79: Breathing room
An interview with cartoonist and illustrator Madeleine Jubilee Saito of All We Can Save
One of the many unique things about the 2020 climate justice anthology All We Can Save (see last week’s review here if you missed it), at the start of each section in the book, there’s an interstitial four-panel comic that evokes the themes of the essays that lie ahead. Each illustration is a visual poem that acts as a kind of meditation bell between the weighty pieces of nonfiction prose that make up most of the book. Along with the use of written poetry, the comics give the anthology a unique rhythm, loosening up the points of entry as you work your way through the book.
The comics are the work of Madeleine Jubilee Saito, a cartoonist and illustrator based in Somerville, Massachusetts. I first came across Madeleine’s work a couple of years ago at the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE) in Cambridge, where I picked up one of her zines, What the body is for, a beautiful collection of introspective comics, memorable for their quiet, understated use of words and color.
I immediately recognized Madeleine’s art in All We Can Save, and as I was reading the book I thought it would be nice to learn more about her work for an issue of Crisis Palace. Climate justice is a topic that runs through much of her art, which has been recognized in Best American Comics 2019, The Comics Journal’s Best Comics of 2018, and featured in Guernica and other publications. In 2017, she co-edited with cartoonist Andrew White the anthology Warmer: A Collection of Comics About Climate Change for the Fearful & Hopeful. Madeleine currently works as creative director and operations lead for the All We Can Save Project, an organization that emerged from the book with a mission of, “Nurturing a welcoming, connected, and leaderful climate community, rooted in the work and wisdom of women, to grow a life-giving future.”
I’m so grateful that Madeleine took the time to chat with me for the newsletter, and allowed me to reprint some of her comics here. We had a wonderful conversation about the role of art in climate change, the irresistible power of comics as a medium, and how her faith shapes her work and outlook on climate justice.
I hope you enjoy it.
Why don't we talk about All We Can Save first, because sometimes I go off on a tangent and I want to be sure to talk about the book. Can you maybe start by telling me like a little bit about how you got involved with the project?
Doctors [Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson] had originally imagined the anthology as just a collection of essays spanning the realm of work that women are doing in climate, and then realized that it just really needed poetry, tonally, and then also realized that they really wanted visual art. And as I've read the anthology, I think that's one of the things that makes it special is that presence of the breathing room that poetry and art provide.
Apparently, Sunrise Movement shared some of my comics on Twitter, and they saw them and were like, oh, this vibe is really resonant with what we're going for, and this could be a really good fit. So they reached out to me and asked about using some of my comics and we worked together for a few months. I drew them originally in full color, and for publication purposes, we had to just do the two colors, orange and black. So I translated them to two color. And then I redrew and sort of reconfigured some of the pieces to work as chapter headers, which is where they live in the book. And that's how that happened.
Oh interesting, so these were comics that you had done before knowing about the book.
Yeah, exactly. So every year I do a monthly comics practice called 30 days of comics, founded by cartoonist Derik Badman. It’s sort of a NaNoWriMo derivative, where every day in the month you draw a comic. And I've been doing that annually, since I think 2014. And I found this to be a really fruitful place for work, especially for someone like me, who finds it hard sometimes to just create out of nowhere. You pick some constraints, for me, that's often the form, like the four-panel comic. I also usually pick a color palette, and sometimes sort of secret constraints that inform the words I choose or the images I choose. And in 2019, I had been making work about climate for a few years in various ways, but I wanted to spend a month exploring the spiritual and emotional and ethical dimensions of the climate crisis. So that series of comics was what all the comics in the book were drawn from.
And how did you choose which comics to use?
The editors picked. Basically, I was like, yeah, go for it, I'd be happy to have any of my work reprinted. And so I think as they were doing the huge task of arranging all these poems and essays into sections, they then went through and found pieces of mine that felt resonant with the theme of each section. And it's been really, really special to read the book. I was obviously involved in editing my own work. But I hadn't read the essays and moved through it all as a sequence before reading the final book, and it has been so special just to see the ways that my comics are sort of in conversation with the essays and poems around them.
And it's a little surreal, because a lot of the women in the book are actually people who deeply formed my own ways of thinking about climate. So it's just been very special. And this is something that I think happens throughout the book. You see the ways that each of the poems and essays and comics speak to each other—there's a depth of conversation that happens just by setting these things alongside each other that I haven't experienced before. And it's really special.
Yeah, it's rare that you come across comics worked into a prose book, much less of prose nonfiction book, much less a prose nonfiction book about climate change. So it really is a unique experience, I totally agree. I wonder, did this make you think differently about any of your past work? Seeing it in this context?
Oh, wow. I love that question. I feel like I'm not going to be able to think of specific ways that they came to new light. But I think of my work as comics poetry. And so I think, coming back to my work and seeing it in conversation with other pieces, it feels kind of like how I experience poems.
At least for me, unlike other pieces of writing, where maybe you are sort of consciously crafting every part of it, and designing it to work a certain way for the reader, there's just a lot of my process that feels very intuitive and I'm trying to distill a specific feeling or draw out a certain image or metaphor. And so, because of that, a lot of the time when I come back to them, they can feel completely different. And I think that's true when I'm looking back at past work, generally. But that's especially true in the book, seeing them in conversation with these other pieces.
Yeah, definitely. I was looking over the Warmer anthology that you co-edited. And it was striking to me how most of those entries were similar to that. Like you could imagine climate change comics being more like Joe Sacco’s work, where it's journalistic or explanatory. But it was interesting how in your anthology, most of them were very abstract or open to interpretation. I'm not sure what the question is there, but is there something about comics and art that is more fitting when trying to understand climate change in an emotional sense versus, say, facts and figures?
That's interesting that you say that. So the reason that all the comics in Warmer are really poetic is specifically because my co-editor and I Andrew White, we're both in sort of the poetry comics world. And we specifically wanted to make an anthology of poetry comics about climate. Since then, there's been a few lovely memoir comics that touch on climate, like Sophie Yanow’s What is a Glacier? and Sarah Glidden’s diary comics about climate and her reflections on raising a child. And I'm sure there have been others.
But at the time, I think a lot of the climate-related comics that I saw were people using comics in this very explicitly, sort of pedagogical way, where it's using comics to be like, here's science for you to understand. And something that I felt really strongly then and I feel strongly now, is this need and this hunger for work that looks at the climate crisis in a way that is more fully human and invites the spiritual and human and emotional parts of ourselves to be present with it in a way that the more pedagogical works don't.
I do think that text only poetry can definitely do that, as well. But I love the way that comics can be powerful and sort of irresistible. I think comics are very difficult to resist and easy to read. And very beautiful. Those are all things that I like a lot about them.
Yeah, that's a great point. I love the inclusion of poetry in All We Can Save because climate change is a really hard thing to wrap your head around, I guess, in linear sort of terms. But with poetry, it evokes these thoughts or emotions that can help you understand it in ways that you might not be able to by reading a book, because we don't have the right words to really describe it, you know? So I love that point about how they're irresistible, because poems can sometimes intimidate people or people feel like they don't understand it. Whereas a comic is very inviting.
Yeah, I think there's a way in which text only poetry still feels for a lot of people like something that you read in school that is either inaccessible or your ability to understand it means that you're very good and smart. And I think that media that fulfills the function of poetry, like music or comics, can fulfill that need in a way that's less tied to people's experiences with reading poetry in school or whatever.
You mentioned that you're a fan of contributors to the book. I wonder, what was your response to the concept of the book in general?
So the concept, I was just very psyched about. Part of why I wanted to make Warmer initially, was just a thirst for climate work that felt more human. Hearing about All We Can Save, and then being asked to have my work in it was just, I was super psyched. Like, this is a book that I wish I had had, I wish everyone had had, like 10 years ago. And I think it would have helped me a lot as I, in the last five years or so, have been exploring how to make work about climate and how to think about it and how to think about my place in the work. I'm very glad it exists, and yeah, I wish I had had it five years ago.
What was it about the sort of mainstream conversation about climate that you felt was unsatisfying?
I think something that was tough for me, and this might be just me, having been socialized as a woman to feel tentative about my abilities in science or something. But when things are framed as, alright, here's the science and anyone who wants to engage in this conversation, you have to be like a scientist, it’s super alienating for me, and I think everyone. And I think it's become clear that that's a framing that comes from the fossil fuel industry. Not framing it as, “What do we do to preserve our common home and our common good,” but rather, “Is climate change real?”
So one way of describing it is that a lot of art that I was seeing about it was around that question of, is climate change real? Which I think is a framing that benefits the fossil fuel industry, and is not a question that I think anyone's really asking.
So maybe another way to answer that is, I feel like All We Can Save, and works like it, and stuff that I want to answer in my own work, move away from that question. And I don't want to overcorrect here; obviously, questions of what is happening in the natural world and how do we know and what should we do are obviously incredibly important. But I'm also interested in questions of: How do we process this? How do we conceptualize ourselves in relationship to the natural world and in relationship to each other? And what does this mean for how we understand our lives? All of those sorts of questions.
Well, I would like to talk a little bit about how you got into comics and your approach to them. I'm a huge comics fan, I should point that out. So I'm curious, what were your big influences? What made you want to get into the field?
I grew up reading Sunday comics, like Sunday strips. I I grew up with a lot of Calvin and Hobbes collections around the house. I really loved them. Then I was in high school during this sort of golden age of web comics. And I was a huge fan of Dinosaur Comics and Kate Beaton's work especially, and A Softer World. Those are some of the big ones. And then in high school, I read Persepolis for the first time. So I think Kate Beaton's work and Marjane Satrapi’s work and Allison Bechtel's work, those are sort of where I started making comics. In high school, I was very interested in the ways that autobiographical comics just made everyday life so magical. Life under capitalism can be so horrible and feel so meaningless, and there's a way in which autobio comics, and making autobio comics about your own life sort of imbues magic. Maybe this is also true about writing about yourself, but there’s something special about drawing about yourself, too. So that is sort of one part of that lineage. And then, when I was in college, I read a lot of Chris Ware and I then found people like Aidan Koch, and Andrew White, who is now my friend and was co-editor of Warmer, and Alyssa Berg who is also in Warmer.
Did you ever do any autobio comics?
I did when I was in high school, but I haven't really since then. I'm very tentative about sharing my life with the world. My work, I think, is very emotionally intimate, and sort of spiritually intimate. And I think there's a way in which sharing that depth but not sharing, you know, like, hey, here's my family and here's what I do every day. I think that has felt like a good balance to me.
Yeah that's understandable. How did you arrive at your current style and the four panel format that you typically use now?
So I started using the four-panel set up I think in 2014, which was the first year I did 30 days of comics. I picked it because I needed a format that I could easily complete in one day and four panels is long enough that you can do some interesting things with rhythm and symmetry, but it's short enough that you can do it in a day. And I really love playing with radial symmetry and the four-panel frame allows for that in an interesting way. So yeah, I chose it as a constraint then and I really loved it and kept using it.
Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of King Cat and John Porcellino’s comics where they're very simple and pared down in a way that allows these special moments of beauty to come through.
I love that. My friend Andrew White interviewed me for The Comics Journal a couple months ago, and he referenced this article about a sort of Midwestern school of cartooning, which includes definitely John Porcellino, Chris Ware, Kevin Huizenga, and some other people. Basically a bunch of white guys in the Midwest. And they describe some of the characteristics of that as a deep simplicity and interest in the mundane as sort of revelatory. And I fully identify with that (laughs). So that's very interesting. And I think John Porcellino lives very close to where I grew up [in Rockford, Illinois].
Another person I might put in that category is Maggie Umber, who is also in the Midwest.
She's also in Warmer!
I love her comics so much.
I'm very honored by even just the association. I love her work so much.
I feel like both of you use color in similar ways. It’s a very emotional use of color. And there's also a quietness to it, for lack of a better term. Kind of a calm to it, like a meditative quality.
Thank you. Those are definitely all qualities I see and love in her work. Yeah, I am only complimented by that comparison. Have you read Sound of Snow Falling?
Yeah, I love that book.
That is just one of the most beautiful comics of all time. It's just so perfectly paced. It's so beautiful. It's so poetic and intensely emotional without having any words or humans. It's such a beautiful piece.
And the way that she uses sequence, it's just a very powerful use of time passing. I totally agree, it’s amazing. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of color in your work and how you use it?
Yeah, I think it varies from piece to piece. There are definitely some pieces like you mentioned, What the body is for. That was the product of a daily practice during Lent in 2018. So I originally drew that with the final form of risograph printing in mind, which the zine that you have is risograph, printed beautifully by Perfectly Acceptable in Chicago. Riso is an old-fashioned way of printing, where you just print one color at a time. It's very cheap, but it results in colors that are very vibrant. It's a lot cheaper and I think more beautiful than just printing digitally. So it's something that a lot of cartoonists and small artists like. So with that piece, the book starts out just blue and then as I was moving through Lent, and moving towards Easter and springtime, some of the reds that I was using came in. So sometimes color is this symbolic thing.
I also did that with another book, House Fires, again, with red and blue. But I think with my 30 days of comics work, it's often less overtly symbolic in that way. I'll often start a piece trying to get at a specific feeling or a specific mood. And I'll pick colors at the beginning that feel like they relate to that. And I think maybe another element is that I'm always trying to be as succinct as possible, visually, especially. So whenever I can pare things down, I try to do that.
I strongly believe that constraints are often the most fruitful thing for comics in particular and probably with lots of kinds of art. So I think sticking to a really constrained palette—I mean it's also cheap, in terms of the indie comic scene. Most mini comics are in black and white just because it's way, way cheaper than printing in digital full color. But I also think it can lead to some really fruitful stuff.
You know, another thing that really strikes me in your comics is the use of the passage of time, sometimes long periods of time in a small space. Which, it seems like that lends itself to some of the challenges in understanding climate change. Some of the challenge is wrapping your head around this very large time scale. There are some comics in All We Can Save that are almost like a time-lapse of change happening. I wonder how you think about time in your comics?
Wow, that's such a good question. So in comics, and I think maybe in film, too, there's this thing called a beat. And certain cartoonists will use it more often than others. As an off topic example, in Doonesbury, the punchline will often be that there's a beat panel where one character says something and then there's a panel where they're just like looking at each other, and then someone says something back. I've always felt so drawn to beats in comics, to empty spaces. And maybe part of it is just that it feels dramatic. But there's something about the way that it creates a pocket of stillness, it just feels very good. I feel very drawn to it and I'm not sure why.
It gets back to what you were saying about how the purpose of poetry and comics in All We Can Save is that you are providing a beat between these essays. It's that breathing space you were talking about.
Yeah, totally.
And I think that's so useful in discussion of climate change, because it's such a chaotic space and sometimes you just need to like, sit and be quiet for a second. Just think about it.
I did want to talk to you about how climate change became a focus of your comics. Maybe you can tell me a little bit about how you first approached the topic in a big way and how it became a bigger part of your life and your art.
My background is, I'm from rural Northern Illinois and I'm a white woman. And I think for me, and I think this is true for a lot of people, my sort of interest in environmental things broadly just came from childhood where a lot of the most beautiful spaces I was in were the woods, or the outdoors. As I've reflected on it more, being in the woods or being outside, those are some of the only spaces that weren't sort of late-capitalist horrors. The town I grew up in, Rockford, there aren't really sidewalks. There aren't really any sort of common spaces besides stores and a mall. And so I think natural spaces, like when I went to summer camp, and when I was able to be in the woods, those are some of the places that I felt most human, because I think those are some of the few places that are not built in an inhuman capitalist way in the region where I'm from.
And so I think from a young age, I had this idea of like, oh, I like the woods. I like the environment. A thing that people who like those things do is they care about the environment, they want to protect it. And then I think in college, I learned a lot and had some awakenings, sort of spiritually, and I became a Christian in a new way. And I also had some revelations politically and as a leftist. And all of that sort of converged into the conviction that the climate crisis was extremely important and something that needed to be talked about, and something that I—especially as a Christian, and as a person sharing this common home with others—this is something that is among the most important things of my life. And among the most important things that we are called to respond to.
You had mentioned your faith and your spirituality a couple of times and this is totally up to you if you feel comfortable talking about it more, but I wonder if you have any thoughts about how your faith and spirituality show up in your art and your politics? Seems like it's a big influence.
This is always a tricky question. Because for me, it kind of feels like a question of, how does your faith show up in your making breakfast and making food for your family? And it's just, it's the whole thing. I think there's a way in which everything I do, and especially everything in the realm of ethics and meaning, is all very deeply shaped by the Christian tradition and my understanding of myself in it. So it feels, to me, like my comics are just 100% my faith. But I'm very comfortable, and I want people who aren't Christian or in any sort of faith tradition to be able to interact with my work. So it feels like 100% of what my work is. But I also am grateful and want people to be able to interact with it, even if that's not where they are, or if that's not a dimension that they read it with.
I definitely feel like that's the case. But it's one of those things where, when you know about it, you notice some themes like redemption and rebirth that show up in the four-panel structure. I wonder if there any themes or ideas in Christianity that you feel come through in your work.
One thing that I have landed on as something that I really want to continue to make work about, and that I've been making work about for a few years, that sort of intersects with my faith and my thoughts about the climate crisis, is how we understand the material world.
I think there's a way in which some parts of American Christianity have an understanding of the material world, that it is sort of secondary, and that it is disposable, or it will disappear, or it doesn't matter. And I believe that that is very much not aligned with the Christian tradition. I think the fact of Christ having a body and the idea of physical resurrection, and the promise of renewed heaven and Earth, I think all speaks to me that the material world is not something that's like a first draft that will be discarded, but is deeply sacred and deeply beloved by God, and is of extreme importance.
And I think that has a lot of implications for just about everything. But I think one part of it is that—obviously the climate crisis is something that hurts other people and so I think Christians are called to respond and stand in solidarity with others and with the people who will come after us—but I also think that the way that capitalism has extracted from and harmed and destroyed the material world is desecration of the sacred, in a way that I don't think people always talk about. So I don't know, that was a little meandering. But that's definitely a theme that I've been thinking about a lot.
No, that's so important. It underscores the tragedy of it all, you know? The darkness of it, I think that sometimes gets maybe glossed over because we're talking about like electric cars and stuff.
I’m curious, was there a point where you were like, “I’m going to be like a climate change comics person, I'm going to do climate change comics”? Was it an intentional thing, or just something you were interested in?
I don't know if there was a point where I was like, "I want to be a climate cartoonist." Obviously, I would love to not be a climate cartoonist (laughing) because I would love to not ever think about the climate crisis again.
But I think it was around 2016 or 2017, I was thinking a lot about it and feeling a gap between what I was feeling and processing and the implications for human life and our common existence, and the art that I was seeing about it. And so I think there was a way in which I was like, oh, I actually think that maybe I have a way of speaking and drawing about this that might be able to provide some of that.
Well, first, actually, I made Warmer, because I just wanted to see it. And sometimes I think there's a part of me that just wanted that work to exist, but was a little scared of just going for it myself. And it felt really good to do it with others. And then after that, I think I felt a little more confident in pursuing it myself.
We've talked a little bit about this already, but I wonder if you had more to say about what comics can do that maybe other mediums can’t.
I think one of the one of the things I love most about comics is they're profoundly accessible, so accessible that a lot of people write them off as lowbrow. And plenty of the comics that have existed over the years have been lowbrow. But I think if I were to name something across all genres, it's that comics are just deeply engaging. And you can't not read a comic. If there's just text in front of you, you can ignore it. But if there's some little boxes with images and words, you're gonna read it, because it looks interesting.
So I think from that perspective, I continue to be really excited about the ways that comics can continue to be engaging, and can sort of speak to people. And I mean, within it, there are so many different genres. I would love to see book-length comics memoirs about climate. I don't think that'll be me. Maybe that'll be like, Sophie Yanow or Sarah Glidden, who started to do that a little bit, but I'd love to see memoirs. I would love to see more essay comics or explainer comics that take a more justice angle and less of a pure, explaining science angle.
I would love to see that too. That would be great. Well, I want to get toward wrapping up, but is there anything you’re working on these days you wanted to mention, whether that’s your art or other work related to climate justice?
So my current work is that I am the creative director and operations lead of the All We Can Save Project, which is an organization co-founded by doctors Wilkinson and Johnson, that serves to continue the mission of what the anthology started. So that's where a lot of my focus has been in the last few months.
Is there anything you can say about the type of work that you’re doing there, or if people should keep an eye out for anything?
Yeah, so one thing that I am feeling excited about is, I have been curating our social media and also an organizational newsletter that includes poetry and art. As we've talked about a lot in this conversation, I very much feel that art and poetry are necessary and helpful for navigating the climate crisis. I've been curating stuff that I think is helpful there. So yeah, so I guess a plug for our organizational newsletter. [there’s a signup box at https://www.allwecansave.earth/]
Okay, awesome. Well, I kept you longer than I said I was going to I really appreciate you taking the time it’s been great to talk about your work. Thank you so much for sharing your time with me!
Yeah, this was super fun. Thanks so much.
OK fam, thanks for reading as always. If you liked this one, maybe send it to someone who would also like it or share on whatever tik toks or clubhouses you’re into these days. I’m going to skip the links and usual bitlets and wrap things up.
One housekeeping note following up from last week, I am planning to move off of Substack because of some of its editorial practices, specifically who they recruit and pay to write for them. No ill will at all toward people using it, I’ve just been feeling gross about it. This will not affect you at all it should be a seamless switch once I pick a new platform.
Also I know this was another gutwrenching week in America, with news of more mass shootings, more police murdering people, more trials about police murdering people. I hope everyone is OK out there. Defund. Abolish. End it.
Take care and talk to you next week.
Tate