Evelyn Evelyn is the ever-expanding story of conjoined twins who become Internet music sensations. The project started as a concept EP by Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley. They created a story of finding the Evelyn sisters on MySpace and insisted that they were real. The EP was successful enough that a full length album was written and recorded. They then began a world tour, using silhouette puppetry by Sxip Shirey to tell the tragic backstory of the girls and act as a foil to their desires. Now the story has expanded to a new medium. Dark Horse Comics released the graphic novel Evelyn Evelyn: A Tragic Tale in Two Tomes on 4 October. The story is the same as the album, but the transfer to an illustrated format opens up the tale in new ways. Cynthia von Buhler is the artist behind the graphic novel. She created the album art which helped to define the sweet and sad aesthetic of the twins and expanded upon those early illustrations to make the book. I had the opportunity to sit down with her last Saturday night for an interview at New York Comic Con.
Cynthia became involved in Evelyn Evelyn because of her relationship with Amanda Palmer.
I’ve known Amanda for years. We knew each other in Boston because I used to do performance art and music, too. I’ve known her for a long time. And then we sort of went our own ways doing our own projects. And then one day, I just wrote her an e-mail and we got back in touch and she asked if I wanted to illustrate the book.
Cynthia was clearly excited about the project. She had this great energy about her from the moment we were introduced. She even anticipated some of the questions I might ask, putting me in the fun spot of trying to spin my prep work to get even more out of her.
Just asking about her involvement in the process led to a brief overview of the aesthetic of the book.
They wanted a specific style, and it’s actually my sketching style. So I just did a sketch and she said, ‘Oh, that’s exactly what we want.' So, that’s how I would do the sketches in my books and it was very easy for me. It came naturally.
She later went on to say that the goal was this almost "children's line art," like what a kid would doodle in the margins during class. There's supposed to be this sense of innocence and wonder on every page, even if something horrible is happening in the story. The most disturbing elements of the story aren't really shown. They're hidden or substituted with text or representational imagery. It strikes just the right balance for the story. Evelyn and Evelyn, despite everything they've been through, are still these kind and sweet young women who just want to find someone to connect with. They have each other, but they just want someone to like them for who they are, not what they went through.
Since Cynthia was so used to working in this style, I had to ask if there were any particularly challenging scenes to get just right. There was one, but not for the reasons you would expect.
The challenging one was the end…When you have all of the celebrities. Usually I can [do] one page in like an hour or two…and that one took a long time…a couple days, because there are so many people I had to draw. And I had to research them all. I had to find reference for everybody and kind of compile it.
The issue was not the challenge of the drawing itself, but the placement of all the celebrities. There is this fantastic moment on the Evelyn Evelyn album where the girls sing a song called "MySpace." The song is about trying to find friendship online. For the actual recording of it, Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley invited a slew of celebrities--included Weird Al, Tegan and Sara, and Margaret Cho--to send in e-mail audio files of them singing along with the girls on the final chorus. It's this moment that finally gives the story some sliver of a silver lining.
Now imagine trying to fill a page of a graphic novel with representation images of celebrities discovering the online account of conjoined twin musicians and grooving along. You need to be able to recognize all the celebrities and place them in a way that looks right on the page. Even if the drawing itself wasn't a challenge, the layout would have been a challenge for anyone.
I could tell Cynthia had a lot of fun working on the Evelyn Evelyn graphic novel. I had to ask her what her favorite scene to draw was. "I actually really like the circus part and I really like the animals. I like animals. Actually, it was very sad, but I really enjoyed drawing the circus part." In the context of the story, Evelyn and Evelyn get sold to a circus where they perform a musical act with a conjoined twin elephants. Let's just say it doesn't end well.
One thing that stuck with me during the interview was that Cynthia really wants her audience to have a visceral reaction to her work. She wants you to interact with it really become involved. She even had a moment like that herself when working on the book. "I actually became a vegetarian. I was almost a vegetarian, but I was still eating chicken. But after the whole part about the chickens I stopped eating chickens." Broad strokes about the story: if the girls love something, it rarely ends well for the subject of their affections. If something could be considered cuter or more traditional fodder for a children's story, it doesn't end well for them, either.
I'm actually going to break the rest of the interview off into a separate post. I began asking Cynthia broader questions about her art and performances. The interview really took off as a conversation at that point. One thing led to another and suddenly I was handing over my business card to be e-mailed tickets to a sold out performance of her immersive play Speakeasy Dollhouse tonight. "You are press, right?" she joked as she started filling me in on the details.
The graphic novel Evelyn Evelyn: A Tragic Tale in Two Tomes is worth checking out. The story is great and the art really adds a new dimension to music. An adult would catch onto all the jokes and dark humor of it, while a child would laugh along at the strange things that happen and be engaged with the dark--think Grimm Bros.--fairy tale unfolding. Any graphic novel fan should be proud to have something this well-conceived and executed in their collection.
