Virtual Memories Show 347:
Kevin Huizenga
“I have a split in my writing life. Part of my brain plans everything out, but I know enough now not to listen to that too much, and that I should be more open to improvising.”
Cartoonist Kevin Huizenga joins the show to talk about his new graphic novel, Glenn Ganges in The River at Night
“One of the great rewards of working on something large over time is not planning it out ahead of time but letting it unfold organically and then looking back and seeing the paths that you didn’t plan.”
“Introspection and self-knowledge is a mixed bag. It’s often bad news when you think about it too much.”
“Don’t follow your heroes on social media.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
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About our Guest
Kevin Huizenga (HIGH zing guh) grew up in a suburb of Chicago, South Holland, which is a small town of Dutch immigrants. He is the son of an accountant and a nurse. In high school he started reading minicomics and quit playing baseball. He attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he started drawing the influential mini-comic Supermonster.
On the advice of a fellow cartoonist, Huizenga then moved to St. Louis where he continued to draw comics, which quickly caught the attention of the industry, and led to his comic book series Or Else. Eventually, he created his series Ganges. Huizenga lives in Minneapolis where he taught in the Comic Art program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 2015-2019.
His graphic novels include Curses
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at the Hotel LeVeque during Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC) on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones
, 
(Fantagraphics) and plenty more! We get into the ups and downs of Ho’s career, his transition from “frustrated cartoonist” to “somewhat dissatisfied cartoonist”, his twin inspirations of Mister X and Black Kiss, and all the comic, writing and movie influences that went into his science fiction epic Godhead! We also talk about his being labeled an “openly black” cartoonist, how being Canadian gave him a different perspective on Martin Luther King when it came to tackling MLK’s biography, why he prefers writing a story to drawing it, the importance of world building in both his fiction and non-fiction work, and why you should never meet your heroes (unless your hero is 
in 1990. He next embarked on the project he is best known for, 
, 
, 
and 
. His newest book is 
(New York Review Comics), is one of my favorite books of 2019. Frank & I get into about Pittsburgh‘s unique visual style, in which he eschews black lines and works directly with color markers, how he solved the problem of word-balloons intruding on a comic page’s color harmony, and how the book’s design and style mirror the reconstruction of memory. We talk about how the book originated with his dad totally opening up to one of Frank’s friends about a story he never told Frank, how interviewing family members for the book brought him closer to them and to understanding them as people, and why I developed the belief that men are far less likely to know how their parents met than women are. We also discuss how his art-training influences his comics compositions, how working for painter Dorothea Rockburne taught him to see the page as music, why he prefers standalone projects to serial publishing, and plenty more. 
and 
, and has collaborated with Ben Jones, Dash Shaw, Gary Panter, and others. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His new book is 
(Mulholland Books), explores artistic and cultural taboos through the lens of a serial killer mystery set in the amusement parks of Progressive Era Chicago. We talk about her inspiration for making outsider artist/writer 
(Fantagraphics), artist 
