Maia Kobabe’s Origin Story
Hi! I’m graphic novelist Jarrett J. Krosoczka and welcome to Origin Stories. In this podcast, I go on a deep dive into the upbringings and artistic developments of some of the very brightest and most talented graphic novelists working today.
In this episode, we are going to get to know how Maia Kobabe became Maia Kobabe.
In 2019, Maia Kobabe made eir debut as a traditionally published cartoonist with their graphic memoir, GENDER QUEER. GENDER QUEER is about Maia’s coming to eir understanding — and coming out — as a non-binary person. It’s a frank and mature book, whose intended audience is for older teens and adults. This book is a look at the intensely cathartic journey Maia took, and as you’ll hear from Maia in a moment, was written, in part, to help eir family understand what it means to be non-binary and asexual.
This interview was recorded well before GENDER QUEER became the target of book banning initiatives across the country. As is often the case with these situations, passages have been taken out of context and disseminated as whole, creating hysteria around the book. What I have
often been seeing in the news is a decrying of what is and isn’t appropriate for children. Of course, GENDER QUEER wasn’t written for children, but for young adults. From what I have been seeing, the terms “children” and “young adults” are often lumped together as one, which is a mischaracterization of where and how books deemed “problematic” are being shelved in libraries.
In this podcast, I will be covering graphic novelists who produce work for all ages. I also want to make it clear that I am a firm believer in the First Amendment, and a student’s right to have access to age-appropriate literature. While my graphic memoir, HEY, KIDDO, has nowhere near faced the level of book canning as GENDER QUEER, I can speak from experience that is neither fun nor a badge of honor to have your book banned and decried as inappropriate.
As the wise Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop presented to us — books can serve as both mirrors and windows to readers. Meaning, when a reader recognizes their experiences within the pages of a book, they can feel empowered. And when a reader experiences a book as a window, they can have a deeper understanding of a life that is unlike their own experiences and develop empathy.
Okay, all that said — let’s get to know Maia, an incredibly talented and kind human being.
Jarrett J. Krosoczka: Hi Maia. How are you?
Maia Kobabe: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me.
JJK: Thank you for spending some time with me and with us and thank you for GENDER QUEER, for so many reasons. I’m here in Massachusetts, but you are in Santa Rosa, California.
MK: Yes. Home of the Schulz Museum.
JJK: Yes! We’ve only ever met in real life once, but it was in the most magical of magical spaces, which was Charles Schulz’s actual art studio, where he made his Snoopy comic strips.
MK: Yeah, it was! I actually just looked it up to remember when that was and it was the summer of 2017 and it was a celebration for, I believe it was the 15 year anniversary of the museum being open and we’d both been invited. There had been like, a little mini Comic-Con and we’d been, I think, selling zines. And you did a panel which I listened to, which was the first time I’d be familiar with your work. And I actually drew you in my sketchbook while you were talking.
JJK: Did you?!
MK: Yes, I did. And I could show that to you later. It’s not that great of a drawing. It was just a quick, like, I’m in the audience probably holding my sketchbook while standing, type of drawing. I love drawing while listening to panels and stuff. And then afterwards, the museum staff invited the cartoonists to stay late. I believe they gave us a big pizza or something. I think they fed us. And then some of us got to tour Schulz’s actual studio which was very cool. I had been to the museum before because I’ve actually taught workshops there. Girl Scouts, actually all Scouts probably, can earn a badge in comic making now. And so I have taught Scout comic badge classes at the museum but I’d never been into the actual studio before so that was pretty special.
JJK: Yeah! So people should know this. There’s the Schulz Museum but then there’s the Charles Schulz Creative Associates, which is an entity that he created in his lifetime where he worked and operated and that is adjacent to the museum. But Charles Schulz Creative Associates exists as it did the day that he passed in 2000, it is unchanged. There is the space where he worked, where he drew his Snoopy stories everyday. Right next to his desk, a Snoopy phone.
MK: Famously the back of the wall where his rolling desk chair would scrape when he would lean too far back in his chair is still there. And you could still see the worn part of the wall.
JJK: Tell me. What kind of comics were you reading when you were a kid?
MK: A lot of, I would say, American cartoonists. I definitely started with newspaper strips. I have very fond memories of my dad taking the Sunday comics and laying them out flat. And then me and my sibling would lie on either side of him and he would read them to us while pointing out the speech bubbles to help us follow along. And I remember that from when I was a little kid. And we would read every single one. I don’t think we skipped anything in the newspaper. I was a very late reader. I didn’t learn to read until I was 11 years old. I have dyslexia and I’m just a very right-brained, image thinker. And it’s interesting, I was not conscious at the time of comics being more accessible or easier but I definitely have always loved comics and I always loved drawings. It’s hard for me to say whether I love comics because I could read them a little bit
more easily or just because I loved images and words and fun stories. But yeah, I would read them in the newspaper and then I would go to the Sonoma County Library and I would get the collections. They had many of those. Collections of all the strips from a year. And I would get Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes and Zits and Mutts and Get Fuzzy and Pearls Before Swine which was written by another local person.
JJK: And did you always draw too?
MK: Yeah. I started drawing as soon as I could hold a pencil. I went to Waldorf schools as a young person which is a type of artsy usually private or charter school. They really focused on handcrafts and the arts so from first grade onward we were often assigned drawings as part of our homework and I loved that. And it meant that it was easier for me to be in a classroom. I literally couldn’t even read through fifth grade. I learned to read between the summers of fifth and sixth grade. But because in Waldorf school, so many of the assignments involve listening to a teacher tell a story, tell information and then actually processing what you’ve learned in a drawing or doing crafts like knitting, painting all these sorts of things I think art always really helped me keep up with my education too. And even if I couldn’t write a very good essay, my teachers could see, “Oh, you picked up all the details of what we were studying”. So they could tell that I was paying attention and learning.
JJK: How lucky to have such thoughtful adults in your life.
MK: Yes. I feel extremely lucky that I was in Waldorf school as a dreamy, artsy child. Not a public school where I probably would have been pulled out and put in like some sort of remedial classes. I was always in with all of the other students. Even if I was always also in the lowest level reading and math groups I was never taken out of the classroom.
JJK: So did you have anything else that you were reading or maybe even watching that got you excited?
MK: I was really more inspired by books. We had so many illustrated books, loads of picture books as a kid. And then I also subscribed to –there’s these magazines, I believe they’re still available and people might know them– the Cricket magazine, Spider magazine, Cicada magazine and Ladybug magazine. Those are in the oldest to youngest descending age order. But I always got those magazines as a kid. And I loved that every month you’d get like a couple short stories and they always had beautiful illustrations. And the Cricket one had a little running comic strip that went along the bottom. Which had these characters, they’re all bugs, a spider and a grasshopper and a ladybug. And they were all friends and they would do little adventures. I remember one of my earliest comics was actually drawing fan strips of the bug comic.
JJK: That is so cool. So would you look at those fan comics as the first visuals that had a narrative element to them?
MK: I guess. It’s really hard to pinpoint what was the first. I do have loads of drawings. Also my mom read out loud to my sibling and I, my sibling is two years younger. My mom read loads. Reading chapter books out loud to us at night before we went to bed definitely through me
being in eighth grade maybe even into high school. I don’t exactly remember when that tradition stopped. But she would read to us for much longer than I think some parents continue to read to their children. And it was often even a book that I had already read. I would read it and give it to my mom and be like you should read this to Phoebe. And because we shared a bedroom, I would just also be there for story time. And so I was usually drawing in a sketchbook while my mom was reading out loud and I would very frequently be drawing fan art.
JJK: And so from having read GENDER QUEER, you are super into fantasy as well.
MK: Yes. I’m very into HARRY POTTER, LORD OF THE RINGS, NARNIA, the ALANNA series by Tamara Pierce, the REDWALL books by Ryan Shocks. There were so many series that I loved. And I still really love fantasy and science fiction. But I definitely had a phase of, in my sort of teen years, where I would not read a book unless it had a dragon, an elf, a sword, a castle, or like a wizard on the cover of it. I completely, for a long time, was uninterested in reading books that were set in the real world or in the present.
JJK: And you know what, I think that’s what kids really need, right? Is to be allowed to follow whatever those passions are. And that’s going to get them continuing to read it. My middle kid is super into realistic graphic novels in which the main character deals with some kind of illness or gets hurt in some way.
MK: Niche but these days you can actually find those. When I was a kid, I would not have been able to find those realistic graphic novels of sick kids 12 years ago, 15 years ago, probably. But now you can find them.
JJK: Yeah. I think that a lot of what drives us and by us I mean, you and me, our colleagues that are all making graphic literature is, is we’re making books for the kids that we were right? And also –what book would I have loved as a kid? What book could have helped me as a kid? I could tell you as the father of a nonbinary kid, GENDER QUEER helped me understand them so much more and what they might be going through. They’re not yet able to verbalize that because they’re still in third grade. I don’t know, Maia, if you fully yet understand the positive ramifications of your courage because it’s really hard to write graphic memoir. You take this thing that’s just really difficult that you don’t talk about. For me that was my mother’s heroin addiction. Which I never talked about as a kid. And now I’m going to write all of the details and draw those details into a book for everybody to read. And then I’m going to have to answer questions about it because the publisher will want me to go on a book tour for it. And at the very beginning of GENDER QUEER, it’s so powerful, you’re in grad school for comics and your teacher asks you to write down secrets, like your deepest secrets. And you wrote your deepest secrets but then you immediately covered them up in your sketchbook. And now that story is published for all to see. I often feel like I’m the annoying person who says, you know, I liked that band before everyone else. And whenever I have a book and it doesn’t have the award stickers, I get a little smug. Because you won a few awards stickers at the American Library Association, right?
MK: It has a Stonewall Book Award and an Alex Award now.
JJK: Could you tell me a little bit about the journey that you took from thinking, “I can’t believe this teacher has asked us to write about this secret,” to now having that book be published? Because I was tracking you after we first met at the Schulz shelter and I started following you on Instagram and GENDER QUEER is also your first traditionally published book. Correct?
MK: Yes. So GENDER QUEER is my first full length book. It came out in May of 2019, which was also the month that I turned 30 years old. That was the best birthday present ever. It’s so interesting because for anyone who hasn’t read the book, it is a very intimate story. It’s about gender. It’s about sexuality and identity. It’s about coming out to family and friends and my community. And then having to answer a lot of questions about, what does it mean to be a non-binary? How does that relate to how you feel about your body, how you feel about sex and relationships and your own relationship to the world? And there’s a lot, it’s a lot. And like you mentioned at the beginning, I too consider myself and feel like I’m a fairly shy and private person. I have a public persona which I feel like I can turn on at a convention if I need to talk to people for hours and hours, but it’s not my natural state. It’s a stage presence to a certain extent. And yet I have published this deeply revealing memoir. It took a lot of emotional work to be ready to put this book into the world, as I’m sure you also had to do to put out HEY, KIDDO which I read and loved when it came out.
MK: I’d say that journey started in grad school. I went to California College of the Arts in San Francisco, which has a wonderful master’s program in comics. And I was in the first ever class or I was in the “guinea pig” group. And I had wonderful teachers. One of them is MariNaomi, who is also a comic book author who writes fiction and memoir. And she challenged us, this was in the year 2013, to do this assignment which is based out of Lynda Barry’s syllabus assignments. To write about one of your demons, basically one of your darkest secrets. The type of thoughts that come to you late at night, that you feel like you’re never going to be able to share with anyone because they’re too private or too shameful or it’s just too scary to talk about. And it was really hard. It was really hard to write about that. Especially, I was in the first week of a grad program, I was in a cohort of students I had met days before, I was at a new school where I didn’t really know anyone. And there was this teacher saying, “Oh, write about your deepest, darkest secret.” I was like, “Yikes!” And I wrote this little comic and it was about struggling with gender and I was made so uncomfortable by it. I taped over those pages of my sketchbook and I didn’t look at them for five more years. It really took a long time for that to come, maybe four years.
MK: It was also when I was in grad school that I started to, for the first time, meet a lot of other trans and non-binary people. I had a non-binary professor, Melanie Gillman, who is a wonderful cartoonist –FLIES and STAGE DREAMS, lots of really good, beautiful stories for teens. And so then having a professor who used they/them pronouns professionally in the classroom, and then hearing the other teachers referring to them with they/them pronouns and our classmates working on this because it was definitely a learning curve for all of us, that was really impactful. And I started to come out as non-binary to close friends and family in 2016 but I wasn’t yet comfortable being out professionally or in, I guess, the wider sphere. And for me, professionally, in the wider sphere is the comics community. It would be being out at comic conventions. And it was just, I was having such a hard time figuring out, how do I introduce this subject? How do I ask for these pronouns? How do I even broach this? And a friend of mine was like, you should make comics about it. It was so obvious, like comics are my medium, this is the language that I feel most comfortable in, that I trained in, that I have a degree in. I have to make comics about this.
MK: And it started with a bunch of these little square comics that I posted on Instagram. I was so nervous to put this material online and the little strips that I posted were just, they were not chronological, they were not the beginning of a book. They were just moments. Anytime I had a gendered interaction, I would write about it. Or I’d think back and I’d write memories from my childhood. Totally out of order, just as they occurred to me. And I would put them online and the feedback was immediate and so positive and so generous and warm and supportive. I got people responding with things like, “I didn’t know that anyone else in the world felt this way” or “I didn’t even know there was a word for this” or “I thought I was alone until I read this comic” and that kind of thing. And it was just incredible. Way beyond the response to any other comics or work I had made up to that point. Because most of what I’d done up to that point was fantasy stories. I had been writing a long-running, fantasy webcomic of the type that I loved as a young person, but that was getting absolutely no traction whatsoever online. And I think probably part of why is because it was missing this emotional core. I was not comfortable talking about gender or sexuality or identity in my work previous to this. And when I finally started sharing it and being vulnerable and being real, that’s when people started actually responding to my work. So anyway, that Instagram series, eventually there was enough of it that I was like, “I think this is a book pitch.” And I pitched it to Lion Forge, which was the company at the time, it’s Oni Press now. And I had a wonderful editor, Andrea Colvin, who really helped me shape this from a series of little strips into an actual full-length narrative.
JJK: Did you have this epiphany where you thought, “all this time I was there for the castles and dragons” but really it was the emotions between those characters that kept you into the fantasy. Do you think that was part of it?
MK: I think it’s both. I do love a dragon story. JJK: Will we get dragon stories from you?
MK: Oh, I have a script that I’ve been working on for a bajillion years that’s literally just called the dragon story. Yeah, some day. I dearly want to. I definitely will write more memoir. I know that I will. But I also really want to write fiction and science fiction stories and fantasy stories. But the difference now is that post GENDER QUEER, there will be non-binary teenage characters in these dragon and science fiction stories.
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JJK: You have really opened up so many important conversations, Maia. I’m often posting book recommendations to my social media and after I had posted about GENDER QUEER, I heard from a lot of educators who appreciated having a resource to help them better understand their gender queer, non-binary students. So GENDER QUEER, it also sort of acts as a guide to cis-gendered people, to help them better understand what it might be like to be gender queer or non binary.
MK: Yeah. When I wrote this book, the audience that I had in mind was one, non-binary readers who often have not seen themselves reflected in books before and two, for my extended family. And I’m writing it almost like a letter to my family. The ones who, you know, when I came out said, “We love you, we support you, but we have no idea what you’re talking about.” And thinking this is what I want to say to somebody who loves me and supports me, but doesn’t really get where I’m coming from exactly. And so I wrote it trying to be like, this is why this is important to me. This is what I’m trying to say in these conversations when I stumble over my words and it ends up in fragments. And maybe you ask a question that leads me off on this side tangent then we lose our main point. This is me sitting down and finally trying to say everything to explain what I mean, that I identify as gender queer, like, what that means. And some of the absolute best feedback that I’ve gotten is people telling me that they either gave it to their parents or if they’re a parent, gave it to their children and that they were then able to understand each other better and have a conversation. Or people saying, “I gave this to my relative and now they use my pronouns,” is just the best.
JJK: And books are a safe space to have those conversations. I know it sounds like a cliche to say that one suffers for their art but you did suffer to get this story out of you and out there and out into the world. And because you did that hard work GENDER QUEER is going to be helping the countless Maia Kobabes across the world. And we are also thankful for that. JJK: Well, Maia, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I will continue to follow you on Instagram. I will wait patiently for that dragon story and I’m here at the ready to cheer you on when that book publishes.
MK: Thank you so much. It was so lovely to talk to you today.
JJK: Yes! And it was so nice to speak to you too. We only met in real life once. I look forward to being in the same room with you again. If it’s that magical studio space of Charles Schulz or just the hallway of a convention center, I look forward to it.
MK: Fingers crossed we can do comic conventions again.
