Sometimes in Reality You Kick the Football: A Conversation with Gabrielle Bell

With clear-eyed honesty and poetic detail, Gabrielle Bell’s comics deliver something that is simultaneously intimate, universal, and very funny. I first encountered Bell and her work in 2009, while I was covering the first-ever Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival. Since then I’ve wanted to ask her about rendering real life into art, and to gain some insight into her process, but hadn’t quite been able to gather up the time, or perhaps courage—sometimes, I have found, it’s better to admire from a distance. (Or as I saw in a Charlie Kaufman movie: you are what you love, not what loves you.) And yet the desire for companionship is a resonant theme throughout Bell’s work, so maybe it’s inevitable that I should want to connect with Gabrielle the person, as one connects with Gabrielle the comic-book character....