Sometimes Painful, But Possible: An Interview with Austin Holcomb (Night Physics)
Austin Holcomb is the cartoonist behind Night Physics, a webcomic in which three boys mess around in the woods and people are interviewed about their dreams on-and-off in between that. The people are animal-people, by the way, which makes it even more dreamly. Austin was generous enough to let me talk to him about his comic - and about all sorts of things, really. As a courtesy: his interview contains spoilers up to the most recent NP update! You should totally catch up!
Rory: I guess my first question is what interested you specifically in dreams — and I guess, more characteristically, the way NP characters describe their dreams, which is the hook that kind of grounds it as what is it. I can remember the earliest NP strips, it’s interesting the way the disjointed single panel narratives really add a lot to the kind of ‘main story’ you’ve been developing more recently.
Austin: Well, I think what really attracted me to it is the fact that what a dream actually ‘means’ is so malleable and plastic — it could be something super personal and intense and jarring, or just a bunch of non-sequitors and random details, and so much of it is immediately forgotten or misinterpreted once you wake up and try to tell it to someone. Only the person who experienced it really knows the significance behind it, so in a way the question is an opportunity for a character to react to a personal, almost unanswerable question. You just get these little slices into who a person is, which is why I liked the idea of it being a questionnaire or an interview — like, the actual dream that the person is describing isn’t as important as the way they answer the question, or what they choose to leave out, or how they couch their answers, or act defensive. I really like the idea of making the comic feel “populated,” so you get this opportunity to bump into people and get this tiny insight into their personality. Initially I thought the whole “story” would be told in those disjointed panels, but as time goes on they’ve become more like little snippets of the larger narrative. As time goes on there will be more of those — I love reading comics that have segments that feel like you’re not “supposed” to see them, like little hiccups of memory that don’t fit in quite yet.
Rory: Yeah!! Kind of off hand but as a kid I remember some of my favorite parts of like, video games that had a lot of tertiary characters in them was veering off from the “main story” and learning more about everyone who populates all corners of your little world. And comics can be the same thing, right? Lots of people answering their own questions about what their own strengths even are in telling a human story. Human or animal-human or not.
Austin: Yeah, absolutely! The video game comparison is super fitting, same thing with a lot of TV shows. The overarching, driving plot or story is cool, and you can do a lot with it in terms of story structure and set-ups and payoffs and everything, but the best parts are almost always the characters themselves, especially secondary and tertiary characters. And yeah, exactly — so many — not all, but SO MANY — comics and pieces of media are powered by the hero-boy and his quest or whatever, when the parts that are most interesting and fulfilling and satisfying are just characters interacting. Like, say, going into every tiny house in a Pokemon game and talking to every NPC you could find, or a “bottle episode” of a TV show. The humanity (badum, tshh) of a good story always comes from the bond you find yourself making with the characters themselves, and their interactions and struggles and senses of humor. I started doing NP largely as a sort of comics boot camp for myself to see what kind of stories I wanted to make, and while there’s an overarching plot and direction of growth to it, my absolute favorite thing is just when characters sit down and talk shit with eachother. In fact, that’s almost definitely why the interview segments are so satisfying to do — when I’m in a groove and doing them right, it feels like company. And that’s also something your comics seriously excel at; all these great little moments and jokes and interactions that make them feel really lived-in and warm. I’ve been laughing about lines from “Little Teeth” for like, two weeks now! Like you said, so much of the kind of writing I enjoy comes from filling in those blanks, seeing little stories and bits of overheard conversation. There’s this incredible series of short comics you tweeted a month or two back, and I’m so mad that I’ve forgotten the name of the artist, but they consist of him illustrating these little bits of conversation he hears in Boston, and you can infer all this personality and charisma and backstory from them. they also feature animal-people, so maybe this is starting to form a pattern, haha.
Rory: Awww thank you gosh! I’ll pass those regards along to J, as well. I think it’s really comforting and when the instinct to execute a story Correctly takes a backseat to just like, feeling like everyone is someone you know or could know and it really raises the emotional stakes in caring about what happens to them. I suppose that’s also a bittersweet thing about NP — so many snippets of people, we’ll never know what happens to them! — And oh yeah! That artist’s name is Chris Goodwin, his stuff is really outrageously good, I think some of the earliest stuff I found as a teenage weirdo spelunking for animal people drawings — I’m just gonna say furries, who cares — on the internet. I think a lot of people’s exploration of that stuff kinda intersects incidentally with some explorations of homosensuality, I guess — because he also did this comic a long time ago that was really important to me, it’s like, an intimate scene between this lion and mouse and the mouse is a trans dude. It was tender in ways that are hard to find in gay stuff period, not even just in weirdo niche gay stuff. This is probably a good place to mention I really like the dynamic between Austin and Fairbanks! I’ve talked before, I think, about how what’s interesting about the language of male affection in furry stuff is that it’s kind of like, this shared experience of feeling more comfortable and validated about shamed desires by bringing them back to this childhood comfort space. It’s really fundamentally different in a lot of ways from like, aggressive worship of disconnected mutually assured uncaring masculinity, all that stuff?
Austin: Yes!! Chris Goodwin, that was it! And yeah, that’s honestly a spectacular way to put it— that mutually-assured-uncaring line hit me like a punch in the stomach. I think a lot of queer kids are drawn to furry media and art because it’s a way to soften and lend intimacy and sweetness to what is usually this, like, intentionally-sexualized sense of scariness around being queer. You have these internalized feelings of shame and fear that then congeal around this idea of, like you said, utterly disconnected masculinity. Using cartoons to explore themes like male affection and intimacy can take them from this very hoo-rah, austere — and deeply, deeply silly — TOM of Finland level of emotional distance to something very secure and okay and comforting, like “this is okay, you are okay! It’s okay for this to be fun!” — Especially for kids growing up queer, it can be difficult to find expressions of closeness that aren’t either veiled in plausible deniability, or are just out-and-out sexualization of pain and internalized shame. I think I remember you touching on this really succinctly, feeling like a silly cartoon character in contrast to the like, manufactured, scary, ultra-serious Adultness of going into a gay bar. Austin and Fairbanks, even though they’re silly cartoon bears, still have a lot of quiet, unexpressed shit going on in their backgrounds, although I’d say Fairbanks has dealt with his history way more successfully than Austin. Austin has sort of suffered from — get ready for a strained metaphor — an emotional broken bone that has never set correctly, and I don’t think he has the tools to express it in a healthy way. But yeah, bringing this back to your point — expressing that kind of affection with cartoon characters is a way to safely, validly, comfortably deal with emotions that are often couched in pain. Especially when a lot of queer kids don’t get to healthily express in that aspect of themselves in their childhoods, framing them with something as comfortable as cartoon animals feels sort of like validating that lost time.
Rory: Gracious, it’s really true. That buildup from everything in your most recent NP update towards the WebMD phone screen and everything on it just wrecked me! In ways I’dve never expected most things to for a long time — As much as of a nightmare The Discourse in “media” or whatever can be as far as talking about real world experiences, there’s been so much wonderful stuff recently kind of tapping into that lost time and the feelings around it in really honest ways, with really honest evocative measures. We Know The Devil [Disclosure: We Know The Devil was written by ZEAL EIC Aevee Bee], of course, is a great example, and I think some day I’d love to refresh my memory of Artdecade’s comics, in particular On Yonder Lea. And I mean, more ‘queer’ comics and otherwise are available now than I’dve ever thought there would be. Not that I’m going to be all whimsical about it, but it’s good when things feel more like genuine reaching out than “We put a trans person in Aquaman or some shit now read it or something”. Anyway, haha, it’s funny, on top of all that I think humans in general have been finding the qualities and quirks they find cute in others in very crittery terms for a long time. The drawings in NP are really affectionate in that regard!
Austin: Hahaha, holy shit — the sad thing is, I’m honestly not even sure if you’re kidding in terms of the Aquaman comment, because it’s just so painfully on-point. And yeah, that’s absolutely true, and at the risk of also sounding hokey, it’s incredibly encouraging to see, especially when these expressions are so palpably genuine. We’re definitely in the middle of an interesting time in terms of comics, games, and other media that speak to those genuine, lived experiences — We Know The Devil does it incredibly, and it’s also just a great, haunting game — WKTD is going to be influential and important for years down the line. And oh god, dude, On Yonder Lea… do not even get me started. I’ve been a big fan of Artdecade’s work for ages, but On Yonder Lea absolutely suckerpunched me. There are so many quiet moments in that comic that are just staggeringly honest and sincere and unflinching. I would definitely agree — you can sort of innately feel when something is an attempt to capture what an author thinks an experience is, contrasted with the organic, almost-effortless expression of somebody who’s lived it. God, I’m still laughing about the Aquaman thing — “Hey, uh, Beta-Ray Bill is trans now! huh kids? right? Like us on facebook!” — But yeah, on the subject of critters, people have always sort of framed quirks and idiosyncrasies of behavior in animal terms, largely because (I think) it sort of brings it back to childhood and kid’s literature, where animals existed more as a way to explain human concepts than they did as actual organisms with their own shit to do. I really like Maurice Sendak’s “Little Bear” illustrations, where all the wilderness and yearning and lack of understanding that comes with being a zany little kid is aptly manifested as being a little wild animal. With NP, I love trying to make each character — especially in the interview segments, where it’s not a sure bet we’ll see this person again — feel as much like a real person as I can, and using animal imagery is an efficient way to convey or subvert information about them, with all their mannerisms and gestures and pieces of clothing working towards your understanding of that person. I’m very into idiosyncrasies and little tics of personality, and when you create a character with a very obvious tic or way of speaking, even if they aren’t named, it’s a lot easier to extrapolate from that and understand more of their personality.
Rory: Noooo yes that is definitely like, my favorite thing, I mean it’s how you process people in your head in the first place, when you know someone well enough you read their texts or tweets or letters or anything in their voice, hand gestures. Though it’s easy to simplify someone enough into even the very idea of a “character”, part of the bittersweetness of seeing only little bits and pieces of the dream interview NP characters is knowing that people can always surprise you, haha. There’s people I’ve known or known of for years who continue to surprise me, maybe that’s the appeal of checking back in on your weird niche ‘communities’ — people from years past who have seen you in really vulnerable and undeveloped stages of your life in ways people in your “professional” life haven’t.
Austin: Yeah, I totally agree — people can always surprise you, even when you feel pretty positive that you’ve got them whittled down into this “character” of how you understand them. It happens all the time with people I know — whether it be a lifestyle change or a spontaneous development or something that’s always been a part of them but was never outwardly expressed or manifested, your pre-set image of who someone is always tends to be this one little figment of them, of who they are to you, contrasted with the real, complete thing. I think with characters, both real and fictional, everything comes down to context, and how impossible it is to know ALL of someone’s context — the full gradient scope of their experiences and how they’ve been affected by them. We’re all these big stories that nobody gets to read all the way through — we just get these snippets of shared experiences and inside jokes and bad nights and fun times. But rather than that being some faux-spooky cynical point like “NOBODY ever knows ANYBODY, really” it’s just a great opportunity for us to share eachother’s experiences and grow from them. My teenage years were some real rough seas — although, to be fair, whose weren’t? — but all of that formative awkwardness and guilt and vulnerability contributed directly to who I am as a person now. No matter how painfully, tragically hilarious those memories might be, they’re still -me-. One of the biggest themes I want to emphasize with NP is that people are always capable of change — sometimes its great, sometimes it’s painful, but its always possible.
Rory: This was lovely, thank you so much for your time!
Austin: Take care!
[This interview was funded through Patreon under Slept-In Comics, an imprint of the ZEAL project. ZEAL aims to provide high quality criticism of rarely discussed games and comics, and showcase the talents of exciting new writers and artists. For details and information on how to donate, please check out patreon.com/mammonmachine!]
