Jude Doyle on The Neighbors, his new horror comic series
“Everything you’re doing is a perfectly logical way to save your own life”
Horror author and cultural critic Jude Ellison S. Doyle returns to the podcast to talk about his new comic book series, The Neighbors with art by Letizia Cadonici and Alessandro Santoro.
A queer family moves to a small town in this tale of folk horror published by BOOM! Studios. The comic is rich with Celtic mythology. It wrestles with heartbreaking realities we face today —especially for trans and disabled readers. Our conversation ranges from the what makes a horror story resonate to the power of reassessing your own writing, while not trying to twist yourself for bad faith readers.
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Elana: Hello, welcome to Graphic Policy Radio. This is your host, Elana Levin. This is where comics and politics meet. and this is a comics podcast. Lunar New Year is being celebrated in the background of my street as I record this, which we could all use a little bit more of, right? ‘Cause it’s dark as fuck right now. So, I am– speaking of dark as fuck right now, I have a guest joining me again and we will be talking about his amazing new horror comic. I will be talking with Jude Ellison Doyle, who is back on the show to talk about his new GLAAD Award nominated Comic “The Neighbors”, which is released now in a softcover graphic novel format. The blurb is: “‘The Neighbors’ are anything but what they seem. When Janet and Oliver Gowdy moved to a quaint mountain town, their teenage daughter Casey and two-year-old Isabelle became part of a horrific chain of events that will forever change their family. It’s impossible to know who to trust and who is still human. Casey’s behavior is increasingly unpredictable. Janet is more distant. Isabelle is happy-go-lucky and seems to enjoy the attention poured on her by Agnes. And Oliver? He’s out to uncover what malevolent forces seem to have taken root under and inside his home. Steeped in Celtic, Irish, and English folklore, Jude Ellison Doyle, writer of “Maw”, joins artist Letizia Cadonici from “House of Slaughter” and colorist Alessandro Santoro from “Bloom” to tread new ground in Changeling Horror, a tale perfect for fans of “Eat the Rich” and “The Nice House on the Lake”.’ Again, nominated for the GLAAD Award. Welcome back to the show, Jude.
Jude: Thank you, thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited.
Elana: I was so glad when you reached out. I really loved our last conversation about “Maw”, so I’m happy to have you back and I’m a big fan of your writing. Love your newsletter, people should go subscribe to it.
Jude: You’re perhaps too kind there, but I’ll try to be a good conversation for you. I’ll try to live up to my not very high standards, but you know.
Elana: I am not too kind. I’m deeply evil. I don’t know what you’re talking about. What, this is your second graphic novel and, uh, what were things that brought you– that brought you to this from your earlier horror works?
Jude: I really wanted to– after “Maw”, which was just like this big angry scream of rage, and when I wrote “Maw” I wasn’t sure that I was ever gonna get to do another comic, so I just kind of threw everything at it. Um, “The Neighbors” was sort of by design a more low-key work, but it was a chance to get into Changeling mythology, which I always love. I think it’s so creepy and horrible and so revealing of like the fractures within families or the terror of parenting. You know, you read these old accounts of women who would just like go and set their babies out in the woods and they’d have to walk away without looking back. And if they came back and a wolf had eaten their baby, then that was probably their baby. But if the baby was still there and alive, then they had successfully exchanged the changeling. Like just this horrible stark stuff about relationships between parents and kids. That felt to me, for whatever reason, because my own life had entered sort of a quiet phase where I was transitioning and I was out in the country and I was finally getting used to being a parent where it didn’t feel like constant terror anymore. Even though there’s like, always like a low level of terror when you’re parenting a kid. It felt like the ability to go inward and write a more paranoid story about a family that can’t trust its members anymore and that is sort of fracturing apart, um, along its many embedded fault lines, that felt exciting to me.
Elana: Mm. I, uh, was struck. There are so many times, and we’ll get into, we’ll get into this in a little bit, but there are so many moments in the book that were so resonant with things that I’m dealing with or seeing with other people or re-experiencing in the world today. Um, without being like, this isn’t, you know, it’s, this is not like a literal comic about stuff that just happened, right. But it’s, it has such a contemporary feel to the metaphorical work you’re doing as well as the literal work. It’s really intense.
Jude: Yeah. Well, it just, it felt, again, this was one of those things where like some things you trudge your way through coming up with a plot and it works. This fell together. It felt like something I’d been writing in the back of my head without meaning to, and it just like– the basic question of are your children who they say they are? Do you understand your children as well as most parents assume they do? How far does someone have to change before it’s not them anymore? Is changing your body the same thing as changing you? These are all questions that get stirred up in the paranoia and constant hand wringing about youth transition specifically, but about like transition writ large. And it felt like to me it might be- because this was gonna be like the first major thing I wrote after I came out, I wrote “Maw” before I came out and then it came out–
Elana: Oh–
Jude: Like that summer, the summer that I told people I was trans was also like “Maw” came out. So it was the first thing with my name on it, but it was not like something I wrote consciously knowing I was trans all the way through. This was gonna be like my first big project as a trans person. And I thought, okay, like what I would like to convey, not that I think that any good story is reducible down to a single message, but just like as much as everyone and their cousin and their brother is scared of trans people and trans kids right now, I want you to think about how scary it is to be the only one of you stranded in a place where no one is like you. I want you to think about how scary it is to be trans right now and to wonder if you can trust your own family or trust your own community and, that thing of one person, looking like a different person, but being far more authentic to who they are and someone else, not to, blow spoilers all over the map, but other people maybe looking exactly the way they always have been but being someone very different inside that it just, the symmetry of it felt really neat.
Elana: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think you do an amazing job of conveying Oliver’s experience. Oliver is one of the protagonists in the story, he is the trans man and he’s the one doing the detective-ing, as it were. But feeling his experience as being a part and separate that predates him coming to the realization of his own gender identity, and I like how that plays out throughout his life there. And the way you interweave– the way the timelines of these characters’ stories with the flashbacks is really well done in advance. So like bravo to you for pulling that off in your second comic series, because I, I always was very clear when, and, and this is obviously also to the credit of the art team, but it’s always very clear to me when and how things are happening and why despite the story taking place in so many different places and times in these characters’ lives.
Jude: Right, like it’s sort of intentionally really dreamlike and the timeline being out of whack is part of that. But I think hopefully that you stay pretty much on course with the plot throughout. But I really wanna shout out Letizia because I was so nervous writing the script. Like, ‘okay, this is when Oliver hasn’t transitioned yet, but he’s still not a gender conforming person. This is maybe. Four months into transition, there are changes but it’s nothing obvious yet’, like going back and forth through somebody’s history like that especially if you like probably aren’t gonna be working with a trans artist given the statistics, like it’s really sensitive. You don’t want to be presenting this person as someone to gawk at or some someone who’s a spectacle. And we do, we see Oliver when he is a little kid and we see him when he is in his twenties and we see him when he is a grown man and it’s always just presented really sensitively in such a way that you can track that he looks different now than he used to, but it’s never presented as like something to gawk at. I loved how sensitively and carefully Letizia did that. Just character designs, I think her character designs throughout are just astonishing and so expressive.
Elana: Everybody has such good body language and the way it carries when they are the ones who do end up being changed in different ways. The way it changes in their– it’s not just people’s facial expressions, it’s their whole bearing and in Oscar you can see when he’s feeling swagger and when he’s feeling really unsure and frightened of himself. And there’s a whole sequence of him in issue two I wanna say, where he is on the subway and dealing with the sort of awareness of, ‘are people looking at him? Is he being judged and are bad things about to happen?’ And like conveying that through his physicality is really well done.
Jude: It’s so well done. And I mean, I was like really astonished because I had written like I always do– I tend to come at things with a cannon rather than a scalpel. Like I just threw a lot into the script and Letizia was so good at looking at it and knowing exactly how far to pare back to just get the emotional moment in every panel. Like I really love that in her work.
Elana: I also really love the stained glass windows in the house that they live in, the stained glass windows that– they’re all really beautiful and narrative, but not so literal– did you design those windows together or– how did those come to be?
Jude: That was, I absolutely, like I was just getting out old maps of houses for Letizia. She got like this whole map of, ‘here’s the house and here’s what window is in each room’, because I did plan them out so that they would speak to the plot. It’s, I think in Casey’s room for instance, it’s a Cinderella stained glass window where it’s just like a poor, abused teenager cowering in fear of her terrible step-parent, which is clearly what Casey wants to believe is happening at that juncture in her life. She’s not at all happy that her mom is remarried. And in the bathroom it’s Rapunzel and the spindle and we have, Oliver injecting T in the bathroom. I had ideas of what it was all gonna look like. I, unfortunately, like I just really– Do you know that movie “Crimson Peak”? The Guillermo Del Toro movie?
Elana: I do! Big fan.
Jude: So like that entire house, the haunted mansion that you finally get to, it’s so over the top, but like every room is a fully realized place and there’s always somewhere to put your eye on and there’s always something special happening. And I really just wanted to get in there and build my haunted house. And so unfortunately, Letizia inherited that. She inherited like a five page document of what was in that fucking house.
Elana: Yeah. Oh my God. But it was really fucking cool. I like that that’s– in terms of folk horror, I mean, it’s funny, people just love to talk about it as this holistic genre when I think it’s actually a really disparate genre. What are some of the folk horror influences in the story for you?
Jude: For me, honestly, like with this one I– the texture of it is really Del Toro-y. “Pan’s Labyrinth” was on my mind as well as “Crimson Peak” a lot while I wrote it. But in terms of the actual folklore, like that’s all just, I’m pulling it out of like Yates and other old folklore treasuries. There’s a scare in issue four, which I love issue four because it lets me get like really deep into the mythology, but it’s– you approach someone and they stand up and then they stand up and up and up and up and it looks so creepy and it looks sort of James Wan-ish. It looks really contemporary, but it’s just like a really literal rendition of one of the folk tales Yates collected in, gosh, I always get, this is a long-ass title and I’ve read this book a million times and I still get it so wrong, but it’s, um, “Fairy and Folktales of the West Country {Irish Peasantry}”. I think.
Elana: That sounds right,
Jude: I’m gonna give you the title afterwards, but yeah, that’s just like how the Banshee is described is that you approach her and she looks like a woman. She’s kneeling over, she’s sobbing. You touch her, you realize that her hair is like nine feet long, and then she stands up and she’s the size of a house. And I was just like, that’s great. I’m doing exactly that because that works. There’s all sorts of just– the little charms that people recite are actually just taken from random folklore, treasuries that I looked for. You know, like I, there’s so much of this stuff is just profoundly creepy. And because we’ve put this Renaissance fair gloss on it, it’s, it’s always presented as like twee and mischievous and scary, but in a pretty way. And I don’t mind pretty, but I want the primal dread of ‘the land we live on is not ours. The people around us are not always people, and we live at something else’s mercy, and we need to be very, very careful to never stand out in any way or bad things happen, bad, bad things happen.’
Elana: Mm.
Jude: That to me, again, that just, that speaks to being a marginalized person in the dominant culture. That, like you, you’re always walking through someone else’s territory, and you need to understand their rules, even if they don’t make any sense to you, because otherwise it’s not gonna work out. Like you’re going to get in very deep trouble very fast.
Elana: Yeah. There is a lot of motifs around different wicker, and straw, and bodies, and cold iron and other sorts of very specific associations with different mythologies and things like that through the story. And they’re presented to us through– in a way where it’s unclear like what is just being invented by this person and what might be drawing from something more real. And so I was left being like, I think that’s a thing. I don’t know. Maybe it’s not a thing I, that one might be a thing, but are they supposed to be like that? Which is interesting ’cause I also am sure that folks who have more specific background in that lore are like– probably have a very different, read on exactly what’s what… but I’m just sort of like, ‘I have watched “The Wicker Man” many times, so that is–’
Jude: Yeah, and it is, there’s definitely like a “Wicker Man” element, like the bit in “The Wicker Man” where they make the kid hold a frog in her mouth to cure a sore throat, that’s a real thing. And like I love, if you ever read like some of these old grimoires and like lists of folk magic, these were farmers. They killed animals all the time, so all of their spells are super fucking bloody. Like the thing of rubbing a bird on somebody and then impaling the bird on a spike because you’ve given their sickness to the bird and you’ve killed the bird and now the person won’t die. That’s definitely a thing. And like I just, I love that stuff and it’s really, it’s definitely– I imagine this is a super disappointing interview because it’s so like ‘Jude’s special interest time. Did people really pee in bottles to make witches go away? They sure did, but–’
Elana: That’s something that a lot of people, I think, have strong questions about, so good, good to know.
Jude: Yeah, so like to the extent that I could manage it, everything in the book is a thing. But like definitely if it was going to be more dramatic or bloody to switch it up a little, then I would do that. Like I absolutely… there’s so much harm done to animals in this book–
Elana: Yeah. Well that’s interesting… yeah, there’s– it’s interesting because there’s such a prohibition against certain kinds of depictions and whether or not I am up for or not up for a particular depiction of animal harm can vary so much on so many factors that it’s kind of impossible to quote unquote content warning it because– I did not have a problem reading this book, but it is absolutely as you describe– yeah, there’s a lot of small animals having things happen to them as part of different religious practices as well as the stuffed animal.
Jude: Yes, poor Kittenbones. R.I.P. Kittenbones.
Elana: I just, I know– I mean also the fact that the cat’s name– the stuffed animal cat is Kittenbones is such a perfect, and I feel funny saying this ’cause you are a parent and I’m not, ut it’s such a perfect example of the kind of weird shit little kids say and give things that I’m like, ‘yes, of course a small child’s fucking cat, stuffed animal’s named Kittenbones’. Like, we have– they, kids say the darndest things,
Jude: Yeah, that is, that’s just my imagination failing me. My brother gave my daughter a cat puppet when she was like three, and she loved it, and she named it Kittenbones because her hands were its bones? So–
Elana: Oh my, yeah. Oh my God. Right. Of course, right. See, it’s like completely creepy. It’s completely creepy and completely real. Like I love that. But, oh, but, so I, this– I was able to read this, it wasn’t like triggering for me, but I literally was reading Jack Kirby’s “Devil Dinosaur”, not long after my cat named Dinosaur died, and just seeing this very not realistic depicted animal, not of the same species even as my cat, not get killed to simply be bullied by larger dinosaurs was too upsetting for me. I was like, ‘I can’t read this right now. I’m crying’. I just like, yeah. We have our, I don’t know that people are necessarily like ‘trigger warning, “Devil Dinosaur” depicts some dinosaurs being bullied. You may cry.’
Jude: Yeah. I think that things happening to animals, things happening to children is, for me, I can’t, I cannot deal with harm coming to children in horror. There’s like a lot of threat being aimed at a two-year-old girl in this particular story, and it was really scary for me to try to figure out a way to handle that without it being unbearable, because when something, when a child or an animal is completely incapable of comprehending harm, that makes the reality of the danger they’re in just all the more overwhelming, and it’s, it can be just unbearable. It’s the entire dilemma of having a pet or a kid–
Elana: Yes.
Jude: –compressed into a very graphic example of, ‘you are not supposed to let this happen because if it happens, they will not be able to stop it’. And that sort of like raw nerve thing. I mean, when my kid was born, I couldn’t even hear her cry. It like physically hurt me. I was just like, ‘there is a life in the world and I am responsible for it and I cannot bear to know that harm is going to come to this person as they live in the world’. You know?
Elana: Yeah, I can’t even, I mean, based on the amount of anxiety I have dealing with my pets, no way would I ever be able to deal with– I mean, the advantage children have is at some point in time they stop trying to eat things that will kill them, generally speaking.
Jude: I mean, do they? Like they stop trying to eat nickels, but then they go to college and they like have a full bottle of Yeager at a party, like I don’t think, I think you’re like 35 before the “just stick anything in your mouth” phase ends.
Elana: Phase is truly over, but yeah, I know. But, so I’m just like, just dealing with that, it still sounds absolutely impossible, but, so yeah. How did you write for that, when that is so hard to do or to witness yourself as well?
Jude: I mean, honestly, I think it’s useful to have a sensitivity or a phobia when you’re trying to write something that scares people, because you can just use your own pain as a gauge. There are moments, I think, especially in issue three and issue four that get really gross and do deal with harm coming to children. But it’s one of those things where like the very end of issue three, which I don’t wanna spoil, but I will say that like the final panel had to be gone back over multiple times so that it was yes, scary. And like the first time I saw it, I like jumped back from the page a little. It needs to be scary and it needs to be profoundly disturbing. And it also can’t be so disturbing that I never wanna read this book again. Right? Because that– I have reached points with some things where I’m just like, ‘okay, I respect what you’re trying to do here, I don’t know if I will be back’. Right? ‘you’re doing something here and it’s great and it’s working and it’s not for me’. So it was just like trying to read everything. The same thing with “Maw”, the depiction of sexual assault I think in “Maw” hopefully does scare you. It should scare you, but it should not scare you in a way that is like a six-year-old trying to get you to look at a dead squirrel. Like, ‘look at it, it’s so gross’. That’s, I hate when I feel like somebody is trying to get off on their own edginess instead of scaring me.
Elana: Mm.
Jude: Writing around your own sensitivities hopefully gives you a decent respect for other people’s sensitivities, and you’re able to press against that boundary without just like walking over it.
Elana: Right, there’s also a certain amount of trust that you also need to have with a creator, and for me, it’s like there’s some people who I would trust to do certain kinds of stories and other people who I don’t, and the pe– there’s people who I don’t, who I love, I didn’t, I just don’t want them doing, I don’t want to read their take on certain kinds of things.
Jude: Yeah, right, like I think that there’s that Anne Carson essay I love about tragedy, about how seeing someone else go through the worst of their darkness in front of you hopefully gives you the ability to face yours and come to terms with it without taking it out on anybody else. I’m really cheapening what is a very beautiful point, as Anne Carson writes it, but I think that when you write, you have an obligation to scare yourself, and you have an obligation to write about things that matter to you because the whole point of horror is to be able to face the unthinkable and the things that you’re afraid of in a contained environment where you are fundamentally safe. Fundamentally, you are going to go to the point of death and maybe beyond and you are going to confront the most violent thoughts you have. You’re gonna confront some of the most raw pain you have, grief, and rage, and terror, and anger, and all that stuff you can’t necessarily bring to like Thanksgiving with your aunt you will be experiencing here. But it’s just like any other really vulnerable moment where like you need to know that the person who’s gonna walk you through this has been there themselves and has a decent level of respect for what you’re going through. That they’re going to facilitate catharsis rather than just torture you for fun.
Elana: Yeah. And it’s, I don’t need them to have literally gone through this, there just has to be like giving a fuck that this is somebody’s life, I think? I don’t know.
Jude: Bringing some like compassion to it instead of just gawking. There’s a lot of how…and this was hard for me because to be honest I’m a very white guy, and I wanted these people to not be an exclusively white cast. That just didn’t, it didn’t feel right for me when you’re talking about people who would feel uncomfortable in a small town, the idea of, you know, my husband’s experience growing up as like one of the only people of color in an all-White town was very much on my mind and I felt like that needed to be represented. But at the same time, like, how far am I gonna be able to get away with like endlessly victimizing Oliver, who’s a black trans person before someone points out that I am a white guy and there are things he’s been through that I will literally never go through in my life, right? I’m not saying approach it with kid gloves, I’m saying approach it with a decent amount of respect. If you can’t have the experience yourself, you know, at least ask yourself what would feel cheap to you. If someone was to write about the worst day of your life, would you want them to do it with a big shit-eating-grin on your, on their face, or would you want them to do it in a way that like reflected the humanity of the person this happened to?
Elana: I like that description. Yeah. Yeah. One, one of the things you also point to is there’s a– I think that people who have a background in critical writing, as well as people who come from spending a lot of time in online spaces, we arrive at the– on the page with a certain amount of critic built in that is perhaps more articulated than what might be for folks who don’t come from that orientation. And not only is it more articulated, we also, we have like eight of them. We’re like, ‘oh, this is what that kind of person is gonna say and this is what that kind of person’s gonna say, and this is what that kind of person’s gonna say. And then where am I? How am I fitting in this?’ And I know that it’s something to really struggle with. Keeping that from silencing me in my work.
Jude: Because you can’t write for like your most bad faith reader. That’s, I mean, I do that all the time in essays where I’m just like, people will go through and be like, ‘you really don’t need to take three paragraphs explaining why this extremely strange reading of your essay is not the point you’re trying to make’. But I’m like, ‘no, I do. I need to, I need to see everybody coming from a mile away’. That ultimately isn’t that productive because it like puts you on the defensive and it keeps you from saying the stuff that feels genuinely risky.
Elana: This is all true, but I will just say that when it came up in a recent essay of yours, I saw that and I said, ‘I identify with you in this moment’. And I, it’s like, I mean, you know, the fact that I have to be like, ‘I realize that I am quoting somebody who may or may not be an okay person. We don’t know. And that’s not why I’m quoting them. I just wanted to share this analysis they shared. Please don’t hold me accountable for whether or not they’re secretly terrible. I don’t know from Adam’, you know, so I’m like, ‘yeah, no, he probably has to say that. Yep. I’ve seen it’. But the reason I think that worked in that piece is that the fact that you had to do that was part of the topic of the piece in the first place. So I was like, yes, that might be disruptive to an analysis of some other topic, but for that it was almost like the medium and the message uniting is one. So, another big thing in real world fear that is really central to the story you’re telling is Oliver dealing with his. I don’t even know that I– here’s the thing, like most people I think would try to clinicalize it and call it agoraphobia, but I don’t think that’s accurate when like, the reality is he’s right, things are happening. And even though the fear that he enters the story with, that makes him unable to leave, feel like he is unable to leave his house in, when he’s in Brooklyn in the beginning of the story, is not rooted in like being delusional. It is just an a, a hyper, highly protective reaction to a reality.
Jude: Yeah, and I mean, I was just reading and this, I read this, literally years after I finished “The Neighbors”, but I read a book called “The Terrible We” by Cameron Awkward-Rich, which talks about the figure of ‘the trans recluse’, the idea that your social self is so awkward for everybody else to deal with, that it often does make sense to just sort of fold up and pack in and not really deal with other people to the extent that you can manage it. And I mean, to me that’s– what Oliver’s going through is an extreme version of that. But it definitely is the case that like, you know, I moved into a new place and one of our neighbors came over and they’re super nice and they baked us cookies and they’ve turned out to be lovely people! But during that first encounter, I was literally just crouched up on the second floor, like Boo Radley, like while my husband and my daughter dealt with them. ’cause I’m like, ‘I don’t want them to see me. I don’t know how they’ll react’. Like that, that feeling that the world is a hostile place is, it’s like a stress injury, a repetitive stress injury.
Elana: Yeah, that’s a great analogy
Jude: Going, you know, like going to the subway one time isn’t gonna kill you, but going over and over and being a little bit nervous every single time, over time I think people do break down. They retreat, they withdraw into themselves. And to me, what was exciting about putting Oliver in that position is that once he’s already limited his fear of activity to the smallest possible, safest possible environment, what happens if that goes away? What happens if outside and inside are equally unsafe?
Elana: I think so much about this is reflective of the experience of the ongoing pandemic. Especially for, for people who were unsafe in their homes as well as unsafe at work as well as unsafe in public spaces during the, during the, the period in time in which more people were recognizing that things were not safe. And then now the experience of myself and many other people who are either immune compromised or, who as I describe, cannot afford to get Covid. So much of the world’s refusal to accommodate the reality of the, this disease has made spaces inaccessible to us, including ones that were accessible before. You know, like I think about, I could go to the movies a couple years ago ’cause people were wearing masks then. I saw so much of my own limited ability to access space portrayed there in a way that didn’t feel like I was being told that there was something wrong with me if we’re seeing this reality that I’m experiencing. And it was so interesting ’cause it’s so close to it. It’s so easily could have been something that felt pathologizing, and certainly there are people in the story, including people in the story who we like, right? Who do pathologize it, and I certainly don’t think that it’s a one-to-one equivalent with dealing with highly contagious level three pathogens in the air, but it was interesting seeing that aspect of our lives illustrated in this way.
Jude: Yeah, but it is the same thing. It’s the idea that the proximity of other people is dangerous in a way you can’t account for or manage, right?
Elana: Mm-hmm.
Jude: And it’s the idea that you have to really control your space and be super familiar with your space and have the best perfect boundaries or something from the outside is gonna get in. And all spaces are permeable, right? Especially you, you’re in the city, like every space in the city is very permeable and you’re at more risk, but– sorry, not to be–
Elana: Oh, no, totally. I mean, a– I and I talk about this ’cause people were, you know– outside is definitely safer than inside, but outside isn’t magic. I got Covid outside. I didn’t get Covid alone in the woods, that would literally be transubstantiation of a sorts. I got, I got Covid outdoors at a holiday market, right? But even the things that are told to be safe or that, are it harm, harm reduction isn’t harm zero, you know? But boy, like, could we, could we use some people taking action for harm reduction right now? The, that would be improvement over being left to only protect yourself because nobody’s willing to take even the slightest actions towards protecting anyone else. So this just felt, so of this time right now, I’m sure I’ve probably alienated 15% of my listeners by talking about this. So I’m happy to engage with anybody who wants to talk about our reality, but, but anyway, it, it is really, it was so interesting to me just to see, I don’t know that that was part of the plan around this story based on the timeline of when it was written, but it felt very much of a p– of a piece with this experience we’re having now.
Jude: No, I mean, I’m glad it spoke to you in that way. I think one of the most sort of revelatory things I’ve learned in the past few years is to not look at any of your reactions as if they are wrong or bad or crazy. Everything you’re doing, even the stuff you might not like that you’re doing, made sense at some point. Everything you’re doing is a perfectly logical way to save your own life, and if you come at it– this is maybe applicable to writing because when you’re writing a character who’s behaving in a way that other people can’t easily understand, you don’t, you say, you don’t wanna view him through like a specimen’s lens, you don’t want to append something clinical to it and you don’t wanna say that he’s broken. You want people to understand that he needs to be inside because he is never safe outside. The end. Like it might not make sense to Janet and it might not make sense to everybody at first glance, but if you were him and you had lived his life, this is what you would be doing.
Elana: Yeah.
Jude: And I think something like we all need stories that approach that raw stuff, the reactions that don’t make a ton of sense or that aren’t flattering. Like the extreme, extreme rage in “Maw”, which was definitely a part of me. I mean, I have had years of my life where rage took up most of it, and it scared me, and it made me sad, and it made me not like myself as a person, but anger exists to push something off of you. I was straining really, really hard to lift something off of myself and it wasn’t moving, and that’s why the anger wasn’t going away. You know, that you can just go into those weird, creepy spaces, go into the reactions that don’t make sense, and try to understand why they make sense and what they’re doing. They can turn out to be really beautiful gifts, and I think that horror, for whatever reason as a genre, really does lend itself to an exploration of people who are extreme or maybe you’d call them damaged or who are having reactions that like, we don’t totally understand. I think even just something as simple as like the Scream movies and how realistic Ja–, not Jamie Lee Curtis, Sidney Prescott’s PTSD is in those Scream movies. Like the later ones is just like somehow really validating and wonderful that, yeah, you can’t just live through 18 slashers and not be a little fucked up, you know? It’s- they do it with Jamie Lee Curtis in “Halloween H2O”.
Elana: So good.
Jude: Strangely, it’s like one of the more realistic depictions of PTSD in cinema. Like she just behaves like she got out of an abusive relationship–
Elana: That’s the recent, that’s the recent one, right?
Jude: No, this is like the nineties one with Josh Hartnett’s terrible hair. I haven’t even seen the recent ones.
Elana: Oh my gosh, I really liked the recent one. I, whatever was one that came out right before the pandemic began, I really liked that one. I don’t know if there’s been another one since then, but–
Jude: They’ve done a whole trilogy and I’m going to catch up on it eventually.
Elana: There’s a lot that has been made. There’s a lot that, there’s a lot out there, so, but, yeah, no, that, I think that’s a really powerful way of looking at this. When it comes to talking about independent comics, I do try to avoid heavy spoilers because part of why we’re having this conversation is ’cause we wanna encourage people to go and check out the book. Whereas, you know, if I’m gonna be talking about what’s happening in X-Men, I’ll have a spoiler-free and a spoiler-full section. Right. Um, so I, this will be the, this, the mild, the low-spoiler version of talking about Agnes. But when I look at the character of Agnes, who’s the older woman, you’re looking at someone who is, yes, interacting with the world in a completely different way than everyone else in the space is. And people’s fear of, or person, fear of her as well as like her own actions, like come together in an interesting way.
Jude: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that hopefully that comes across. I always feel really annoying when I talk about what I was trying to say because, right, like the book should say it. One thing you could say about my whole, ‘let’s be a sensitive guy’ routine is that I’m being programmatic or I’m allowing ideology to substitute for storytelling. And I don’t think that’s what it is. I think it’s just like having a steady hand on your own worst impulses as you tell the story. But with Agnes, I really just again, I want to go back to that– because it’s a story about family and a story about children I wanted to go back to childhood fears. The witch from Wizard of Oz scared me so much. Once when I was delirious, I was like convinced she was trying to get into my bedroom, and I just screamed my throat out, I was like so horrified by her. And I think that just like an old woman who lives in the woods and is weird around children is primal, and we can visit that, but it’s also the case that like even as Oliver is convinced that everyone in the world is gonna look at him and only see the worst of him and move in some kind of violent way against him, the second someone he doesn’t know is nice to his kid he’s like ready to lock her up for life. That I want, I wanted to have that as part of the story. Maybe just because there was so much conversation about the demonizing of gay and trans teachers and calling trans people groomers and ‘we’re not safe to be around kids’ and I am also a parent. I don’t think anyone is safe to be around my kid. Like it’s, every human being on earth is protective of their child, but when you automatically ascribe harm to people based on what they look like or where they come from, that is a recipe for things to go very wrong.
Elana: Yeah, yeah. Speaking of complicated characters, I– it was interesting the daughter, the teenage daughter in the story. She’s a character who I wanna come in with sympathy for, because I’m like, ‘okay, here’s depressed, goth girl, teenager, let’s see where she’s at’. And then it’s, ‘oh, where she’s at is being fucking terrible in ways that are very believable and very teenager believable’. How did you sort of land on her particular kind of being terrible? That is her from the beginning.
Jude: Yeah, I think that anything, if you’re gonna try to write someone who’s being terrible, you should understand why they’re being terrible. You should be able to acknowledge that maybe there’s a part of yourself that’s terrible in that same way. Like with “Maw”, like Diana was this very programmatic feminist for whom everything was very black and white and she was convinced that she was making the world better and therefore the ends justified the means. And that’s absolutely someone that– I can be someone who’s like absolutely convinced of my own rightness and unwilling to bend or consider nuance. Everybody has that. I think Casey acts like a little demon because her family has very recently splintered out of her control and changed in several ways that she didn’t really get a say in. And she used to be her mom’s only baby, and now she’s not the only baby, and she’s angry and motivated to, I think, cause chaos and press on fault lines in the family and play people against each other. And that’s all coming from a really– I think it originates in a pretty human place of needing to exert some control over a family life that is increasingly just moving forward without any input on her end. I think I have never been– like the worst person I’ve been in my life was always every time I met one of my mom’s new boyfriends, because I was like, ‘I’ve seen you before, buddy. You’re not gonna last. Wait till you see what I can do. Wait till you see what a horrible child my mother’s raised’. And it was because I had seen the worst of people early on in life and I was just testing people to see what kind of reaction I could get out of them. I think that’s pretty common for kids. But I also think that like at a certain point in this story, it hits this whole other level where what begins is like just a teenager being annoying to prove that she exists, becomes something a lot darker.
Elana: Her particularly like her messages with her friends and how off, like the terrible thing she says about Oliver, just like kicking me in the gut each time with, ‘oh, but fucking teenagers would’, and you don’t wanna think of them as being capable of saying bigoted shit like that. And I think often they don’t wanna think of themselves as being capable…
Jude: Yeah. But like they’re teenagers. The only power they have in the world is cruelty. So they’re going to be, like–
Elana: I love that. Yeah.
Jude: I think it’s, what’s really fun for me is that as Casey gets worse, she gets more aggressively normal.
Elana: Yes. Yes.
Jude: She just, she cleans up her act more and every time she cleans up her act, it’s a preface to her being even more terrible than she was last time. I think it’s just the encroaching threat of normalcy that she represents is really terrible. But she’s so well done. And that’s another thing where again, I don’t want to get into it in a way that’s just gonna wreck every last turn of the plot for people, but Letizia’s heart on her– Casey starts out as, I was sending her like photos of Billie Eilish or I don’t know, like Fiona apple when she was really miserable and a teenager and like she starts there and by the end, some of the visuals around Casey are just astonishing in ways I couldn’t have predicted. There were some that just made me gasp and again, like pull back from the PDF of the inks. I really, really love what she does with her.
Elana: It’s really freaking good. It’s a good team-up. How did you guys connect?
Jude: Again, I think that Letizia was somebody that Boom! knew ‘bout ’cause she’d worked on “House of Slaughter”, and they had just wanted to see more from her for a long time. And that’s one of those things where, it’s, I tend to trust my editors on those things, because like I understand that as much as I have strong ideas of how something should look, and I have like a palette of aesthetic inspirations, and I try to include a lot of references, and I try to include a lot of visual detail for the artist so that they’re not just like flying blind and having to cover for a shoddily written script. My goal ultimately, like the most gratifying thing about the comic is that they’re gonna hire someone who’s a lot more talented than I am at this, and I’m going to get to watch them go, right? Like I try to leave a lot of room, hopefully provide some inspiration, but leave a lot of room for the artist to just come in and be amazing because that’s the fun of the book for me.
Elana: Yeah. Yeah. Getting to see your work brought through them. Were there things that you learned about how to write a comic between this book, between writing “Maw”and writing “The Neighbors”?
Jude: Yeah, I think with “Maw” I was a little bit showier. There are pages like that Instagram grid for Wendy and there are a lot of weird little, there’s like the maze panels in I think in issue two– I’m talking about like specifically issue two because I remember doing a lot of things just to prove that I could do them there. And with “The Neighbors”, I thought, ‘well this is my second comic, I’m now a master of the form! I’m gonna do the most wild ass layouts you can think of!’ And often I found that yeah, some of that is still in there. Some of the weird layouts are still in there, some of the sort of disjointed storytelling, especially in issue four, which I wanted to just do like full-on “Black Lodge”, David Lynch, I want us to be in nightmare logic for the whole thing. But very often I found that simpler was better. That if you sit and you tell the story, the story will tell you how it needs to be told. And you just need to pull back and stop trying to impress people and wow people and let the story organically create those opportunities for a great panel or something.
Elana: Another moment from the comic that really felt like a very timely horror was– and for listeners, we are now entering like, the full spoilers moment. Okay, here we go. A moment that felt really relatable and terrifying to me, and also very timely to the world now, is when Oscar can’t access his T. His testosterone for the uninitiated– is… not only are we dealing with legislation that is keeping trans people and non-binary people from being able to access their medication, the entire pharmacological system was disrupted by the pandemic. And there is– I know so many people with so many different kinds of disabilities, spending so much time chasing down medication that they used to be able to order online easily that they can’t get anymore. Like first you have the maliciousness of the people who they’re trying to deny healthcare to. And then you have the, the apathy by design, the structural abandonment of, every, anyone who needs, you know, ADD medication or antidepressants or any one of the many medications that we periodically are running short of. The feeling so vulnerable to accessing medication and to worrying what you will be like without it is such a real active fear for so many people right now, like of all different kinds, and is very, very scary.
Jude: Yeah. And hopefully that’s how it comes through is– I think T plays a role in the story. I wanted to just demythologize it a little bit, do you remember the clip of Lindsey Spero taking their T in front of the Florida Board of Medicine?
Elana: Yes. That was so badass
Jude: It was so great! But it was also just like, all of this Sturm und Drang and all of this, you know, hand-wringing about post-humanism and the vast conspiracy to trans our kids, it’s over a fucking shot. It is a liquid. It comes in a vial. You shoot it into your thigh once a week or some people do their stomach– Spero did their stomach– or your hip, I don’t know. But it’s, I wanted it to be just like any other medication where it’s not given supernatural powers in this story, it doesn’t make Oliver a different person, it doesn’t change his personality, but it is a substance that he needs to manage his disability. I guess, I don’t know. I think that’s probably, people could tell me why framing transnesses as a disability is fucked up in a few ways.
Elana: Except for disability people who are trans who will totally talk about it that way because there is no consensus and people are just gonna have arguments with each other. Anyway, continue.
Jude: But it’s like he needs, just like some people need their antidepressants, just like some people need diabetes medication, he needs this one substance to be okay. It’s a scheduled substance, if he loses it, given that he can’t leave the house, it’s gonna be hard for him to get more. It’s, it’s because it affects his hormone levels, it affects his mood and going off it suddenly is gonna send him into freefall. And that’s why Janet’s gonna be able to think that he’s crazy in the next issue because he’s literally going under– undergoing a mood disturbance as the result of his body changing its temperament. It’s, I don’t know how well I do this, but I wanted it to just be like a given, the way you might have– in “Rear Window”, James Stewart has a broken leg and the entire plot is like very much formed around like what can and can’t he do with this broken leg. Like Oliver needing T is the “Rear Window”, broken leg of this story where there are things that he physically needs and there are ways in which his physical needs shape the course of the story. And it’s not more complicated than that. It’s just a shot.
Elana: So many substances become more precious in the manufactured scarcity that we are experiencing. It shouldn’t be that when you accidentally lose medication on the ground, you want to cry because you don’t know if you’ll be able to get it again and your insurance might not pay for it for another month. But that is the reality for so many people, and like, you know, when he talks he mentions like specifically like, ‘this was supposed to last for six months!’ Like, you know, I, I’m my brain goes this immediately. Like, his insurance is not gonna replace that for him. Like, it’s like these, these like horrible indignities that are created by the medical society and like all this other shit. And that’s just such a strong piece of the horror experience of the story for me.
Jude: Yeah, and it’s that other thing. It’s outside, inside. It’s the body is one form of inside that you’re supposed to be in complete control of, but you so often aren’t. That so often the world gets into the body and changes the experience you’re allowed to have of your body, and that can be profoundly destabilizing. There’s an image, this is another issue four thing, but this is another thing that comes from folklore of the people who are made of rotting logs. So if you look at them from the front, they’re people and if you look at them from the back, they’re just empty and emptied out. And that just, that felt to me, again, it’s one of those things where like I think I was just like writing off vibes and I was like channeling some sort of emotional feeling about what it feels like to be in a body you don’t fully control or feel at home in. But that image, the idea of people being empty on the inside or only half full or full of something that isn’t them, is all over “The Neighbors”. And I think it was just literally me trying to wrap my head around, I don’t know. I was not somebody who was terribly physical before transition. I am now, I’m a lot more physical now because I feel more comfortable. But the idea that making a physical change could make my life better was like almost insultingly obvious to me. It was like, ‘no, what are you telling me that if I remove the rock from my shoe I’ll have an easier time walking?! I need, I’ve developed an entire theory of mind and a theory of life around having a rock in my shoe. My politics are about the fact that I have a fucking rock in my shoe. Everything that I do ideologically is around having a rock in my shoe. And now you’re telling me I can take it out. I can’t believe this’. It’s, again, I think that these are, a lot of these are questions that people go through in early transition and people who’ve been out for a long time are like, ‘yeah, that’s nice, honey. We’ve all heard it, we’ve heard it all before. Everybody thinks they’re the first person to go through it, but “Neighbors” has a lot of fucking with the idea of identities and bodies and ways they line up or don’t line up. It’s just literally just me working through my issues at the time.
Elana: Well, it’s certainly not unique issues to you, and I think it’s good to be seeing all this happening in public and is helpful for a great number of people. So yes, and I think I wanna have the right audience, the audience who really needs this and will benefit from it the most be folks who find it. So that is one of the reasons I am really happy to have you on the show.
Jude: Well, I am so happy to be here. Thank you for taking me seriously
Elana: Always! Yes! Oh, I didn’t ask you. What does it feel like to be a GLAAD Award nominee?
Jude: I feel like they maybe ran out of comics and they needed to find an extra one to fill the list.
Elana: So that used to be true, but it is not true anymore. I mean, it was only ever true because they didn’t look at indie titles. There was definitely a point early on where they’re like, ‘every single Marvel or DC comic book that has anything that’s like pro queer in the slightest will be nominated’. And the one who wins will be the one that’s actually the one that you’re like, ‘yeah, you should give it to them’. But for, I don’t wanna say how many years, for a number of years now, they’ve definitely been doing more recognizing independent comics. And you have lots of competition right now, including recent podcast guest Jadzia Axelrod, who is the creator of the new “Hawkgirl” series. But, and like just, I mean–
Jude: Yeah Jadzia’s on it, Charlie Jane Anders is nominated, like there’s some great comics on the list. I feel really, it feels neat to be on a list with those names, just to be on a list with them. I know that’s like corny, but it really does feel true, and I’m so sensitive about critique of the comics in ways that I’m not of the nonfiction, because with the nonfiction, I’m making an argument and you can disagree with my argument, and you probably will. If I respect you as a person and you think that my nonfiction is bad, that’ll hurt because it means that I’m not as smart as you. I’ve failed to convince you. But for the most part, you go into it preparing to be divisive. With the comics, so much of it is just like trying to step back from making an argument and just speaking with honesty from my subconscious and from my sense of what it is to be human that, if I write a bad comic, it’s just like being told that the inside of my brain is bad. So I was really, and I know that’s not the case. I know that it’s just people have different tastes and what they like, but I was so nervous coming out, especially coming out as a person with an established platform where there were a lot of eyes on me right away, and if I fucked up or was bad for the community, it could be exponentially worse than if I were just like bad for the community with 15 Twitter followers to, to see that it meant something to somebody that I wrote “Neighbors”, that people felt like I had maybe pushed the conversation forward. It just, it felt like letting out a breath of air that I had been holding for two years. I was really humbled by it. I was really, I felt really nice about it. I’m sorry that, that was so sappy, but it’s very genuine. I
Elana: That’s awesome.
Jude: I’m sorry, I’m sorry that that was so sappy, but it’s very genuine.
Elana: No it’s– it was a sappy setup, what else are you gonna say? You’re gonna say, ‘fuck those people, I should get everything?’ Or you’re gonna say, ‘I don’t even care about the GLAAD awards, I’m so cool, I don’t even care?’ No, it’s the only possible answer, but I’m always gonna ask you ’cause people, people get, people should have the opportunity to say it, you know? So don’t, I, that’s the expected answer, but that’s fine!
Jude: Yeah.
Elana: But just speaking chronologically, I mean there are a lot of things that could be in this year, so I think it’s really awesome to be nominated for that. I think it’s really cool, and hoping you that it gets the book a big bounce in sales which is one of the things they could potentially do. Getting my fingers crossed. Like you’re coming at this as someone who is very well established as a writer and a critic in a whole lot of other areas outside of comics, and we spoke a bit aside beforehand just about the difference of the response that you get in– just– in comics criticism. And for me, I, as someone who’s been aware of your work for a long time, like since the blogosphere days, it was, it’s so refreshing seeing people comment on your comics and not carrying in all of this baggage that… It says more about them than you, I think a lot of the time. So that’s been fun, so…
Jude: Yeah. And I mean, like for me, I think just writing it is really liberating because you know, when you’re writing an essay it’s your name on it and you are stepping out there and saying, ‘these are my experiences and they’re my beliefs’. It’s very literal and one-on-one and necessarily like, it makes sense to me that people have things they attach to my byline. They have an idea of who I am or I exist as a cartoon character in their head because I’m creating myself as a character. I’m putting myself out there and no character is universally loved. There are plenty of people on social media where when I see them I’m like, ‘Ugh, it’s this guy’. And it could be completely unfair! Maybe this guy’s dog just died. Maybe this guy is having a terrible day and could really use a pick-me-up, but I’m gonna be snarky and shitty, and he’s gonna feel worse if he sees it. That’s kind of how social media encourages us to treat each other. But when I am writing a comic, I am stepping away from the action, I am in a collaborative mode, I am very purposely thinking in terms of what the characters need and what the characters think, and trying to be true to them and their decisions, rather than stepping out there myself and inviting you to judge all of my decisions, all of which are wonderful– {The following is sarcasm!} by the way if you’ve ever had a problem with anything–
Elana: Oh yeah!
Jude: –I’ve ever thought or done, that’s, there’s something wrong with you, but– yeah, I know. I know! It’s hard.
Elana: Here I was, feeling like a good person, you know? But now I realize that because we have disagreed on things, I am really terrible. So I’ll sit with that.
Jude: It’s hard. It’s hard. It’s hard to be around me, I think because I’m perfect? It so often brings to mind for people the ways in which they’re not. But you know…
Elana: But no, seriously speaking and thinking about this– I, as a critic who takes critical writing, distinct from the topic of having opinions that you post as like 280 characters, like actual critical writing seriously as an art form, I am struck by the fact that periodically I will share with friends, ‘look at this amazing review from this particular person’. And I’ve had friends say to me, ‘but that person hates “insert thing that Elana loves”. I’m, why do you, why are you sharing their essay about this other thing?’ And I’m like, ‘because it’s interesting and I’m not, so, I’m not, they’re not my God emperor, I can agree with them on this and disagree with them on that’. Or people will get confused about why I shared criticisms written about things that I like. I’m like, it’s interesting to me. And I don’t know why that’s there’s I, which is not to say that I specifically go and collect critical analysis that I disagree with, there are so many ideas that are too dumb to be honored in public and should be ignored. But there are so many smart people with takes I disagree with that I’m interested in reading because they’re a good critic and I wanna know what they have to think about it. And I invite people to be more open to that, especially as I would like to think that my audience are the kind of people who know that we don’t agree with and sub– and subscribe to everything that every, you know, musician, God-knowing we listen to, or comics writer we’ve read, believes or subscribes that like, you can also find things that are enriching and interesting in a critic who you respect trashing something that you love actually, or vice versa.
Jude: Yeah, and I mean for me, like I think the internet sort of encourages you to treat everything like it’s a sports team? Like, ‘I like Taylor Swift and not Lana, Del Rey’, or vice versa, and then your idea becomes conflated with your sense of self. So you have to keep defending your idea to the death and you have to not only, not like this particular TV show, but hate it so much that it becomes part of your brand, or hate everybody who’s a fan of it, or just specifically not read anything that’s gonna be critical of the TV show that you love or whatever. Like that to me what I noticed that I was spending so much of my offline time thinking about whether or not I would feel personally insulted reading an article by someone who was gonna disagree with me, that was a warning sign.
Elana: Hmm.
Jude: Because you cannot learn if you are afraid to pick up a book that contains concepts you don’t already agree with. So I purposely go out of my way to try to find books and essays that I’m gonna disagree with, not in a way that like I am picking at the wound or trying to irritate myself, but because I am man enough to admit that I do have stupid takes sometimes.
Elana: Hmm.
Jude: That’s right. In my 15 years of writing, I would estimate I’ve had between two and three bad takes, but I’ve now corrected all three of them, because I’ve actually become aware that I have stupid ideas sometimes, because I’ve made it a point to read outside my comfort zone to seek out ideas that are not already mine. And I know that sounds really, that sounds like a free speech guy. Like, ‘I just have to be comfortable with conflicting ideas,’ But it’s, no, I think that you could absolutely accuse me of being blindly white-centric in some of my earlier feminist work. And I know that because I’ve read enough critiques from feminists of color of things like where the Violence against Women Act falls short by building up policing, or ways in which ideas of white femininity as perpetually endangered and weak and fragile, like that’s very much just white femininity, and protesting those stereotypes as they’ve been applied to White women isn’t necessarily gonna do a lot to help Black women who’ve been stereotyped as overly strong and overly sexual and all the things that White women have had to fight for the right to be perceived as it’s, when you’re not cognizant of that, then you end up writing analysis that’s limited or faulty or false. I once wrote like a bad crack, when I was just coming out and like coming to terms with myself as a trans guy, I wrote a bad sort of joke about like having a teenage boy at the girl’s slumber party, and I didn’t understand why some people reacted to that as if I were like a huge jackass. I straight up just didn’t understand it, and then I read enough to know that there’s a history of teenage trans boys being framed as sort of sexually dangerous or predatory to their fellow students. And my dumb joke about a boy at the girl’s slumber party was actually some moms’ trans panic defense for like trying to get a boy socially quarantined away from all of his friends. If you don’t keep your mind open to people who might disagree with you strongly, you’re never going to get past the sports team ideology of ‘that was a perfect joke, and everybody who hated that joke was an asshole and they projected so much of their bad feeling onto me,’ and just be like, ‘oh shit. I might have just accidentally repeated something that you heard every day during high school and it was terrible for you. I heard a different thing in high school’. I don’t know if I’m coming across as really preachy or lecturey, but I think that just the internet creates this sort of constant conflict engine where our ideas are ourselves, and as I’ve gotten a little bit older and I’ve gotten to see how silly some of the ideas that people project onto me are, I’ve come to realize that my ideas are not myself. My ideas change, my ideas die out. I remain, and it’s up to me to just keep encountering the world with curiosity, even if that means sometimes having to deal with the 30 seconds where I cringe because I was a dick in 2002.
Elana: Hmm. That’s like really noble and aspirational and like stuff that I think more people… I certainly feel like I could certainly use as well in my life too. So I appreciate you bringing your full and flawed self to all of this shit and continuing to share in that way despite everything else that goes on. So for our listeners, if they want to keep out, keep an eye out for upcoming work from you, where should they check that out?
Jude: Well, I am on Bluesky mostly, that’s where I do all my bad taking. So I’m @judedoyle.bsky.social, and I have a newsletter that I come out with once a week, and that is jude-doyle.ghost.io.
Elana: Fabulous. Get on that. You are an early trendsetter in not doing Substack. It was so fucking crazy ’cause we were telling people, we’ve been telling people about Substack for a long time!
Jude: I think they’re just so comedically horrible that it was hard for people to understand. Like they thought that they were like Mark Zuckerberg terrible, where it was just like–
Elana: Right…
Jude: –I’m going to passively allow the Nazis to take over because I have ideals about free speech. And it’s no, these are the Nazis! Are their friends terrible? Like they’re so deeply bad that they’re like comic book villains, and when you try to explain how horrible they are, with like Hamish leaking notes of his meeting with people who protested the Nazis to the Nazis so that they could write blog posts about how Hamish was right all along? Oh my god. Like that it, you sound paranoid and shrill, and then people actually are like, ‘well, it seems like this is pretty clearly bad. I think I’ll try protesting this, I’ll take this to the Substack guys and see what they say’. And 15 minutes later they’re walking out with that look on their face, like they’ve just seen death, right? Like ‘I’ve looked into hell, I’ve seen the tape from Event Horizon, and it’s just the Substack guys’. Like it’s, they’re so bad that it stretches belief, but thank God people are catching on.
Elana: Woo-hoo! Moving over, happy on your platform. And as for me, well one, I wanna shout out… I have an intern now, which is, I just wanna thank them for coming to me and wanting to do this, and now getting school credit. Thank you Sophia Longmuir! Like I, you’re the fucking coolest.
Jude: Thank you Sophia!
{Thank you guys!}
Elana: I know! They’re the coolest fucking person. Why did– well, podcasts didn’t exist when I was in college, but I’m like, I would’ve loved to have thought of the initiative to do that myself too. So for listeners, if you are excited to see things like episode guides and transcripts of things like our Deep Space Dive episodes, you now know who to thank. And I myself am also on that very coolest, most interesting, and now open to the public of microblogging sites Bluesky with my handle at @levin. I am not completely gone from that other site because of the nature of the work I do, if you are there, you certainly can still follow me for now at @Elana_Brooklyn, but I don’t hang out there for kicks. That would be Bluesky, so come hang out with me on bluesky for kicks. And as we like to say, keep it geeky!
Episode Guide
1. Link to “The Neighbors”
2. Link to “Maw”
3. Link to “House of Slaughter”
4. Link to “Bloom”
5. Link to “Eat the Rich”
6. Link to “The Nice House on the Lake”
7. Yeats book
8. Jude’s essay
9. Cameron Awkward-Rich essay
10. Lindsey Spero clip
11. Podcast episode with Jadzia Axelrod
12. GLAAD comic nominees
13. Substack is a “free speech” newsletter site, here are some articles on its Nazi problem.
