A family saga in the tradition of Steinbeck, The Weight (Drawn & Quarterly, Sept.) tells the story of Edie, a tomboyish girl growing up amid the privations of the rural Northeast in the 1940s. Through quiet, observational cartooning, creator Melissa Mendes reveals moments of transcendence, tenderness, and humor in a graphic novel that PW’s starred review calls “a feat of rough eloquence.”
The Weight was partly inspired by a written account of your grandfather's life. When did you first read that?
When my grandpa died in 2014, my uncle sent everyone in the family a copy. My grandpa was an engineer—very sciencey—but also funny and really into the art world. He took a creative writing class and wrote this essay, called “A Brief History of My Life.” I was most interested in the stuff from his childhood. Really vivid, detailed stuff, like waking up before dawn to bring the cows in and finding a calf that was born in the night. I thought, “I need to use this somehow.” Originally, I was thinking I would draw it literally. Then I realized that’s not really what I do.
How did the main character, Edie, take shape?
There was an image by the cartoonist Denys Wortman that stuck with me, an image of this woman standing by the ocean. She was just very strong-looking and independent. That kind of planted the seed. And then I was looking at Farm Security Administration photos from the ‘30s, and I found this Dorothea Lange photo of a girl—the daughter of a migrant farm worker—wearing overalls. Her face was perfect. She's the inspiration for the character design of Edie. Walker Evans was a big influence as well. I decided to do ink wash because I felt like it emulated the feeling of old photos.
So you had your grandfather’s essay and a character taking shape. How did you proceed from there?
I kind of let Edie guide me. I had all these things from my grandpa’s essay that I wanted to include—and a lot from my own life, and stories of my aunt and uncles and my mom growing up on a farm, too. But once Edie became a character, she was leading the way.
Edie’s time on her grandparents’ farm feels like the emotional center of the book. She has such a natural affinity for the clover fields and animals.
The way my grandpa wrote about his time on the farm had a big influence on the book. It was a haven for him—very bucolic. The part of the book I wanted to draw the most was the stuff about the farm and that life. I mean, I love looking at bugs. Observing little nature things is grounding for me, and maybe it was for Edie.
Were the book’s settings places you were familiar with?
I live in the Berkshires, in Western Massachusetts. I'm surrounded by little green hills, and that scenery just kind of makes its way into the book. I did take a trip to Williamstown, N.Y., where my grandpa lived with his grandparents. I didn't know exactly where the house was, but I took a bunch of photos of the fields and old buildings that I used as reference. Towns that feel like they haven’t changed at all—that’s my favorite stuff to look at.
There’s a lot of warmth and humor in The Weight, but abuse and alcoholism feature prominently, too. Was it difficult to spend so much time inside Edie’s story?
I loved working on it. I didn't really realize till I was done how heavy it was. I sometimes think it should have taken me half the time. But when I look back, I think I needed to take as much time as I did to handle the emotional weight of it. And the whole time I was also, in a way, dealing with the grief of losing my grandfather, though that didn’t really register.
You serialized The Weight over the course of a decade. How did it evolve over that time?
It was ten years of work, so it was influenced by stuff happening in the world at the time, and by my own life, and then whatever I was watching or listening to as well. A true crime podcast, the “Scandoval” season of Vanderpump Rules, Roe v. Wade getting repealed—all the stuff in my life was threaded through the book in a way.
I think I grew up a lot over the past ten years, and I think Edie did as well. We were growing together, basically. It would sometimes surprise me how funny she was. And the stuff where her violent tendencies come out, I didn't plan that. Rage is something I don't express very well, and it was almost cathartic showing her expressing her own rage.
I noticed there are no captions or thought bubbles in The Weight.
It felt right to show Edie from the outside. I try to reveal stuff with just facial expressions. The subtleties of facial expressions are really important to me. That just comes from being a kid and worrying about what everyone's thinking, but I think it’s helped me communicate through my drawing. And I tend to like movies that don't explain everything. I try to do that with comics, too.
