Tish Doolin lives in the satirical crevices which bind our world–what comic artists call the gutter space between panels. As a freelance writer for WomenWriteAboutComics and as the co-creator of Modus Operandi, Doolin offers up her keen insight in both written and visual narrative spaces whenever she’s able to gift the world with snippets of knowledge. Perhaps her time as an Army medic helped sharpen her script doctor skills. And perhaps it’s no stretch the Kafkaesque military world helped her realize that truth lies somewhere between fact and fiction–in the scratchy linework of her art.
What drives your pen?
It’s a storytelling compulsion. A productive compulsion. I have to. I have to be making something at all times, and it’s usually in the form of sequential illustration.
I started drawing when I was really young, like – 4? And that whole time, the longest I ever stopped drawing was about a month shortly after I got to my first duty station. That’s it.
So, do you feel your service had an impact on your art?
Absolutely. I learned a lot while I was enlisted. I learned to hone my satire. I got better at making commercial work, because sometimes whatever unit I was in would need t-shirts or posters or whatever. I already had some graphic design training, but the military – at least at that small scale – they aren’t looking for refined, design student work most of the time. They’re looking for Cousin Ted’s drawing of a Cool Bulldog, except they want Cousin Ted to be really good at drawing.
I also got a lot faster, and less stiff. Time constraints make it harder to excuse being precious and luxuriating in perfectionism.
You mentioned that your time in the Army helped you hone your satire. Did you find any part of military life kind of… satirical in and of itself?
It’s almost entirely satirical, both in the things one loves, and the things one hates. Have you ever read Catch-22?
Y’know, I haven’t!
If you want to know what being in a hot mess of a unit feels like, read that book [Catch-22]. It’s clearly satirical, and isn’t true to the word of the experience, but is 100% true to how it feels. It’s hard not to find a lot of it funny. You sort of have to, like how folks working in the ER laugh about some weird things. If you aren’t laughing about being called to a 3:30 formation in 98 degree weather that leadership doesn’t start until 4:45, what are you going to do? Cry about it?
The NCOs are all bickering at each other off on the side and we’re all just. Standing there. Watching them. You have to laugh.
You have to laugh about how you can stick your hands in your battle buddy’s armpits if it’s cold, but you cannot stick them in your pockets.
On top of the military being such a weird bureaucratic experience…did you find yourself struggling in any way because of how you identify?
When I was on active duty, I never had any issues with my peers in regard to sexual orientation or gender. Some pretty funny things happened – well, Kafkaesque, I guess. This was back before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ended, and when people wanted to get sent home from basic or AIT, one of the things people would try to do was to get caught being gay. It never worked, to my knowledge, because the Army had discretion as to whether it would send you home for being gay, and at the time, it needed people way too badly to opt for it.
I did have issues with leadership, though. Only ever enlisted leadership. NCOs really had a weird issue with my hair being short. It was in regs, of course. When I started wearing a metal clip to keep my bangs out of my face, that was also in regs – it was plain, and the same color as my hair. NCOs were constantly trying to rake me over the coals for the hair, and when that didn’t work, the clip. I learned to recite the relevant regulations. I got the impression that my hair was, frankly, too gay. It wasn’t an unusual style or anything. It was just too gay.
Active duty is – and I think a lot of my fellow progressives blanch at the idea – a neat cross-section of American society in a lot of ways. And, on the whole, people get along despite how different people are.
I was surprised to find out just how well I got along with people who I thought would never, ever want to talk to me out in civilian society. It was an important life lesson, and one I’m really grateful for.
So, did your service in the military change your approach to writing and visualizing characters? For example, did you find yourself creating a certain sort of character more often, or did you find a depth to characters that you didn’t initially?
Writing kinda saved me even more than drawing did, not gonna lie. People who say art is useless have never had need to make use of it, or never had enough skill to make it a real tool.
Military personnel show up a lot in my work. The big thing that’s changed since I was in the service, is that I tend to write them as found family groups. I don’t think of myself as being much into the found family trope, but if I have a guard detail out in front of a government building, or something like that – I don’t just skip right over them. Those characters mean something to me. There’s a dynamic in that squad, and I want to convey a little bit of that to the reader.
It’s very possible that those characters don’t care much about the state, or the organization that they are a part of. But they know, and care, about each other.
And more often than not, that dynamic is one of comfort – both in terms of kindness, and the permission individuals feel they have to criticize each other freely.
Y’know I’m kind of a sucker for that trope but it’s less with enlistment and more with other organizational stuff. Maybe it’s because I’m a sad comic book nerd who wishes The Avengers were my family, but I just like that theme.
That means you get it
What do you ultimately hope people learn, or feel, from your work? And do you feel that people who’ve served would have a stronger understanding of your work?
The thing I really want people to get out of my work is that there are no perfect solutions to problems; that the perfect solutions we hear about tend to be lies, and that sometimes you have to embrace that imperfection. Give grace to people who have had to make unpleasant choices, because it may have been the best option on the table. Be glad it wasn’t you who had to do it, and give yourself grace when it was. Because, if you’re at all responsible in your life, someday, it will be you making those imperfect choices. The military didn’t create this theme for me, being alive did. What the military did was heavily reinforce it. The Army is an organization that can’t possibly train every individual in the way that draws out all their strengths and diminishes their weaknesses. There’s too many variables, not enough time, not enough expertise in the whole world for that. Instead, they’ve set out to do the best job training the largest number of people they can. It inevitably leaves some people out in the cold. In a lot of ways, I was one of those people. But that didn’t mean the Army was wrong. It meant they were doing the best they could, and the best wasn’t perfect. It couldn’t be.
As for the second bit – I think people who served are more likely to relate to the undertone of black comedy juxtaposed with hope – i.e., people are sort of awful, but we love them anyway.
That’s definitely a life motto of mine, I guess working retail kinda does that to you as well. Definitely not to the same extent.
Yeah. It’s another very, What are you gonna do, cry? scenario.
You sort of have to laugh.
Interviewed by Michael Rezaie Weaver
ISSUED 