In this fourth and final part of our interview with Swallow Me Whole writer, Nate Powell, we turn momentarily from all of that heady talk about childhood schizophrenia to discuss the author’s use of language—both textually and visually—in his latest book. It’s a particularly interesting topic both in light of the fact that much of the author’s past work has often been largely silent, as well as the ways in which Powell’s years spent working with developmentally disabled adults has affected his own speech in life.

We also briefly touch upon some religious themes broached over the course of work, and how the religious culture of the South influenced Powell’s work.

[Part One][Part Two][Part Three]

I was speaking with Dash Shaw and he howh your time spent working with people with developmental disorders has affected your use of language. I thought the comment was interesting on a number of levels. First, you’ve done a lot of work without any text at all. And second, I think, more than a lot of working in the medium, you have a very visual way of illustrating text, especially in the case of music or whispered speech. Has Your time working in that field impacted your use of language?

Absolutely. On a couple of levels. For a long time, I was more interested in using a shear economy of words—just only using the words that are necessary. I was really afraid to say anything, whether it’s in words or not. From the time I was in Providence, I basically programmed myself that I was stupid and invalid.

Not just on the page?

In general. In life and the way it affected my comics. In life, I basically lost a lot of self-respect. In the book It Disappears, it can be very special sometimes when I read it, but other times, all I see is me trying to have a very, very raw, personal conversation over the course of the book, but it just comes across as this theory-heavy garbage to me. I think, once I got to this uncomfortable spot—and a lot of this has to do with the particular director jobs that I’ve been working with, since moving to Bloomington. I’ve been working with the city and people for five years now, and I’ve developed a really close and special relationship with some of these people, and not only have they affected my use of language in everyday life, but I’d say, I got comfortable enough with the way that real people use real language, and also trying to communicate things in a way so that literally anyone can understand it. Basically, I finally got to a point where I was unafraid to have people talk like people in books.

And, as far as the visual language in comics, I think a lot of that is I just relaxed a little bit. When I was in Providence, I just forgot how to have fun with art. It took me a couple of years, during Swallow Me Whole—not even Please Release, that was kind of me breaking out of my shell—I finally started to ease up and have fun and bring more iconic and cartoony and expressionistic elements. The expressionistic elements within language and wording and lettering started to come in again. Most of the people I work with have autism—I’d say, like 80-percent do. It’s not intentional, but my older brother has autism. I’m basically the autism guy. I really truly get it. For what it’s worth, I feel like I’ve gotten to a very special place in understanding the framework for getting along with autism. I can see a more level playing field, as far the as the way that people communicate and do the things they need to do in their lives—the ways that people use language to communicate the things that they want. It’s played a big part in making me unafraid of language.

You mentioned religion a little before—growing up a Southern Baptist. There’s some symbolism in the book that’s hard to ignore: the use of cicadas, which seem to be a direct reference to the locusts from the biblical plagues.

Of course. But I will say that my dad’s side of the family grew up Southern Baptist, but I grew up Prespiterian, which is basically the equivalent of having the excuse not to believe anything, whatsoever. My dad, who’s basically one of the coolest people on earth, was my Sunday School teacher. In the seven or so years that he was my Sunday School teacher, he probably said the word “Jesus” five times. He talked about the JFK assassination and curfews and censorship, and we’d use that as a pathway to ethic and moral issues, but he would never explicitly talk about God, and I’m very thankful for that.

When the cicadas found their way into the story, it was definitely unavoidable that there was vast religious implications there. Just for the record, I’m an atheist, but in the last two to three years, I’ve developed a very different relationship to religion. The things I used to hate about religion—the ritualistic aspects, the consecration of sacred space, the dualist aspects, even the social aspects (people were really just going to church to hang out with their friends. They didn’t really give a shit about Jesus or church or anything).

When I stopped going, my mom go so mad. But a couple of years later, she just stopped going, and is much happier about it. She’s navigated back and forth in that world, and now she’s in a more comfortable spot, but I don’t think my mom believes in anything. But the things I hated most about religion, when I was 21 or 22, are my very favorite things about it. I love the idea that you can consecrate a sacred space—we’re going to use our energy to turn this into a holy space. I love that shit. It’s a wonderful, magical act, and even the social aspects. I don’t like that people feel they need that to have a moral structure, but I personally appreciate the fact that my was my Sunday School teacher and I learned things about ethics and morals that I’m still using.

Actually, a couple of years ago, reading up on different religions, it was through a search about Wicca that I actually got to appreciate Christianity, ironically. Wicca’s formal mission, that there is no magic happening with these spells and sacred spaces, it’s almost a very intense visualization process, mixed with some archetypes, and a lot of focus and learning to visualize the change that you want to happen. And by getting a crystal clear vision of that and focusing on a religious exercise or a spell, you are able to change your life and the world around you. And I realized that that’s what happens when people visualize on any sort of religious space. I still don’t believe in God, but I have a much more respectful view of religion.

It also almost validates Ruth’s impressions that she is some kind of a chosen being.

It’s important to note that the original title of this book was Wormwood. I changed the title after I discovered Wormwood Gentleman Corpse. Basically I did a lot of reading on neurology and physical disorders. I read this really excellent book called The Midnight Disease written by a neurologist with impulsive writing disorder, and it compared the neurological roots of many, many disorders, and then asked questions about the source of creativity and how it played into disorder, neurologically and culturally. And it turns out that there’s the same exact abnormalities in the chemicals of the brain which play a part in particular kinds of temporal lobe epilepsy, certain kinds of bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia, certain obsessive compulsive behavior, and even a certain kind of autism.

Those abnormalities activate the same part of the brain as when people have feelings of religious mania or when they have abenthenia, And the wormwood in absinthe, activates that specific spot. Coincidentally, I had decided to call the book Wormwood before I discovered that, and all the sudden it was like, “wow! There’s a reason!”

–Brian Heater

A exploration on the admittedly sometimes fuzzy line that separates childhood schizophrenia from standard youthful fantasy, Swallow Me Whole presents a definite point-of-no-return between the two, for its protagonist, Ruth, during the course of the story. Where precisely in the book said moment occurs, however, is perhaps not quite so clear.

Where author Nate Powell puts the line in his own reading of the book, presents some fascinating insight into the author’s own views on mental illness, as well as its manifestations and treatment. The precise placement of the line that separates an individual who can be successfully treated from one who is “too far gone,” is particularly interesting in light of Powell’s years spent working with the both developmentally disabled and mentally ill adults.

In this third part of our interview, we discuss breaking points and the scapegoating of mental illness.

[Part One][Part Two]

There’s certainly a point in the book in which Ruth—more so than her brother—becomes a danger to herself. As far as her breaking point, I have a feeling I would point to something different than you. Based on what you were saying about confrontation with authority, it seems like for you, that moment might be when she’s approached by the principal and a police officer.

Right. That’s the point of return, definitely. The important thing specifically about that act of violence is that, first off, that tale about the Nolan Richardson Baby Ruth bar actually happened to me. at the time, no one responded at all, because it was such a wild, wild thing for a teacher to say. So there was was a personal vindication there. I was so excited to draw it.

There was catharsis.

Oh, absolutely. I was finally able to hit this teacher in the face with a book. It really needed to happen, to be honest. But, at the same time, this is where the stigma comes into play. This is where I hit that gray area that is powerful and relevant in this particular story–the fact that her act of violence is considered a product of her mental disorder.

She is in the office, vying for the rational nature—or not even the rational nature, but the fact that she had reason to commit the act of violence, and they’re actually vying that it’s an inherently irrational act, and they’re using her disorder as a way of getting rid of her. It’s a way of using that few bad apples theory to discount whether acts of violence, collective acts of disobediance—once something gets stigmatized as a product of either an irrational mind or an inherently violent movement, it’s easy to discount any action and remove reason from anything that might subsequently occur.

By the same token, there’s that old argument about pleading an insanity defense in a murder case—if anyone is going to commit a murder, clearly there’s something not right there, mentally.

Yeah. And actually, this is an extreme example, but one of my personal references when doing that scene was, I was considering the case of the Unibomber. Not that any innocent person ever needed to die at the hands of the Unibomber, but I find it incredibly interesting and very much worth discussing, at least, that, during his trial, his entire platform was that he wanted his fate to be determined on the soundness of his ideas. He did not want to be an insane Unibomber, he wanted to make the point that he committed these acts as an activism based on ideas. Obviously, based on his actions, he is not sound, but he’s arguing that he’s not insane.

In terms of Ruth’s action’s subquent to that act of violence, do you think she would have argued similarly in her own defense, or do you think that, at some point, she would have chalked that up to her own insanity?

Basically Ruth the entire time, she reaches a point, around halfway through the book—I think it’s right around the time where she actually starts communicating with, what I refer to as the “queen bullfrog,” which is actually an impossibility, because bullfrogs have to be male. But when she encounters the bullfrog in the museum, she kind of gets to a point where she’s starting to question the idea of fighting whatever these powers are that are trying to claim her brain.

In terms of being an adolescent who’s very invested in what she believes in, I think that the book incident that sends her into the office is kind of the final straw for her, and she’s kind of tired of trying to prove herself sane to anyone, and I think, as far as conflicts with her parents, later in the book, she’s already long since made a decision, by that point.

–Brian Heater

Swallow Me Whole is one of the year’s most powerful graphic meditations on both adolesence and mental disorder. Author Nate Powell walks a tightrope between imagination and hallucination for the duration of the book, effectively generating as many questions as he attempts to answer, a method that is frustrating, to be sure, but also imbues the book with a sense of fascination that commands repeat readings.

In this second part of our interview with Powell, we delve deeper into this heady topic of childhood schizophrenia, and hit on some equally troubling questions about the role that gender politics play in the diagnosis of mental disorders.

[Part One]

How large of a role does misdiagnosis play in the book?

It definitely plays a big role. In fact, I have a lot more words in this book than I did in my early days, mostly because I didn’t know how to write at all.

There mere existence of words in this one is a marked difference from some of your past books.

That’s true. The words help. But here are a couple of things that I did want to keep open-ended. There are a couple of things that I think became more powerful by being open-ended. But one thing that I know in my brain for the story, which I kept open-ended is that—and I don’t know if this was successfully communicated or not—that basically both kids, when they’re 11 or 12, or whatever, coincidentally get a degree of hallucinations—mild delusions. A lot of of stuff I was trying to communicate was the stigma of behavior for children of different genders.

Socially acceptability?

Exactly. When you have Perry and let’s say he’s 16, and he has this delusion with this little wizard that basically has these grand plans that Perry has to draw, so that they can complete their big mission together. The fact here is that he’s compulsively creating art, and I assume he’s pretty good at it. But we basically have a teenage male who’s an artist, who’s doing something that’s creative and constructive. It’s not someone who is cutting themselves or doing something destructive, where I find—this is not from personal experience—to be very easy to pass off, even something like a hallucination, as being the product of someone not getting enough attention and having an overactive mind, but being a part of the creativity itself, and maybe not even being appreciated or pushed enough, so they’re pushing themselves.

On the other hand, you have a teenage female with almost the same issues. Even though I personally feel that might be constructive with Ruth, who’s actually creating an armada out of these bugs and amphibians. She has a particular rank and file system to them. She’s exercising her creative and constructive capacities, as well. Constructing an imaginery army out of insects is not always considered art, or whatever, but she’s actually female and she’s crossing a line of introversion/extroversion, as it relates to gender in our society. She also has delusions to mild hallucinations, but they’re more readily perceived as a problem, much more than if a male had these same issues. So that’s kind of an under-current that I thought was important.

That’s interesting—there seems to be two issues at play here. There’s the gender issues, which you mentioned, and then there’s the ways in which their psychoses manifest themselves. Do you think that, were the roles switched, and he were collecting bugs in jars and she were drawing, that the reaction would still be the same?

I don’t think that they’d be the same. Interestingly, I think it’s more of the presumed gender norm that males are more physically interactive with their world, especially when you have bugs and frogs and related things. That would fall more under the category—once again, I think that females who grow up having a very strong interest in math or science generally are considered at least slightly more aberrant in their interest than a male having the same passion. So I would say, then, that it would not be the exact same, but I think it would open up some entirely new doors of stigma. In fact, it might be a little more intense. I think it plays on the same thing, but probably to different degrees.

The gender of one isn’t totally clear from the art, but it seems that the boy goes to a male doctor and the girl goes to a female doctor.

Yeah.

Do you think the gender of the person making the diagnosis plays a factor in the diagnosis itself?

I do think that the male doctor’s does. The male doctor formerly has some kind of a relationship with the family, as general practitioner. He was a pediatrician for the family. He knows their history. It was just Perry and dad, Brady Bunch-style. He has a previous relationship with them. So there are these theoretical concerns which you’re picking up on, which are absolutely correct. At the same time, it’s only—I would credit the doctor by saying that he knows enough about the way that a child would interact and express their problems. And also, he knows the dad enough to know that something else is going on to know why he is there for treatment, to know what’s behind the injuries.

And, as far as the psychiatrist is concerned, interestingly, I will say that I don’t necessarily think that her gender plays a role in her diagnosis. As a side note, that doctor is actually based physically and somewhat behaviorally on a friend of mine who is female, but who kind of skirts the line, as far as being transgendered sometimes and being a female other times. That was actually an intentional choice, and she’s got a couple of things on her plate, mentally. Part of it was sort of an empowerment exercise, by casting this dear friend of mine in the position of psychiatrist, basically making sense of someone else’s problems. So there’s a personal reason for that, and actually, gender did play a role, in a different way. I didn’t want things—gender was the whole reason that they went to these different doctors, and there was a point in their diagnoses that I didn’t want it to be just that binary.

It seems like something of a double-edged sword. On one hand you’re saying, once these diagnoses are made—and if they are, in fact, accurate—especially in the South, there’s a tendency to ignore them and write them off, but at the same time, in terms of the diagnoses themselves, you seem to be siding with the male doctor’s decision not to diagnose Perry as schizophrenic. Without giving too much of the subtext away, where do you side, as far as the difference in terms of diagnosis between childhood creativity and schizophrenia?

That’s an excellent, excellent point, within your question there. First off, I should reveal that for the last nine-and-a-half years or so, I’ve worked basically inside the mental health field and human services field. I’m a direct care worker for people with mental health and developmental disabilities. I work a lot with people with mental impairment issues as well as developmental disabilities. From a professional perspective as well as a personal perspective, I do side with the male doctor in his decision not to recommend Perry to a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but I’m not freeing him from basically playing a part in a gender stigma of boys being boys and encouraging basically the existence of this order because it’s creative.

One of my biggest frustrations and fears, however, and this goes beyond talking about my brother, as far as the kind of stigma that happens whether it’s someone with developmental disabilities or a mental disorder has any kind of encounter, no matter how minor, with law enforcement, something gets set in motion that can never be erased, and I’ve seen people’s lives really go down the shitter, just by getting a little out of control or out of hand, one time, or doing something inappropriate at the exact wrong spot. There’s really no way to get back from there.

For people who actually have schizophrenia, it’s very frustrating, because perhaps the most important thing is that you get diagnosed and you find something that works for you. If that’s medication, you find the kind of medication that works, and then you make sure you keep taking it, and then you make changes in your life around this important role of getting diagnosed and finding something that works for you. And schizophrenia is a neurological disorder, and its roots are medical. That’s what makes it different. That’s what makes chronic depression different from intense sadness. The roots are neurological, they’re not just 100-percent how fucked up the world is, making you depressed. So, basically, I do side with the male doctor, but I’m not letting him off the hook.

For people with schizophrenia, diagnosis and treatment are incredibly important. But at the same time, I do want to say that, even if there is this gender diagnosis stigma going on with Ruth as well, from a narrative perspective—the fact that we’re dealing with comic books here—there is a gray area, where the fantasies that we see in our heads, especially when we’re young, whether it’s emotional extremities, or whether it’s actual creative energy happening—our imaginations at work—from a strictly visual standpoint, it really isn’t fully resolved whether these are actual schizophrenic hallucinations. I will tell you that they are actually the result of schizophrenia in the book, however.

It being a comic book, the reader never really knows whether the fantasies themselves are real.

Exactly, yes.

–Brian Heater

Swallow Me Whole caught me off-guard. I was largely unfamiliar with Nate Powell’s work when I first picked up the Top Shelf book, and as such, didn’t have particularly high hopes, beyond his very clear talents as an artist.

More than just a standard tale of a brother and sister growing up in a southern town, the work skillfully weaves between the real and fantastic with little effort, whilst tackling the touchy subject of childhood schizophrenia in an uncharacteristically frank manner. The book also demonstrates Powell’s understated gift from graphic storytelling, effortlessly blending elements across panels and pages. It adds up to one of the most thoughtful and engrossing books that 2008 has offered up, thus far.

Powell, a Little Rock native and current resident of Bloomington, Indiana, wears a number of other hats, as a record label-owner, punk vocalist, and occasional, a hip-hop emcee. He also holds down a job working with developmentally disabled adults.

Clearly this is a man just begging to be interviewed.

How long have you lived in Bloomington?

I’ve been here for a little over four-and-a-half years. It’s a fine place. I used to move all of the damned time. Like every three to six months, I’d move to a new town. Part of it is I got burned out a bit, part of it is that I just got tired of the act of moving, and part of it is that I just got to a phase in my life where I’m really ready to focus on things. Sometimes I get bored living here, but really, it’s an awesome, awesome place.

Why were you moving so much, initially?

I went to school in New York City. I graduated when I was 22. Often times, from 1997 to about 2006—or maybe even last year—I was in two bands that would go out on tour three times a year. When I was 22 to 25, I’d move to a place that seemed exciting, and I would work real hard and draw a comic, and when it was time to go back to Arkansas and tour, I would just quit my job and move out of the place. We’d go on tour for a month or two months, or whatever, and then I say, “I want to move to Kansas City!” and I would just move there for three months or five months, and then it would be time to go on tour.

A lot of it is that my life is more structured around time spent with my friends in my band. And a lot if it was that I didn’t have any attachment to anything and I didn’t really need a lot of money. I only needed like a couple thousand dollars a year. I really scraped by. In a way, even though I didn’t have a life that was thickly-packed with personal connections in town and a home that feels like a home, I was, in fact, more free at the time, with a different home every couple of months. It has its tradeoffs.

So why was Bloomington where you finally opted to settle down?

One thing was that, before I moved here, I lived in Providence, RI, and a lot of my best friends from Arkansas, Florida, and elsewhere already lived up there, so it was a very comfortable place, people-wise, but it was a very, very stressful, toxic environment. I developed all kinds of ways of not dealing with problems and bad habits. My brain just got wrecked. I kind of lost track of who I was. I knew that I had to get out of there. I also wanted to get closer to Arkansas, because my grandparents were pretty much all about to die, and my older brother has autism and other developmental disabilities and he got moved into an assisted living situation, so I wanted to move closer to Arkansas to be around the family more.

Also, I knew a lot of people who were in bands that my band toured with and my very best friend in the world lives here—actually, she just moved back here, which is nice. Bloomington just seemed like the right place. Bloomington, in a lot of ways, I perceived as being antithetical to Providence, at the time. It’s everything that Providence was not. People complain about how people in Bloomington are too nice—that people in Bloomington are too nice, and it’s annoying.

If Bloomington and Providence are opposite ends of the spectrum, where does Little Rock fit in?

Little Rock fits in a really weird spot, and there are two reasons why. One is because it’s my hometown and number two, because it’s a place where I and many people have exiled themselves from. Arkansas is still my absolute state in the United States, for a number of reasons, and Little Rock is a fine city, and the climate is great. I vastly prefer the South to the northern-Midwest. As far as the underground punk community and the artists and everything, there are always just enough people to keep something good that everyone has to participate to keep everything going.

Even as far as music goes, you’d have these shows with punk bands and hip-hop bands and metal bands and weird bands all playing together, because, if you cooperated, you’d have these huge shows where two or three hundred people would show up, and, if not, you’d have these sad little stinkers. It’s a place that’s dried up enough and lame enough that, if you’re trying to make something cool happen, it’s a place like no other. And in the 1990s, the punk scene in Little Rock was generally considered the best in the United States. Kids were a very, very special breed there.

A lot of people moved away, and there was a loss of ways of doing things. It’s an overtold story from many different towns, where you end up having to hang out in bars, even if you don’t drink, to see your friends. It was a loss of resources that put a considerable damper on things. People still try really hard to make magic happen, and I will admit that it really is a different place now.

Of all the places you’ve lived in your life, is there a reason why Swallow Me Whole had to take place in Arkansas?

Well, actually I did see in a review a while ago where somebody—actually, I guess it does take place in Arkansas, because otherwise there’s an Arkansas Razorbacks comment that wouldn’t make sense. I dreamed up Swallow Me Whole almost in its entirety in one night in October 2001. At the time I was living in rural western Massachusetts. In my brain, I always thought of Swallow Me Whole taking place in Virginia, but it’s something that I was never very serious about, number one because I didn’t think it mattered. Number two, I really wanted to include a couple of Arkansas references, so I just thought I’d keep it vague. And number three, even though it’ll be kind of awkward to have it in print, I actually had a bizarre relationship with the movie Donnie Darko. When I dreamed Swallow Me Whole, it was before Donnie Darko had it’s initial debut. I think it came out, and it went away, and it sort of came out again, a year later.

They did a Director’s Cut.

Yeah, and I didn’t get a chance to see it, until January 2003, and when I saw it, my initial version of Swallow Me Whole was about 70-80-percent similar to Donnie Darko. It scared the shit out of me! I just wrote Donnie Darko. Over the years, I decided that I needed to take notes. Even if we were tapping into some collective unconscious of a particular era’s creators and storytellers, I want to make sure that Swallow Me Whole is Swallow Me Whole. And one thing is that Donnie Darko takes place in Virginia. Again, it never says it, but you can see it on the license plates. Once I saw the Virgina plates, it was like, “shit! They’re even secretly in Virginia.” So basically I sealed up Virginia and just let Arkansas have it.

I know there’s some debate over whether or not Virginia is technically the South, but do you think it’s important that the story more or less takes place in the South?

Yes, absolutely. I mean, besides the fact that a lot of important parts of my own life took place there. I think that there is something special about life in the American South, especially growing up in a Protestant middle class white Southern existence. A lot of the missed communication or lack of communication, a lot of the avoiding of confrontation, and, particularly, I find that with middle class Southern white existence, when there’s so much stigma that goes with any type of disorder or behavioral problem, or even any kind of cultural discretion, depending on the respectability of the person, when middle class white southern Americans are talking about, say, someone who is an alcoholic, there’s still a myth, which I think is greatly perpetuated by a lot of folks.

People think that alcoholics have to be hoboes or live in a garbage can. There’s a lot of euphemistic language that happens with disorders. People who like to drink a lot or people who are bi-polar, it’s like they’re a cannibal or something. I’ve seen it inside my family and outside my family. If someone has bi-polar disorder, it’s almost like when people whisper the word “gay,” which still happens a lot in the South. I think the avoidance of the issues which need to be addressed before this can be dealt with, in any sort of way, is very specific—to me—to the South. I think there’s something interwoven into the culture that provides for that unspeaking.

[Continued in Part Two.]

–Brian Heater