I Feel Awful, Thanks is the debut graphic novel by Lara Pickle, a Spanish-Romanian artist and storyteller whose work thus far has been more in the video game and animation arenas, for places like Netflix and Nickelodeon. The graphic novel arrives in stores this week and is published by Oni Press.
From the outside, I Feel Awful, Thanks looks like what you might expect from a YA fantasy graphic novel, featuring witches, magic and dragons and. But the story addresses some serious issues around mental health, something Pickle experienced herself. It’s about a witch named Joana who has secured her dream job with a coven in London, so she relocates and discovers the reality of city life is not so idyllic.
I spoke with Pickle about the graphic novel, pulling in her own experiences into the story and some of the fun design choices she made while creating it.
I thought I’d start by asking about your origin story — how did you first discover comics?
I started reading manga when I was very young actually! I used to grab them from the public library in my hometown back in Spain. They had these amazing Sailor Moon and Sailor V tomes that I kept reading. I was also watching loads of anime on tv, and of course with internet coming through, I rapidly found ways to read things online as well! Then I got a lot more into European comics and some superhero comics – I really like noir stories and I was a bit obsessed with Batman! – as I grew up and got into university.
I know you’ve done several projects in animation and video games in the past, but what inspired you to start making your own graphic novels?
I’ve honestly always done comics for myself, and with friends!
A funny story is that me and a friend drew this little comic when we were twelve, and just cheekily sent it to a Spanish publisher via post. We of course never heard back from them, but every time I go home and have a look through the pages – we drew and inked them on paper!! – I find them super endearing and funny.
But of course with time, and as I got busy with life and work, it was more and more difficult to commit to a proper comic. What happened though was that my agency at the time saw some small comic stripes I had done for myself to understand and process my own emotions after therapy, and they saw a lot of potential into a full-length story, so they encouraged me to give it a thought, and the story just came out on its own really!
Talking about the book itself, I wanted to ask about the setting, as I know you moved from Spain to London — kind of like Joana, who is moving there at the beginning of the story. How much of your own personal experiences influenced the story, particularly that part?
Well, the story started being a lot more like a biography than the story you know now, but as I delved into it I found myself more and more separated from Joana. In many ways because as I worked on the story and tried to find the best ways to incorporate the messages I wanted to tell, and as I talked with friends about emotions and their own experiences through adulthood, Joana became a mix of everyone, and everyone’s experiences. Of course a lot of us go through very similar things in life, but the experiences might be a bit different, so I love that Joana has become a bit of a catalyst for many different people to relate to.
She still has a lot of my own experiences, like moving to another country and starting from scratch, which is definitely not easy! Her rocky journey to self love is very similar to mine, in the sense of being rocky and very much trial and error, until finding the right answers.
And of course there is the fact that I set her to be from Spain, which is where I’m from! There are some Easter eggs on the beach as I painted the beach that is very close to my house.
You’ve created a fun world for Joana to inhabit with all the witchcraft elements, but you’re also shining a light on some serious subjects as well, regarding mental health. Was it challenging to juxtapose the whimsical setting with the serious subject matter?
Well…it was, and it wasn’t, at the same time! I really wanted to showcase more of the witchy world, but because of the nature of this story, I needed it to be a bit more of a background thing rather than the main thing. The main big magical thing I wanted to show off were the emotions and dragons themselves, so it was quite hard to see where and what to add of the magical world.
But overall I think any story about mental health at its core is a tough beast to tackle. Everyone experiences their traumas and issues in very particular ways, and the least thing I wanted to do is make it look hollow and plain, or give harmful advice. Mental health is such a complex issue, that I had to constantly check and double check with friends and also my therapist to make sure that I wasn’t writing anything weird.
But having the element of magic to express analogies made everything a lot easier because it allowed me to be so much more gentle and poetic about these topics!
I wanted to ask about a couple of the design elements that stood out to me — first, the scrapbook-like opening pages really jumped out at me, and we see those sorts of elements several times in the story. The other is the “broken glass” panel effect you use when Joana is stressed or sad, or encounters a difficult/negative situation. Can you talk about your inspiration for these design choices, and what you were hoping to achieve with them?
I’ve always loved scrapbooks, and I thought that it would only be fit for this story to have the essence of a scrapbook because it’s a very personal story. We know everything from Joana’s perspective and hers only, so it just made sense when it came to make her story more relatable. It also allows for adding details about her likes and personality without having to necessarily explain these within the story!
When it came to the broken panels, I remember not drawing them for the first chapters up until a bit later when I thought that broken glass was very reminiscent of a broken soul, since there is this belief where one’s reflection is sort of like seeing into our own soul, and i started thinking then that the panels were like a screen where we’d be seeing Joana’s story, so it made a lot of sense to play with the visuals and literally break the whole thing. When I started doing that I thought it was very powerful visually, and I am a really big fan of visual analogies, so I rearranged the story so that I could slowly incorporate this into the core of I Feel Awful, Thanks.
What else are you working on, or have coming out soon?
I am currently working on the pitch for my next novel at the moment. A bit on the line of exploring emotions, this next story is centered in generational trauma passed on from mothers to daughters and takes place in communist Romania. Hopefully we’ll get to a stage where I can work on it full time so that it can be released soon!