The Rural We: Barbara Slate
Barbara Slate has written hundreds of comic books and graphic novels for DC, Marvel, Archie and Disney including Barbie, Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas, and Betty and Veronica, and created her own comics Angel Love, Yuppies from Hell, Sweet XVI, and Getting Married and Other Mistakes. In 1976, she created Ms. Liz, a feminist cartoon character who graced greeting cards, ran as a comic in Cosmopolitan, and appeared as an animated segment on NBC's TODAY Show for two seasons. Also the author of You Can Do a Graphic Novel, Slate travels the region teaching her craft to students of all ages at public libraries and at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She lives in Stockport, N.Y. with her partner, Richard Minsky, founder of the Center for Book Arts. Slate’s latest project is The Mueller Report Graphic Novel, the first volume of which was released last week. The second in the two-volume adaptation of the Mueller Report will be released on September 17. You can purchase them now as individual comic books, or in September as one complete graphic novel. You can find Slate and both volumes of her new comic at the Brooklyn Antiquarian Book Fair in Greenpoint, Brooklyn on September 7 and 8.
I was born in St. Louis and then we moved to Harrisburg, PA, where I was raised. I went to school at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and, when I graduated, I took the Greyhound bus to New York. I stayed at the 92nd Street Y and found a job at JCPenney as a package designer. I lived everywhere — uptown, downtown, in The Village — for 35 years. We also had a place in Sag Harbor. Then I adopted a child and wanted to get out of the city. Richard Minsky, my partner, and I sold our apartments and house and moved upstate 22 years ago.
When I started writing at Marvel in the ‘80s, it was all men; I was one of only two women who were writing and drawing for Marvel. When I worked on Barbie, it was all women writers and artists, thanks to our editor, Hildy Mesnick. My friends said, ‘How can you go from feminist Angel Love to Barbie?’ But Barbie was the ultimate feminist. Barbie could go to the moon, have all sorts of jobs, and she could live anywhere. The only thing she couldn’t do was make a mistake.
After The Mueller Report came out, I thought ‘Which one of my genius graphic artist friends is going to draw this?’ I kept thinking about it, so I did my own take, with my own humor. Whoever reads it will get a very good idea of the report. A lot of the time I took his words and put them in balloons. I wanted to be true to him but make it digestible and readable.
I have a strong boring-meter, so I can tell when things are getting boring. I concentrated on making it the real deal. I took 4 to 6 pages and read them over and over 8 or 9 times because it’s very difficult material to get through. I did it so I would understand what the story was. That was a lot of time spent, but it was well worth it. So much of it is just nuts. I gave the sections different titles than Mueller did; when Trump invites Comey to dinner, I called it “Dinner for Two.” I had fun with that kind of thing, and some of the stories are shocking. You can see how Manafort’s connection to Russia was so wrong and how it changed the election.
The other thing was, I wasn’t into Twitter, but I started posting one page at a time on there and I went from 50 to 1,500 followers almost overnight. I was happy I had that forum there and on Facebook. I felt like I had a support system, because I’m usually working by myself with the dog all day.
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