John Hawkins: In October of 2017 huge swathes of Northern California were wiped out by fire. You describe these events in your graphic memoir, A Fire Story, just released in paperback. Can you conjure up a brief What Happened account of the Tubbs fire?
Brian Fies: The Tubbs fire that destroyed my home was just one of a half dozen firestorms that broke out in northern California that hot, very windy night. The real problem was the wind, which blew at hurricane speeds from the east and north, dry from passing over the Nevada deserts, and pushed the fires sideways like a blowtorch. The fires tore through grass and trees that were already weakened and dried by years of drought, although paradoxically we'd had heavy rains just the winter before, which produced thick carpets of dry wild grasses that were the perfect fuel nine months later.
It's a pattern of historic drought plus unusually strong winds plus a single small spark, either from nature or humans, that we've seen repeated all over the western half of North America and in Australia as well.
Hawkins: A Fire Story reminds me of another graphic account of processes at work -- Ted Rall's comic account of how vote counts in America are manipulated by politicians, away from the prying eyes of the media, which was included in investigative journalist Greg Palast's nearly prescient How Trump Stole the 2020 Election. What are the advantages of relating your story graphically over, say, a podcast?
Fies: Well, different media have their strengths and weaknesses. Comics are my mediumI'd had two graphic novels published before A Fire Story.
I think comics combine words and pictures in a way that makes them greater than the sum of their parts. I often compare comics to popular music: the lyrics of a pop song may be bad poetry, and the music may be three repetitive chords, but put the lyrics and music together and suddenly you've got a song that can remind you of the summer you were 16 or define a generation. Comics are like that. In a good comic, the words and pictures communicate two different things and readers have to connect them, which draws them into the storytelling process. When a comic really works right, it can feel like a direct tap from the creator's brain into the reader's, which makes them a great way to tell intimate personal stories.
Hawkins: Your account details what happened to your specific community. It was kind of like Nature's deconstruction of what comprises a community. What did the fire teach you about "community"? What is it?
Fies: Big question! Speaking only for myself, I think I tended to see myself as a kind of lone wolf who plugged into the community when necessary but didn't really need it. You can have an illusion of self-sufficiency, which evaporates quickly when you lose everything and suddenly need help, and need to surrender some pride to accept that help.
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