Sammy Harkham Spread Virgin’s Blood (2023, Pantheon).
Fourteen years in the making, the graphic novel by Sammy Harkham Virgin’s Blood (Pantheon) follows a father in his twenties and his struggle to make a B-movie of the same title in 1970s Hollywood. The storyline developed through a series of staple-related comics called “Crickets”, originally published by Drawn & Quarterly and later self-published. In 2007, Harkham’s DIY philosophy led him to open an art bookstore in Los Angeles called Family with friend David Kramer, for whom he named “Kramers Ergot,” a revered anthology series that rocked on the edge of comics from 2000 to 2019. Below, Harkham talks about his inspiration for his three-hundred-page opus, which draws on deep comic book history and personal experience to tell a story about cinema and family, ambition and anomie, and the dark understudy of the American dream.
I THINK A PLOT is like a hanger to hang ideas and feelings. The basic plot and structure of Virgin’s Blood was the perfect hanger. The story was a magnet for all these other ideas I had at the time about Los Angeles as a place and its past. There seemed to be some sort of thematic connection between how I thought about the city and how I thought about the relationship between the book’s main characters, an aspiring filmmaker and his wife, Ida. This relationship was loosely based on my parents, but my father worked in the garment industry. He has never worked in the cinema. I was thinking of a Sephardic Jewish man from the Middle East with a young wife from New Zealand and a child, and trying to make something work in Los Angeles in the 70s. That was the spark.
When I work on comics, the goal is to clear the mind of everything else, so my subconscious is still working on the story. Even when I go shopping, cooking dinner, or picking up the kids, I know my creative mind is fully engaged. I don’t write scripts for my comics because I don’t want to adapt from one medium to another. I want to work from within the medium. So many discoveries are found in the act of drawing. I don’t want to write something and then find a way to translate it into a comic. I want to work with panels and images, trying to find a way to convey an emotion from the medium itself. And I want to find actions that are both completely clear while suggesting some ambiguity.
At the start of a panel, I sometimes only have a vague idea of what I’m trying to do. It’s a bit like having the first part of a melody that I repeat over and over until a certain rhythm develops. And the pacing gives me an idea of what the next scene should look like. It’s like I’m digging into the ground, trying to get up under the thing I’m trying to touch, instead of watching it from above or from a distance. Hopefully by the time I get to the end of the chapter the panels will feel cohesive and organic. The phrasing is subtle and very particular, and comes from being so deep inside the story.
The cover of Virgin’s Blood (2023, Pantheon).
I did a lot of punk-rock posters when I was a teenager for shows for all ages at a local club. When I was fifteen, I snuck onto Will Oldham’s show. It was a show over eighteen years old and I went backstage and asked him if he would do an interview for my zine, Kramers Ergot, which did not yet exist. A few months later, I sent him a number, which I did because I had offered the interview. He called me and he said, “I’m about to put out a record under this new band name called Bonnie Prince Billy, and I’d love some artwork to go with each song because I’m trying to create a character that is not me. . I try to move away from something that is completely autobiographical towards this other form. Which I didn’t really understand at the time. I was at an age where you looked at a David Bowie record or a Leonard Cohen record and assumed that was the person. But there are layers of identity tied to a personality for a musician. He sent me the demo tape and for three months I just listened to the tape every day after high school. I would draw a page for each song. Every time I listened to a song, I made more drawings in this sketchbook. And then I sent him the book – I didn’t even scan it first. I just sent him the book and they took drawings of those pages. And these were used in Bonnie Prince Billy’s debut album, I see a darkness, and he paid me. It was my first paid concert.
A few years later, I self-published the first in a series of anthology-style books under the same name, “Kramers Ergot.” Meanwhile, there were so many great comics that weren’t taken seriously. I thought if I could create a context for this work by putting it together, the reader might see some connections and maybe that would change the way comics were seen.
As an editor, there were deeper issues that I was trying to pursue that I wasn’t fully aware of. When people asked me about “Kramers”, my answers were a bit vague because I didn’t have any answers. I had just put in place what seemed right to me, intuitively. But as I finished the last issue, I finally got to see what the connecting line was, and that’s what made it the last issue. Because once you’ve answered the question, you’re like, Oh, it’s done. I know the answer. If I keep doing that, there’s no more sense of discovery.
In curating “Kramers Ergot”, I think I was looking for work that felt connected to the history of comics, the last hundred years of the medium, but also looking at the future of comics at the same time. And always with humor and always in a personal voice, in a tailor-made voice. With comics, if you do your job well, you always feel like you’re about to embarrass yourself.
– As said to Maegan Dolan
