The Art Form of Trauma Aftermath: “Precious Rubbish” https://ift.tt/hle3sL5
I first met Kayla E. at the 2025 HeroesCon in Charlotte, when I explored Indie Island and stumbled upon the advertisement for Precious Rubbish as soon as I walked down the stairs. Her booth caught my eye immediately with the bright, striking colors in the iconic logo of Li’l Kayla, the protagonist of Precious Rubbish, a graphic memoir exploring her childhood trauma in Texas. From the moment I saw the poster, I knew she was an immense talent, and not just because I had read a review of her debut in The New Yorker. In a comic con, it’s hard to stand out. I often found it hard to pay attention to any one booth for too long because of the crows and the noise and the floor so overwhelmingly full of artists selling their products. So for her graphic design to catch my attention meant her book would, too. And it did. Precious Rubbish is one of the most original graphic novels I’ve read.
Memoir and childhood trauma are expertly woven into panels, paper dolls, board games and other experiments in a way that is gut-wrenching and emotionally impactful. It is a brilliant and innovative use of the comic form, one that will stay with you long after you read.
Kayla E. is an award-winning Texas-born artist of Mexican American descent. She works as creative director at Fantagraphics and is a recipient of a 2023-2024 Princeton Hodder Fellowship. She is the co-founder and former president of Nat. Brut Inc., a non-profit that produces an art and literary magazine, of which she was the editor-in-chief for nine years. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University, where she served as the art drector for the Harvard Lampoon.
I spoke to Kayla via Zoom in July about the process of creating Precious Rubbish, her influences as an artist and graphic designer and becoming a cartoonist.
Do you remember the moment when you knew you wanted to be an artist or a cartoonist?
I think for the artist part of it, it was just something that was an innate sort of gift and talent that I had. From a very young age I loved to read, and I loved to draw, and I think that creative interest was sort of a survival tool for me as a child. And then for comics, specifically, I didn’t become interested in drawing comics until my freshman year of college, after I took a seminar called Alternative American Comics at Harvard, and it was there that I read graphic novels for the first time, specifically reading Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware was paradigm-shifting for me as an artist. I was like, What is this magical medium? And, I have to try it right now! So after I read that book I drew my very first comic strip, and then I was hooked, and I’ve been drawing comics ever since then.
What was it about Jimmy Corrigan that lit the spark for you?
I think that he’s just so proficient at using the form, in particular, to communicate human pain. And so the character Jimmy Corrigan has such complicated relationships with his parents and is dealing with these unnameable feelings of abandonment and having not really been loved or nurtured by his parents, and so Chris uses the form to sort of investigate what it’s like inside of Jimmy Corrigan’s head, and I really feel like through that book I was able to embody a character in a way that I had never experienced before in any other medium, including movies, and that character, his pain, his challenges, his emotional state, really hit me, and impacted me greatly, almost on a spiritual kind of cellular level. I’d never had that kind of relationship with a text or a work of art. It felt really intimate, and it definitely changed me.
Were there any other comics taught in that class that had an impact on you?
Yeah. Definitely American Splendor by Harvey Pekar, and we also read Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Those were some of the foundational ones for sure.
Your book definitely reminded me of Maus in how it challenges our expectations of what a comic can do, especially how you play with the form and experiment with breaking out of panels. I love all the cutouts you have and the word searches. They sort of remind me of something in creative writing called a hermit crab essay, where you take the form of something else to tell the story. How did you know when to experiment and when to play with panels versus paper dolls?
That’s a very good question. My answer might be a bit surprising, but I have no idea, to be completely honest. The book was entirely driven by instinct. There were really little to no conscious formal decisions that I made. I think because I wrote the bulk of this book in private, essentially in secret, it freed me up to not even think about rules. Not just break them, but make the comics that I felt truly driven to make for my own personal reasons for trying to understand what had happened to me. So these choices would just occur to me and I would do it. And so I think the sort of awareness of what I was doing came after I decided to share the book with the public. I pitched the book to Fantagraphics and then I started editing it and organizing it, and so I was able to make decisions about the order of things, like when is there a paper doll, when is there a board game, when is there sort of a more traditional story in terms of moving things around, but even with that it was kind of vibe. When it felt right, it just read right, and I try not to think about things too much honestly. I feel like I can get in my own way, so my work is at its best when I try to release those sort of shackles and just make the thing.
Do you find engaging with other forms of art helps you make comics?
Yes absolutely. I think really in particular, for me I listen to a lot of Gregorian chants, like very spiritual. And so that helps me. I love listening to that kind of music. And also reading my big stack of books on prayer and mindfulness and whatnot. It’s not all woo-woo stuff, a lot of it is fourteenth-century medieval mystic texts, so I like to read a lot of that stuff, too. So I’d say, at this point in my life, contemporary comics aren’t moving me to make art. It’s a lot of old, old stuff. Like really early comics are the things that make me itch to draw, but definitely when I was making Precious Rubbish I was just constantly consuming comics from all periods including more contemporary comics works, but I’m in a bit of a different phase with my influences right now.
For more about Precious Rubbish and the artwork of Kayla E., visit her website.
NONFICTION Precious Rubbish
By Kayla E.
Fantagraphics Books
Published April 8, 2025
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