I had submitted designs – they have those contests in Archie, or rather Betty & Veronica comics, where you can design outfits and send them in. It was just something that I did, like you read Archies, and I had totally forgotten that I had read so many of those comics. And I just sort of…didn’t count that as comics or even really count it as reading. JILLIAN TAMAKI: When we were promoting Skim, I found that I was saying that I hadn’t read comics as a kid, and then it dawned on me that I read a lot of comics as a kid, but they were Archie comics.

(There’s a recurring though understandable fixation on the errant dog turds lying around Brooklyn, her current stomping grounds.) I had to annotate a lot of bracketed laughter.ĬHRIS RANDLE: I understand that you didn’t read many comics as a kid, so I’m wondering when you started dabbling in the medium, as opposed to pure illustration. She’s frank, funny, and charming, even when stuck doing an interview inside a tiny kitchenette, and unlike the cranky rant strips that make up part of Indoor Voice. I spoke with Tamaki at this month’s Toronto Comics Arts Festival, where she was not only a featured guest but the official poster’s illustrator. Tamaki’s swirling, expressionistic brushwork foregrounded the ritualism and mystery surrounding its title character, a teenage Wiccan outcast who begins an affair with her bohemian English teacher. But the artist really hit her stride with Skim, a graphic novel scripted by her cousin Mariko. There was nothing dilettantish about her 2006 debut, Gilded Lilies, which collected various drawings, paintings and early comics experiments, including “The Tapemines,” 80 wordless pages of strange transformations and distorted forms.

Tamaki’s career can be seen as an inversion of the typical cartoonist’s, taking on freelance jobs to eat in between their comics she’s been a full-time illustrator since graduating from the Alberta College of Art and Design in her Calgary hometown, making periodic forays into cartooning. She’s still drawing evocative, stylized illustrations for the likes of Esquire, The Guardian, Penguin Books and just about every venerable publication with “New York” in its title. In “Bad Mood,” a sketchbook strip from her last collection Indoor Voice, Jillian Tamaki contemplates a piece-in-progress: “You are completely without talent and this will finally expose you as the fraud you are.” It hasn’t happened yet.

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