Jessica Campbell explores a constrained girlhood in religion in her graphic novel, Rave
CBC Books | | Posted: April 27, 2022 3:07 PM | Last Updated: April 27, 2022
Jessica Campbell is a Canadian visual artist, comic creator and lecturer originally from British Columbia and now living in Green Bay, Wis. Her first two comic books, Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists and XTC69, were farcical, feminist and fourth-wall breaking stories featuring characters called Jessica Campbell — one an art lecturer, and the others a space commander and the last Earthling in post-apocalyptic times.
Her third book, Rave, is a departure from her first two books — still funny, but a longer, more serious coming-of-age narrative. And while there isn't a character named Jessica Campbell, Rave does draw from the artist's life and religious upbringing in B.C.
"The church was the dominant thing in my life for the first 18 years, and so it's something I wanted to address in my work for a long time," said Campbell. "It's taken me quite a number of years to feel comfortable addressing it directly, which is what this book is trying to do."
Rave's main character, Lauren, is a teenage girl who quietly begins questioning the teachings of her church — particularly the expectations of women to be pure and of service to men. At her public high school, Lauren is paired with a free-spirited girl named Mariah for a project on evolution. Lauren grows bolder, exploring her sexuality, as her relationship with Mariah deepens, but always feels the suffocating weight of the church.
How are you feeling now that Rave is out?
I feel good. It's such a funny process publishing a book, because I finished it a year ago and I was like, 'I'm so desperate for people to read it.' And now, after waiting for so long, people are starting to read it. I am a little anxious about it, but excited.
What makes you anxious about this particular book?
I think that there's always some anxiety with a new project about how people will respond to it. But specifically here, this book is so personal. It's fiction, but it's very much rooted in my own experience having a religious upbringing and the fraught-ness of that.
I think I'm a little anxious about making something so personal. But also I'm a little nervous about my parents' response to it, if and when they read it. I'm kind of hoping my father won't ever read it and we just have to not address it. I think that's compounding the general nervousness with the new project.
What were some of the things that inspired the story of a teenage girl growing up in a religious community?
It's not fully autobiographical. It's definitely fiction, but a lot of it is rooted in personal experience. I was raised in a really conservative evangelical Pentecostal charismatic church and then also attended public school, which is true of the central character in the book as well.
It's not fully autobiographical. It's definitely fiction, but a lot of it is rooted in personal experience.
A lot of this book is me trying to grapple with some of these conflicting ideas and experiences that I went through as a young person. The church was really the dominant thing in my life for the first 18 years, and so it's something I wanted to address in my work for a long time. It's taken me quite a number of years to feel comfortable addressing it directly, which is what this book is trying to do.
What was going on at the time that made you decide to take that step and write the book?
I had known for a long time that I wanted to write about the church and in fact, in 2012, I started a mini comic series of the same name that was going to also address the church. I was doing that through a micropress called Oily Comics. I did one issue of what was going to be a multi-issue book project. And I just felt like I wasn't ready yet to write the story or my cartooning skills weren't up to snuff and I put the project on the back burner.
My earlier books, Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists and XTC69, I did through Koyama Press in Toronto — those are more humour books. And then in 2018, Koyama announced that they were going to be slowly shutting down over the course of several years.
After that got publicly announced, Drawn & Quarterly approached me about doing a book, and I I felt like I had developed my storytelling skills enough to finally be able to grapple with this bigger topic. I knew that Drawn & Quarterly has the distribution and the public presence that the story would get out there. So it just felt like this coming together of all these different threads allowed me to finally write this book I'd been thinking about for a long time.
LISTEN | Jessica Campbell on Q
Was there a particular feeling that you wanted to capture from that time and what kind of techniques did you draw from yourself to make that happen?
My earlier work is pretty strictly humorous. It addresses some of the same kind of feminist issues that are present within this book, but it's not as serious. There are parts of this book that I think are a little bit sad or sombre. This was partly a development of my storytelling ability. I knew I wanted to have a little bit more complex of an emotional landscape in this book.
There are parts of this book that I think are a little bit sad or sombre. This was partly a development of my storytelling ability.
The kind of central idea that I was interested in developing in this project was that the church that I grew up in had very strict ideas about women and gender — women are put on earth to be servants to men, they should be attractive and submissive and all of these different things. Those kinds of pressures are dehumanizing and demoralizing as a woman or girl in the church.
I think those kinds of pressures exist writ large within the culture as well, and that people crumble under those pressures. If women don't stand up to those standards that are set for them, the church's response is often to put the blame exclusively on their shoulders and not these other societal issues, like drug addiction and overdoses. There are some scenes within the books where characters fall victim to, in my opinion, these large societal pressures and then get blamed for it. That idea was important to me to convey. I wanted people reading it to feel what it feels like to have those pressures put on you.
But also, there are many parts of the book that are funny. That's a fundamental way that I engage the world, and so that is also fundamental to everything I'll ever do.
Were there any surprises or discoveries that you made going back to think about and untangle that stuff?
I wrote this book differently than the previous books. I talked to a couple of cartoonists, Nick Drnaso, who did a book called Sabrina and Anya Davidson, specifically about her book Lovers in the Garden. Both of them talked about how they used script writing in advance of making these graphic novels, which I previously hadn't done. I worked from thumbnails.
I wanted there to be another layer of editing possibilities here. And particularly, I wanted the pacing to be slower than my earlier books. So I wrote a script for this, which was useful and instructive. In writing that script, part of what I wanted to capture was the specific cadence of preachers, because they have such a particular way of speaking that is really fascinating.
I watched a bunch of YouTube videos of preachers to get the cadence correct. It sort of made me feel nauseous. I just felt like this constricting stress listening to these men speaking. It was something that I didn't realize still held such a power over me.
It's now been half my life since I left the church and I would like to move on from the religious trauma a little bit going forward.
I think in some ways maybe this book will act as a little bit of an exorcism, too, that I'm hopefully getting over some of my issues about my upbringing. It's now been half my life since I left the church and I would like to move on from the religious trauma a little bit going forward.
I think you also captured the cadence between teenage girls, and teenage girls and teenage boys, really well.
A lot of that was memory, thinking about my own interactions with friends. The characters in the book are all amalgams of different people, but I was thinking about specific interactions.
There's a scene where there's a teenage boy in the church who says he wants to get married and have a baby every nine months. I remember one of the boys in youth group saying that and I was like, 'Oh, my God.' So that stuck with me.
What did you want to accomplish with your take on a coming-of-age story?
What did you want to accomplish with your take on a coming-of-age story?
What I wanted to kind of convey with the protagonist Lauren is that, at least for the first three quarters of the book, she's passive in many facets of her life. It's kind of like life is happening to her, and she's subject to the whims of the church and what the pastor is telling her or the way her peers are engaging with her. She's not an active participant in her own life in some ways.
The development of my own voice and my own sense of agency was a huge turning point in my life.
Over the course of the book, I want to show her developing a little bit more of her own agency or starting to feel comfortable speaking up for herself, thinking for herself. And that was an experience I definitely remember having, just as a young person being so painfully insecure, even with my best friends being unable to contradict them in any way. I just absolutely never wanted to rock the boat as a young person. I just remember feeling very, very uncomfortable in my own skin — and very much like life was something that was happening to me and that I was not an active participant in.
The development of my own voice and my own sense of agency was a huge turning point in my life. That was something I wanted to convey for this character as well and to capture in the book.
The book has really wide gutters in between the panels. My original plan was to kind of write in the gutters what she was thinking. But then as I was working on it, I realized that it was more powerful to see her kind of stony faced, implacable, inaccessible interior experience — that it made it a little bit more profound, maybe when you started to see her act on some of her thoughts.
What was the most rewarding part of the experience for you?
This book is more vulnerable than any of my earlier work and more kind of direct about this experience that I had, or some facets of my upbringing. I think that's pretty rewarding to finish a project where I feel like I'm actually talking about something that's important to me and hopefully conveying some of this personal experience. It's very exciting to see it as a physical object in my hands after so many years of drawing it in pieces and designing it, that's very exciting and rewarding.
I'm starting to get feedback from people who've read it, which is also meaningful to me. I hope the book can have an impact on people.
What kind of impact are you hoping that the book will have?
I want people to understand what it feels like to be a young woman in the church — being told that your life is not fully meaningful and the conflicts and pain that arouses.
I also am curious if anyone who is going through an experience like this will read it, like a young person who's growing up the way I did. I just feel like I have not read many books about experiences like this.
I just feel like I have not read many books about experiences like this.
There's a great book by Tara Westover called Educated. It's not exactly the same thing, but she grows up in a Mormon household and gets pulled out of school and stuff. I read that book and related to a lot of it, even though it wasn't exactly my experience.
My hope is that this book might have some similar impact in some ways where people can see into this world that might be closed off to them normally.
Jessica Campbell's comments have been edited for length and clarity.