J: You have been in the comics game for a very long time. How did you come to make comics?

Bitmap: Well, when I was very small, maybe like seven years old, I started reading Calvin and Hobbes, and immediately I thought ,”I want to do that forever.” I went so far to get books on how to publish books - which prompted my parents to say, ”Are you serious about this? This is a bad career.”

. . . I was ten.

J: Wow.

Bitmap: And because I was ten, I went, “It’s okay, fifty people in the world probably do this, and I’ll be one of them. I could definitely do it, no problem.”

Bitmap’s Avatar Drawing

J: Did you know what kind of comics you wanted to write?

Bitmap: I knew I wanted to write deep lore things. Funny enough, at first I was going to make video games but then I realized all of my novellas would not turn into video games very well. Turns out it’s hard to be a one-person game-making machine. For example, I developed this big deep, OC lore, which I later rethought. I told myself, “If I did 3 pages every other week, I would finish my magnum opus when i’m 80 yrs old, which is a bad idea.”

So at 24, I revamped my story probably because I started transitioning and that may have influenced me. “This was bad,” I thought. “This story is about a bunch of depressed people who are destroying the world. I need to modify it.”

J: So when you were little, you wanted to make comics. Then at one point you were thinking of making video games - and then you went back to comics?

Bitmap: I was into painting too.

J: Painting?

Bitmap: Yeah, my background as an artist is a little messy. My father deeply disapproved of me doing art to the point that I went to a liberal arts college instead of going to an art school like RISD (since I was from Boston), because I was banned from that.

So then I entered the art department and took all the classes including painting. I had to take an independent study to make a comic. It was a bit of a reroute, but when I started drawing digitally, I was immediately able to take everything I learned from painting and applied it to my tablet.

J: In a way, it worked out!

Bitmap: It did! It’s funny, the stuff I did in my non-comics related class sorta came full circle. When Emily asked me what I wanted to draw, I told them “I want to draw something quiet and contemplative” and they introduced the mountain aspect. Then I asked if the mountain could be this sculpture I made in college, which was this weird pyramid skyscraper made out of glued-together styrofoam so it had all these curves.

We all have our motifs that we put in over and over again and especially since I haven’t been able to use the mountain idea, I’m like ‘I need to bring this back somehow.”

J: Were there any other motifs that you brought back into this project besides the Mountain?

Bitmap: I’ve always had a thing for ‘bigness’ and ‘smallness’ and I did bring that into this. I think it may be some psychological thing because I feel like most of my ideas stem from my Jewish identity. I think about how little I was able to relate to very common cultural structures around me in the sense of “what is considered a good thing to do or bad thing to do? Is selfishness good or bad?” Very basic things that fundamentally disagreed with the culture I was from. Even from a young age, it stemmed from that - big vast things you can’t easily connect to, small intimate things you can, and not doing well with the middle.

So ‘bigness’ and ‘smallness’ comes into all of my comics, not just in Mountain. It’s in my style. I like making these large sprawling, detailed backgrounds - seeing this world, this shape of something that’s overwhelming in its density, and it can be tragic or lethargic. Then I like to zoom into it almost like you’re dissecting it through a microscope and then you get up-close to this super hyperactive scene. This is how I built everything essentially. You make something emotionally intense and then you zoom in and override it. I keep coming back to it and try to not get stuck into it because then I make stuff like…this.

J: Whoa, that is intense.

Bitmap: Yeah for me, it’s always like..I think about the vastness of everything around us and the feeling you get when you go hiking or go to the ocean, exploring a city alone, being distanced and getting a broad picture - then the actual closeness and intimacy of what you’re doing with your normal life that’s fun and exciting. Sadness and joy. Sadness are big panels that look really pretty and awestruck and then the joy are all the smaller moments so they become smaller panels.

J: That’s really interesting - the way you lay out your panels is pretty conceptual. What made you say yes to collaborating with Emily on this project?

Bitmap: Before Emily wanted to do a comic with me, I was in such an intense burnout phase and I wanted someone else to take the lead. Also, I met Emily in person a bunch of times and that helped. They’ve read all of my stuff, they’re open and flexible, and I was like “well I’m not sure I want to make any of the stuff I’ve been wanting to make right now, maybe I need something different.”

Turns out Emily was very good at making things I do want to draw and it was impressive. It’s very rare, I tend to be boxed into drawing things I don’t want to draw, which has happened in the past. I’ve been incredibly pleased - this has been a great project to work on, I’ve been able to open up and explore ideas without falling off or without getting too absorbed and getting bogged down in detail.

J: So what DO you like to draw?

Bitmap: Hmm. Well, things I enjoy drawing involve opportunities to draw flowing linework. And I'm always interested in contained fantastical adventures like landing on an alien planet, exploring an island or city, et cetera, or just exploring a character’s inner life during an unusual situation. As long as there is some form of visual spectacle I suppose. I struggle with work that’s mostly talking heads since I end up over-focusing on the environment and body language. So if it was a conversion piece, it would need to be set to the backdrop of a dramatic environment, the way Calvin and Hobbes does for its Sunday strips. Also, doing the environments first help me set the palette for the rest of the scenes.

J: I’ve definitely noticed. Your environments are amazing. There’s so much detail and it’s clear that there IS a story in these environments. You just don’t know what the story is.

Bitmap: Yeah, I like implying that something has happened but not telling you all about it. Something I think a lot about is death and societies, and moving on. You don’t need to know what happened, just that it did.

See more of Bitmap’s work at BMPrager.com
☆ Twitter @BMPrager
☆ Store http://bmprager.itch.io
☆ Gay Space Future Comic http://ASHENPRINCESS.COM
☆ Patreon http://patreon.com/bmprager

A Page from “We’re Still Here” Anthology

Interview with Bitmap: How does she draw?