Vancouver-based graphic novelist Adam de Souza, acclaimed as he is prolific, has five years of full-time comics work under his belt – an accomplishment marked by a recent nomination in the prestigious Eisner Awards’ ‘Best Publication for Teens’ category, for his 2024 graphic novel The Gulf.
When I had first introduced myself to Adam at Toronto Comic Arts Festival’s Wowee Zonk tabling area in 2018, he was thriving off of zines, prints, and other personal projects made in school and during his free time, vending shoulder-to-shoulder with the greats of indie comics. Over the intervening years, he has produced a creative catalog ranging from ongoing comic strips (“Blind Alley”), short story collections (Ish), and his soon-to-be released anthology: Mutt Mag.
On a sunny June morning, we sat down to talk about what drives his creative process, the fomenting politics in his writing, and what the future holds for his next projects.
JULIAN: There’s a lot of great things going your way lately, but I like to think the biggest thing is that it’s the 8th anniversary of this –
ADAM: [laughs] Fuck off!
J: You also got an Eisner nomination. I think that’s pretty… I don’t know if you care. I’m sure you’ve had enough people be like, “Dude, Eisner nomination!”, and you’re like, “Whatever”.
A: I care. I know it’s not cool to.
J: I know you make a lot of work for yourself, things that interest you personally. But do you place any value on receiving that degree of industry recognition? Do you consider, at any step in the creative process, “wow, this might be the one that gets acclaim”? Or do you remove yourself from that mentality entirely?
A: I try to, but I do think there’s this feeling when I’m working on something where – especially if you’re working on a graphic novel – you got to be like, this is really good. With The Gulf, I was like, “oh, this is good. This is the best thing I’ve written”.
I tend to feel that way with everything I’m working on. It’s only in looking back that I’ll be like, “maybe that was less strong”. The awards are really lovely, for that external validation. I steel myself to not win, because I usually don’t win. And that’s fine. But just having an Eisner nom feels like cartooning, professionally, is staring at you, finally, and you’re at their table.
Maybe awards don’t matter. It should be ridiculous. I shouldn’t give them that much credit, but the Eisner Awards are the only comics award that the [wider public] knows about.
J: Yeah, I guess there’s the Doug Wright Award. You also got a nomination with them, no?
A: I’ve been nominated a lot.
J: I mean, how long did it take you to make The Gulf?
A: It was really stop-and-start because I would work really hard to meet a deadline – roughing the book, inking it, whatever – and then wait two months to get feedback, which (…), I think that’s pretty normal. But it was probably about two years solid. I finished it a year before it came out.
J: What was the lead up to that final year then? It was just promotion and packaging, designing it and stuff like that? Or did Tundra just leave it at the wayside ‘til they were ready for it?
A: I think it was just the scale of publishing it and the printers that they work with. They book the printers that far in advance. It’s funny, I keep reminding myself, “it’s been over two years since I finished the book now”. And I’m like, oh, I need to make money, oh my god, what am I doing?
J: Well, you’re doing something right.
A: Expecting to lose is a good place to be in, I think. And I try to genuinely mean that. Of course, winning all the time would be really nice. But I also think being a bridesmaid is good, too. I think because it’s a stupid job, you have to really be in tune with why you’re doing it. I’m a sicko who can sit there all day telling myself stories. That’s the most important part of it.
J: Maybe you can give us a quick rundown on what your latest project, Mutt Mag, is all about?
A: Mutt Mag is a solo comics anthology kind of in the mold of Shonen Jump, where it’s just a collection of various comics.
J: I like how you open the book with this phrase, describing it as “a place for stories I felt like telling”. A mandate to create without a mandate, to kind of just catch ideas and explore them at the whim of your own natural curiosity. How do you find this largely independent set of works differentiates itself from the writing process for the Tundra Books-published The Gulf?
A: Yeah, it’s definitely different – I was really intimidated when I first started working on The Gulf because I had to write a script [for the first time]. And then I worked with an editor. You hear stories of people who work with an editor, and they say, “the book that’s published isn’t the book I would have put out”. And I think that’s the worry, you know? I love comics, but it’s so much work, that I have to be invested.
But the process was actually really, really rewarding and really great. It’s just so much more structured than what I’m used to. Comics, for me, come from the sketchbook a lot of the time. Just thinking and drawing, you know, and seeing what happens. Mutt Mag is kind of this attempt to maintain that personal side, while also working on things that are more collaborative.
J: It’s pretty healthy to not keep your creative mind too locked in one mode of process, too.
A: I mean, it’s nice to be creating, kinda jumping back and forth a little bit. When something stalls, you can just pick up something else, I suppose. It’s for sure why I started “Blind Alley” while working on The Gulf.
If I reflect on it, it’s like maintaining that private comic space, an intuitive comics-making process, while also working on something that’s more structured and, traditionally, narrative. You know? Sometimes I call “Blind Alley” my COVID depression project, where it’s just keeping the bad things at bay and just keeping busy.
J: I get the impression that when you write your stories, especially because they deal so much with these characters – their social circles and the connective webs binding them together – you write with some degree of sentimentality towards them. You do have a keen eye towards community and these ensembles. Does that come from a deliberate choice, or is that just something that comes intuitively to you?
A: No. I mean, writing is interesting…unlike drawing, where I trained a lot to do it, writing is more intuitive. I honestly feel like what I do now is the same thing I did when I was a kid. I’d be on anime RPG forums, I’d make a post and then go for a walk, and think about what circumstances could happen next and imagine what my character would do. But I do intellectualize it a little bit more now.
Something like “Blind Alley”, or “Brambles”, the stories generate through the characters. What do they want? Put two characters in a scenario, and if they’re different, they will respond in contrasting ways. Maybe there’s something funny, or interesting, there.
J: Definitely. I mean, I loved reading “Brambles” [one of the recurring strips featured in Mutt Mag]. It was just really sweet. I loved how simply you set up protagonist Ought, their kind of character, through this quiet little conversation with their frog friend Forte. You establish their personality right out of the gate, before throwing her into all these different environments, building all these mini-narratives, mini-conversations. That’s a really strong skill of yours, for sure, unpacking these personalities in bite-sized chunks.
A: I appreciate that. “Brambles” is interesting because I feel like it’s just evolved so much while working on it. By the end, it’s a lot sweeter and gentler and more just…a silly gag comic. But when I started it, I was like, oh, this is gonna be epic. I had an idea for this Hobbit-esque adventure Ought’s gonna go on. And now I don’t really know where I’m at with it. I have so many ideas for this sweet little gag comic.
I find it so compelling too, in a vignette, where you just get a little glimpse into a moment, and then maybe the next strip has no relation to that past one, and you just have to imagine what happened. I think that’s a really fruitful place to write in. That space feels like a little bit of a gift to a reader; You tell me what you think happened in between there, you’re connecting dots and developing your own narrative.
J: Are you continuing it? Some of these stories may continue in future issues of Mutt Mag, some of them might just be thrown to the wayside?
A: Honestly, I think most of the things in there will continue, other than a few of the short stories. But “Brambles” is the one where I knew for sure I wanted to do more of it. But it’s hard to juggle work on a graphic novel and then wanting to continue “Blind Alley”, but also wanting to do another Mutt Mag. Time is short, and there’s, you know, only so much you can give on top of just living a normal-ass life.
J: “A Gleaming” is another excellent work of yours I wish had continued, honestly! It was the very first comic of yours I’d read, back in 2018. You’ve mentioned it’s super personal, right? I’d be really curious to hear more about that. How did that journey and creation kind of feel marked by your education at OCAD university [in Toronto] and the anxieties around pursuing arts, but also, you know, it ending in 2020, in the middle of that one pandemic?
A: It’s hard to remember the inception of it, but I was kicking around this idea of a bunch of characters at a party, with all of their melodrama, their loaded relationships, and then a supernatural event happens. It’s very me because it’s very maudlin and kind of nostalgic. I feel like when I was in university, I was very much looking back at my early twenties and these parties we used to have when we were 18, fresh out of school.
There’s definitely a lot of me in there. A character like Joon, who’s a painter, this type of person who was a big fish in high school, really good at art. But in art school, she doesn’t find herself thriving and kinda loses touch with what she wants to do, which I was reflecting on – that listless early 20’s feeling of needing to have arrived at the top yesterday.
J: Definitely super relatable, especially when you grow up in a small town. You’re the comics guy in high school. Then you go to college, and, like, everyone has lived that same story.
A: I think it’s really funny, too. That book captures a bit of that.
J: But, like, the worst thing you can do is run away from that. Maybe it’s okay to be in the deep end of the pool more often than not.
A: Mhmm. You just constantly feel you need to have arrived already. But now that I’m a bit older and I’ve done comics for five years, I realize, oh, shit, there’s no rush. But I’ve been thinking about writing characters that are in that phase where it’s like:
My band needs to blow up. I need to be the biggest artist at 22. And if I don’t, I’m dead.
Because I think that’s a real feeling in the arts. There’s always someone younger and more successful than you.
I was gonna finish “A Gleaming”. It was gonna be my next project after The Gulf. There were two different publishers I was maybe gonna work with on it, and it just didn’t feel like the right career move to work on my university project. But, I would love to finish “A Gleaming” from the perspective of a person in their thirties. I feel like it’d actually be a fun thing to return to. I’m quite proud of parts of that book. I was trying a lot of stuff visually that didn’t always work, but I think it’s fun to look back on.
J: A sense of malaise runs through plenty of your work, and makes for an especially predominant quality in The Gulf’s protagonist, Oli. She’s a runaway striving for life within a commune, but embodies many antisocial traits. What stands out about her is the political context driving her internal conflict, which is a rarity in your books. In this case, 2007, the Bush-era War on Terror. What prompted that thematic exploration, where so many of your characters were defined prior purely by their social circumstances?
A: I think it’s natural, it’s just stuff that’s already in me. But I did want to write about a character who, in some ways, is a lot like I was in high school, in terms of dissatisfaction. I wanted a character who looks at the street corner and sees someone who is unhoused and asking for money, and sees a sports car drive by, and just thinks, “what the fuck is going on?”
The really basic inequities around us are, unfortunately, easy to get used to, but I think maintaining a sight on them is fundamental to developing a politics. I feel like a lot of my politics has grown from just observing the day-to-day things that affect or surround us. But I also felt like with setting it in 2007, you get some distance and we have this awareness that Obama being around the corner – for a lot of people, that felt like this moment where it’s like, it’s happening, things are going to get better – and we can know from our vantage point, that that’s not the case. I just thought it was a really interesting period of time to reflect on, and obviously I don’t go into it too much. It’s more texture.
J: Yeah, and of course, younger readers aren’t going to be so attuned to the political specifics of those times, either. But you do manage to still express some of that emotional reality, which reaches across that generational barrier.
A: I guess it is still part of the story. The goal is to write characters whose feelings you understand.
I remember watching 9/11 on TV as a nine-year-old, as it happened. That sense of the world being big and terrible, forces being animated by motivations kind of beyond your capacity to understand, but just wanting everything to fit into a box – those feelings are very much of how I felt in high school.
Even if you might think Oli’s a bit off-putting as a character, how rash she is or how mean she can be, I always want you to get where all this frustration is coming from. You’re always feeling the emotional core of what’s animating her.
J: We’ve mentioned social dynamics and community being big parts of your work, with The Gulf presenting an interesting sociopolitical wrinkle there. Do you imagine any carry-over of these themes in a future project? Are you envisioning where you might want to try to take your writing from here?
A: I’ve been working on this pitch seriously for like four months. Writing a lot and drawing. But I’ve been meaning to pitch it since last summer.
And yes, it’s very akin to The Gulf. I have another idea for a book, other than the one I’m currently working on, and I view them as a trilogy. They’re dealing with similar themes, from different angles into different depths.
Do I say what it’s about? I haven’t even pitched it yet. [laughing] Fuck it, whatever, it’s about a kid who grows up as the only child in a cult. A secluded island cult.
J: A bit of a direct inversion on The Gulf, then!
A: The commune/cult is really extreme, and it’s about that child and who they become under really different circumstances. It’s kind of an exploration of how the world makes us, but then also how there’s always a world beyond that.
J: Their whole world is that island, right? But then that island isn’t the whole world.
A: I like exploring that idea – what does it mean to have a child in a space like that? “Blind Alley” is written with similar intentions. From our perspective, we can say, that’s brainwashing. But you can make the reverse argument, that the way our wider world makes us isn’t necessarily beneficial, and it works plenty of terrible values into us, too.
But I’m really excited to work on it! It’s formally exciting, too. I’m envisioning it as 300 pages, and the first 150 pages will have no panels except for little circle panels occasionally. The pages are open and visually flow together, and the second half will be gridded. It’s just so exciting [to make comics], every part of the page can tell the story. The format of the page, the lack of borders, what colours you use in a single moment –that’s all texture to the story and whether or not a reader picks up on that intellectually, it’s still fertile ground to write from.
J: I really liked this passage at the end of Mutt Mag, where you say, “Drawing has always been meaningful to me. It rewards my natural inclination to overthink. It benefits from attention (…). Stepping away from my drafting table in order to spend time elsewhere is equally as valuable to spending the day drawing”. Would you suppose this to be a key piece of advice you’d want to give someone who is trying to get into making any sort of art? To just not get too wrapped up in it?
A: I believe that where you spend your time informs your art. You should make time to be an actual inhabitant of the world – not because you’ll make better art, but because you’ll be more of a person. I genuinely burnt out on The Gulf towards the end there because I didn’t ask for an extension. And for three months, if I was awake, I was at my drafting table. I hated comics by the end of it and felt like my body was falling apart. There were a handful of months where I didn’t even want to draw anymore.
All of my comics have come from – whether I wanted to or not – lived experiences. Art comes from observing, thinking, learning, and feeling things; you must be a participant. I believe all of my favourite works have a preoccupation with being in the world. I just feel like that whole idea that we have to suffer to make art is so existentially taxing and untrue. It’s hard to draw sometimes – it’s hard to form a habit, but our worth should not be measured in productivity. Like, I don’t think the art should be treated like a tech company or whatever.
It’s fucking weird. It’s a weird job. It’s been so nice in Vancouver, and I really struggle to work when it’s nice out. All last year, I was doing research, all while still working on “Blind Alley” – but if it was nice out, I’d go lay in the park and read a book. That was research, tangentially anyway.
And so now, on the other end of it is like, I’m hustling now. I need to fucking pay rent – but this forthcoming book, “Blind Alley”, and even Mutt Mag, would not be the same if I brute forced them. When I am writing, I have the internal sense of when a story needs more time in the oven, and each time I’ve tried to force my way forward, I lose the plot. It’s hard to make time for this style of work. It doesn’t fit naturally into the world we live in, but I do think there’s genuine value in that. It’s a luxury to take time in this world.
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