PRECIOUS RUBBISH
Presenting a series of hybrid gag panels and short prose, modeled after mid-century children’s comics like Casper, Little Dot, and Little Lulu, starring “Kayla,” a character whose blank expression never changes.
16 pages | black ink on tan paper | stapled | 2018This series is rooted in reclamation, as the author takes historically sexist and racist gag comics and interjects her own experience into the medium. By confronting dark themes—homophobia, the problem of evil, alcoholism, poverty, racism, aging parents, death—in this slapstick, silly context, the heavy moments become more potent, starker, and more shocking.
Kayla E. is a Texas-born artist and designer of Mexican-American descent. Her comics practice centers around her childhood and functions as a map-making exercise. Leaning heavily on the fixed compositional structure and aesthetic codes of post-war American comics, she imposes order onto recollections once disorganized by intrafamilial abuse, addiction, and sexual violence. Her textile work and painting practice are concerned with memories that present as unmappable. She works as creative director at Fantagraphics and is the co-founder and president of Nat. Brut Inc., a non-profit that produces the art and literary magazine Nat. Brut. She earned her B.A. from Harvard University, where she was awarded the Albert Alcalay Prize in Visual Arts and served as the art director for the Harvard Lampoon. As a public speaker, E. has been invited to expand on her practice at universities and creative conferences across the country. For the past few years, she has worked out of her downtown attic studio in rural North Carolina, where she lives with her wife, Laura Bullard. Kayla is a recipient of a Princeton Hodder Fellowship for the 2023-2024 academic year.
Recognized in American Illustration Annual No. 37, 2018.