Typewriter interview with Tom Hart
10 questions for the cartoonist about comics, playing the piano, and rediscovering exuberance in your work
Hey y’all,
Tom Hart is a cartoonist who’s been teaching comics and graphic novels for over 20 years. He started The Sequential Artists Workshop, a non-profit comics school and creative community whose latest project is Young in Iran, a collection of memoir comics by Gen Z comic creators in Iran. (It has only 3 days to go on Kickstarter, so check it out.)
Last year Tom published an updated paperback edition of Rosalie Lightning, his incredible #1 New York Times bestselling graphic memoir about the untimely death of his young daughter, Rosalie.
This typewriter interview was conducted via the magic of the United States Postal Service. (For a plain-text version with links, see the P.S. below.)
![You've been diving into your archives and showing people various bits of the process of making ROSALIE LIGHTNING. Is there anything you found that surprised you? What has the process of looking back at your process been like? That book was brute force. There had to be a book, because a book on the other side of that experience would keep me alive. I'm surprised, then, sometimes by some of the parts I'd forgotten. Honestly, I was most surprised, upon reflection, how much EXUBERANCE there was in it. There was exuberance in most [of] my work, but here too accidentally, intuitively, through the portrayal of my daughter.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Sdo3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4cc7766a-4790-4548-83d9-9c80b8d72bcb_1024x1306.jpeg "You've been diving into your archives and showing people various bits of the process of making ROSALIE LIGHTNING. Is there anything you found that surprised you? What has the process of looking back at your process been like? That book was brute force. There had to be a book, because a book on the other side of that experience would keep me alive. I'm surprised, then, sometimes by some of the parts I'd forgotten. Honestly, I was most surprised, upon reflection, how much EXUBERANCE there was in it. There was exuberance in most [of] my work, but here too accidentally, intuitively, through the portrayal of my daughter.")
Big thanks to Tom for being the 16th participant in this series of typewriter interviews.
Check out Tom’s work, SAW’s Kickstarter, and go out and get a copy of Rosalie Lightning.
Thanks, as always, to paid subscribers who buy me the time to do all the email coordinating, typing, snail-mailing, and scanning that goes into them. If you haven’t yet, consider supporting my work with a paid subscription!
xoxo,
Austin
PS. Here is the plain-text version of our interview with links:
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