Thin-Skinned, a guest post by Anya Davidson

Content warning: One of the pictures in this post is of a fake injury/stitches (after the second paragraph, part of set of 3 pictures). Parts of the post describe gory images, injuries, and death.

A teenage girl lies impaled on a picket fence, drenched in gore. Her friend photographs the scene. When the photographer complains, the accident-victim snaps awake to give art direction. A young man puts his head in a noose and steps off a chair. When his mother returns home to find him hanging from the rafters, she reminds him to get ready for the dinner party she’s hosting.

These are the opening scenes of the 2000 Film Ginger Snaps and the 1971 films Harold and Maude, respectively, and they provided the inspiration for the opening pages of my graphic novel Night and Dana,  in which high school seniors Dana and Lily stage a gruesome prank on school grounds, resulting in an ultimatum from their principal: enroll in and pass a community college film class, or be expelled before graduation. On the quest to fulfill their grade requirements, Lily and Dana meet new friends and mentors who change their lives in unforeseeable ways.

When I was developing the story, I knew I wanted to replicate the magic formula of horror, humor, and heart I found in my favorite media growing up. I wanted to play with preconceptions. My protagonist had to be, as I was at seventeen, learning to think critically and develop her own opinions about the people and issues affecting her life.

Since childhood, I’ve struggled to make sense of the cruelty with which humans treat humans and other animals. Horror was a way to process my grief. For a high school drama assignment, I memorized a monologue from George Romero’s post-apocalyptic zombie film Day of the Dead. In a college ecology class, as part of a presentation on tadpole mutations caused by factory farm runoff, I showed a clip from the 1979 eco-horror film Prophecy, directed by John Frankenheimer, in which toxic runoff from a paper mill transforms a variety of wildlife into horrific, hairless killing machines.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve found ways to incorporate my special interests to every facet of life. That said, Night and Dana isn’t a horror story. It’s a story about horror-obsessed teens learning, like I did, to process their trauma and express their anger in productive ways.

The setting is Boca Bella, a fictional town in South Florida based on Sarasota, where I was born. For the final project in their film class, Dana and her friends choose to make an eco-horror film inspired by the red tide, a phenomenon in which harmful algae blooms kill off swathes of marine life. They don’t always agree on how best to do that, and the resulting conflicts are painful.

 It was challenging to write Dana with a balance of abrasiveness and vulnerability. A profoundly sensitive person, she uses snark as a defense mechanism. Although she feels overshadowed by her best friend, Lily, Dana is fearful of venturing out in the world alone. It was important to me to show her, over the course of the story, developing greater self-awareness and stronger communication skills.

When the story begins, Dana is acting out of boredom, creating gore effects to shock and entertain her peers. Galvanized by the red tide, a real-life horror caused by ocean warming, she becomes involved with Boca Bella’s activist community, and uses her special effects makeup skills to create visually arresting protest imagery. It was very important to me to show Dana putting her media literacy and her affinity for special effects makeup to use in service of her convictions. As I was writing, I thought a lot about Representative John Lewis’s distinction between bad and good trouble.

In 2020, I attended a climate rally in McKinley Park, Chicago, and saw members of the Sunrise movement, a climate group for young people, speak. They, along with the Vermont-based art collective Bread and Puppets, provided the inspiration for Anchorwatch, the fictional climate group in Night and Dana.

Each week on her way to film class, Dana passes city hall, where environmental activist and an Anchorwatch organizer Daphne Ocean is engaged in a one-woman protest. Her friends and parents have their opinions, but Dana must think for herself. Is Daphne a dangerous instigator, yelling nonsense into a megaphone, or is she a concerned citizen, rallying for the welfare of her neighbors? As Dana knows very well from her stunts with special-effects makeup, things aren’t always as they seem. The news is scary. Rather than turn off and tune out, Dana’s story encourages young readers to channel their fear into art and activism.

Meet the author

Anya Davidson is a cartoonist, printmaker and musician living in Chicago. Her debut book, School Spirits, was excerpted in Best American Comics 2015, edited by Jonathan Lethem and Bill Kartalopoulos. Her sophomore graphic novel, Band for Life, (2016, Fantagraphics books) based on her experiences fronting a noise-rock band, was nominated for an Ignatz award in the Outstanding Graphic Novel category. Her comics journalism has been published in the Chicago Reader, Newcity Magazine and The Nib, and she writes comics criticism for The Comics Journal. Davidson is a professor in the Painting and Drawing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Instagram:           https://www.instagram.com/anyapdavidson/     

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Anya’s Website: https://www.anyadavidson.com/

About Night and Dana

A creative coming-of-age story for the climate-change generation

Dana Drucker fights boredom in her Florida beach town by crafting special-effects makeup—the more gruesome, the better. But when a messy prank with Dana’s best friend Lily gets the wrong kind of attention, the girls have two choices: find a new creative outlet or leave high school without graduating.

To save their shot at diplomas, Dana and Lily join a community college film class. It gives Dana a chance to keep practicing her monster makeup, as she and Lily start work on a horror movie inspired by local ocean warming. And a search for filming locations puts Dana in the path of Daphne Ocean, an activist and self-proclaimed water witch—the perfect kind of inspiring outsider. But when filming starts, Dana finds herself growing apart from Lily, who doesn’t seem to need her closest friend much anymore.

Soon, tempers are flaring, and Dana’s pushing away old friends and her new mentor. But as everything starts going up in flames, Dana also begins to forge her voice. Night and Dana is a creative coming-of-age story for the climate-change era, a graphic novel about making art and growing up when it feels like the world is on fire.

ISBN-13: 9781728430362
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group
Publication date: 09/12/2023
Age Range: 13+

Filed under: Guest Post