Whether you find bugs to be fascinating or just creepy, you’ll likely enjoy today’s Q&A with Peter Kuper and Allison Conway. We continue our new interview series in conjunction with the Boston Comic Arts Foundation as the creators of Insectopolis and A Pillbug Story talk about their big love for some of the world’s smallest creatures
Picture + Panel is a monthly conversation series that brings fantastic graphic novel creators to the Boston area. Each conversation explores a specific topic, ranging from the fun and exciting to the strange or serious — like demon possession or monsters. Produced in partnership by the Boston Comic Arts Foundation, Porter Square Books and the Boston Figurative Arts Center, Picture + Panel provides thought-provoking discussions for the unique form of expression that is the comics medium.
On June 2 at 7 p.m. Eastern, Kuper and Conway will be at the Boston Figurative Arts Center in Somerville, Massachusetts for a discussion on all things bug-related with Whit Farnum from the Farrell Lab at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. You can find more details on the event’s website.
Big thanks as always to Gina Gagliano and Jason Viola, who organize the monthly series in Boston and brought this Q&A series to Smash Pages!
How did you get interested in insects?
Peter Kuper: At the age of four, my family was living in New Jersey and it happened to be ground zero for the 17-year cicada emergence. While most people would probably run screaming from millions of insects crawling out of the ground and up trees while creating a 100-decibel alien wail, I was totally thrilled. Also at that time one of my favorite books was P. D. Eastman’s, Sam and the Firefly. My parents bought me a Golden Nature Guide on insects that became my Bible. I still have it sitting next to me at my drawing table to this day. It’s like a talisman.
Allison Conway: My interest in insects started by an experience I had in college in Savannah, Georgia. My final year at Savannah College of Art and Design I began noticing red, itchy welts on my body. At some point I put it together that I was getting them in the morning. I pulled the sheets back to find bugs and eggs in the BED! I called our landlord, and he brought a general bug spray guy who looked at my pictures and said they were not bed bugs so there was not much he could do. He did a surface level spray and left. I had completely stripped my bed and kept getting welts and discovered that the bugs were all in the bed frame too. I ended up with a mattress on the ground with a bed bug cover on it. I did some sleuthing around the house to try to figure out where the bugs were coming from. By this point I had discovered they were a bug called carpet beetles. They do not bite humans, but we can be allergic to the hairs on their body. They primarily eat dust, cloth and wood particles. During my sleuthing I discovered the culprit: the couch. Carpet beetles had taken over the couch. Eggs, larvae and adults were all throughout the cushions and creases. Even after sending pictures of this to the landlord, he would still not bring a proper exterminator because it wasn’t bed bugs.
One night my best friend, who I lived with, came to my room in tears. She had found a bed bug in her bed! Then she discovered they were all in her curtains, adults, larvae and eggs. We sent a picture to our landlord, who finally said, “Ah! That’s a bed bug! I will call the exterminator.” I was annoyed but relieved that we would finally get a proper exterminator. We went through the process of packing everything up, washing everything and putting all clothes and cloth into garbage bags.
By this point months had gone by, and I only had two months of college left. I was so ready to leave. I settled back into my room, which was now a shell of its former self. I did not want any surface where bugs could get comfortable and multiply. I was sleeping on my bed, which was now a mattress on the floor with no sheets because I felt like the sheets would hold bugs to my skin. One night my pillow felt weird, and I looked in the opening of the pillowcase. I pulled out my phone flashlight and saw little poops from something entering the pillowcase. I shined my flashlight in the pillowcase and found a giant cockroach inside. This time, I ran to my best friend’s room crying and telling her what happened. She graciously got the cockroach out of my pillowcase which, fortunately, was dead.
A month later I graduated from SCAD and went to my parents’ house in Rochester, New York to live at home for a year after college. It took about five years until I stopped having bug nightmares and having to wake up in the night to check my bed for bugs.
Why did you start making comics about insects?
Conway: During my first year out of college, I thought it would be cool to publish some strips on Vice. I emailed Nick Gazin, the editor of Vice Comics at the time, some comic ideas, which he promptly turned down. He told me to pitch again, so I tried to decide what a fun, weird idea might work for Vice.
I figured I would just draw bugs since they were all I could think about and have nightmares about anyway. I love pillbugs and they have never scared me even as a kid. When I Googled about them for the comic, I discovered they were not an insect at all but the only land crustacean that lives amongst bugs. That is essentially how Millie the Pillbug was born. I figured I would draw the bugs all cute and sweet-looking to help me see them as nice creatures and not terrifying villains.
When I was a kid, I had lice, and my mom suffocated them off my head with olive oil, which sucked out oxygen. I felt bad for them. They had generations of families wiped out in two hours! I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there is a part of me that felt bad when I left the apartment in Savannah, knowing and hoping all those bugs would die. They are just trying to exist like all of us.
Kuper: My desire to become an entomologist lasted until I saw comic books. Although I continued to study insects, comics became my passion and ultimately my career. At some point it dawned upon me, there was a Venn diagram between the two. My first combination of them was doing an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis back in 2002. Then later, I did a graphic novel called Ruins and made one of the main characters an entomologist who had moved to Mexico. My wife, daughter and I spent two years living in Oaxaca Mexico, and during that time my daughter, and I raised monarch butterflies, and then, in one of the highlights of my life, we visited the monarch reserve where they come to one area of forest every year by the millions.
Creating Insectopolis was the culmination of my dual interests — plus I explored not only insects but also the people who studied them through history. This gave me an opportunity to reach out to actual entomologists, who gave me important advice that helped me make that book as accurate as possible.
How are insects integrated into your work?
Kuper: Every possible way imaginable.
Conway: For my book, A Pillbug Story, insects are the main characters of the book. Each character is a different insect, arachnid or crustacean species, and that factors into their lives and how they function. Every bug has different needs and attributes. I love to create a mixture of actual bug facts with the human experience. For my other comics I am also including bugs wherever I can in my work because bugs truly are always all around us.
What’s your favorite thing about insects?
Conway: I love how insects are so small and unassuming and always present. Once I started to research bugs for comic ideas I discovered not only how many there are (1.4 billion insects for every person on Earth) but their wonderful and infinite horrifying abilities. For instance, ladybugs eat up to 50 aphids a day. Aphids are sometimes born pregnant. One dung beetle can drag 1,141 times its weight. Cockroaches can live up to a week without their heads. Butterflies can smell each other from miles away. Just to name a FEW facts!
Kuper: I couldn’t narrow it down to one thing, to me they are miraculous and beautiful on so many different levels. My exploration of insects is bottomless.
What’s your least favorite insect?
Kuper: Hard to narrow that down as well. The ticks that give you Lyme disease, sand, fleas, bedbugs and scabies. I’m also not crazy about many mosquitoes, but as you may discover in my book, their story is complicated.
Conway: My least favorite thing is swarms of insects, and especially insects that feed off our bodies. I understand that every creature has a purpose in the ecosystem, but my gosh are mosquitoes, ticks and bed bugs annoying. I would never want to unnecessarily kill them. However, it is rare that killing them is unnecessary.
What misconceptions have you found people have about insects?
Conway: I feel like people think of insects as irrelevant or horrifying. Spiders (I know) are not technically insects, but people hate them. There are so few poisonous spiders, especially in North America, but people treat all spiders like they are poisonous. I feel like people assume more harm from insects than good. I feel they get a bad rap because we see them as so different from ourselves. I think we are more like insects than different. If you look at a city from high above it looks like an ant colony! Also, people hate flies and maggots, but they are the natural born cleaners of the world. Our planet would be a disgusting place without these tidy little critters.
Kuper: That cicadas are locusts and sting, that all mosquitoes bite, and that they are synonymous with malaria, which is like blaming a syringe for carrying heroin. But the biggest misconception is that we don’t need insects in order to survive. We do.
Are there other media about insects that have inspired your work?
Kuper: While I was working on Insectopolis, I watched hundreds of hours of YouTube interviews with entomologists, Ted Talks on anything related to insects, documentaries about evolution, dung, beetles, dragonflies, and on and on. There’s a certain point when I am drawing or I’m able to listen to and half watch films, and certainly podcasts, so in the nearly five years it took me to complete my book, I threw down many hours of information that way. I also read dozens of books on the subject.
Conway: As a kid I remember being really inspired by Miss Spider children’s books by David Kirk. I specifically remember in the books Miss Spiders Wedding when a suitor that was trying to get Miss Spider to like him tried to eat her boyfriend. That shot was so scary, but I loved it. Also, Pixar’s A Bug’s Life made me think about the worlds that are around us all the time that we may not notice. As a kid I loved the first shot that zooms towards this large tree then down and you see there are whole families and creatures existing in this space under the tree that if I walked by it as a kid I might have never noticed.
If you could recommend one other graphic novel about insects to people who love your work, what would it be (and why)?
Conway: Beautiful Darkness by Kerascoet.
This graphic novel is not exactly about insects, but it features many insects and is unlike any other book I have ever read, prose or graphic novel. It explores a world in the grass and underground, and is cute but terrifying at the same time. Also, be warned, Beautiful Darkness is quite a bit more upsetting than A Pillbug Story, so brace yourself if you decide to dive in.
Kuper: If I had to recommend just one, it would probably be Ruins (I know that’s self-serving, but it does cover the migration of the monarch butterfly and has lots of entomological details throughout) if I were to recommend somebody else, it would be Jay Hosler’s graphic novel The Way of the Hive: A Honey Bee’s Story. It’s more geared for a YA audience, but I found it both informative and very touching.