Kayla E.’s Precious Rubbish (Fantagraphics, 2025) is a graphic novel memoir about the author’s childhood marked by poverty, neglect, and tremendous abuse. Her approach to this intense subject matter is layered and complex, but also somehow unflinchingly direct. It’s almost enigmatic how she conveys the pain, loneliness, and fear little Kayla feels without ever contextualizing or intellectualizing it. I think that’s partially because there are no DPS reports, no court orders, no school records. The only third-person perspective we get comes as disembodied quotes from poets, playwrights, thinkers, and theologians. Little Kayla stands directly in front of us, and Kayla E. never lets us turn away from her world, her coping mechanisms, her memories, and her imagination. The images, many based on pages in mid-century comics like Archie, Little Dot, and Sweetie Pie, seem to vibrate against the linguistic starkness. Reading the book felt like my whole brain was experiencing simultaneous contrast, that visual phenomenon that happens when you look at complementary colors next to each other. Your eyes, or in the case of Precious Rubbish my brain, freaked out.
Kayla E. and I spoke over video call days before Precious Rubbish was released and she was about to begin a multi-city reading and signing tour.
Sommer Browning: You loved Archie and many other similar comics. What spoke to you about them?
Kayla E.: In a way, Archie found me. I was reading Archie because of the grocery store checkout stand. That’s what was there, so that’s what I read. My parents weren’t invested in childhood literacy or anything like that. But the double digests were pretty affordable, and occasionally, my father would get me one. And so that was my favorite comic. I have one of those brains that just, I mean, I’m an addict. I’m in recovery. My brain gets hooked on things and gets fixated and obsessive. I’ve been like that my entire life. Archie grabbed a hold of my child brain and never really let go.
I think what attracted me to these comics, specifically these mid-century comics, were [they] were such a dramatic contrast to the world that I was living in. So, opening up my little comic books and then looking around me and in the mirror, it was a shocking thing for my child brain to contend with.
I immediately internalized the thought that there was something wrong with me and that there was something wrong with my life. There was nothing wrong with me—but there was something wrong with my life. I think Archie comics were a comfort, but also a source of real uneasiness for me.
I’m interested in using these comics from my childhood to tell stories of what really happens to kids, what really happened to me, and using that as a framework. Both because I admire it and respect it but I’m also interested in turning it on its head—reclaiming and reappropriating it as mine now. I’m using it the way that I see fit instead of it having control over me.
SB: I feel like comics in general turn things on their head.
KE: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think that comics as a form has the potential for layered meaning and it offers different possibilities of interpretation. I don’t really feel like I read comics. I almost absorb them or something. There’s also a language to comics, its own form of literacy. That’s a huge reason why I chose this medium to explore stories about childhood trauma. And the way that I construct my stories—I try to take full advantage of the expansiveness of the form. I do that with layered lines of text, with images that don’t directly depict what the text is saying, [with] different entry points and ways to look at it and move through it. This really speaks to the expansiveness of the form, that a random person can go in and push those boundaries.
SB: You’re not a random person!
KE: But I’m just a girl who has been making these comics on my own in solitude. So, in a lot of ways, it kind of feels that way.
SB: Can you talk about all the other modes that are in the book? The games, the activities, the paper dolls?
KE: Almost all of my decisions were purely instinct-based. I’m extremely obsessive about production—the color, the line, the formatting. But when it comes to creating the book, it’s very freeform. It’s an entirely intuitive process that has no architecture to it, no structure, no rules, no rhythm. The choice to include the games, the puzzles, and the fake ads was initially an instinct.
SB: The unconscious is very powerful. Do you believe you’re channeling something or you’re a vessel of some kind?
KE: Absolutely. I appreciate you bringing it up. I’m trying not to be so bashful about it, but I feel a little, I don’t know, embarrassed or something. But it’s true. I feel like there is something that is working through me. That I am the tool being used to tell these stories because oftentimes, I feel like I’m the last one clued in to whatever the fuck it is that’s happening on the page. Sometimes I don’t get it until someone else explains it to me. It really is this mystical experience that is actually very unpleasant. I hate making this work. It’s literally traumatizing.
SB: I see little Kayla treated like a pawn or a commodity. And then with the fake ads you include that sell people a new, better, prettier life, and the fact that you found Archie in the supermarket…maybe I’m making it all up, but is there a through line here? Capitalist culture, consumerism, body autonomy?
KE: You’re bringing up things that I don’t know if I’ve fully found the words for yet, but it’s all clicking for me in an interior way. I think it relates directly to the title of the book. It’s lifted from T. L. Shaw’s mid-century book of art criticism called Precious Rubbish which just eviscerates the art world. It’s really funny and great, but my sort of claiming of that, those two words together, is toying with this idea of comics as a “garbage” medium, but also the disposability of the child. [I’m] playing with finding value in the trash, and the trash being inherently valuable, both as comics, as human, in all of these different ways.
SB: Humor has a trickiness and a power. It’s a place of rebelliousness and resistance. How do you think you use it in your work?
KE: I use it in a lot of ways. And again, I’m not speaking to any of this as what I was thinking when I started this work. This is all what I’ve learned from the work. I see [humor] as a tool that allows me to say the unbearable, and also a buffer that gives me distance from the unbearable. I think it opens space for people to look at it. Without the “haha,” you don’t want to [look at it]. I also think that it complicates the response to the work because laughing can be uncomfortable for the reader. They feel guilt.
Humor has been a really powerful way to connect with some readers because when you get it, you get it. When you think it’s funny, you’ve probably been there. The people who laugh the hardest at certain things, I come to find out, are also survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I’m in recovery for alcoholism, and in 12-step groups, we often laugh about the horrors we’ve been through.
There’s nothing funny about crashing your car drunk. You know what I mean? But when we’re together in community and are willing to be honest about the darkness we’ve endured, it’s so bonding to laugh at it. It’s also so freeing to laugh because it releases you from the shackles of the self-seriousness of trauma. And I will say I have had readers of the book tell me that there is nothing funny in it whatsoever. It’s just an onslaught of nonstop oppression, violence, and torture of this child. It’s unrelenting.
SB: It’s actually surprising how unrelenting it is. It’s 2025…you’d think I can’t be shocked anymore.
KE: Would you be comfortable speaking to that a little bit more? What about the work made it have that impact on you?
SB: One thing is the starkness of the language. It’s not “Once upon a time, I lived in a room that had shag carpeting and yellow walls.” There’s no purple flowery language. Something about the syntax…it has a brutality to it. And then there are the little things, like little Kayla who in many scenes appears with a knife stuck in her body. No one says, Hey, you have a knife in your body. As the reader you’re the only witness to this person bleeding out all over the fucking house. There’s this private relationship that’s built. That’s also brutal. You can’t help. I’m like, Somebody help this kid! But I can’t. I’m just reading it. I just have to sit and watch.
KE: It’s so interesting for it to have that impact on you as the reader. You are witnessing her suffering and seeing that no one is coming to help. That’s literally what happened to me as a child. No one helped me. That’s a fascinating parallel.
SB: You created a simulacrum of your reality.
KE: Yes.
SB: How do you draw?
KE: I have a very weird process.
SB: Ah, good. Let’s end on that!
KE: I used to be so ashamed of it, and then my wife told me that Flannery O’Connor writes this way and that she said the stories would write themselves. And I was like, “Oh, okay. If Flannery does it like this, then I’m good.” [laughs] So, there’s no architecture. I don’t even have my materials laid out in front of me when I start. I just have the blank Illustrator page. But, more generally, I tend to jot down lines and quotes from books that I read. I also jot down when memories resurface or when different sides of memories become clearer. Sometimes, I’ll come up with a title of a comic first, and I’ll write that down.
Then, whenever I feel like a little fragment of three or four words, or the fragment of a sentence that I wrote down, needs to be kind of pried at, my first step is to start reading public domain comics. I go into that world and let the comic find me. I read and read and read and live in this ocean of comics, and I find the framework that, to me, sparks a connection with the idea. I pull the framework, start drawing over it, and sometimes I’ll finish an entire four-page comic. I’ll have it completely drawn out, but I won’t have written a word. I have this fully formed comic with no words in it.
Then, oftentimes, I will step away, give it some space, and when I reenter it, I’ll write the entire thing in one sitting. I’ll bang it out really quickly. And then the editing process…I’m very, very careful with every single word that goes into my comics. I try to strip it down to where it’s literally the skeleton of what I’m trying to articulate. When I feel like there isn’t another word I can remove, the writing is done. If I read the comic and I’m like, “Ooh, there’s something I’m not quite getting at in the right way,” I’ll go in and add speech bubbles. I’ll look at my notes app, see this Julian of Norwich passage, and [realize] that that’s what I’m trying to say. I’ll have the characters speak using her writing on God as mother/father. She’s doing a better job at saying what I’m trying to say. Then I’m done, and I’ll be like, “Where did that come from?”
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