The other characters and the story line are all amalgams of people I know, my own experiences and things that happened around me. She’s very repressed, insecure, uncomfortable in the world outside of very specific instances, which I think is very much my own experience of childhood/adolescence/early adulthood, though I do not think of her as me, exactly.

However, as I was working on the book, I realized I wanted her to function more as a somewhat stoic avatar on which readers could project their own feelings. My original intention was to have a kind of running inner monologue for Lauren that expressed the things she felt unable to speak aloud, which I think would have given her more personality in some ways. Originally, I had intended to include text in the margins, which is something I did for a comic about Emily Carr that I produced for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2018. Specifically, this story centers around Lauren, who was raised in a Pentecostal/Evangelical/Charismatic household but attends a public school, which was my experience growing up. I wanted to tell a story centered around the conflicts that arise when someone from an intensely religious background and upbringing is confronted with people of other beliefs and backgrounds. I think the Lynda Barry-coined term “auto-bi-fictional-ography” applies best here. It is not strictly autobiographical, but draws very heavily from personal experience.

It has the visceral authenticity of memoir, but based on what I know of your bio, I suspect it’s not. I corresponded over email with Campbell, who was in France for the world-renowned Angoulême International Comics Festival. Her new book is the coming-of-age story of Lauren, a teenager grappling with the cruelty of adolescence, including body-image issues, mean (and nice) girls, and confusion over sexuality and sexual orientation-all grappled with under the heavy hand of oppressively religious parents.Ĭampell recently relocated from Chicago to the hometown of her husband, the cartoonist Aaron Renier, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where there’s “some illness in his family, so we moved to help out.” She soon joined the artist roster at the well-regarded Western Exhibitions, and earned a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2018.Ĭomics are but a part of her artistic practice, and she’s just now publishing her third graphic novel, “Rave,” and her first with a major publisher, the legendary Montréal imprint Drawn & Quarterly. Not so for Jessica Campbell, who burst onto the Chicago art scene right out of SAIC, becoming a Newcity Breakout Artist in 2015, just a year after earning her MFA.

Though cartoonists are increasingly feeling art-world love, it usually takes years of toiling away in relative obscurity until achieving enough publishing recognition for galleries and museums to notice.

Rave by Jessica Campbell