LUST BRIGADE ☮

I'VE BEEN SEEING THESE THINGS...

THEY LOOK LIKE UNMANNED DRONES.

IS ANYONE ALIVE WATCHING OVER US?

Since my last interview with Matt Seneca, his webcomic, AFFECTED, has become a straight up porn read, filled with every kind of indulgence that takes readers to the darkest parts of life in Los Angeles. Behind those indulgences are the rawest emotions and insecurities, leaving the characters starved for love and the feeling of home in a place where home does not exist.

The October installment of AFFECTED was also an exposé, in which both Matt and Druuna - and their respective real-life counterparts - were stripped bare with a closer pen than any other comic I've read. AFFECTED has become a comic about what people do when they are at their loneliest, but the saddest part is knowing that someone was lonely enough to write about such a low experience.

It is, at least, appropriate that such a great storyteller is the one translating that loneliness. I hung out with Matt a few times when he visited the East Coast and every story Matt told about himself was something that could easily be dropped right into AFFECTED. I have even been able to pick up on a few of those moments - as I'm sure anyone reading this comic that knows Matt might be able to do - and I'm telling you, Matt Seneca is AFFECTED. This comic is the real thing, and if you're looking to really indulge, AFFECTED is your book.

We started this interview after the first installment of the first November chapter, so most of the parts we refer to had probably happened in the October chapter.

ADAM: The AFFECTED site went through a minor redesign since the last chapter. What made you change the layout?

MATT SENECA: Mostly it was hearing one person tell me I should. I had always just assumed the site looked fine, whatever -- but then the first time somebody brought it up to me it was because they thought it was ugly. And the girl who told me that has this incredible looking website that gets like a million hits a day and got sponsored by Belvedere vodka, so I figured I should listen to her. Somebody else (was it you?) told me the silver bars along the side didn't work, which I agreed with, so I switched it to a flat black background. I think the comic reads easier against it. The banner image is just a drawing I really liked when I finished it, and I thought it worked pretty well as kind of a "movie poster". Just trying to make the page itself as attractive as I try to make the comic, really.

A: Since our last interview, you moved back to California from New York. I think it's always been clear that AFFECTED is your "LA story" - I read "Hipsters" as a LA vs. NYC/Hollywood vs. Williamsburg comic - and it's hard not to notice that LA, in both AFFECTED and "Hipsters," doesn't get the same longing portrayals as New York. What was it like writing about and drawing a place like AFFECTED's LA while in New York, knowing that you were going back there in only a few months?

M: Aw man, it was like a death sentence, dude! It should be pretty clear from the comic that I do NOT like Los Angeles, and when I went to live in Brooklyn this summer I discovered that I like it there a ton. Moving back to LA has been really tough for me, so much so that I've had to pretty much quit drinking entirely because when I'm inebriated here I just get too sad. Most of my thoughts on LA are there in the comic itself: to me this city is a cold place where everyone is so scared that the dreams they moved here to fulfill aren't coming true that they lose their humanity and start functioning at the base survival level. No genuine human interactions, no emotion, no compassion. And this is true for me too. In New York going out is actually fun, everybody is sincere in their desire to have a good time in their bodies. People here drink and do coke and get fucked like they hate themselves so much they actually want it to kill them. I feel like I live in a truly evil place.

That being said, though, I'm making a pretty evil book, and it was difficult for me to get into the right headspace to work on it while I was in New York. There's a certain kind of... hmm... of paranoia, I guess, that goes into this stuff. Like everyday the place I live is making an argument with me and this comic is my rebuttal. Making comics is one of the few things that I'm content in doing when I'm here.

A: Yeah, and that's exactly what's coming through...LA as a hell, if that's not putting it too lightly. Can you walk us through that scene when Matt first sees Druuna wearing a burka? The change from two-and-a-half white panels to that red shift works so well with it, but red means so much in this comic that I wouldn't want to assign any meaning to his reaction without consulting you first, I guess.

M: I wanted that scene to be the first in a string of "you can't go back from this" moments that makes up the rest of the "October" chapter from that point on. So the slide from white into red is like that, just a move from one stage of the narrative to another.

But it's also really the moment where the story stops being about some depressed kid in LA, and starts being a story about Matt and Druuna, which to me is way more interesting. I wanted that picture to be the first time you look at her as a lead, and not a supporting character. And if I can do that by drawing her in a burka, which the Bush-era media narrative tells us takes away its wearer's subjectivity, then so much the better. Transposed in space from its natural environment in the Middle East, the burka is about the most powerful expression of difference, even of individuality, that someone can manage with fashion. I've seen women in burkas walking around LA twice and both times it's been a visceral shock, stopped me dead in my tracks. I also think it's just a great piece if clothing aesthetically. When I was working my fashion design job I kept trying to push through stuff that had a little burka to it, black women's sweaters with high back collars, jackets with lapels that would cover the cheeks a little bit if you popped them out.

I think the woman in a burka is also a waaaay more powerful sexual symbol for my (our) generation than anybody realizes. We've gone past the Paris Hilton moment in fashion where "skin is in", now it's about what you hide and how you hide it. And the story that Islamic culture uses to justify the burka is that if women's bodies were more displayed, men would think desirous thoughts about them. There's a subtext to that idea, one that's sharpened immensely by our wartime media's portrayal of the Arab woman as this super sexy, dangerous seductress. It's like this: we read the burka as hiding a woman so sexually powerful that a single glimpse of any part of her body would be enough to send all men into transports of uncontrollable lust. Seriously, anybody who likes this comic should actually do a google image search for "Iraqi women" or "Muslim women": there's a lot of rape shots, like the ones I've showed, but a lot more pictures of faces covered by veils with just this one pair of gorgeous, mascaraed bedroom eyes staring out at you with the most intense look in them.

So that red is also this violent surge of desire that Matt feels for Druuna, the first time he's looked at her as a sexually available woman and not just his roommate. He knows she's a prostitute, he's seen her in a towel, he's heard her having sex through the wall multiple times, but it isn't until he sees her in a burka that he can find that aspect of her. Which is also me saying something about how sexually twisted our generation of media consumers is, of course.

A: Yeah, I think since our last interview Druuna developed a much stronger voice - well, she definitely had that voice, but as her and Matt open up to one another she seems way more comfortable. And I think in most stories, two protagonists developing a relationship - not necessarily sexual, and not even necessarily sexual in this case - is seen as a positive thing, or at least not as heavy of a situation. But Matt and Druuna's relationship is also the product of this hedonistic environment that can't be good for anyone, and I can't anything come from this relationship but utter depravity for both characters. Are they both completely broken, just doing whatever they can to get by? Or is the sliver of a chance that they might rise above their heartbreaks so small that I just can't see it?

M: Well, that would be telling! I will say this though: our bodies are the single source of potential pleasure that no one can take away from us, the last thing we can turn to when everything else seems to have gone to pieces. And that's not trivial, that really matters. That's why I'm showing their sex scenes in so much detail in this comic, and trying to really draw them as attractively as possible -- because so often the camera of comics turns away or floats off to a detached perspective (*AHEM*chesterbrown*AHEM*) during scenes of the greatest sensual enjoyment they contain. That's when the focus needs to narrow, man! And especially in a narrative like this, with two characters who are full of sorrowful memories and terrified of the world around them, it's so important to recognize that the best they ever feel is when they're having sex with each other. I don't want to spoil what ends up happening in this relationship, but for now these two sad people are at least able to make one another feel good during the moments when one's inside the other. That's a sad thing, but I think it's also a beautiful one.

A: I totally felt that - what I'll call AFFECTED influence - when I was reading something the other day and the scene changed right as two characters began embracing, and I felt cheated out of getting to see the characters at their most raw, which is when you really see them for who they are, you know? And the October chapters of AFFECTED definitely had the best sex scenes in the comic so far - to the point where sometimes I'm reading AFFECTED as a sex comic. Which I think is fair, because throughout this comic sex feeds the story just as much as the story natural lends itself to sex scenes. Does that make sense? Is there anything you want to say about that?

M: Yes, I want to say stuff about that. Let me see if I can organize my thoughts. First of all, I want this comic to be able to function as legitimate pornography. Back when I was first planning this story out as a prose-form novel, I was doing a lot of thinking about high versus low culture, acceptance versus non-acceptance of forms, junk like that. I wanted to work in a form that had as little cultural acceptance as possible. Honestly, seeing comics gain so much cultural cachet over the past decade was a big part of it -- like, where did the excitement of the bastard form go? Before I knew what the story was, what its politics were, who the characters were going to be, even what art form I was going to use, I knew I wanted to work in pornography, because I wanted to make something against society, something that wouldn't go down easy the way Chris Ware and Dan Clowes comics (great as they are) went down easy as "American literature". The original title of the book was "Fuck You (Affected)".

And as far as actual sex COMICS, it's basically the same impulse. I like the forbidden, "low" aspect of comic books, I like the idea of making something that no matter how smart or accomplished I can make it, will always be seen first as base and venal. Because we all saw how cultural acceptance took the teeth away from comics, man! I'm annoyed at the very thought of working in a medium where the "heartfelt memoir" or "thought provoking essay" is a championed form. And this book, with the serious ideas and socio-political discussion I'm working from, is a little close to academia for me. I think the sex is just so important, to the book as an aesthetic object as much as it's actual story -- it needs something in there to dirty it up.

Finally, I'm just so in love with the comics of Guido Crepax: devastatingly beautiful, unrepentantly pornographic, deeply psychological sex comics that are also impossible to find and laborious for me to read in their original Italian. So I wanted to make the kind of comic that Crepax made, just so I would have another one like that to read when I was finished.

Oh yeah, and multiple nude human figures in motion, interacting with one another, is the most fun thing for me to draw, so I get a big kick out of drawing sex.

A: Did you actually write any of that prose novel? And how close is the story to what we're reading in AFFECTED? I'd imagine it's pretty similar, right? It's kind of strange to think that readers could have had a completely different experience with this story had it been written as prose, especially since the majority of your creative output over the past year has been in comics.

M: Yes, I wrote about 20 pages of the prose novel in one night before I realized it wasn't going to work. I just reread it now after not touching it since I started the comic. It actually isn't as bad as I thought it was at the time, but it's also very definitely not what I wanted. I spend a ton of time describing visual information -- North Hollywood streets, the layout of their apartment -- that the comic puts across in one or two images. And while I get off some nice turns of phrase, there's no quality of beauty to the writing whatsoever. That was a big part of why I stopped with the prose version: I knew I was going to tell an ugly story, but it was really important to me that it carry something beautiful too. And I was never a very lyrical or sensuous prose writer. The sex scenes especially weren't at all erotic, which basically means the book would have been a failure regardless of everything else. (Though to be honest, I've never read any prose that I thought actually achieved a real quality of eroticism. The visual arts just do that so much better.)

To me, almost all drawings, especially of the human figure, have some kind of beauty to them. So I figured if I just drew the story, drew the sex scenes, the beauty would take care of itself to a large extent.

It's almost exactly the same story in both versions. The prose is more introspective and less political, which I think is due pretty much wholly to form. It also moves a lot faster, which is the opposite of how I usually think of prose in relation to comics, but it makes sense. In doing the comic I've been cherry-picking the best of the prose bits I wrote in my notes and generally spreading them out over a few pages, but in writing it's only a couple sentences. A really different experience, like you said, even though the words are the same.

A: When I first found your blog I think you were still releasing short stories on what has now become your non-AFFECTED, MATT SENECA COMIX blog. Did you make a conscious decision to focus on comics for an extended period, or is creating comics just more interesting to you right now than working in other mediums?

M: Both. It's more than just being more interested in comics, though that's obviously the case. I actually stop feeling good when I haven't drawn comics in a few days -- like, I lapse into a pretty deep depression. That was one of the biggest reasons I started doing AFFECTED at all, to have a longer project to work on that could sustain me. And I feel like I understand the most about comics, like I have the most to give to comics.

Writing fiction was something I started doing both when and because I fell in love with the girl I ended up getting engaged to, both so I could get her to notice me and explain to myself how the particular sensation of loving her felt. All my novels were about being in love with Olivia in one way or another. Shortly before we split up I wrote a novella that made her cry when I read it to her. When I'm honest with myself, that was all I ever wanted my prose to achieve. And once she was gone the whole reason I ever wrote to begin with was too. I always liked comics better, and I didn't think I was a good writer anyway, so I didn't see any reason to continue. Now I'm so in love with making comics that there's no doubt in my mind that this will be how I express myself artistically for the rest of my life.

A: So what did you do after deciding to make AFFECTED a comic instead of a novel? I would imagine that AFFECTED as prose had different influences than AFFECTED as a comic, right?

M: Yeah, but also a lot of the same ones. And the comics-specific influences kind of took a while for me to develop. All the classical art I'm quoting now obviously wasn't part of the prose version... but it wasn't part of my idea for the comic until long after I started it. I wasn't even that deeply into classical painting when I started the comic back in February. Part of it is just that allowing the comic to reflect my interests of the moment rather than this crystallized picture of what I was into when I started it or when I first got the idea makes it more interesting to work on. But also I realized that by the time Matt and Druuna start up their sexual relationship both he and the audience have already seen her acting as a sexual being. So the quotations from fine art are there to give his sexual interactions with her a more rarefied, "felt" sense than the rest of the sex we see the two of them having. Plus I really like those references as linchpins of the erotic scenes, pinnacle images to hang everything else around -- to work up to and then down from.

Those callbacks to paintings are really the only influence that the comics medium has brought into the story though, besides Guido Crepax. And they're strictly visual. Even with the Ditko and Watchmen quotes I'm mostly interested in the narrative/content aspects of those works. Criticism of Moore and Ditko's takes on the Question character was part of the prose version too, though it sure works a lot better in comics form.

Most of my influences in AFFECTED are literary, not visual, honestly. The poetry if Tristan Tzara, specifically his Approximate Man (which is my favorite work of art in any medium), and H. Rider Haggard's beautiful Orientalist novel She are the two verbal works that make it into my text, but that's more for their symbolic qualities than their actual influence on the story. The big ones as far as that goes are Dennis Cooper and Leslie Marmon Silko. I didn't discover either author until I came to LA, and both are firmly connected with this place for me.

Cooper more than any other artist presents a view of Los Angeles and existing within it that rhymes with my own. His horror/porno novels and the line they walk between those two genres were the bug inspiration for the kind of book AFFECTED is. And the amount of genuine, heartbreaking human emotion he layers into his pyrotechnic content is just incredible. My story is pretty different from most of Cooper's -- he's writing queer literature and I'm not -- but in terms of tone, genre, the levels it hits you on, there's no way it could be too close to what he does for me. And the quality Silko's stories have of occurring in a world that's both very much the real, gritty thing and a supernatural place with a mythical past that in a lot of ways is still living was the other thing I wanted to capture. It's my favorite fictional space to inhabit.

A: It's really amazing that Matt and Druuna found each other and live with each other, when I get the feeling that both characters are essentially homeless - or, they had homes, Matt having been at home with Olivia while Druuna's home was a pre-war Baghdad. Is that fair? Where else could he call home?

M: I think that's fair. That's certainly what it says in the text -- I'm coming at Matt's character as biographically identical to myself, so when I'm thinking about it his real "home" is specifically with Olivia before they came to LA. The one page we see the place he had in LA with Olivia on, it's a completely empty white box -- and that has a lot to do with her absence, but also plenty with the place itself. I'd hope that the book at least implies that such a thing as a real "home" doesn't exist in Los Angeles.

A: What are those diet pills doing to Matt's head?

M: You'll see. Without giving too much away, a more apt question might be what they're doing to Druuna's head. Things are moving faster for both of them. Did you notice how many jump-cuts I was using toward the end of the October chapter there? Everything is getting harder to see, more difficult to negotiate with. More dangerous.

A: You mentioned in an e-mail that the first few pages of the November chapter were done all in brush, and the ones you posted in the November chapter so far look great. It's tough to tell so early in the chapter, but is that style change reflective of the story at all? Or are you just trying new things out?

M: It's a little bit of both. I'm not doing the whole chapter in brush, much as I'd love to. The paper size I'm using isn't big enough for me to have the same kind of precision in brush as I do with the quill pen I've been doing the vast majority of my inks with. But the two-tier page I use to kick off this chapter gives me a lot more space to work with than the three-tier that I'm using everywhere else, and I love the brush so much that I'll take any opportunity to draw with it. Also, in November the weather in LA shifts really dramatically from hot to cold, and with that comes a shift from the radiant lux perpetua of spring, summer, and fall to a more shadowy, somber kind of light. It's such a strong shift, and so peculiar to LA, that I wanted to spotlight it by putting a little more black on the page to open up the November section.

A: Thanks again for agreeing to do this. Is there anything else you want to add?

M: If anyone reading this besides the people who have already gotten in touch gets themselves off or has sex to this comic, please drop a line and let me know. It's really encouraging.

AFFECTED

MATT SENECA COMIX

DEATH TO THE UNIVERSE

LUST BRIGADE: MATT SENECA'S AFFECTED (PT. 1)

LUST BRIGADE: MATT SENECA'S AFFECTED (PT. 2)

LUST BRIGADE: MATT SENECA INTERVIEW (DEC. 2010)