Latest news with #commune
Vogue
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Vogue
In Her New Graphic Novel, ‘Simplicity,' Mattie Lubchansky Explores the Dark Side of Communal Living (and So Much More)
Mattie Lubchansky has written and illustrated several graphic novels, including 2023's riveting Boys Weekend, but her latest, Simplicity, defies comparison to her earlier work. While it retains plenty of Lubchansky's signature wit and stunning artistry, the book also ventures into timely territory with its focus on commune-slash-cults and the dangers of unquestioning loyalty. Vogue spoke to Lubchansky about stuffing Simplicity with ideas, her longtime obsession with cults, AI's threat to art, and drawing various dystopias. The conversation has been edited and condensed. Vogue: How did the composition process this time differ from those for your two previous graphic novels, Boys Weekend and The Antifa Super-Soldier Cookbook? Mattie Lubchansky: Well, smarter people than me are talking about this, but you always hear, 'You have to learn how to write each book that you're writing,' and that was certainly the case for me. All three of my books have been pretty different. The Antifa book was a larger outgrowth of short-form political work I'd been doing. Boys Weekend was not autofiction, but it was in the universe of things where I had something happen to me that I transmuted into a fiction story by changing all the details and setting it in the future and adding satire. With this book, I kind of started with the characters—the main character, specifically—and then kind of built everything around him. I did research for this book, which I never do, and as I thought more about it, I just started piling more and more stuff into this book. Boys Weekend kind of has one idea in it, which is the idea that trans people are human, whereas I feel like Simplicity has 40 ideas in it, after a long time of trying to cram them all in there. What got you interested in the theme of communes and cults? I've always been obsessed with cults. I mean, there's one at the center of my last book, too; I realized as I was finishing this book that the two books have kind of similar premises. I think there's something in the air about communes. In the last 40 to 50 years, there's been a lot of queer separatism and, very recently, a lot of specifically trans separatist movements, where it's like, if you are a gay person in a big city, you're probably somebody that went and tried to start a farm with their friends. It's just sort of in the air. In my research, I was doing a lot of reading about 19th-century pre-Marxist socialist groups, and our time now is obviously not similar in terms of what the world looks like. But there's a similarity in the idea that people's lives are being reordered, in a way, and people feel like they don't have control over their own destinies, their own bodies, their own communities. So there is this weird pull of, like, I'm gonna go start a new society. Everyone's gonna see how good it is. I think I've just always been fascinated with what makes a person drop everything and join one of these groups.
The Guardian
08-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
What I learned as a kid in a quasi-commune
When I was a kid, my mum used to talk wistfully about living in a commune. But, looking back, there were times when there were enough of us and we were random enough – two single mothers, heaps of kids, lodgers, a guy in a caravan in the garden, more cats than had names – that it would have been a commune in anyone's eyes. I don't know what she was waiting for, some kind of hippy badge? Anyway, for a while, we lived in the 80s version of a blended family, which is to say there were a lot of us – my mum, her friend, her friend's three kids (one a bit older and twins) and me and my sister – with a world of wisdom and expertise, none of it in DIY. I remember everything and my sister remembers everything, yet our memories are completely different. I remember our mum's friend bought Ribena: it was the most exciting thing that ever happened, because our mum thought squash was a capitalist conspiracy. My sister remembers the friend teaching us all how to do a Greta Garbo impression. I remember the older son offered me 50p to eat his scab, and I did, but he never gave me the 50p. He remembers that I was always covered in snails, because I had taken a shine to them. I remember thinking the twins were telepathic and a bit magic – and I still do. My sister remembers our mum taking against a beefy cat and nailing a skirting board closed behind him. I remember her friend freeing him; we both choose to believe that our mum must have known her friend would do that. The kids hadn't seen a lot of each other in the intervening years, because of life, then two funerals – our mum's and theirs – happened this year. The sheer number of events we had to catch up on – four divorces (OK, two of them mine), many bereavements, yet more cats – was like listening to a Dynasty plot read by someone on helium. It was exactly like a family, except bigger. It turns out I do want the hippies to send us a badge. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
The Guardian
08-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
What I learned as a kid in a quasi-commune
When I was a kid, my mum used to talk wistfully about living in a commune. But, looking back, there were times when there were enough of us and we were random enough – two single mothers, heaps of kids, lodgers, a guy in a caravan in the garden, more cats than had names – that it would have been a commune in anyone's eyes. I don't know what she was waiting for, some kind of hippy badge? Anyway, for a while, we lived in the 80s version of a blended family, which is to say there were a lot of us – my mum, her friend, her friend's three kids (one a bit older and twins) and me and my sister – with a world of wisdom and expertise, none of it in DIY. I remember everything and my sister remembers everything, yet our memories are completely different. I remember our mum's friend bought Ribena: it was the most exciting thing that ever happened, because our mum thought squash was a capitalist conspiracy. My sister remembers the friend teaching us all how to do a Greta Garbo impression. I remember the older son offered me 50p to eat his scab, and I did, but he never gave me the 50p. He remembers that I was always covered in snails, because I had taken a shine to them. I remember thinking the twins were telepathic and a bit magic – and I still do. My sister remembers our mum taking against a beefy cat and nailing a skirting board closed behind him. I remember her friend freeing him; we both choose to believe that our mum must have known her friend would do that. The kids hadn't seen a lot of each other in the intervening years, because of life, then two funerals – our mum's and theirs – happened this year. The sheer number of events we had to catch up on – four divorces (OK, two of them mine), many bereavements, yet more cats – was like listening to a Dynasty plot read by someone on helium. It was exactly like a family, except bigger. It turns out I do want the hippies to send us a badge. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
