Matt Huynh, Creating Graphic Memoir Cabramatta, for The Believer
Artist Matt Huynh works with brush and ink, pulling technical inspiration from Western comics and Eastern sumi-e (ink brush painting). He frequently uses his art to explore and amplify stories of refugees, of migrants and asylum seekers and their communities. For the October/November issue of The Believer, Huynh created Cabramatta, pulling readers into the Australian city he grew up in.
In the graphic memoir, which also appears in interactive form at believermag.com, Vietnam War refugees struggle to make good lives in a country that blindly, roughly pushes them to be more like European Australians. A recession rages and Vietnamese workers are accused of stealing jobs as heroin takes over the streets. The neighborhood is ruled by dealers and gang members and populated not only by the Vietnamese community but also by addicts arriving on the train to Cabramatta.
Situating Readers in an Unfamiliar World
Early in the process, Huynh considered his Believer audience, what they understood and what they didn’t know. “I quickly realized that this wasn’t speaking to my community back home in Cabramatta, as much as it was for a new audience to use this specific example as a way to broach the challenges and think of the many sides of current migration stories and experiences,” he told Spine.
“I was conscious that the readership would be much broader and unfamiliar with the historical and political context against which much of Cabramatta’s gangs emerged, became Australia’s heroin capital, and infamously led to Australia’s first political assassination. … There was a delicate balance of including just enough context to hint at larger developments in Australian politics, without becoming bogged down and becoming an impersonal Wikipedia entry.”
For example, Huynh included derogatory terms used by European Australians — “ghetto” for his neighborhood, “the smack express” for the train that brought addicts to Cabramatta, “jungles,” the place where pundits thought Viet gang members belonged — to efficiently give readers a sense of how the community was viewed, how they were talked about and treated. “I used plenty of quotation marks … as shorthand to conjure doubt over the ubiquitous labels.”
He also turned to The Believer’s Art Director Kristen Radtke to identify those spots that might throw an outsider out of the world he and Cabramatta pulled them into. “Kristen and The Believer bridged cognitive gaps in the story that I took for granted after a life of living with these memories and ideas.”
Discussing his narrative approach with Radtke, herself a graphic novelist, he decided to tell the story of Cabramatta from two viewpoints, his own and that of an omniscient narrator. When Huynh is offering first-person reflections, the story features his younger self as protagonist. As the narrative shifts into the big picture, visuals grow almost theatrical. “They are flatly staged, and the conceit of the scenes being imagined is unavoidable,” Huynh said.
Graphic Memoir, Digital & Interactive
Reading a comic in print, readers consume spread by spread; two facing pages contain panels which at once stand alone as narrative segments, and serve as part of the whole spread, speaking collectively to indicate setting or theme or tone. Each spread is static; movement comes with page turns.
Reading a digital comic, readers move one panel at a time. The experience of opening to a new spread and intuiting mood or situation is replaced by a scrolling, panel by panel by panel. To put readers in a similarly effective space as that first glance at a spread, a digital comics creator can use elements not available in print. “The addition of sound, music and a map on which the comic panels floated helped to pull the isolated moments of the comic together into a cohesive experience,” Huynh said.
Cabramatta is exactly the type of piece Radtke looks to publish. “As an editor, I’m most interested in comics journalism or graphic memoir for The Believer,” she told Spine. “Cabramatta is a spectacular example of a perfect hybrid between the two genres—it’s an autobiographical narrative that positions itself within a larger cultural and political moment.” But while the piece was a perfect fit, it also presented challenges. “The magazine had never before published something so digitally interactive,” she said.
The magazine brought in two of Huynh’s former Brooklyn studio mates, coder and game designer Ivan Safrin to code, and photographer, writer and musician Kevin Shea Adams to handle music and sound design. Though the trio had worked alongside one another, Huynh said the creative collaboration allowed his two friends to discover a side of him “that I carry in Vietnamese with memories from the other side of the world,” a view of him that they hadn’t previously seen despite years of friendship.
“To share and explore that history is rare, but to do so in the language of their creative competencies has been particularly special and has let me tell old memories in a contemporary and new creative voice.”
Find Cabramatta online at The Believer and in their Oct/Nov print issue.
Find Matt Huynh online at www.matthuynh.com and on Twitter @matty_huynh.
Find Kristen Radtke online at kristenradtke.com and on Twitter @KristenRadtke
Spine Authors Editor Susanna Baird grew up inhaling paperbacks in Central Massachusetts, and now lives and works in Salem. Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including Boston Magazine, BANG!, Failbetter, and Publishers Weekly. She's the founder of the Salem Longform Writers' Group, and serves on the Salem Literary Festival committee. When not wrangling words, she spends time with her family, mostly trying to pry the cat's head out of the dog's mouth, and helps lead The Clothing Connection, a small Salem-based nonprofit dedicated to getting clothes to kids who need them. Online, you can find her at susannabaird.com and on Twitter @SusannaBaird.