Tillie Walden is a cartoonist and illustrator from Austin, TX. She is the creator of a number of award-winning graphic novels, including Spinning, On a Sunbeam, and The Walking Dead’s Clementine trilogy. Walden is a graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, where she now teaches and lives with her wife and son. LJ talks with her about the inspiration for her forthcoming graphic novel Charity and Sylvia (Drawn & Quarterly), writing historical biography in comics form, and queer life in the 19th century.

Charity and Sylvia is your first book since completing the Clementine trilogy, which was set in the world of The Walking Dead. What drew you to this story?

I am always drawn to the opposite of whatever I did last. This has been true for pretty much all my books, looking back. After finishing Spinning, a kind of downer ice-skating memoir, I immediately jumped into working on a positive space opera (On a Sunbeam). So after finishing Clementine I was really searching for some sort of new challenge, and I got very lucky that Charity and Sylvia’s story kind of turned up on my narrative doorstep. I knew right away I wanted it to be my next book.

How did you encounter the lives of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake? What convinced you that their story could sustain a full-length graphic biography?

About three years ago, I became the state of Vermont’s fifth cartoonist laureate. It was an honor, and a surprise, mostly because I’m not from Vermont originally. But then I was informed that other laureates were also not from Vermont but had laid roots there later on. (See: Alison Bechdel!) Anyways, after getting that new title, I got an influx of emails from Vermonters and Vermont organizations, and one of those emails was from a gentleman named Christopher from VT Humanities. He told me he had a story, a little piece of Vermont queer history, that he was dying to see made into a comic. We talked about it, and Charity and Sylvia certainly seemed compelling, but I told him this was likely just a short stapled comic, black-and-white, maybe 60 pages.

It wasn’t until I read the book about their lives, Charity and Sylvia, written by Rachel Hope Cleves, that it dawned on me that this story was much more than I realized. It’s not that anything too profound or crazy really happened to them—they were just average women, hardworking tailors in a rural town—but I found myself getting really deeply invested in every detail. The neighbors’ gossip, the deaths of family, the illnesses, the religiosity. So of course it had to become a full book!

What do comics allow you to do with history that a prose biography might not?

I don’t think there’s anything a comic can do that a prose biography can’t, but I think comics just bring about a different kind of feeling. Plenty of prose histories are excellent at expressing the vivid and minute details of daily life in a bygone era, which is usually the thing I’m after too. But comics have this way of really allowing you to linger in a historical space. You visit the same places again and again, you watch seasons roll by, hair come unfurled, clouds parted and graves dug. I think comics have a real power of welcoming a reader in, and this is just so much fun to do in a historical book. What I also appreciate is that comics allow you to tell subtle stories in the background. Of course there’s the main characters in the forefront, usually talking about something, but you can add layers so easily around them. Every panel has room for another secret story. In this book, it’s not complicated, but it’s there: wagons and families and dramas always flowing around Charity and Sylvia, noticed and unnoticed.

Were there moments where the historical record resisted dramatization? How did you handle those gaps?

Of course! So much of their journal was just recollections of church and a list of chores completed. Not a lot there. I feel like I handled these gaps by trying to find a way to make the mundane matter. This didn’t feel that hard for me because I’m sort of in the thick of that myself because I have a young child. My wife and I both work and have almost no childcare, so the strain of everyday labors is present. The long stretches in Charity’s and Sylvia’s lives that lacked drama still retained a strong sense of sweat and grit. They never stopped working, they never stopped fearing for their lives and homes and next meal. That in itself became a large part of the story, and I fueled a lot of it from my own observations of early motherhood.

Visually, the book feels more restrained and observational than some of your earlier work. How did you develop the visual language for a 19th-century setting?

It is! I actually really adore comics in a grid format, and it’s my preferred way to make and read comics. But for a long time, it felt like it would be restrictive for most of my other stories, and I quietly bided my time until the right project came around for me to profess my love for the 12-panel grid and for the vignette format. The grid lent itself beautifully to capturing the 19th century: so many squares, so many barns and wooden plates. I of course had to use a ton of reference, and I was hungry for as much as I could get. I still feel like it wasn’t enough, but I ended up using a lot of paintings, illustrations, and recreated homes and spaces at historical societies and museums. My packet of reference photos was about as thick as the book itself!

Charity and Sylvia presents a queer relationship that is neither hidden nor tragic, despite the period. How did you think about representing queer life in the early United States without imposing contemporary frameworks?

It was delightful. This is such a subversive story to me because it flies in the face of how we think about queer life in the past. I think all representations of queer history are welcome and add to the genre, but I have to say I was really excited to share a story where Charity and Sylvia’s difference was solved by community, not by individuality. They found acceptance by meeting their town where they were at, by continuing to be helpful and pious and generous with their family and neighbors. They slowly wore down everyone around them to the point where their lives appeared normal. Never did they come out, never did they yell or fight for their rights. They simply existed with a quiet and subtle defiance, and because of that they had a long life together. Of course, we still desperately need stories, past and present, of active fights for rights, especially as so many are currently being dismantled. Charity and Sylvia’s method to a same-sex marriage is just one piece of the whole American puzzle.

What books or comics have you enjoyed recently?

On the American history beat, it is no surprise to say I am loving Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming. I’m moving through it as slowly as a Regular on a muddy road but loving every minute. A comic I enjoyed recently was Cats of the Louvre by Taiyo Matsumoto. I love everything he does; his work is such a gift.