Lauren R. Weinstein teaches drawing and cartooning at the 92nd Street Y, the Parsons School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts. In 2003, she received a Xeric Grant to publish her first collection of comics, the much-heralded Inside Vineyland, which featured many cartoons originally published in Seattle’s weekly newspaper The Stranger. In 2004, she received an Ignatz award for “Promising New Talent,” and her 2006 Girl Stories bravely took on the complex, angst-ridden world of eighth- and ninth-grade girls. Her most recent effort, an oversize graphic novel with etchings entitled The Goddess of War, was one of the Village Voice’s “top 10 comics of 2008.” Her comics and illustrations have appeared in Glamour, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, LA Weekly, The Chicago Reader, and Seattle’s The Stranger. She has also contributed to such anthologies as Kramer’s Ergot, Hotwire, Legal Action Comics, Scheherazade, and The Ganzfeld. Weinstein’s work has also appeared in Yale University Press’ Anthology of Graphic Fiction, edited by Ivan Brunetti.

What initially drew you to the language of comics? How would you characterize your particular approach to the form?

LW: I went to art school for painting, but I was never satisfied with anything that I painted. I remember once painting a canvas over and over and finally cutting it up into squares and throwing all the squares away. I was always trying to tell stories in my paintings, but in art school it just wasn’t cool to do that. I did two comics in art school, one was called Depression, about going to Red Lobster when I was really depressed and the Sizzler Platter starts telling me to cheer up because “at least I’m not breaded.” I found this comic very cathartic to make, and I wasn’t thinking about the formal or semiotic levels of comics. It’s only after doing them for a while that I’ve realized how intricate and varied the formal language of comics is.

I am a firm believer of two things that slightly contradict each other. One belief is that style finds you, you don’t find it. I also believe that different stories dictate different styles. I feel like I’m both casting, directing, and acting in the different kinds of comics I do, from semi-autobiographical teenage stories to epic science fiction sagas. In each case the more I work at something—trying to sink into the story, the more formal and stylistic demands the comic will make. I did a sequence in The Goddess of War where the hero’s brother gets killed, I wanted to slow down time for that so I made many little boxes to slow the pace of the comic and draw out tension. During the wild sex scene I open up the space altogether and borrowed a little from Jack Kirby in terms of composition and style. What I love about making comics is that it’s one of the simplest and intellectually challenging things to do at the same time. The parts of your brain that deal with writing, drawing, geometry, music, and semiotics are all engaged at the same time—when it works and you are present, all of these things flow together.

What dynamics of public space are you interested in exploring or capturing in your work?

LW: I deal with that question differently depending on what I’m working on. Obviously the type of story will dictate the type of space or setting, and much like a cinematographer, the type of scene will dictate if it’s a “long shot” or “close-up” within that space. The comic that I made for Creative Time revolves around a random encounter that a woman has with a boy in Central Park, and that meeting triggers a flood of memories within the woman. They don’t even touch but there’s all this psychic space that’s created between them. At any given moment in the park there are over a million things happening like this. People see other people, they remember things, they make new connections. On an overcast winter day, one can’t help but pull up melancholy winter thoughts, and those bare trees are like a silent chorus that amplifies your feelings, and you feel they have feelings too.

What’s great about the park is that it’s full of both epic and intimate spaces and some feel very ancient (for America) but they’re constantly being re-used and reinvented. Every day kids play in the Ancient Playground or sit on Alice in Wonderland’s lap, and the history of the park gets more and more layered. I read in Samuel Delaney’s biography that when he was a boy he was sailing a boat in one of the ponds in Central Park. It tipped over, and who picked it up but Albert Einstein! So these chance encounters effect people’s lives over and over again.

How has your music career (as the singer for the Brooklyn-based band Flaming Fire) influenced your comics? Do you see these as related efforts?

LW: What I love about making music is it involves a group of people all working together and creating something in the moment. Cartooning is so isolating and monastic. Singing with other people is the exact opposite. But in both I’m creating a fiction. Flaming Fire had a performance art aspect to it where, for around ten years, I’ve played a loopy blonde who drinks the Kool-Aid of Patrick Hambrecht, our leader, who plays kind of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. He wrote a song in 2004 called “The Goddess of War,” which inspired the comic. My years of playing this blond weirdo helped me figure out The Goddess of War’s character.

What was your experience making The Goddess of War—your epic, out there, and ambitious graphic novel?

LW: I kind of went insane making The Goddess of War. It took a really long time. The format of the book is really large—10 by 14 inches. The originals are 20 by 30 inches. So doing 32 pages like that took a lot out of me, and this is only the first part. My philosophy with Goddess of War was wherever the narrative of the book took me, I would do lots of research and the research deepened the journey. I wanted to figure something out about the nature of war, and I feel like I’m just at the very beginning of the mythology, the characters, and research of military history.

What are the issues facing us today that you’re most interested in, concerned about, or motivated by as an artist? What should we be paying attention to?

LW: I hope the recession will be a good thing for art in this country. My friend who is a successful painter told me the other day that now that no one is going to buy her paintings she can make the art that she really wants to make. I feel like the country is waking up from a massive coma, and now we have to reckon with being the bad guys and the losers. Artists are particularly good at depicting profound absurdity.

Now we have this great leader who seems to care about art and science, and I think he inspires us all by eloquently boiling down the American experience—he’s making me think about myself as a citizen-artist. How can I make art that helps someone, that moves someone? How can I make art out of my community garden? I am a huge believer in arts education enriching the lives of kids too—I teach comics to teens and see their brains open wide when they start creating their masterpieces. I hope with budgets being slashed that kids will still get the arts classes that they need.