Emily McGovern’s latest graphic novel, Twelve Percent Dread, might increase your personal dread percentage, even as it entertains. It’s about roommates and former couple Katie and Nas, scrambling to get Nas’s visa approved and to survive in the gig economy. It’s also about a tech giant making terrible ethical decisions, and how their employees become complicit. Drawing on some of McGovern’s own life experience as a tutor for a millionaire family right after she graduated from college, it’s also about the intersections between those worlds.
McGovern’s art in Twelve Percent Dread generally appears in capsule-like panels, as though the reader is scrolling through a social media page with lots of bite-sized updates from multiple people, and it builds tension through these snapshots to a monumental ending.
Emily McGovern chatted with WWAC about her process, goals, and toxic girl bosses.
Emily, thanks for doing this interview! I know it’s a busy time and I hope the UK launch is going great for you.
Thank *you*! A pleasure!
The lozenge style of the panels was great for this story, as it felt claustrophobic, and like I wasn’t getting the whole picture — which, of course, I wasn’t. Looking at your “making of” pages at the end, it looks like you started out with more traditional rectangular panels with narrow spaces between them. Can you talk about how your layout style developed for this project?
The book is made up of lots of small moments – my characters tend to speak colloquially, in short bursts, with lots of hesitation and pauses. This results in many small panels! It also gives the story a chaotic and restless vibe, and as you say, a feeling of compression, which adds another layer to the storytelling.
Gender roles and expectations are front and center in this comic, and we see women of different socioeconomic statuses interacting with each other a lot. Katie is scrambling in a shared room to survive in a gig economy, her old friend Emma has a salaried tech job and attending stress, and her billionaire boss Michelle is a visionary and terrible tech giant. I think Michelle as a kind of girl boss Musk or Bezos is an interesting character. We judge her as a mother, for instance, in a way we might not judge a guy in the same role as a father. How do you see Michelle’s gender playing into her character?
When I was writing it, it did occur to me that some people might get annoyed at the cliche of a female professional not being a good mother (very 00s rom-com). But for me, her actions are less about gender and more about what the role of billionaire CEO requires, which is a staggering level of self-interest and narcissism, and very low levels of empathy. I suggest that combo would rarely make for good parenting.
But yes — I love the interaction between Michelle’s high status and her gender. My favourite bits are when she manipulates the concept of patriarchy and institutional sexism to fit her own purposes – as in, to excuse her own failings or explain away problems in her business practices. I always thought this would be a fun aspect to explore in a powerful female character.
I’m a fan of your other work, too, including Bloodlust and Bonnets, and in a lot of your work I think there’s a focus on the interplay of different personality types in the group dynamics. I kept wondering if Nas and Byron would get along. What’s your process like developing characters’ relationships to each other? Do you start with one character and build out, or think about the dynamics you’re looking for and build up your characters to suit?
It’s so organic and drawn out — overall I worked on this book for over 2 years — that it’s hard for me to untangle the weeds of the entire process! Quite quickly the characters become “real” to you, and their course of action feels to some degree natural, or inevitable. So it definitely starts with the characters, and the group dynamics follow on from that.
In terms of character interaction, I think I work off the principle that all of them have their own personal self-interest, and also a desire to forge connections with the other characters. Where does empathy/the desire to connect win out over self-interest, and how? That makes it sound very clinical though — actually I’m usually just trying to create funny situations and the dynamics will come from that.
The grind of the gig economy is brutal, and it was interesting to see how it variously exhausted and affected Katie, Nas, and others. At one point, Nas has a gig with a woman named Victoria as part of a cleaning team. Victoria also has her own business selling oils, and kind of offers a counterpart entrepreneurial side to your depiction of the gig economy. How do you think Victoria, with her scalp oil pyramid scheme hustle fits into that depiction?
I love Victoria, I think she’s pure of heart! She’s a Black working class Londoner, and the system is telling her that success is within her grasp, if she only hustles hard enough. She and Michelle are doing similar things, at opposite ends of the scale. Maybe I should do a Victoria spin-off…
Well, that would be awesome! Twelve Percent Dread is largely about the unsustainability of the tech industry’s hold on us and the unsustainability of the gig industry, and I’d love to see what happens next, after the climax at the end.
Twelve Percent Dread is out now in the U.K., and will be coming out in the U.S. August 2nd, so you, too, can join in the dread!
