Virtual Memories Show 429:
Nate Powell
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“It was a lifesaver, having Congressman Lewis in my life during this period — his temperance, his playing the long game, his absolute lack of compromise on a moral and ethical level — a lot of this helped me on a personal basis.”
How will we remember (and recover from) the last 5 years? National Book Award-winning cartoonist Nate Powell‘s new collection, Save It For Later: Promises, Parenthood, and the Urgency of Protest (Abrams ComicArts) explores America’s fractures and its hopes for the future. We talk about the impetus of the book, how it follows his work adapting Rep. John Lewis‘ story in the MARCH trilogy, and how his conversations with the late congressman scared him even more about the impact of the previous presidential administration. We get into the Save It For Later‘s balancing act of memoir & essay, his decision to draw his kids as magical animals, what MARCH taught him about comics storytelling and how it influenced his recent work. We also discuss the irony of Gen X’s apolitical nature, Nate’s punk ethos, the combo of thrash metal & X-Men comics that instilled a social conscience in him, the delight of visiting the quarter bins in his childhood comic shop when he goes home, why not being an activist doesn’t equal being a defeatist, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read Save It For Later!
“The older I get, the more I feel that my generation is more strongly linked to the Baby Boomers than to Millennials, specifically by the erroneous assumption of the inevitability of social progress, by the privilege of assuming that things will naturally work out.”
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“It’s not wrong that parents generally lose a lot of bandwidth to get involved with a lot of other work.”
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About our Guest
Nate Powell is a National Book Award–winning cartoonist whose work includes civil rights icon John Lewis’s historic March trilogy, Come Again, Two Dead, Any Empire, Swallow Me Whole, and The Silence of Our Friends. Nate has also received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, three Eisner Awards, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Comic-Con International Inkpot Award, two Ignatz Awards, and the Walter Dean Myers Award. He has discussed his work at the United Nations, on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, PBS, CNN, and Free Speech TV. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana. His new book is Save It For Later.
Follow Nate on Twitter and Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone
