It’s always interesting to consider who and what had an influence on something.
Take Leela Corman’s new graphic novel Victory Parade (hardcover, Kindle), which, as she says in the following email interview, was influenced by such seemingly disparate influences as the iconic experimental band Einstürzende Neubauten, the sitcom M*A*S*H, author Primo Levi, singer Josephine Baker, and painter Otto Dix, to highlight a few.
Photo Credit: © Dena Rosenberg
Let’s start with the story. Without spoiling anything, obviously, what is Victory Parade about, and when and where is it set?
Broadly speaking, it’s about the ways that individuals carry collective traumas. It’s set in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, Buchenwald in 1945, and in the place where the worlds of the living and the dead intersect: the dream state and the death state.
It sounds like this story has some political and social relevance to what’s going on in the world lately.
It’s impossible to be a cultural worker in this or any time period and not make work with relevance to what is happening in the world. It’s a matter of choosing what to respond to, and refining that response through the work.
All of my projects begin with very personal stories of human beings. In fact, they always begin with a single image. In this case, it was the image of a woman factory worker in the 1940s. That was in 2013. I let the idea incubate. By 2015 I was beginning to hear fascist rhetoric deployed at immigrants and asylum-seekers. In the beginning of 2016, I was trying to narrow down ideas for my next long graphic novel, and chose this one because it felt the most alive to me. Only after the 2016 election did I understand that my book would have to serve as a form of antifascist activism.
It’s also an attempt to stay in my lane. It’s not my place to write and draw about other peoples’ group traumas, but I can use my own to talk about things that are happening right now. The echoes of the Shoah and the decade leading to it are all around us, but now happening to other groups of people. Genocide is always with us, it’s a species problem. It didn’t begin with the Shoah. But that is the lens through which I feel qualified to talk about it. I didn’t expect it to be so painfully relevant: neo-Nazi activity, far right violence, the genocidal wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the dehumanizing rhetoric and laws towards asylum-seekers and refugees.
Credit: Leela Corman 2024
You kind of just answered this, but did you set out to write something politically and socially relevant, and Victory Parade is what you came up with, or did you start with the story and then realize it would work better if it was politically and / or socially relevant?
Neither. These things grow organically.
Victory Parade is your fourth graphic novel, though you also have two collections of short, non-fiction comics. Are there any writers, or specific stories, that you feel had a big influence on Victory Parade, but not on any of your previous books? And when I say “writers,” I include in that writers of fiction and poetry, not just graphic novels and comics.
I am extremely influenced by many artists in all disciplines: William Kentridge, Ana Mendieta, Diamanda Galas, Einstürzende Neubauten and Blixa Bargeld in particular, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Lynda Barry, Pedro Almodovar, Fatih Akin, Otto Dix (whose painting “The Skat Players” I copied in this book, as well as the inverted bullet-ridden legs from his Tryptichon Der Krieg), George Grosz, Jeanne Mammen, Carolee Schneeman, Phoebe Gloeckner, Aline Kominsky Crumb, Rabih Alameddine, Rowland S. Howard, Aleksandra Waliszewska, Clarity Haynes, The Velvet Underground, Thurston Moore, Yiddish Modernist graphic arts, Thalia Zedek, Brian Eno, Studs Terkel, Primo Levi, Lydia Lunch, Josephine Baker, Mark Rothko. I could go on.
How about non-literary influences; was Victory Parade influenced by any movies or TV shows?
Well, I named a few directors above, but I’d love to get specific about this.
Fatih Akin’s film Head-On (Gegen Die Wand) was my school of storytelling for many years. When I’m working I often ask myself, “What would Pedro Almodovar do?”, and I cannot pick a favorite film of his, though lately I think it’s All About My Mother. But also Talk To Her, Julieta, High Heels, and Women On The Verge of A Nervous Breakdown. I learned so much about communication through color from him.
A huge influence, in an aspirational way, is Lina Wertmuller’s incredible film Seven Beauties (Pasqualino Settebelleza). That film is the mountain I wish to climb. Many works of art claim to be transgressive, but few truly are. This is one of the most transgressive films I have ever seen, especially the part set in a concentration camp.
I am also a big fan of a movie called Remembrance, by a filmmaker named Anna Justice; I think it is the most honest depiction of a lager I have seen. Agnieszka Holland is another filmmaker I love, also Agnes Varda. Werner Herzog looms very large for me, especially Aguirre, The Wrath Of God; but also his documentaries, recent and earlier. Abderrhamane Sissako’s film Timbuktu absolutely destroyed me. Bahman Ghobadi made some of the best films about the impact of war on civilians that I know of. The film Crossing Delancey loves and celebrates Ashkenazi women, and was made in the New York of my childhood. This book directly quotes Busby Berkeley films in several visual sequences, and finally, Richard Elfman’s 1980 film The Forbidden Zone is the best movie ever made, and I sneak a different line from it into each of my long books.
Episodic TV has been a massive influence, in particular Deadwood, Mad Men, and M*A*S*H. More recently Reservation Dogs, which is a work of genius, possibly the best thing on a screen in the past couple of decades. The first season of Russian Doll, which is such a third-generation Holocaust descendant story, without ever hitting you over the head with it. And over the summer I had covid, which forced me to do nothing for a month; I watched a series called Vida that I had missed, an absolutely great show about a queer Chicana community in LA; and P-Valley, a show set in a strip club in rural Mississippi that is Deadwood-level astonishing. And, I have a thing for German detective dramas. They often deal with the rise of neo-Nazi activity after the end of Communism, and with other serious issues; they’re not copaganda.
Credit: Leela Corman 2024
Switching over to the art, who or what do you feel had the biggest influence on the way you drew Victory Parade?
Well, first and foremost, I’m a classically-trained figure artist and painter, so, my training. I am heavily influenced by the Neue Sachlichkeit painters of Weimar Germany, by Modernism in general, by vintage pinup art, by the ’80s and ’90s underground comics I grew up with and trained myself to make comics by reading.
And was Victory Parade drawn or painted? Or a mix? Because some of the backgrounds look almost like watercolors, while the subjects look like they were drawn with pen and ink, and then colored.
The whole thing is watercolor, gouache, and acrylic.
Hollywood loves turning graphic novels into movies. Do you think Victory Parade could work as a movie?
I absolutely think so, and I think this about my 2012 graphic novel Unterzakhn, too. Given the way the best writing has moved to the small screen, I think they’d both be great as limited series. I would dearly love to see that happen.
And if that happened, who would you want them to cast as Rose, Ruth, and the other main characters?
I’m really not sure. I do know I don’t want actors in Jewface or prosthetic noses. And it can’t be directed by a cis man.
Honestly, if Joan Micklin Silver were still alive I’d give anything to have her make it. It would need to be made by someone who loves and understands Ashkenazi and New York women, from the inside; so preferably somebody who is those things. Natasha Lyonne. She’s brilliant and those things.
So, is there anything else people need to know about Victory Parade?
Don’t read it right before bed, or, maybe do. It depends on what kind of dreams you want to have.
Finally, if someone enjoys Victory Parade, which of your other graphic novels would you suggest they check out next and why that one?
Definitely my recent short comics collection, You Are Not A Guest, and my 2012 graphic novel Unterzakhn, which is book one of my New York trilogy. Victory Parade is book two.
