance is more reminiscent of Muz’s
colleague, Dirty Martini. She more physically resembles her. And then the third
burlesque character, Valentino is sort of vaguely inspired by Tigger, who is
also a good friend of Julie's and Dirty’s.
Mike Rhode: 
Wow. One would not expect ultra-high-class Oberlin
in Ohio to nurture a burlesque performer who then pops up in New York City all
these years later for you find inspiration for a comic story in.
Jason Little: All sorts of weird and cool
people go to Oberlin and they ended up doing some weird and cool things.
Mike Rhode: Good for her. Finally, it sounded as though
you were not too interested in returning to the story of Bee, but my third
reader question asked if you would be doing any more stories about her.
Jason Little: I actually have a whole
script that I wrote and revised through several drafts for a third Bee volume
in which psychedelic drugs plays a big role. Bee actually goes to a version of
Oberlin. She enrolls at a liberal arts college and I actually went so far as to
attend an Oberlin reunion and take copious reference pictures of all the
locations. I had a real regression thing. I went to the reunion and I wanted to
remember deeply about what it was
like to be an undergrad at Oberlin. I found myself horny and depressed and
deeply needing to act out and draw attention to myself. I achieved that sort of
time travel, but tI'm also not too excited about the idea of repeating myself
creatively. So, that book is a low priority, so it keeps getting pushed aside
by, by other projects that I would rather be working on.
Mike Rhode: Because The Vagina is essentially done and you're just cleaning it up a little bit, do
you want to talk about current or planned projects?
Jason Little: Sure. So now that I'm
middle-aged and I have children, and I've gotten this dirty thing kind of out
of my system, my next two book ideas are
for a middle grades graphic novel, and maybe a young adult graphic
novel, with no sexual content and no romantic content at all. I do want to
explore issues of death, and disease, and aging, and acceptance of aging, and
how difficult wrapping your brain around that sort of thing is for a child. But
I have to do them under a pseudonym because now that I've done all this naughty
stuff, an editor would probably think twice before signing me on to do it a
middle grades graphic novels. I know that Tomi
Ungerer in
the seventies did all these picture books and then he when he did some erotic
work, it totally torpedoed his entire picture book career. Renee French did her children's book work under a pseudonym because she had
previously done work in which child characters had sexuality. So, that's what
I'm going to do.
As you might expect,
Jason’s work can be found at multiple places online–
Web site: www.beecomix.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/beecomix
Tumblr:
www.littlebeecomix.tumblr.com
3D Comics: littleanaglyph.tumblr.com
Facebook: facebook.com/beecomix
Twitter: twitter.com/beecomix
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