How an award-winning cartoonist is bringing hand-drawn comics to the web

American journalist imprisoned during the 2021 coup in Myanmar Danny’s window He spent six months as a political prisoner. For most of his imprisonment, he battled boredom and fear, subsisting on meditation and podcasts on an SD card smuggled in the mail, sent by his girlfriend, Juliana.

Now, nearly five years after his release, he has teamed up with his cousin Amy Kurzweilis celebrated The New Yorker Cartoonist and Graphic memoir writeron A long-form interactive comic strip for Edge About his imprisonment. I spoke via email with Kurzweil about her role as illustrator and storyteller in this ambitious, long-form project, the responsibilities inherent in telling someone else’s story, and how she produces rich, layered drawings using only pencil.

The Verge: Like yours, your work often focuses on family history Grandma stays in the Warsaw ghetto and Using artificial intelligence to recreate your grandfather’s voice. What was your experience like helping tell Danny’s story?

A. Kurzweil: When Danny was first imprisoned, I called my friend Ahmed Nagya writer who was imprisoned by Egypt’s authoritarian regime for nine months in 2016. He told me that the experience of unjust imprisonment can be worse for people on the outside; You care about the detainees but have no information about what is happening. I’m not sure I believe him, but I appreciate Ahmed’s assertion that I don’t know It was a special kind of torture. That was part of my motivation for wanting to collaborate with Danny on this piece. I wanted to know what his experience was like, to know it in detail, and to allow myself some enlightened imagination about the reality I was blindly perceiving in my mind.

As you can imagine, Danny’s case was a big part of my family’s life in 2021. Along with Juliana, our family formed a kind of impromptu SWAT team dedicated to figuring out what to do. We were meeting regularly with our embassy, ​​and turning to every resource we could think of. (We were organized, and we had a Slack channel!) We met other people who had gone through this particular torture, and gathered a community of people who were invested in the mission #BringDannyHome And #protect_the_press.

But we didn’t really know what Danny was going through. There was a profound disconnect between our banal and unknown everyday reality in Danny’s arrest. I have a vivid memory of early morning meetings with former ambassadors while on vacation at Disney World with my brother’s family, and standing in line for “It’s a Small World” while posting about my cousin’s imprisonment. The confusion of this experience had a profound impact on everyone in my family. We felt out of control. Helping to create a work of art that bears witness to the ins and outs of what happened seems profoundly channeling. It’s healing. This is one of the reasons why creative, immersive storytelling is so important: it gives us a long-lasting feeling of like, Oh, that’s what it was.

How did this creative collaboration work between you and Danny?

Danny is a talented writer, and I was delighted to exploit his desire to document his experiences and his openness to doing so in a multimedia way. We started with conversations, working together to figure out what part of his experience would translate well into a story Edge. We knew we wanted to highlight the importance of storytelling and media, as a way to deal with uncertainty and as a way to connect people across literal and metaphorical bars. Danny started by writing prose, then we worked together to adapt his essays and selections from his prison memoirs into humorous text via Google Docs, and then I started drawing.

Tell us about your drawing process.

Drawing has always been my way of communicating a sense of reality, for two reasons. The first: that drawing is embodied; It helps me feel and convey emotions. The second is that drawing reveals details.

Danny sent me all the relevant pictures he had of Myanmar, as well as his diary which had some drawings in it, but no general pictures of Insein Prison. We looked together at the Google Maps satellite view of the Panopticon and he showed me his pavilion and explained what happened there. He drew me many maps – of his apartment and Juliana’s, of his suite and his cell, but the only other visual source I could rely on was… Collection of drawings Written by Mung Vu, a former prisoner in a different ward.

When I draw a space I can’t see, even in a simple style, I need to answer a lot of questions: What was the floor of your cell made of? What is the texture of the walls and what is written on them? What did you see through the bars of your cell? Where was your bed and where did you keep your things? Oh, you really had The New Yorker A pregnancy in your cell for six months? amazing. Every drawing requires review. Sometimes Danny needed to see me draw something – in detail – before he could remember what the space actually looked like. That wall was longer, it had barbed wire on it, there were weeds, there were no trees here… This comic required more frequent graphics revision than anything I’ve ever worked on. This is partly why I draw the finals in pencil.

But it was such a pleasure to get something right, and I was thinking, Wow, drawing is the most magical technology ever.

How has technology played a role in your drawing?

Danny and I have relied heavily on texting to share photos and clarify things while I work. We’ve been able to spend time working and sharing notes in person, but most of our operations have taken place with us across the world away from each other: me in the US, Danny in Vietnam, where he lived until recently. We also organized (somewhat messily) all of our visual and text resources into Google Drive folders.

I draw by hand. I love the direct connection to the paper, and I especially love drawing in pencil because of the friction and texture of the line. I do a lot of tracing, like the way I hold up paper to my computer screen to trace Danny’s handwriting by scanning his prison diary. For my finals, I drew the bottom draft with a blue pencil, then “inked” with Blackwing pencils, which are thick and create beautiful dark tones.

Having a good scanner (and good scanner software) is extremely important: I use the Epson wide format with Epson Scan 2. Then in Photoshop, I stripped away the blue pencil’s bottom layer and adjusted the levels, so the dark pencil had higher contrast without losing grayscale and texture. Photoshop also became my drawing board to play with layout and approximate how the layer flow would work in the final animated version. I’m obsessed with how pencil marks appear on a digital screen, and I think “inking” with pencil saves me a lot of process headaches and maintains the initial feel and flow of the drawing spontaneously.

How was technology part of Danny’s experience in prison?

One of the first things Danny said to me when he got out of prison, which I’ll never forget, was that it was nice to be without his phone. That’s not to downplay the suffering, but it’s not unusual for Danny to make a remark like that, to come out of prison noticing that he’d been offered something. One of the questions we wanted this story to explore is: If we are inundated with information, with stories of suffering and hardship and injustice, how do we actually honor an individual news story? In a democracy, we need access to all these stories, but how do we? nursing About which one of them?

That’s to say nothing of all the untold stories. Danny and I are only in a position to tell his story in Myanmar because he was lucky enough to be American and have some resources. We think the answer here has to do with craftsmanship, emotion, and immersion, which is what we hope this story offers readers, but it also has to do with the mind of the story’s recipient.

The climax of this comic involves Danny receiving, from Juliana, a story that really moved him: A This is American life An episode about another American imprisoned abroad. Danny had lost constant access to pen and paper, the basic technologies he originally relied on to create meaning and fill his time, so he was meditating, preparing his mind for boredom, and then here comes… the podcast!