EH: In line with the countercultural history of underground comix, your own work often exposes and interrogates capitalist destruction. Do you think there’s something about comics/comix that lends itself to cultural critique?

MM: Yes, I think part of it has to do with the fraught and tense relationship between the different signifiers that the comics medium uses to convey feeling or story—a word and an image bouncing meaning off of each other, for instance, or two different images. Almost by requirement, comics invite us to see the world from different angles and to see those perspectives as simultaneous and coexisting. Where capitalism propagates false beliefs in clear-cut answers, stability, and progress from “wrong” to “right,” the best comics invite nuanced and tangled conversations, whether about justice, identity, or habitat destruction. There is a magic that erupts when word and image come together and express this and this, rather than this or this. Not to romanticize the medium as a whole, though. Comics have been deployed as propaganda too.