Over the last decade, French Canadian cartoonist Samantha Leriche-Gionet, otherwise known as Boum, has established herself as a singular voice within the Montreal comics scene. Boum brings the timing and humour from her animation work into her comics, including Boumeries (Glénat Québec), La petite revolution (Front Froid/ Soaring Penguin Press), Nausées matinales et autres petits bonheurs (La Pastèque), and La méduse (Pow Pow) – which Pow Pow has released an English edition of this year entitled, The Jellyfish.
Inspired by Boum’s personal experiences with various eye diseases and the permanent loss of vision in her right eye, La méduse has already received several awards including Prix de la critique ACBD de la bande dessinée québécoise 2023, Bédéis Causa 2023, Grand prix Québec BD, and Prix BD 2023 du Salon du livre de Trois-Rivières.
In this interview Boum discusses her decision to fictionalize her experiences in The Jellyfish, her gravitation towards health topics in comics, using shifting story perspectives in comics and other visual strategies to communicate experiences of visual impairment, how her structural and design choices amplify her themes, and how she continues to create comics despite her current visual impairment.
This interview was conducted at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival in May 2024 and was transcribed and edited with the help of François Vigneault.
I wanted to start by asking you about your long-running web series Boumeries, it was a diaristic comic for 10 years. Being that you’re no stranger to autobiographical comics, why did you decide to tell a personal story like The Jellyfish through a fictional lens?
I'd had enough of autobiography. Boumeries, for those who don't know, it's a journal comic I did every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for nine whole years. It's all true stories, so whenever something funny would happen to me, I would write it down and make a comic out of it. And through those nine years I had children, so the topics switched to being about parenthood mostly. My avatar in Boumeries, the way I draw myself, is associated with gags and humor, and The Jellyfish has some humor in it, but it was more serious. I just felt that it would be strange to have my avatar again in a more serious manner. But also, I don't have a very interesting life! I wouldn't want to spend 220 pages telling about my life!
Boumeries was a slice of life comic, so it was just anecdotes. The Jellyfish is about the loss of eyesight obviously. When I lost my eye, I spent nearly two months going in and out of the hospital. I was not hospitalized, but I would get there very early in the morning and I wouldn't know when I would get out of there because they were trying to find a way to save my eye. But then I would come back home and make dinner for the kids. I didn't feel like I had something to tell, really.
So, I just took my problems, and my fears, and I gave them to a fictional character, Odette, who had a life of their own, so I could take some liberties with the storyline. I think I could tell a much more interesting story that way.
In your autobiographical comics, you're not opposed to sharing health issues, or weird body issues. What's the appeal for you in creating comics about this specific subject, about health?
I realized that some people would forget that I had problems, namely my husband. We've been together fourteen years. Before losing my eye. I would have floaters inside of my eye. It's just like tiny dots. Most people end up getting them at some point, sometimes they look like strings that float inside the eyeball. Eventually they fall to the bottom of the eye and you don't see them anymore until the new one arrives. Normally they're benign. But I had like thousands of them, thousands and thousands in the middle of my vision. Because it's in the gelatin of the eye, they moved like a jellyfish. I would look in some direction, and the blob would have a delay before it would get back into the center of my vision, and it really moved like a jellyfish.
I went to see doctors for this and they didn't really know why I had so many floaters in my eye. And they just said, “Oh, you've probably had some kind of inflammation that left scarring.” So, because I didn't have a name for it, I said, “Oh, I have a jellyfish in my eye.” My husband, every once in a while, he'd just be like, “Do you still have your jellyfish?” And I realized, it's not because I don't talk about it, that it's not there anymore. I wanted to make a story about something that the reader couldn't avoid. So, the main character sees a jellyfish at all times, but the reader gets to see it as well. As the book progresses the jellyfish grow and multiply, so the reader also loses their vision, and the comic becomes harder and harder to read. And I was hoping to show the reader, that’s what it's like to lose a sense.
Honestly, I don't think I could have told that story in any other medium. I think comics is the only medium where it works perfectly because it's static. I feel like a film would be really annoying to have the jellyfish movement at all times. This, because it's static, even if it's hard to read by the end of the book, and you can barely tell what's underneath all the jellyfish, you can take your time. You can start over the page. In fact, I was hoping the reader would start over some pages, or some panels. Because they don't know what's going on. They have to do it again, and maybe even get frustrated, which is usually a bad thing. You don't usually want someone to start over a page because they didn't understand, cause that's usually a sign of bad cartooning. But I took a risk and I think it works. I'm really happy with how this book turned out.
Yeah, you really put us in the perspective of Odette. I’d like to talk a little bit about the formal qualities that you used to do this. One of the things that I was very interested in this book is when you shift from a third person perspective of how the jellyfish work to Odette's first-person perspective of how the jellyfish is portrayed. Can you tell us a little bit about negotiating back and forth between that first person and third person perspective of the jellyfish?
Yeah, so obviously the third person perspective makes no sense. Sometimes the character is looking a certain way, and the jellyfish is floating away from them. That's not the way it's really happening in Odette's eyes, and so I had to, in some instances, illustrate Odette looking at their hands, or in the grocery store trying to read the ingredients on a can, and then the jellyfish moves into the way. I had to make it clear that it's annoying, it's something that can be a problem sometimes.
But for the rest of it, I couldn't do the comic in first person. So, I had to find a way to signify the jellyfish is still there, but it's moving around, and that Odette learns to adapt to it, at least when there's only one jellyfish. The reader also gets used to it. So that's just how I had to work things out, just to make it clearer. There’s what Odette sees, and there’s the storyline part of the story in third person to make it clearer – to make a comic that was actually fun to read and legible.
Like you say, you get used to it, until you don't. You adapt, and much like Odette, the reader gets used to seeing one or two jellyfish, until another one comes up, and we have to get used to how we're re-negotiating the comic. I'm very interested in this process of visualization, it also seems that Odette has a very hard time communicating about their experience because while they see the jellyfish, it's invisible to other people.
Elaine Scarry, in her book The Body in Pain, explains that our pain is incomprehensible to others because they can't see it. They don't feel it like we do. What strategies did you use to make Odette's pain understandable to the reader so that they could potentially empathize with her?
I just went with my gut. Most of it is based on what I went through. I've had eye problems since 2007. I would get several eye diseases like uveitis, and I had to put in eye drops like 12 times a day for five years. Now, thanks to losing my eye, I have an official diagnosis. I have multiple sclerosis. That didn't come as a shock to me, because whenever I would get an eye disease, I would look it up, and it would say it is often associated with MS. I'm like, “Someday, it's going to fall on me. I'm going to get this.” So, when I had the diagnosis, I was just like “finally” and started treatment for it. So, there's hope. But I had already processed it long ago. Like even losing my eye was not that big of a deal, because I had known this was coming for several years, and when I woke up half blind, I was just like, “What else is new?”
But my family had to grieve and I had to cope with that. It was a strange part of my life because my mother and sister would be crying. At first, I was put off by this. I was like, “Oh, come on! You didn't lose your eye. You don't have multiple sclerosis.” But with time, I realized that it's because I had already grieved. I had to let them process this. I am their close family member, and it's a big deal still.
I wanted to illustrate this in the book because it's enough to carry this weight on your shoulders sometimes, it's enough to process it by yourself. You don't want to have to, as I did, deal with somebody else's grief about your own body. It's a normal process, and it's a normal part of life, but the character finds it already hard enough to go through this and they don't want to get other people into this.
I just wanted to incorporate parts of my story that felt important, and also create a learning experience. I was hoping that the message would get through.
Odette experiences the same kind of journey where they're very reluctant to tell certain people about their problems. But eventually their community has to go through it too, their parents and their friends.
Physical and mental illness narrative scholarship talks about this like a coming out process. If you have cancer, you have to tell people you have cancer. If you are going through a medical issue that they can't see, you have to tell them. How did you process that coming out story for Odette, or did you see it a different way than a coming out story?
No, that’s it exactly. Actually, at the time I didn't know it was okay. I felt like I was appropriating some terms, I’d say I'm going to do my “coming out” as having MS, but then I was like, “Am I using this right?” Was it just used for gender or sexual orientation?
But then I learned that it was actually used by cancer patients. It is a coming out. You have to at some point tell people, and it's difficult, because you know there will be his huge reaction to it. You're going to have to take care of this person, but it’s you who's sick! It's not an easy thing to do.
You also really portray this kind of dynamic in a really hilarious way, where Odette's mom is talking about herself and Odette's father, all their medical issues as parents get older, and it's just a wall of text and Odette's feet walking along.
What was happening with that push-pull of this wall of text telling every little detail of their parents’ medical story, versus this very personal and quiet experience Odette was having? Why did you put those two things together with each other?
Odette's mother is very intense. She's basically a helicopter parent. Odette is their early twenties. It's a crucial part of adulthood, where you're just out of being a child, you're looking for your independence, and especially with a parent that's too involved. There's a part where Odette tells another character that their mom would call in at Odette's workplace to call them in sick, or she comes to Odette's place to do their laundry.
I just wanted to put in these things, introducing some tension where Odette is looking for their independence from this really overbearing mother. But at the same time, Odette is losing their vision, and potentially losing some of their autonomy or independence. So, there's tension, and that’s just more interesting I find.
That is part of why I think it's better sometimes to write fiction, because my own mother is not like that. Some parts of it, I think all moms are. I'm a mom myself, and so I'm trying to watch what I do. My kids are still young, but I'm trying not to repeat the things I didn't like about my own family.
I also was very interested about how you paired stories – not just these two stories between these two characters and how they approach it – but also all the other kinds of international news stories that are popping up. For example, you see “Marine Heat Waves put Oceans at Risk,” “Drought in Nigeria,” “12 Dead in Texas Shooting,” and even “What Fruit Do Your Breasts Look Like?” There's this array of other information coming in. Can you tell us about pairing Odette's personal story with these other, broader categories of stories?
[[Figure 8: The Jellyfish, page 18]]
Those were mostly to just illustrate how reading is part of our lives at all times. On our phone, just doing some scrolling, or even waiting in the supermarket in line, there's a bunch of magazines with really dumb headlines, or photos of the princess, or whatever. There's a ton of books at Odette's apartment, and they work at a bookstore. So, we are reading at all times, and then, what happens if you lose that?
I wanted to incorporate more and more reading just to show how this is going to become more difficult for the main character – that this will be lost in some way. There are ways around it, but for somebody who's been seeing for all their life, it's quite an adaptation.
I really like the parallel between Odette and the jellyfish. What was your process of designing these two entities in your story as characters, and how did you negotiate their designs?
With Odette's design, the funny thing about it is that it's actually based on somebody I saw once in Montreal. This person had glasses and I did some other changes, but they had black hair and that haircut, we call it a “mushroom cut” in French, un coup de champignon. I started with that, but then I thought there was a parallel, because their hair looks like a jellyfish in some way, and so that was part of the thought process.
Designing the characters was a lot of fun. I browsed a ton of street fashion blogs, and I basically got to play Barbie with all the characters for the whole book. The book is set in Montreal, and it's set over the course of a year, so we go through all four seasons. So, for every scene, I'm like: Is this outside or inside? Is Odette going to the hospital? If so, obviously they won't be wearing very fashionable clothes, they're gonna be in sweats. Because in Quebec, if you go to the hospital or the emergency room, you're gonna wait for several hours. It's free, but you lose the whole day.
I would research and take notes and save photos. Some of the clothes Odette is wearing actually exist, or they were inspired from Tokyo street fashion. All because of a person I saw one time – Odette had a really great character design! I don't know who that person was, but thank you!
There’s this great montage in the middle of the book where Odette's preparing to go to a party and you just see all the different kinds of fashions together.
I would design these outfits, and they would be used for one panel. All that work! But it's worth it. It was fun to do.
Something I wasn't prepared for was how adorable the jellyfish is. That jellyfish character is so cute. It's very interactive with Odette throughout the book. For something that's such a difficult topic, why did you lean into this kind of cute aesthetic?
Actually, I struggled a lot with a jellyfish design. I probably drew 50 pages with an early design of the jellyfish, and at some point, I was like, “I don't think this works.” Then I just went with an ink splatter thing, just a few tentacles and that flower shaped thing. It's super cute, but very easily recognizable as a jellyfish and it worked. So, I had to go back and edit all the jellyfish on all the previous pages.
It was just trial and error. I wanted it to not feel too foreign. I could have probably drawn like a line around it, like an outline, like the rest of the book, but I guess that felt like it was too inside the world, like it would be too tangible. The ink splatter thing made it look otherworldly, at the same time as belonging there, because it's the same kind of watercolor feel as the rest of the book.
Screenshot
Also, I had to keep it simple, because with all the jellyfish that are in the book, I never copy/pasted it. And there are some pages where there are a lot of jellyfish, like a lot. I've been asked “how many jellyfish are there?” I haven't counted them. Probably thousands. I've drawn them one by one. It was almost like a meditation thing. I wouldn't think, I would just draw, draw, draw. It was long. Sometimes I was tired of them. I drew the pages in order. Not all people do that, for me it was because of the continuity thing. But I knew that the more and more jellyfish there were on a page, the closer it was to the end of the book, so I held on.
You come from an animation background, and so you're used to telling a story in time, especially something that has humor in it, there's a pacing to it. Transitioning to a static medium with a character like the jellyfish that is so fluid, how did you negotiate the pacing that the jellyfish would go through over the course of the book?
Again, I went with my gut. I think what I'm trying to say is that I don't really know what I'm doing! I guess doing animation before has certainly helped with the timing. I've been told multiple times that my work feels cinematographic, which I don't see myself. I do whatever feels right.
The Jellyfish is my longest book so far. It won't be forever, because the next one is going to be even longer. I guess this one gave me the courage to tackle longer works. But for The Jellyfish, I knew where I was going. There were definite beats, say where the jellyfish is bigger, or they multiply, and so that was deliberate.But as for the number of jellyfish, or how they would spread on a page, I would just try to make sure that the action is still legible and it would make sense. I was eyeballing it. I guess it worked. It could have gone really wrong, because I'm toying with the legibility of the comic. But that's the point, that's why it works.
I wanted to ask you about that specifically, because in art, we are always looking at both the positive and the negative space. Here, you're trying to show while also hiding.
This is a black, white, and gray comic. That's it. There's nothing else to it. So, I'm wondering, how you decided to use positive and negative space, or whether you looked at it from the double page spread point of view, or limited panel point of view, how did you negotiate light and dark?
That's interesting. I actually work my storyboards with the double page. So, whenever I'm storyboarding, I always have the spread. I think most of the jellyfish placements were already set at the storyboarding stage. So, I would just use them in transparency and then trace a neater, better looking one over it.
I moved some of them, of course, because my storyboards are famously very ugly. I draw them very quickly. The action, or a character's pose, could change enormously from this stage to the penciling and then inking stage. So, the jellyfish were very approximate, but I didn't think too much about it after the storyboarding phase. I set up the action and it made sense. Once that was set in stone, like in early 2020 or 2021, then I just went with it.
But it's interesting that you mentioned that it's a black and white comic. People have asked me, “Why didn't you do full color?” First, I don't think I'm that good with coloring. An illustration or a cover is one thing, but coloring a whole comic is a completely different thing.
You have to make sure that the reader's eye is going in the right way, and sometimes full color comics work against that. “Oh, the sky is blue, and the leaves are green!” Sometimes it's not useful in a comic to have it be the exact way we see it in reality, because you have to use color to be like, “Oh, by the way, you have to look at this first, and then this.”
Because I knew I was gonna have comic pages covered with black ink, I'm pretty sure that having a full color comic would have made the whole thing completely impossible to read. I wanted to limit myself, so I was sure that reader's eye was going to look at the right place at the right time.
That’s so true. The eye loves black and white. That's why black and white comics work so well - it's based on that contour. So, the fact that you're trying to guide the eye while also disrupting the eye in this kind of book is incredible.
And speaking of that kind of perspective, there are times where you show us Odette from these really pulled back, really third person, almost bird’s eye views. I'm wondering what you're trying to capture or communicate in those moments where you really pull us so far back from Odette and their experience.
You have such great questions. I’ve never been asked that before. I think it often portrays Odette’s isolation, especially towards the end. Sometimes it's just a nice establishing shot. Okay, so here we are, we're in a bookstore. That's what it looks like. But I've had other instances where I wanted to pull away just to illustrate how alone Odette feels, especially since they're trying to keep this to themselves, and they don't talk about their problems, even with people who should be actually involved.
Also, sometimes it's just a matter of trying new angles and making things differently, because sometimes it's a lot of talking heads. I've done a lot of comic strips where it's just like a bust talking, and it felt liberating to do something else.
Sometimes you pull so far back from Odette that we also can't see the jellyfish anymore. Other times when we're looking at things like “Marine Oceans are at Risk” or “People Dead in Shooting,” that also puts Odette’s experience into a different perspective, because it's both personal but also universal. How do we set ourselves in this world? And how are we seen in this world? And how small do we feel sometimes? I really enjoyed that kind of multiple layered aspect of it. Not to answer for you! But I thought it was cool.
I'm also interested in the larger organization of your story. We've talked about the idea of the layouts, we've talked about what kind of selections you make per panel, but you also organize this book into four parts. You follow the seasons. You start in winter, you go all the way through spring, summer, fall, and you end in winter. Why did you decide to organize a story this way? And why did you decide to start and end with winter?
I started to separate it into chapters and seasons mostly to help with the time. It's like a clock. The reader knows where we are in the year: “Okay, so it's been several months like this and blah, blah, blah.” Because the book starts slow. There's only one jellyfish for a long time. It's not that big of a deal and Odette gets used to it at first. I wanted to illustrate time passing, because that's how I went through it. I think that’s how probably most chronic illnesses work. Time just passes, especially in our Canadian healthcare system. Sometimes, you get like an appointment and it's in two months and you're like, “Oh, two months? Really? That's a long time to be wondering about what the heck is going on with my eye.” So, it's partly inspired from what I've gone through, and partly to guide the reader through the year and the time spent in the story.
And why starting with winter? That's a good question. I don't know. I guess I began writing it in the winter. It could be that simple, and I turned it into a plot device… but that’s something that happens at the end, you have to read it to know what I mean. I think that with winter, especially the end of winter in Canada, you get tired of it. The first snow you're like, “Wow, this is so beautiful.” And then in March, you're like, “I'm over this.” Winter is a sad, dark time sometimes, and when you have health problems on top of it, it feels like you can't go outside. Even if it's a sunny day, you're like, “Eh, there's snow and I have to shovel the staircase.”
It's very interesting to me in negotiating this cycle that you start, like you say, with this world weariness and winter. And when we see the seasons change, we see the seasons change. But eventually, as Odette keeps going on their journey, they don't see things change, but instead they feel things change. Art is such an embodied experience. We feel its effects. How did you think about incorporating feelings of change as Odette goes through their journey and they can no longer rely on sight.
Right. There's a huge spotlight on hands, on touching, on feeling. I think that's the only way I could put this. And towards the end that it becomes more important.
There's this great montage with Naina, the character that Odette is interested in. You can see this zooming of infatuation happening on the page. But later that idea evolves differently in Odette's relationship.
I went with what felt right. I always end up talking about my personal health problems, but it's I guess justified. There was one instance where I got something benign in my seeing eye. I'm not even sure how it's called in anymore. It has a weird name. Anyway, I had some kind of swollen thing inside of my seeing eye and I had to put eye drops and even like cream – like some kind of ointment – like thick ointment in my eye so it would leave.
But whenever I would do that, I would be totally blind, because I would have to stop in my tracks and be like, “I'm putting this on my eye.” I don't look blind, but I couldn’t see at all. I would do this at a comics festival, or at a restaurant, but people wouldn’t know.
I'm standing in the middle of the way, trying to take care of my eyeball. People are walking all around me, and I can’t see them, but they don't know that. I make a move, and I bump into them. And then, if I can see again with my other eye, then they look at me like: “Watch where you're going.” But I couldn't.
I guess it's very visceral to me. I can still see out of one eye, but I have a foot in both lives, so I wanted to test this as a drawing. So, it's very tactile by the end. I wanted to illustrate this. I just went with what felt right. And as you said the whole ending revolves around this. I'm not sure I answered your question again.
You're answering.
You're asking very good questions.
Thank you. I want to talk a bit practically about being an artist who has negotiated an eye condition and partial blindness, and you're creating in a visual medium. So potentially for any other creators that are low vision, or may become low vision with time, how did you adapt your processes to continue to make the spectacular comics that you have been making?
It's mostly a tool thing. Because I have one working eye, my perception of depth is affected. I say that the hardest thing for me now is putting a cap back on the pen! It's the stupidest thing, but I never get it on the first try, I have to be very careful and slow. I don't know if it shows when I sign a book, but it’s like landing the space shuttle or something.
The Jellyfish is my 16th book. But it's the first book that does not have any paper stage at all. It's entirely digital. Just because somehow working digitally is much easier. So, it's a crutch, basically. Because I can zoom in as close as I want, and there's an undo or whatever.
I have Wacom tablet, a drawing tablet for the computer, but like the old-fashioned one, so it doesn't have a screen. I draw here, but I look there. I also have an iPad. I did most of it on the iPad, which is a screen, but then it felt redundant to buy a tablet that also had a screen, so I bought an old-fashioned one. Because my old one was not compatible with a new computer I got in 2023, which was a bummer. So, I draw here, I look there, but because my screen is far away, the depth perception is corrected. It’s hard to draw with one eye!
I'm really cautious when I park, because everything seems too close. That's a good thing. If everything seemed too far, that would have been a problem! “Oh, I have space for that.” And then you bump into somebody, but for me it’s the opposite. Like I park the car somewhere, then I ask my kids, “Can you open the door safely?” and they're like, “Mom, yeah.” They open the door fully, and there's like this much space [indicates a wide hand gesture with hands far apart], and I thought it was this space [indicates a small hand gesture with hands close together].
So, switching to digital is what I had to do. Kind of a bummer, because I don't have originals for The Jellyfish, and people have asked me “Can I buy an original?” There was this guy in Montreal who wanted to buy an original, and I knew him. He's a friend of a friend. And I went, “I don't have any, but maybe I can make you one.” I'm working on Bristol with ink wash. And I'm going to take my time with it. And the process sucked. I did not have a good time. I think that the drawing looked fine. In the end he was very happy about the drawing. I don't like doing commissions, especially because they pay you and then, you gotta do it, and you gotta do it well because the person paid you for it.
I did not have a good time. I basically had a headache from start to finish, because my eyes were competing. Being blind does not mean I see black. I can see, still see some movement, some contrast. I can't see color. It's completely gray on this side [indicates her right eye with a hand guesture].
So, it was very difficult, but the good thing about this is that I know for sure that I am never going to draw a comic that way again.
I have one more thing for us to consider. In an article entitled “Disability and Representation,” disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson explains that Claude Monet became almost blind from cataracts later in his career. This change in vision forced him to paint differently, essentially changing his style from a more representational painting style to the impressionistic painting style that he is renowned for (Garland-Thomson 523-524). So essentially, Monet's work changed the way that we could see and express in art. I want to ask you: How do you think comics made by visually impaired creators might change the way comics can be viewed, can be presented, and can be experienced by readers?
Oh, wow. No pressure. Huge question. I talk about legibility a lot. I'm probably more inclined to watch out for this than a lot of people. We all do this, but maybe I'm really being anal about this. I don't know.
There's a comic artist in Quebec whose name is JP Perreault. He has very low vision. When he draws, he has a Cintiq, and he draws with the screen really close to his face, because I think he has tunnel vision. He walks with a white cane. His cartoons are very colorful.
So, I believe that everything is about contrast. I think this works with my book too, because there's a huge contrast with the black jellyfish and the white paper.
I think if I ever start losing my vision in my other eye, I'm probably going to want to do something that's even more high in contrast. So probably if there's color, it's going to be like huge pops of color. I want my next book to have some color in it, but I want to use just two colors, probably like hot pink and dark blue, just because there's a huge contrast between the two, and I think that's where I want to be going. I didn't think it might have been because of my eyes, but maybe?
I feel like I'm half disabled. I am disabled, but I don't qualify as a disabled person officially for the government because my other eye sees too well. That eye sees perfectly. But I do have floaters in it. I'm being checked really quite often because they know I'm a visual artist.
I'm going to adapt if something happens. I'm not scared. Honestly, I like drawing. It's going to be a bummer if I get to lose my other eye, but I love writing. I'm going to find a way.
This interview has been edited and condensed from its original form for the purposes of clarity.
The post I just wanted to incorporate parts of my story that felt important, and also create a learning experience: Boum on vision loss in The Jellyfish appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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