SP talked with Bread Tarelton about their bio comic Flip Turn, available at breadcomics.bigcartel.com and for sale at Partners and Son. The instagram version of this interview needed some light editing to fit into the IG post character limit, so this version is slightly longer.
š£ļøWere there reasons why this became the right time to tell this story?
š¤When I started this piece, I was in the middle of a period of therapy focused heavily on my interaction with my body, and the way I carried pain in it. So, realistically this became the right time to tell this story because I started looking directly at these moments of my life and the way I carry them in my body still.Ā
In a way, the timing almost felt too late. A lot of these events were fuzzy in my memory by the time I even acknowledged them, so I had to try to find what I knew was true about each of these moments. For a lot of them, I looked to my general feelings around larger periods of time, rather than accessing very specific memories.Ā
š£ļøDid you need to move to a different place emotionally to be able to tell the story?
š¤I think I had to grieve to tell this story, honestly. I was very clinical in early versions of Flip Turn, and wanted to also use it to discuss concepts in fat scholarship and fat liberation. I thought that I needed to explain the positioning of my fat experience more to those who wouldnāt have a similar history, and I also thought it was my job to educate people. But the feedback I received told me that while that was interesting, it was avoiding the emotion in the piece. And I was avoiding it because the primary emotions are pain and grief. Thereās joy and love in there too, but I was looking away from the pain and grief, and I had to look directly at it to make this piece in earnest.Ā
I think the arc that the story makes, and the joy and love in it, had to be found by moving through those harder emotions, first. And in the end, I think I had to follow that emotional arc myself.
š£ļøLife is always full of complexities and unrelated details. How did you decide what to include in the story?
š¤It took me a long time to figure out what was actually going into this piece. I really had to dig to find my own history, and journaled a lot for the first month that I was working on Flip Turn trying to find memories I had forgotten. I found a lot of things that never made it into the final draft, or became somewhat irrelevant.
I did a lot of research on fat liberation and fat history, and this more rigid study helped me start thinking about Flip Turn without always having to dive into the more difficult emotions. On top of that, initially, the piece was focused on my experience with transness as well. And in the end, I found both the more educational and trans parts of the story didnāt really add to the narrative I was trying to tell.Ā
I think a lot of what I cut was adjacent to the real story, but was immensely helpful in allowing me to really think about what I wanted to write.
š£ļøDo you think that if swimming hadnāt been part of your life early on, things might have been easier?
š¤I think stopping myself from swimming due to fear around my body wouldnāt have meant much if I didnāt love the water, so itās a double-edged sword for sure.Ā
But realistically, I donāt think I would have done competitive swimming if I didnāt love being in the water as a child. I think thereās an argument that it would have been harder for me if I wasnāt doing competitive swimming and instead was doing a different sport. Itās likely that I would have done football or something similar, considering that as a child I stubbornly felt like I had to prove myself strong to counteract the vision of fatness as weak. At least with swimming, I loved being in the water even if lots of other things were painful about it.
š£ļøDid it get difficult reconnecting with painful and unpleasant memories and experiences?
š¤It was definitely painful, but I think the pain was mostly the freshness of the sting. Itās been over a year since I wrote the final script, and the grief is still there, but it feels dull. Accessing those emotions is not nearly as rough as when I started the project. I think thereās catharsis in reimagining the narrative as a thing that Iāve moved through and am not currently going through; itās simpler with the idea of that history being a closed loop, with an ending.Ā
š£ļøFlip Turn was supported by a Cupcake Award. What was it like working with your mentor Jim Terry?
š¤Jim was great to work with! The Cupcake Award is usually for a piece to be made in a year, but CAKE was canceled for multiple years, and so it ended up being a two-year process of working on and off. Every six months Jim and I would realize we hadnāt talked about this project and/or that I hadnāt worked on it, and then I would do a mad dash working on it so I could present a new draft to him. I think we were both thrown off by the length of the mentorship, but we worked well together. Jim gave excellent feedback and was the one who really recommended that I dive into the emotions of each scene, rather than just reporting what was going on.Ā
š£ļøHow did you land on the format for the book? What led to the 5 x 6.5 inch trim size?
š¤Honestly, I almost never think about the final production of a book until Iām almost done (which can sometimes land me in hot water), and this was no exception. I had done two or three sets of digital thumbnails but I had a really hard time getting started on the final art of the piece, and eventually, I had so little time that I just had to get going. So I printed out my thumbnails from Photoshop onto letter-sized paper and inked over them. I was literally stapling the zines three days before CAKE, so I didnāt have time to think about a different binding style and so the 5 x 6.5 was just a reduced size from letter that I could saddle stitch. In the end, I think the size is excellent, but itās a product of coincidence.
š£ļøYou have a book coming from Fieldmouse Press, can you share anything about that?
My book Soften the Blow is coming out with Fieldmouse Press sometime next year! Itās a long-form piece about a trans, fat ex-pro wrestler struggling to find acceptance for her body and move through her anger and isolation.Ā Ā Iāve been working on variations of it since 2020, and Iām a little stunned and excited that itās finally coming together into a physical form!Ā
š£ļøAt what point in the process do you start making decisions about page layout and design?
š¤When I started Flip Turn, I honestly had no idea what was going to be in it, so I just started making individual drawings of concepts that I thought I wanted to write about, like the idea of baby fat, or the constraint of laned swimming pools, or being a fat swimmer in high school. Right now, my work is primarily digital, so I just drew individual loose thumbnails for each concept, saved them as separate files, and then arranged them in InDesign. I did multiple essay drafts and would just toss paragraphs onto appropriate pages and then rearrange the piece to match the essay. I pared down a lot of those essays over time, and ended up focusing more on the flow of the piece.
Ā As I started to cut and add things, I decided what moments I wanted readers to hold on (full pages), and what moments I wanted to be more like a visual essay (closed multiple panels). I always focus on spreads and page turns when designing books, because I think thatās the most important reading rhythm for comics. So between that and the content, the book just designed itself.Ā
š£ļøYouāve stated that your work often involves characters growing after a traumatic period. What is it about that narrative which appeals to you as a storyteller?
š¤I think the big draw for me is that I want stories to end with characters being better off than they started, but I donāt necessarily want to write light pieces. There are lots of ways to do that, and I just primarily do that by having characters with complex pasts, and simple but difficult presents.Ā
For me, most compelling conflicts in stories are about the self vs the self rather than the self vs an outside force, but the majority of internal conflicts are the results of outer conflicts. Iām currently more interested in skipping over the outer conflict (or not going into depth on it) to find the internal arc of a character and showing the growth/change that comes as characters find a personal balance.