By Mia Beach
Sol Brager is a comics artist, historian, and writer living in Brooklyn, NewYork. They are the author of Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory (2024) from William Morrow Books, an analog inkwash comic about situating family Holocaust history in the context of ongoing colonialism, resisting trauma narratives that excuse the violences of the present, and figuring out whether the ghosts you’ve invented to keep you company are really the ghosts you need. We are excited to introduce Funny Times readers to Brager’s work with this excerpt from Heavyweight and an online exclusive interview.
Q: Can you tell us what inspired your book, Heavyweight? How long was the process from premise to production?
A: I’ve been interested in and researching family history and Holocaust memory for a long time—I first started thinking about doing a comic about my grandparents in like 2016, I did a mini-comic called “String of Pearls” that year about my Oma bribing the French resistance with a pearl necklace. I’ve been kicking the ideas behind this book around for a long time but in this iteration, I spent a lot of 2020 working on a proposal and submitted that at the end of the year, Heavyweight got picked up by William Morrow in early 2021, I spent about a year writing the book, about a year drawing it, and then there was a few months of doing final proofreading and developing the cover.
Q: What was your favorite part about writing about your family? The most difficult?
A: In terms of research the most difficult part was what to do when I hit dead ends—Heavyweight does a lot of dramatizing the process of research, and a lot of my research just at a certain point, stops sort of unsatisfyingly. My favorite part was kind of the hardest part—which was when I pieced together some of these family stories, I got a reallydifferent picture of my family dynamics and I had to approach living members in my family with a lot more compassion.Which was both really nice and upended my sense of what had been happening my whole life.
Q: Why do you feel cartoons were the right fit for your subject matter?
A: On the one hand, cartoons are what I do. If I was a filmmaker this would be a film. For whatever reason, comics are what I’m drawn to, they’re what I want to make. But also they’re just so capacious, they can contain so many different things at once. In Heavyweight there are moments where I move, pretty quickly, between reproductions of archival material, dramatizations of testimony, autobiographical material, pretty joke-y gag cartoons—there aren’t a lot of forms that you can do all of those things in. I think there are a lot of ethical considerations for doing non-fiction comics, especially about historical violence, but there’s a lot of precedent to draw from.
Q: If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would it be?
A: Right this minute I would love to just be in nature and not working, I think my compromise will be to try to go to Brighton Beach after work today!
