Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Cartoonist talks about being punk in Little Rock
There will probably be a line out of the library when an aging punk rocker brings his slideshow to Fayetteville.
Nate Powell, award-winning graphic novelist and Little Rock native, opens up about his approach to writing characters and the fictional Arkansas universe seen in his latest book, “Fall Through,” from 2-3:30 p.m. Feb. 24 at Fayetteville Public Library. It’s a fictional tale of Arkansas’ first punk band, Diamond Mind that slips through time, guided mostly against their will by group’s vocalist.
In addition to being an often awarded cartoonist, with a National Book Award, a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, three Eisner Awards, two Ignatz Awards, four YALSA Great Graphic Novels For Teens selections and two Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist selections, Powell was well known around Arkansas for his band Soophie Nun Squad, active from 1992-2007, whose shows were the stuff of legend for their outlandish music, crowd games and costumes. Powell also had a record label, Harlan Records, from 1994 to 2010, that some may also remember.
In his author talk and slideshow, Powell will be speaking about the Arkansas punk scene of the 1990s and its relationship to the larger underground network at the time. Ahead of his trip to Arkansas from his new hometown in Bloomington, Ind., he answered a few questions about the book and growing up punk in Little Rock.
Q. Can you tell me a little about how you got into DIY publishing and music? Was there anyone in Arkansas who steered you in that direction?
My paths into self-publishing and underground music are parallel. Primordial steps included Mike Lierly, Nathan Wilson, and Deadbird’s own Alan Short making comics in the late 1980s as junior high metalheads, and I joined their fray in 1990. Most of the future Soophie Nun Squad crew crossed over from metal into punk in 1991, which exposed us to local self-published fanzines and self-released demo tapes. Alan played guitar in the band Entrance as our comics crew began work on a series called D.O.A., with our first issue published in September 1992, which was also the same month the still-gestating Soophie Nun Squad began writing songs.
Local zines included Mark Dober’s ‘Ahoalton’ and Matthew Thompson, Steve Schmidt and Jason White’s ‘Fluke,’ but punk and comics crossed over more directly as now-Fayetteville resident Jeff Jackson and future Lucero frontman Ben Nichols were fellow local cartoonists too. The owner of our comics shop, Michael Tierney, was sympathetic to us from his own self-publishing experiences a decade prior and generously offered us crucial shelf space for our earliest books during the peak years of the early ‘90s comics boom.
Q. I’m hung up on this
quote about those legendary, life-changing shows that are sparsely attended: “The most influential underground bands function as mass delusions. It seems like we were never here. It’s not that this should’ve never happened — It’s that it all only happens once anyway.”
Can you unpack what this quote means to you as a longtime music fan?
Much of “Fall Through” revolves around the process of mythologizing creative movements and rewriting our own memories of them. I’ve seen it with the flattening and truncating of a complex band like Soophie Nun Squad’s existence into a deeply inadequate shorthand (i.e. we were comedy, we were a fun band with costumes) and expanding singular moments to sum up the band as a whole (we are occasionally mythologized as a band that only played in laundromats, when in fact we only played a single laundromat show).
As memories are smoothed over, we struggle with how our own subjective experiences often exist in tension with the consensus memory. Many transformative shows which shifted the direction of a scene’s interest or style are similarly misremembered and were quaint affairs influencing a handful of attendees. I recall Cap’n Jazz playing a profoundly influential Little Rock house show in late 1994 on a Sunday night before high school finals week, or Against Me!’s first Little Rock show for about 15 people on a frigid 2002 night at a Riverfront gazebo. I missed the Cap’n Jazz show, and the next morning was pummeled with news from the friends who did attend about the electrifying and unique set, as the moment was carved into local legend within a matter of weeks. This process of mythologizing is a prime motivator for attending every underground show — you never know what you’ll miss.
Q. Are any of the stories in this book inspired by the scene that you helped develop in Little Rock? Also, did you learn that “cops will often wait until the song ends to break it up” by experience?
“Fall Through’s” plot is fictional, but many of the individual scenes and anecdotes stem from something which actually happened within my band-family on tour or in the context of a local show. The book’s first scene in which Diamond Mine breaks the floor at a New Year’s Eve show — and in fact, the entire visual device of the band falling into an interdimensional leap — originates from Soophie Nun Squad causing showgoers to dance so hard that we broke through the floorboards at four or five consecutive New Year’s Eve house shows, including people falling into the basement on at least one occasion. The scams, night swimming, pirated and repurposed public spaces and utilities, pushing a broken-down van along city streets, sleeping huddled in a ditch on the side of the freeway, playing a 3 a.m. show in someone’s front yard as police vans and helicopters circle overhead — all of these things happened.
Many of Little Rock’s underground shows were free, public, outdoor, illegal events at overlooked spaces which have since been privatized and gentrified. Our scene existed in a dynamic tension with the police who were occasionally summoned to shut us down. When cops did show up during someone’s set, they’d often wait for a break between songs to step in — so we’d collectively ignore them, dancing and singing along as hard as we could, and sometimes they’d actually be defeated by the joy and enthusiasm and they’d move along. This was the exception to the rule, though — cops had a long history of harassing, arresting, detaining and pointing guns at those within our scene.
Q. Do any of the main characters — Napoleon, Jody, Diana, or Steff — reflect yourself or people you knew when you were in bands and touring? How did you take those stories and build them around the ideas in this book?
There’s a lot of me in Jody, Diana and Napoleon. Each character helps embody a different part of my persona and relationship to the band-family, but each of those similarities developed organically over the course of several years (of) writing the book. The characters were originally created for a minor role in my Ozark-based 2018 book “Come Again.” I fell in love with them immediately, but they were fairly undefined characters at the time, with only Jody and Diana initially based on my friends Erin and Daun in the band Fat Shadow. The joy of writing and developing characters is allowing personalities and backstories to emerge organically, sometimes seeming to reveal themselves by their own agency.
Q. In a way, this book seems like a story about growing up — both for the characters and the “punk” scene as well as the people they met — was that intentional?
It’s a story about young adults coming to terms with their own complex relationships to a perpetually youth-defined subculture as the rest of their lives come calling. That’s what growing up is in a nutshell, felt acutely in a movement that focuses so much on resisting anything that smacks of a teenager’s limited notion of what adulthood is.
Monica Hooper is a features writer and podcast host for the NWA and River Valley Democrat-Gazette. She loves sharing stories about artists, dancers, music makers and all sorts of interesting folks. She can be reached at mhooper@nwaonline.com. Read the stories at nwaonline.com/staff/monica-hooper.