Mattie Lubchansky has written and illustrated several graphic novels, including 2023’s riveting Boys Weekend, but her latest, Simplicity, defies comparison to her earlier work. While it retains plenty of Lubchansky’s signature wit and stunning artistry, the book also ventures into timely territory with its focus on commune-slash-cults and the dangers of unquestioning loyalty.
Vogue spoke to Lubchansky about stuffing Simplicity with ideas, her longtime obsession with cults, AI’s threat to art, and drawing various dystopias. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Vogue: How did the composition process this time differ from those for your two previous graphic novels, Boys Weekend and The Antifa Super-Soldier Cookbook?
Mattie Lubchansky: Well, smarter people than me are talking about this, but you always hear, “You have to learn how to write each book that you’re writing,” and that was certainly the case for me. All three of my books have been pretty different. The Antifa book was a larger outgrowth of short-form political work I’d been doing. Boys Weekend was not autofiction, but it was in the universe of things where I had something happen to me that I transmuted into a fiction story by changing all the details and setting it in the future and adding satire. With this book, I kind of started with the characters—the main character, specifically—and then kind of built everything around him. I did research for this book, which I never do, and as I thought more about it, I just started piling more and more stuff into this book. Boys Weekend kind of has one idea in it, which is the idea that trans people are human, whereas I feel like Simplicity has 40 ideas in it, after a long time of trying to cram them all in there.
What got you interested in the theme of communes and cults?
I’ve always been obsessed with cults. I mean, there’s one at the center of my last book, too; I realized as I was finishing this book that the two books have kind of similar premises. I think there’s something in the air about communes. In the last 40 to 50 years, there’s been a lot of queer separatism and, very recently, a lot of specifically trans separatist movements, where it’s like, if you are a gay person in a big city, you’re probably somebody that went and tried to start a farm with their friends. It’s just sort of in the air. In my research, I was doing a lot of reading about 19th-century pre-Marxist socialist groups, and our time now is obviously not similar in terms of what the world looks like. But there’s a similarity in the idea that people’s lives are being reordered, in a way, and people feel like they don’t have control over their own destinies, their own bodies, their own communities. So there is this weird pull of, like, I’m gonna go start a new society. Everyone’s gonna see how good it is. I think I’ve just always been fascinated with what makes a person drop everything and join one of these groups.