Processing: How Mattie Lubchansky Wrote and Illustrated Simplicity
The author and illustrator on utopian fiction, science fiction satire, and "skepticism for how things are done and how things can be different"
On a semi-regular basis, I interview authors about their writing processes and the craft behind their books. You can find previous entries here. This week, I’m excited to share an interview with the author and illustrator Mattie Lubchansky, whose new gorgeous new graphic novel Simplicity is out today! Like Lubchasnky’s previous book, Boy’s Weekend—and her regular comic strips—Simplicity combines lush illustrations and science fiction settings to examine very real world issues. Simplicity takes place in a not-too-distant future America where an anthropologist, Lucius Pasternak, is hired to study an upstate commune that lives outside of the corporate-controlled “New York City Administrative and Security Territory.” The novel combines ecohorror, cyberpunk, and utopian fiction to tell a story about the ways we live and the ways we could be living.
I talked to Lubchansky over email about Ursula K. Le Guin, political separatism, and science fiction satire.
As a prose writer, I’m always curious how the process of creating a novel with both illustrations and text differs from a novel that is only text. Do you write a script first and draw from that? Or thumbnail out pages first and write the text after? A bit of both?
So if you ask five cartoonists, you'll give five different processes for how they work. Personally, I like to go completely through each part of the process 100% of the way before moving on—especially if I'm getting edited in the case of a big book like this. It's, for obvious reasons, a lot easier to make changes in the script than it is during the pencils, which is easier than the inks, which is easier than the colors. Something like moving a scene around would be close to impossible the further I get along. So I outline really heavily, I work off something like a 20-page outline, where I break each book into its scenes, and even the outcomes of conversations. Once that's in order I'll write a script, which sort of looks like a screenplay. From there I'll get into drawing. I don't "thumbnail" per se because I sort of hate doing it, but I take a long time with my pencils and am basically thumbnailing and penciling at the same time.
You regularly put out some of the best satirical comic strips—formerly at The Nib (RIP) and now on your Patreon and Instagram—that comment directly on contemporary topics in the news and media but often do so through a science-fiction lens. The reader knows you’re talking about Elon Musk or ChatGPT or what not, but what they’re seeing is mutant cyborgs in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. My question is how these four-panel comics prepared you (and how they didn’t prepare you) for the long-form science-fiction narratives of Boys Weekend and Simplicity?
Thank you!! I started doing political strips through the sci-fi lens because, frankly, I hate drawing caricature, and it was more interesting to me (in terms of where I come from politically) to talk about structural issues. And I'm such a dork about genre fiction, that's just where my mind went when trying to generate metaphors. So I think it really prepared me for getting in a "speculative fiction" mindset, where I was already so trained to sublimate these thoughts of mine about current events into big metaphors and wacky settings. The big artistic problem I had to struggle through was to make the fiction more character-focused, and worry more about who the people we're following are and why we care about them, not just vessels for my incredible and perfect ideas that everyone should be listening to.
One thing I love about Simplicity is how it explores ideological and political resistance to a future dystopia that is an extension of our reality—climate destruction, wealth inequality, rule by the whims of billionaires, etc.—but doesn’t present that resistance as entirely rosy or effective. This is especially true of the cult or group at the center of the novel. Can you talk about the inspirations behind the Simplicity group and how you wanted to portray them?
Yeah, I mean what resistance ever has been! So much of this book to me is about history—what makes the historical record and what doesn't, and more specifically who is making it. And specifically, with the Spiritual Association of Peers (the group at the center of the book), I've been thinking a lot lately about political separatism, which if you talk to people it's been bubbling up a little bit. You want to move to the middle of nowhere with your friends and start a farm, where there are less exterior pressures from our present fascistic moment. But that won't stop climate change from ruining your farm, you know? But on the other hand, community life is so important and we've been experiencing a massive breakdown of that over the course of basically my entire lifetime in America—so I wanted to engage with why someone would live that life in an honest way.
Can you talk about the role of research in creating Simplicity? Was the cult inspired by historical groups?
I'm so glad you asked me about this. I was talking to my friend Calvin Kasulke about my general idea for this book, when it was just sort of a vague sketch about the main character and the universe he lived in, but I didn't know where the story went—and he recommended a book by the author Chris Jennings called Paradise Now, which is about all these 19th-century, pre-Marxist socialist communes, often religious, often millenarian, all over the US: specifically the Shakers, the Owenites, the Fourierists, the Icarians, and the Oneida commune. Anyway I read it and it lit up my brain like a Christmas tree. I saw all these parallels with the thoughts I was already having about separatism and utopia. These people were all reacting to massive societal upheaval from the industrial revolution. What would it look like if I mapped their responses onto a different kind of cultural turbulence? The SAP specifically I took a lot from how the Shakers functioned, I was really enamored with how they’d rip their clothes off and run around screaming in the fields to get their ya-ya’s out. My thought was: would it have solved their problems if they simply fucked? (Yes, and then also no.)
One novel I thought of while reading Simplicity was Ursula K. Le Guin’s anarchist science-fiction novel The Dispossessed with its An Ambiguous Utopia subtitle. I know you’re a great fan of that novel. (I am too!) Did it influence Simplicity? What other books, movies, or works of art in any medium were influences?
Gosh, you know it's probably my favorite book? I talked a ton about it influencing Boys Weekend, where I really was trying to capture the feeling of “experiencing capitalism for the first time” with this fantasy version of Las Vegas—I wanted people who even like going to the real one to understand where I was coming from. With this book, I think yeah the influence is still very much there, and Le Guin in general. Something she strikes at the heart of so effectively in The Dispossessed is that essentially every way you can set up society is going to have problems. Which unsolvable problems do you want to have? In terms of other work, I was (obviously) very taken with the 1973 The Wicker Man and Jeff VanderMeer's book Annihilation.
Other stuff that was really top-of-mind to me while working on this were the Octavia E. Butler Earthseed books, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Alan Moore and Steve Bissette's Swamp Thing, Kelly Reichardt's First Cow, Sondheim's Into the Woods and Pacific Overtures (my favorite song from the latter gets an epigraph). I was thinking a lot about the work of Henry Selick, who loves making a guy crawl into a big sticky hole to see what's on the other side – the working title of this book that was just for me was "A Big Wet Sticky Hole." While working on this I would also basically stare and stare at that Bocklin painting "The Isle of the Dead" which I am ashamed to admit I first saw in Animal Crossing during lockdown. It's fine.
While I wrote this I also could not stop listening to Mort Garson's Mother Earth's Plantasia, which is an album written specifically for plants to listen to.
I’m not sure if I’m wording this well, but I wanted to ask you about “background gags” and background images. As a prose writer, there is a feeling that the reader will give more or less equal weight to every sentence. It is harder to “slip in” a joke perhaps. But in illustrations, there is the foreground and background and panels will often reveal other elements—especially jokes—on a closer look. I suppose the question is how you navigate the difference between background and foreground in storytelling?
So to me this is more about worldbuilding and, to coin a term that I immediately hate, Vibebuilding. I think this book could have easily been really really self-serious and I wanted to avoid that because that's not a place I like being and it wouldn't fit with the way I draw, I don't think. The difference is, I think to just not let it overwhelm what's happening, and to let serious stuff happen when it needs to. I do a lot of worrying over the tonal balance of a book like this, and it's just one more thing to juggle! I think the original run of Futurama is my eternal lodestar on this. They could really kill you with a background gag.
Queerness is very much at the center of Simplicity and certainly connected to the political and ideological themes of the book. I’m also curious if you also find queerness connected to the form of the book?
I obviously don't think I can write from another perspective! To be Queer, politically, requires a massive amount of skepticism for how things are done and how things can be different—and functioning better focusing on community care. The form of the book, again, is so much about history and how it's told. And there's entire academic disciplines now devoted to unraveling it—Queer history is often very hidden. So the format and the way the story is told, to me, is pretty focused on that, very specifically.
As a fellow satirical science fiction author, I often joke about how hard it is to keep up with reality these days. I say “joke” but it’s true. Every week there’s some new evil government policy, dystopian tech product, or other absurdity that would have felt like “too much” only a few years ago. If you feel similarly, how do you handle satirizing a reality that feels almost beyond satire? How do we keep up?
This has essentially been my issue my entire career, right? And it's always why, when I was drawing a weekly "political cartoon" for like ten years that I so often was just trying to zoom out as far as possible on structural forces. But in terms of "keeping up," I think we just have to do our best to identify why things are happening and work from there—just representing what the President said this week but with some funny aesthetic changes isn't going to do it (and, I think, kind of never has).
Lastly, can you tell us what you’re working on next?
I've recently finished scripting and have begun drawing on my next book for Pantheon, which will hopefully be out sometime in 2027. It's called Between the Collapses. My elevator pitch is: What if you got so mad at your girlfriend for breaking up with you that you stole her car? Okay, what if the car was a time machine? I've jokingly been calling it 10,000 Year Dyke Drama.
My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “Brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.
Great interview!
Both deeply theoretical and dangerously relatable. Am I inspired or being gently radicalized? Great interview, actually. Thanks!