Christine Schwöbel-Patel (CSP): Thank you so much for allowing us to reprint your comic in this collection! And thank you also for agreeing to speak to us about your work.
My first question relates to victims and agency: One of the things that animated this collection was the representations of victims (of international crime) as lacking agency. While your work does not represent international crime and justice directly, it does engage with agency of victims. What made you decide to portray Juliana, the main character in your comic, as a brown belt in karate?
Peter Quach (PQ): The origin story of this comic could be a meta-commentary on the agency of victims, so let me start at the beginning. It was 2018, when I was talking with one of my then-roommates in Chicago about her dating life using Tinder. At the same time, it was the height of the #MeToo movement in the US and I was grappling with new stories of sexual assault from people in my life and trying to understand it in a more concrete rather than abstract way. The Believer magazine commissioned a comic from me, and I decided to write it about all these things swirling around in my life—Tinder, dating as a woman, and sexual assault.
Carolina Alonso Bejarano (CAB): When Peter told me of his new comic idea, I asked him, as a hetero, cis-gender man who’s never been harassed, what he could possibly say about sexual harassment from the perspective of a woman. I asked him how he planned to do his research, and I told Peter, ‘it’s time for men to listen.’ He replied, ‘it’s time for men to speak up,’ and then he hung up. I was really skeptical of what he would write, especially when I didn’t hear from him for a few days.
PQ: It took me a while to overcome my ego and accept that I didn’t know anything about this topic. Men think we know everything! But I eventually swallowed my pride, called Caro back, and asked her to write the comic with me, officially.
CAB: I was excited about the idea of writing this comic with Peter. He and I had collaborated in art for many years and we already ran a serial webcomic together. However, as a person who has experienced sexual violence and had never written about it, I really had to consider whether or not I felt capable of writing the story with Peter. In the end I thought that this would possibly help me heal from my experiences of sexual abuse, and I accepted the invitation.
PQ: When we were conceiving of the comic together, we knew that we wanted it to be a story about healing. We decided that fifteen pages was too small a canvas to portray recovery from sexual assault, which may take a lifetime. So instead, we aimed to illustrate a snapshot of the process.
CAB: I am a Gender Studies scholar and proposed that we talk to a few of our friends who are experts in sexual violence before brainstorming the storyline. During this research stage, multiple sources said that women who suffer sexual assault often try to reconnect with our bodies during our recovery.
PQ: To circle back to the question, I have been practicing karate for many years, and in our first brainstorming session we decided that having Juliana train in karate would be a good way for her to recover a connection with her body and to reclaim a sense of agency. We could use my own knowledge as a brown belt in karate, and karate could serve as an overarching metaphor for Juliana’s healing process and state of mind.
CAB: I understand that karate is about much more than this, but I believe that knowing how to rip someone’s testicles off would help me reclaim some of my sense of safety in going through the world as a woman.
