"Precious Rubbish" Discussion & Book Signing
April 7, 2025
Graphic Narratives Lab
Start time: 6:00 p.m.
End time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: STEM Building, Room 216 (817 West Franklin St, Richmond, VA 23284)
Description
The Graphic Narratives Lab, in collaboration with independent artist Rae Whitlock, is hosting an artist talk with Kayla E., creative director of Fantagraphics, in conversation with Dr. Francesa Lyn, co-director of the Graphic Narratives Lab. The talk will be about Kayla E.’s forthcoming graphic memoir, Precious Rubbish, followed by a book signing.
About the Book:
Kayla E.’s Precious Rubbish is an experimental graphic memoir drawn in a style that references the aesthetics of mid-century children’s comics and tells the story of a childhood shaped by maternal emotional dysregulation, rural poverty, and incest. The author’s childhood is portrayed as a collection of short-form comics and gag panels punctuated by interactive elements like paper dolls, satirical advertisements, games, and puzzles.
While the work is concerned with violence and a particularly Texan brand of Pentecostal fanaticism, it is presented in a playful visual language with a deadpan humor that elevates the material beyond mere graphic memoir. Precious Rubbish is a landmark work of comics storytelling and graphic medicine.
The debut graphic novel from artist Kayla E., Precious Rubbish asks the reader to do the extratextual work of filling out narrative gaps, which mirrors the challenge of trauma recollection. The reader is invited to co-labor in the meaning-making process, an exercise that facilitates an intimacy (between the author, the subject, and the reader) that is at once horrifying and hilarious.
About the Artist:
Kayla E. is a Texas-born artist of Mexican-American descent. Her comics practice centers around her childhood and functions as a map-making exercise. Leaning heavily on the fixed compositional structure and aesthetic codes of post-war American comics, she imposes order onto recollections once disorganized by intrafamilial abuse, addiction, and sexual violence. Her textile work and painting practice are concerned with memories that present as unmappable. She currently works as the creative director at Fantagraphics and is the co-founder and former president of Nat. Brut Inc. She holds a B.A. from Harvard University, where she received the Albert Alcalay Prize in Visual Arts and served as the art director for the Harvard Lampoon. Kayla is also a public speaker and has been invited to speak about her work at universities and conferences across the country. In 2023, she was granted a Princeton Hodder Fellowship to support the completion of her first book.