I know it's unlikely that that's literally how it works for you, but is that basic image in any way reflective of your method?Īidan Koch: I think I definitely consider "what is the minimum information needed to move the story along?" Unlike traditional cartooning, it's not a thumbnail to pencil to ink to color process. With you, it's very different: I picture subtraction, as if somewhere out there there's a maximalist version of each page that you slowly whittled away at until only the elements you felt were necessary remained. Collins: When I think of how most cartoonists approach a page, the picture in my head is one of addition: piling mark upon mark until the page is full. Sure enough, Koch's thoughts on how she constructs her comics, what they communicate to their readers, who those readers are, and the kinds of comics she doesn't like having created, filled in the gaps, all right, but in a way that only increased my appreciation for what she does and how she does it. This seemed like an ideal time to take stock of Koch's work to date.
(As a 2009 graduate of Portland's Pacific NW College of the Art, she's surely no stranger to speaking about what she's up to.) Meanwhile, Koch's two most recent releases-the life-drawing collection Field Studies, published by Jason Leivian's Floating World imprint, and the crime comic (!) Red Sands, a No Country for Old Men-like story of desert death drawn during a residency in Utah-take her work back to the somewhat firmer penciled ground of her earlier efforts. It feels a shame to shatter the quietude of the comics themselves.īut I learned first-hand that Koch is as garrulous, amicable, and confident a talker about her comics as the comics themselves are restrained and gestural: After introducing myself to her at this fall's Small Press Expo, I probably stood and talked with her about her work at her table for half an hour, and was repeatedly impressed by her articulate insights into both her comics and the process behind them. Indeed, the trajectory of this 24-year-old Olympia native's work has taken her from comparatively straightforward, meticulously penciled black-and-white slice-of-lifers-including many of the comics available on her website and her book-length debut, The Whale-into more inscrutable color work-the cryptic Grecian imagery of the broadsheet-format Q and her Xeric-winning story of mental illness (I think), The Blonde Woman, previously serialized at Study Group Comics. Gossamer pencil rendering, conspicuous gaps in both image and text, a tendency to put just enough on a page and no more-these techniques give Koch's comics a sense of whispered mystery and melancholy. I almost didn't want to interview Aidan Koch, since so much of the power of her elliptical comics stems from things left unsaid.
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