By Zack Quaintance — Cartoonist Nate Powell is one of the most accomplished storytellers in any medium, known to most folks in comics for his work illustrating the March Trilogy, an autobiographical story about the Civil Rights movement told from the perspective of U.S. Congressman John Lewis. Powell’s newest book is a set of poignant essays set during the Trump presidency, examining in different ways the factors that contributed to this movement, how it felt to be in the early throes of it, and what exactly do you tell your kids?

In advance of the book’s release — Save It For Later is due out April 6 — Powell took some time out to chat with me about his newest work.

INTERVIEW: Nate Powell talks SAVE IT FOR LATER - PROMISES, PARENTHOOD, AND THE URGENCY OF PROTEST

ZACK QUAINTANCE: The first thing I wanted to ask about in the book — which I absolutely loved, by the way — was the dates at the end of each of these essays. I’m curious whether they marked the month you finished each piece, and whether you kept notes or journals to inform the comics…

NATE POWELL: The answer to both those questions is yes. The observations that led to the work in Save It For Later really kicked in in late 2017. Their origin would have been as two separate projects. I had been taking some notes in my sketchbook for myself, in terms of the quieter and more subjective experiences that happened in the first year of this authoritarian regime.

Everything was a series of fires. A lot of this was stuff I’d observed about shifts in my own allowances or lack of allowances I’d made for my own feelings. I was very much catching myself feeling like there was not enough bandwidth to focus on my feelings or what things were like with my family, trying to keep things normal when everything is on fire. So, I thought I needed to keep track of these and make sure we don’t lose the rawness of what things felt like in the moment.

I eventually got an idea for what would have been a slim, 90-page book I would have made quickly with rawness and immediacy, strictly these quieter subjective memoir accounts. At the same time, I had been congealing a lot of observations about military and paramilitary aesthetic and styles and symbols, shifts I had seen through the 2010s. A lot of the stuff I’d been thinking about for much of my life, and observations I had not concluded or continue from my book Any Empire that came out in 2011 started popping up again. I realized I had something to say about it.

The more I worked on each of those projects starting in 2018, by the end of that year I realized these were interconnected parts of one bigger idea that needed to be communicated…and so much had happened so quickly that I thought it was going to be important to point out when certain chapters were completed, because so much of the situation on the ground changed so quickly that the context of where those markers are in time are pretty crucial.

ZACK: Even before I finished the first piece, I wondered exactly when you were coming from and what the thinking was at that point in time.

NATE: The very first chapter, I was in New York City for an exhibit of artwork for March. While I was there, I visited my agent and told him this idea I had for this slim volume. He was fired up about it, I was fired up about, so I basically went back to my hotel room and wrote the entire first chapter, Buttered Noodles, in one sitting over the course of an hour or two. I went straight from that to thumbnailing it out, and all of that was basically laid out in one day in March of 2018.

ZACK: I did want to ask specifically about the piece About Face, with the context of January 6, it felt really prescient. What drew you to the increasingly prevalence of paramilitary symbols. It feels now like it’s been obvious or that we all should have been paying more attention. What initially inspired your attention to it?

NATE: A lot of that information I had been carrying around in my head for a couple decades, with a lot of reading I’d done between 2007 and 2010 for work that went into Any Empire. But what really pushed that into turning into its own essay goes back to just mundane every day life. It had to do with driving around my town doing mundane stuff every day and recognizing day after day a measurable uptick through 2016 and 2017 with stylistic shifts of preferred car colors while buying into political alignment with bumper sticker culture, and how that worked with Internet avatars, boiling down complex issues into a single image. It was about how people were using that to project themselves and project a sense of self or alignment onto their car, already an extension of self for many people.

The shift was so noticeable to me over the course of 2017 that it hit a boiling point where I realized no one was really talking about this in terms of surface or style, but I knew what I was observing was very real. I didn’t know if anyone else was paying attention to it. One of the values of comics is it allows you to work stuff out on the page, whether its comics as therapy or comics as a means of organizing your thoughts and actually arriving at a more measured conclusion than one may have had when one started.

When I finished the essay, a lot of those patterns had an increased. A crystallization of my observations had gotten firmly embedded, and yet there was such a sense of normality to it — which was the entire point of the essay. What’s disturbing is the normality. It constantly left me with the feeling that I was coming off as a paranoid wingnut, hitting way off the mark.

It tipped back and forth between the certainty I was really onto something and the deep fear that I was going to come off as paranoid, judgmental, dismissive. By the time I finished the essay — moving through the reasoning of the essay — I had to remind myself I was arriving at a point I agreed with whole-heartedly. Every day it’s been a really weird vindication to see it’s become part of a larger conversation in an important way.

ZACK: There’s a panel in there with a man in a Billabong t-shirt, a flashback to 1995, connecting dots to the past. It made me think about how terrifying these giant trucks we regularly see now with skulls and enormous tailpipes and a looming blackness to the window tint really would be if you took them and put them in 1996 or something.

NATE: Certainly. When I think about being a kid, I saw Robocop slightly too early — I was probably 10 — but I was really struck by this dystopian vision of what I now understand as a dystopian facist commentary on the militarization of police. I remember seeing Robocop that first time and the colorization on the police cars was jarring to me because it was for the 1980s out of the universal color standard and design standard for police cars. I wondered why they would be these muted charcoals and grays. Of all things, Robocop planted these seeds that would come to fruition in the 2010s.

ZACK: One of the other choices in the book I thought was really effective was portraying children as anthropomorphic figures. It made the themes around informing the innocent all the more powerful. I was wondering if you could talk about that choice?

NATE: It served two primary functions. So much of Save It For Later revolves around my family relationships and our family relationships with our children as they grow. A lot of it had to do with just basic consent issues, recognizing that it’s in my power if my kids are going to be part of the story in this book, they don’t really have agency yet. It’s up to me to give them as much distance as I can give from my work while still including them in some way, beyond just taking out their names

It was easy enough to shift their likeness a bit. It made me feel comfortable and less like I was mining my family for content. At the same time, when I think about the whole reason behind the more subjective, personal side of this book, I don’t feel like my story or my family’s story is noteworthy. That’s the point, that broadly these universally shared fears and sentiments and observations are things that tens of millions of families across the country can identify with.

I took a calculated risk that by shifting and obscuring my kid’s likeness a little bit, other parents would be able to project their own kids, their own families, their own experiences onto what they are reading more easily. That’s my hope. It works on both ends.

ZACK: It did make it feel a little less specific and more about the feelings and choices you make when trying to articulate what’s happened the last few years to children.

NATE: It’s also true that I made my kids magical quasi equestrians because yes the children are the future and yes they’re full of magic, so it’s an easy enough choice…to show that in equipping my kids to be able to observe and tackle a unique and pervasive set of challenges that they’re growing into very quickly, yes it is a race against a sense of magic and a sense of wonder which everyone has whittled away from their lives in degrees according to circumstances and according to privilege.

ZACK: That came through really effectively and it made the harder moments more poignant. The scene where you tell your daughter the bad guy won absolutely wrecked me.

NATE: It’s a weird thing when you catch yourself being so foolishly over confident. As a parent, I never expected I would be lying to my kid on election night. My assurances, my over assurances, my calloused overconfidence about the electoral result just shamed me rightfully as a parent in terms of buttering up my kids for some sense of a future that’s never guaranteed.

ZACK: I wanted to ask a quick process question. There’s some truly poetic memoir prose in this book, especially in the Tornado Children piece. There’s a segment that starts with all my old apocalyptic dreams, sexy and foolish, now choke our world. I thought that was gorgeous writing and wanted to ask when that writing takes place in your process.

NATE: On a storytelling level from page to page, I do tend to think of my page flow in a musical sense. I think of it in terms of rhythm, in terms of beats and trying to get to the bottom of the page and the next page. Moving through measures there’s sort of a rhythmic quality, and I’m sort of cascading a lot of my prose and a lot of my text to the bottom right of the page.

In the case of that four-page except that gets really internal and personal, I wrote all of that out for that entire sequence in probably 20 minutes. That sequence was an attempt to write lyrics to a song. I haven’t been in a band in almost 11 years, but there was sentiment I wanted to capture and I thought they were lyrics. I went through that as a rough version of a song. I was going to sit down over the next weeks and try to figure out something on bass or guitar or something, but then I looked at it the next day, and I thought, nope, this is just comics poetry. Let’s get to it.

A lot of it happens very quickly, and like with any bad poetry, it’s then a matter of snipping and tweaking and being focused on the lyrical quality of what you’ve written, focusing on the writing rather than the intent. The images came very naturally. I was probably able to layout those pages in the course of another day, very organically and quickly.

ZACK: There’s a few tonal shifts from informative to personal, and it made me wonder what kind of catharsis — if any — did you find in compiling the book the way you did?

NATE: From 2019 on, when I was in the thick of making the book, I was being gripped every day by fear and uncertainty of what lay in the future, in months or years to come. I think for about a year I was pretty focused on making a balanced, finished set of ideas that could stand on its own by saying what needed to be said in a way that would remain true regardless of who the winner of the 2020 election was. It would move into the 2020s with its core ideas not immediately irrelevant or dismissed because of the 2020 result.

The core of the entire book was that the set of crises and challenges we face aren’t new and aren’t something that are going to magically appear as a result of 2020. It makes a massive amount of difference who won the 2020 election, but most of my focus was not overstepping myself one way or another, not trying to hedge my bets but trying to see past that particular kind of armchair partisan approach to our national and social problems.

As we approached finishing the book in summer 2020, there was a lot of back and forth between me and my editor trying to figure out how to finish the book, whether or not we needed to do an afterword or two versions of an afterword depending on the result of the election. That’s when it became more and more clear I needed one way to wrap up the book and communicate these ideas that would be able to withstand either electoral result. When I would review things, I had to remind myself every couple of weeks that it would still stand up.

ZACK: The last question I wanted to ask is generally just, how are you feeling right now today with everything that’s happened in 2021 so far?

NATE: I have to say in terms of how my community is fairing with the virus, we continue to be doing pretty well. I’m taking the good where I can, I’m sticking with what I know works for me and my family. I did not have huge expectations for the Biden Administration, but I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised on a lot of levels. At the same time, I’m making sure that I’m clear-headed enough to speak up, to speak out, to push back against what I feel needs to be spoken out against or for. It’s also to remind my kids this is the core lesson of the last several years — that just because you get a victory or a crises is averted, it doesn’t mean you can let up.

When we talk about engaged citizenship, when we talk about learning the lessons of the past five years, what that means is you stay out in the street as much as you’re able, you find ways to protest and increase the pressure. These are not problems that go away. It involves a sustained effort and a permanent sense of civic engagement. So, I’m feeling cautiously optimistic. I’m also terrified, just watching a lot of fence-sitting politicians trying to slip back to business as usual. That’s the most terrifying to me, the idea that we’ll return to these usual modes of playing politics instead of using power when we have power to give real people real help, taking big chances, and by doing so acknowledging the degree of crisis that we face right now.

That’s what scares me now. It scares me more than the paramilitary and the white supremacist forces in this moment — this notion of business as usual. That’s the number one biggest danger.

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.

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