Tucker Leighty-Phillips Interviews Adam de Souza

Adam de Souza is an illustrator and cartoonist. He splits his time between drawing Blind Alley and an unannounced graphic novel set to be released in 2023. His comic strip Blind Alley updates on Mondays and Fridays at www.blind-alley.com. You can find his other work here www.kumerish.com.

Cartoonist Adam de Souza describes his comic Blind Alley as “a strange and lonely neighborhood” where his many child characters exist and interact. Tucker Leighty-Phillips spoke with Adam about the vastness of childhood emotion, taking a cinematic approach to the written word, and the process of creating the worlds we want to envision. Blind Alley is published for free online twice a week at www.blind-alley.com, and Blind Alley: The First Year, a print collection of the biweekly strip, is releasing this Spring. This interview was conducted over Zoom in late April 2022.

TLP: What was Blind Alley born out of? What ideas or concepts were you hoping to explore?

ADS: It was born from growing up with Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, and The Simpsons; reading and watching but not seeing any of the characters age as I did. I really wanted to do a long-form story in the daily format about the nitty-gritty of growing up, where you can watch characters change and grow. The initial idea was horrible; Lord of The Flies-meets-Peanuts, which [Blind Alley] very much is not. I think it’s important to my work to show childhood as a real thing, not in this nostalgic way, but in this “it’s weird and scary” way.

TLP: One of the things I like about Blind Alley is that it feels really respectful of childhood, and holds childhood problems with the same gravity children treat them with, without looking down or making fun of those problems. This is sort of in that same vein.

ADS: Thanks! I remember being a kid and my mom talking about money troubles or knowing someone’s parent had cancer, and being aware of these big feelings going on around you, and even if your parents are trying to shield you from it, you’re still aware, feeling things and processing them in a very real way. I think we don’t often talk about the emotional capacity kids have, but when you give them agency, they actually do feel and understand emotionally complicated things. At least, that was my experience as a kid. I didn’t feel hemmed off in some secret world, I felt like I was a part of the adult world, but not given full access to it––almost like I was receiving only the overflow of emotions from the adults around me.

TLP: There’s a weird blend of the surreal in Blind Alley; bird cameras, a tin can telephone that talks back, a mysterious figure living beneath the manhole cover. Could you speak on how the strange and absurd informs the world you’ve created?

ADS: When people read Calvin & Hobbes, there’s always the question about whether or not Hobbes is real, which to me doesn’t matter, because the strip itself isn’t real, it’s a reflection of what’s real. Whether these weird things in Blind Alley are real or not, it’s really nice for me to try to write for [the sake of] fiction, to write in the space [of knowing] it isn’t real, so it doesn’t have to reflect our reality, even while speaking to truths of it. I think all that really matters is whether or not a character thinks something's true or real. That’s where I’m writing from when I’m thinking about those absurd details and strange elements.

TLP: I’ve had that same gripe, not just with Calvin & Hobbes, but with other media––it doesn’t matter if it’s real for the audience, because it’s real for the characters involved, and we’re on that journey with them.

ADS: Totally. It’s a knee-jerk response, not to my comic, but for a lot of fiction in general; Marvel, comics––the need to explain and organize everything. And I think it’s important for me in my work to explain enough that it’s satisfying, but to leave room for interpretation and for strange things to exist that don’t necessarily need an explanation because it’s not real, and it’s fun to play with that.

TLP: I think it creates a lot of possibility too, because it gives the premise that anything can happen, and I think that’s exciting.

ADS: Yeah!

TLP: How has this world evolved since you’ve began creating these comics? I know you said it started as Lord of the Flies-meets-Peanuts, has it changed in other ways?

ADS: It's always changing! It started as the LOTF concept in my sketchbook five years ago, I wrote out a bunch of strips, character ideas and plot points. Last year, when I returned to the idea, I thought it was dog-shit, and I was like you know what? I’m just going to start something [with] a very rough idea on the plot, and more of a strong grasp on the characters, so it feels like it changes every time I draw a strip. I want it to be fun and intuitive and a process where every strip informs the one after, so it’s always evolving, and not necessarily something pinned down as a project. I think that’s really important to me.

TLP: A lot of these children grapple with different forms of grief––loss, the afterlife, body anxiety. Have you found children to be a more accessible vehicle to explore these issues in your work?

ADS: I don’t know that it’s necessarily easier to tell these stories through kids, but I think there’s something in couching these very complicated emotions and feelings in kids that makes it more accessible to readers, whereas my longer-form comics, strictly because they’re longer, you have to actually sit down and read the whole thing, which requires more of someone. Maybe we're more inclined to treat adult characters like they are individuals, and more readily willing to relate with children characters because they're "cute" or "wholesome" or maybe it's just natural? Having cute characters in bite-size strips makes it easier to talk about these things because I think there's an element of expecting it to be funny and kind of silly, so there’s almost an irony to a child talking about grief.

TLP: Are there drawbacks to exploring these concepts through children?

ADS: Not really, honestly, there’s nothing off the table with Blind Alley in terms of content. For better or worse, it’s not necessarily made for one audience. There’s swearing and it will deal with heavy stuff in the future. I don’t know if there’s drawbacks, because, at least, in my strip, and how I approach writing it, I don’t view them differently from how an adult character would be. I think the only drawback in terms of telling a story in that format is that it does have to be bite-sized, and each strip needs to feel like it has a beginning, middle, and end. It’s a really weird but fun format to work in, because everything has to be very coherent.

TLP: Treating the kids like adults feels similar to your approach to the possibilities of the surreal. It’s respectful of the children, and you’re willing to take them wherever you feel they should go, but it also feels wide open. 

ADS: I definitely don’t ever want to feel like I’m saying they’re kids, they shouldn’t go through this, because if you think about life and the variety of experiences any one person could have as a kid, it’s not always fair, and it’s not always good, and it’s not always right either. I don’t want it to be a dire strip or a sad strip, but I think it’s really important to talk about childhood grief, or not being comfortable in your own body, or accidentally killing something.

TLP: You were recently named the 2022 winner for the Cartoonist Studio Prize in webcomics––how did it feel to have Blind Alley recognized in such a prestigious fashion? 

ADS: It’s pretty surreal! With Blind Alley, I have a sense that people are reading it but it's indirect enough that I am never sure if people really enjoy it. For someone to call it the “best” is a very nice feeling but I try not to get caught up in it, or personally think of it that way, because that would change how I work on it.

TLP: Does it put pressure on you? Are you feeling like you now have a reputation to uphold?

ADS: Not yet. Maybe. A few people I admire were congratulating me on Twitter who I didn’t realize read it. It’s humbling to know people are reading it. For as seriously as I think of Blind Alley, the characters, and how much love I have for it, I don’t want to consider the responses to it too seriously, because I did start it as a project where I wanted to have fun. So I try not to get caught up in response or what people think of my work because comics are so much work that you have to be a little selfish. You have to have your blinders on, and forge forward in order to get anything done. But I am really grateful people like it, it’s such a nice feeling.

TLP: When I think of the popular dailies (Calvin & Hobbes, Garfield), my assumption is that they were always intended for longevity, trotting ahead until the creators grew tired of it. I don’t typically imagine it as a form with a predetermined beginning, middle, and end. Are you approaching Blind Alley as a world of infinite expansion where you can keep building continuously, or do you have an endpoint in mind you’re building towards?

ADS: It’s a bit of both! I love comic strips, and I’ve been reading through early Peanuts, which is interesting because the daily format has such a short memory. You’ll see Charles Schulz trying the same joke over and over. It’s a strip built to have no memory, and I’ve always thought of Blind Alley as the opposite; I don’t have a specific place where it’ll end, but I do have things I want the characters to go through, and things I want to happen in the world, because it’s important that the neighborhood itself is a character that people wonder about. I want readers to feel rewarded when they recognize a character changing and growing. There is a history of strips that tell a longform story in the daily format, but I wanted to do something in the middle, something that feels like a daily slice of life strip, but could, when you take the broad view––in five years or whenever––has a bit of an epic scope. But I also don’t want do it forever. I don’t want to keep doing it until it gets bad.

TLP: These characters also have a keen relationship to nature and everyday fascination––April sniffs a flower, inhales deeply, and offers it a word of thanks. Oliver cries to Pod’s music. Sweetpea and Pod speak to a tree. What made it so important for Blind Alley’s children to be conscientious of the world’s beauty?

ADS: For me, as an adult existing in the world in its current state, I feel like we treat nature as a commodity rather than a living entity, and it’s important for me to recognize that as something we’re taught, rather an inherent thing to being human. We’re taught to think green spaces are spaces in terms of use, and trees are lumber and not just a tree that exists as a tree, a lifeform of its own. I think it naturally comes from my own awe when I think of how diverse life is, and how complicated even the simplest organism is, and even though humans have taken over the earth it doesn’t mean those living things we view as peripheral to being human are actually peripheral. It’s myself coming through in how I feel and comforting myself when I think of the state of the world. I think it’s important to treat a tree like it has integrity. A tree is its own thing, and it’s important to not allow ourselves to think of everything as a commodity or something to be taken advantage of. I believe the nature in Blind Alley is its own character, and these characters are responding to it a way that is natural, before being taught to view it otherwise, and when these characters say they’re talking to the tree, it’s important for me to consider what that means.

TLP: When I was returning to the strips, there were a lot of comics where it felt like, even in such a short space, there were moments where silence felt vital to the strip. Do you have any thoughts on the role of silence in your work?

ADS: It’s funny you ask, because I’m working on a graphic novel right now, and I’ve been going through editing to get the page count down, and I've realized I am inclined towards having wide-open pages of silence. The pacing of a comic is so important; to have contrast between energetic moments, and to know when to let a moment ring, and to try and trick the reader into sitting with it. You can’t control how fast someone reads a comic, but outside of the daily strip format, you can make efforts to by using a big panel with no words in it, or you can make a detailed splash page so someone will spend more time with it, but with this strip it feels like silence is important because it has the opposite effect of a punchline. Sometimes, there’s no punchline to a strip, so we’re just going to sit and watch the clouds go past because that's where the feeling is. I think subverting the structure we expect in a daily strip gives these moments of nothing more space. Who knows how long that trick will work for! I don’t know why, it just feels important to me. Sometimes, being quiet and contemplative is just as powerful as or even better than saying too much. I haven’t considered why it’s important to me. I really like Hayao Miyazaki, and he talks a lot about [the importance of] having space in stories where it’s not necessarily moving a plot forward, and is more of a vibe or pause, and I think those moments are really important, even if, as a reader, it just makes you wonder why that decision was made. 

TLP: It feels like such a Western concept to interrogate what everything is doing for the greater capital-S Story, so I appreciate how Blind Alley pushes back on that.

ADS: I like the idea of an idle strip, where two kids lie in a field or something. I think moments are more important than plot sometimes.

TLP: If this series had a family tree of influences, what or who would exist on it?

ADS: Oh my goodness. Peanuts, probably. Definitely Hayao Miyazaki. Maurice Sendak. Oh, that’s hard. I love Taiyo Matsumoto, Akira Kurosawa. I do watch a lot of movies, and I find they’ve been some of the biggest influences on my work––when you watch a scene and it hits you emotionally. I think those are probably the biggest ones right off the top of my head, but there’s so much. I grew up reading Shonen Jump and so much manga and watching anime and it’s not necessarily [present] in my work, but it’s hard to say what influences come through, in terms of a family tree. I feel like it would be the things that are really there in the anatomy of it.

TLP: I had wondered about movies informing your work when you spoke about moments versus plot, because I think they feel cinematic.  

ADS: I’ve been re-reading Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, which is one of my favorite books, and while rereading it, I realized I want to make comics that feel like that book, like you’re in a place, and the world is alive around you. I would maybe add that to my family tree.

TLP: Do you want to talk about how cinema has informed your work? Are there specific ways or moments in film you feel you’ve taken from?

ADS: Yeah! I do think there is a benefit to learning from film; visually, how directors tell stories, how they lay out a scene or let a moment ring out. Sometimes I think of panels as cameras shots moving through a scene, but I do think thinking of a comic as similar to film can do you a disservice. There’s something so evocative when you watch a movie. Have you seen Stray Dog? The Kurosawa film? There’s a scene at the end that I’m always thinking about because there’s so much wrapped up in it; theme and visuals that aren’t necessarily beautiful, because it’s two men wrestling in the grass over a gun, but there’s so much at play, and I think about that moment because there’s no dialogue I can remember, but it’s so striking. Whether or not I can translate that feeling into comics, it’s a feeling that sits with me, and I think it does inform my work. Whenever I watch a movie and it feels like it fundamentally reorganizes my atoms, it’s hard not to feel like [I’m] carrying that forward in some way, even when it’s hard to pin down. I don’t know if I can say Blind Alley is influenced by this movie or director, but there is something about when a certain moment in a film really speaks to you, or an image, it’s something so evocative and full of emotion that it’s hard not to carry that with you and have it be your own memory you can recall. With all my work, and how I write fiction, which is from the first-person, but buried and placed in a bunch of different characters, I think having images from film and those moments and characters living in your mind, almost like your own memories, is a good well to draw from. Same with books, of course, but there’s something about how automatic film is; it’s so easy to lose yourself in, at least personally.

TLP: Is there a specific character you find yourself gravitating towards as you create new comics?  Are there characters you’re still getting to know?

ADS: That’s a good question. When I write five Kaye strips, or five Crane strips, I try to balance it so I don’t play favorites. To a certain extent, I feel like I’m getting to know all of [my characters], because I don’t want them to be a fixed point. If I write a strip with a character and it feels natural for them to respond a certain way, I’ll do it, even if it seems counter to something they said earlier, because I believe people are that way. I don’t believe we’re fixed points. I try to be nice to all my children and give them equal time. I definitely have characters I really like writing, in that I feel like I’m accessing them a bit more, but to a certain degree, they’re all enigmas that I’m figuring out and teasing out over time. I would never want to write something where I have bullet points about what the character is or isn't like.

TLP: Because Blind Alley is so character-oriented, do you find the story or dialogue or character actions changing when you’re in the process of writing it?

ADS: Totally. My writing process for Blind Alley is horrible. No one would be able to figure out anything from it, because it’s just gibberish in the Notes app on my phone. I’ll write a sentence, or the punchline, or the heart of the comic or whatever. That’ll be what I work from. I think it’s necessary for ambiguity when writing comics. If I had everything figured out, there’d be no point in drawing it. Sometimes I’ll have an idea where I know what a character wants to say, and I ask myself which other character is best to be in that situation, and I’ll start drawing and be like what would [that character] say here? and the strip changes or I’ll get an idea for another strip. It’s always changing, it’s never fixed.

TLP: There is a thoughtfulness to these children, even the ones who bully others and cause trouble. Can you speak on how these kids represent the larger world they exist in? Where do they divert from the larger world?

ADS: Like, the world of Blind Alley?

TLP: Yeah, because we don’t really see a lot outside of the neighborhood, and we don’t see the adults, so as a reader, I’m not really sure what the world is like. There are little divergences from our world, so I’m curious how these kids represent the world we don’t see. 

ADS: I think the idleness of their childhood, the fact there’s not been a mention of school says something. There’s Pokémon and video games and the internet, but it’s intentionally a very different world from ours. That will slowly come into play, and I don’t know how much I can answer without giving away too much, but I do feel like the idleness represents something about Blind Alley as a place, as well as the lack of parental supervision and the birds and the sewer. All of these things point in a direction, and I would rather err on the side of being too vague. There are definitely readers that ask where the parents are, if they’re dead, but it’s in the text that they aren’t dead, even if you don’t see them. I think it’s a very different world they’re growing up in. I’m tempted to talk more about it, but I really want it to be a slow reveal. I think the idleness is the biggest thing. That says a lot about the world they’re in. And the way they interact with each other and the world, the things they know and don’t know. It’s intentional. It’s not an oversight. I always knew what the world of Blind Alley would be.

TLP: Have you received any great or bizarre BA fan theories?

ADS: Definitely. Someone recently asked if Oliver was an alien, which I think is cool. It’s not a bad take, he’s a weird kid. There’s been some stuff with the birds. I don’t receive a lot directly. A lot of questions about where the adults are. If they’re dead, etc. But nothing too involved. I’ve gotten a few DMs about it. Someone was wondering if Lula was a real vampire, and had a theory about it.

TLP: If she says she’s a vampire, why not?

ADS: Sure!

TLP: It feels in line with the internet fan theories for older cartoons, like Rugrats, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Ed, Edd, n Eddy. There’s as much richness here as there is in those.

ADS: I love stuff like that. There’s not a single one I point to as a favorite, but I do think engaging with things in that way is fun and rewarding.

TLP: It’s a signifier of a well-written world.

ADS: Yes! Thank you.

TLP: Maybe this is one you can’t answer because of future story knowledge, but has it been difficult or rewarding to reject the assumed logistics of world building? Like, refusing to answer why the kids aren’t in school, or allowing them being a certain age to play a role in how they act. Again, maybe this is fueled by you knowing something I don’t, but has it been empowering in rejecting logistics in favor of story?

ADS: It's absolutely empowering. I frankly know so little about the formal do's and don'ts of fiction writing or world building and I feel like the less I know the better; believing there's a correct way to make art is strange to me. I think it’s important to write about what you think is worthy of attention. In BA, bad things will happen to the kids, and I don’t ever want to be cruel or give in to it solely being a plot-oriented thing, but I think it’s important to write from a place of caring about every detail, from what is true to you personally, even if it isn’t on display. Idleness, the environment, those concepts are important to me, and [I enjoy] thinking about what it would be like to grow up without school, in an environment without much parent supervision, not being taught the same things we’re taught; you know––the focus on what you’re going to be when you grow up, how you measure value based on work output, how successful you are, how much money you have. Some of that hasn’t come into play in BA, but it’s very much the place I’m writing from, because while BA isn’t exactly a world I’d want to exist in, I think it’s important to write about the world how you’d like it to be despite bad things happening, despite traumas and horrors in your neighborhood. The whole underlying story with this first year of BA is the [children] being watched, which is a very insidious thing. I don’t necessarily want it to be a haven, or wholesome, but I think it’s important to write about things that need attention, to write what I care about and believe is worth considering. I spend a lot of time wondering why things are the way they are, and I used to give into grief about it a lot, which is fair, but I also think it’s important to write about the ways and worlds you’d like to exist in. Sometimes I’d love to be an idle child in Blind Alley.

TLP: Is Blind Alley a utopia?

ADS: It’s not a utopia, but it’s not a dystopia either. I don’t know. Utopia is such a loaded term. There are glimpses of it for the kids. When Sweet Pea and Pod are lying in the soil, watching the clouds, talking about drifting into the soil beneath them. To me, that’s something I’ve felt, and it’s peaceful and comforting. There’s utopia in that idea, and in being a kid that could exist like that. But I also don’t think that’s realistic, and there are bad things that will happen in BA, and there are bad things happening currently, and I think it’s important for me to reflect the real rather than a utopia or dystopia.

Tucker Leighty-Phillips is a writer from Southeastern Kentucky. His work has been featured in The Adroit Journal, BOOTH, Passages North, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. His work can be found at TuckerLP.net.