Interview: Pénélope Bagieu on ‘California Dreamin’: Cass Elliot Before The Mamas & the Papas’

My priority is always to make my characters alive, more than close-to-reality. What will make you turn hundreds of pages, laugh and ache with a character is clearly not the fact that they are similar to the actual person. What I usually do is doodle them until I love them, and am willing to spend a year or two with them (that is, drawing them). They have to be real persons to me, so I can start working on the way they act. And on the other hand, I want them to have features that will definitely remind of the actual people, for instance if you Google them afterwards. Pretty much like you would cast actors, I guess… You wouldn’t prefer a lookalike over a very good actor or actress.

I imagine the celebrities and many of the musicians who appear in the book left behind a great deal of photographic reference which you could look to when coming up with your designs for them, but how did you approach drawing Cass’ family members and the characters in the earliest parts of the book? Was sufficient reference available, or did you have to fill in a lot of blanks?

Again, the accuracy, especially in Cass’s family members, didn’t matter that much. They have the appearance of what they are to her. Her mom looks permanently worried (a little pissed) and exhausted, her dad looks kind and always just about to have a very bad idea, etcetera. That’s the great part with writing comics (compared to, say, photography); it’s not a documentary, I can twist reality anytime I need to for the purpose of my story.

How different was that character design stage on this book than it was with, say, Exquisite Corpse, where you can feel completely free to draw the characters however you like?

Well, the fact that they are real people didn’t hold me back, it was more of a canvas to start from, or a backbone, instead of just starting from scratch. And again, the characters in all my books, even in Exquisite Corpse are not really from scratch; I always think of someone I know as a reference. Same for Cass, who is a mix of two of my friends. I don’t know how to create expressive characters otherwise.

I was curious about the particular format you chose to tell your story, in which different narrators take turns telling different chapters of the book. Was that inspired by some of the sources you used, like Go Where You Wanna Go: The Oral History of The Mamas and The Papas, or did that seem like the most efficient way to tell the story of a person’s life?

It was a good way of not revealing everything all at once, and seeing her through the eyes of people who knew her, loved her, hated her. It forced the reader to unravel it by themselves, and solve the puzzle chapter after chapter. If Cass had been the narrator, there would have been no riddle, it would have been a totally different story.

It was very striking reading this book in 2017 and seeing that Cass encountered the same old stuff that women in the public eye are still forced to deal with–concerns about their looks and weight and so on–and her varying degrees of acceptance of those expectations. Sometimes she tried to comply, sometimes she defied them, sometimes she seemed to do both more or less simultaneously. How do you think Cass’ relationship to the expectations thrust upon her in the 1960s resonates today?

I’ve often seen comments under videos of Mama Cass from people nowadays praising those “good old days” when an artist was judged for her talent and her talent only, and people didn’t care about her looks like they would today. And of course the 1960s were just as cruel and oppressive to women with unconventional looks. The entertainment industry didn’t wait for MTV to judge singers from their looks. Even more so for Cass, who was fat in a time when, well, there weren’t that many public figures who looked like her. She was a Beth Ditto before her time, and it already took guts to suffer the body-shaming back then.

When considering whether or not to cover this book on Good Comics For Kids, my editor and I discussed whether it was appropriate for the audience and, since we’re talking to one another now, we obviously decided it was a good comic for older kids, if not for every child. I was curious how you felt about Cass Elliot in terms of being a role model for girls and young women. I suspect the answer is something like “it depends on the page,” given her relationship with drugs and so forth. Overall though, to what degree do you think of Elliot as an aspirational figure for young people today…?

She is definitely the kind of strong woman figure I grew up with, and yet it never entered my mind that drugs were okay! So not okay, actually, that I had to ask friends what it was like to be on an acid trip, to draw it, cause I never knew! It was just part of her life and part of that time, I guess.

But what clearly makes her qualify as a role model is how far she went with the worst initial deal she could possibly land, not the “right” look, the “right” place of birth, the “right” connections, not even the “right” musical taste, and yet she persists and becomes what she always says she would be: a rock star, no matter what. And all that, without letting go of her convictions–for civil rights, for example–or her good nature and her empathy. We need more stories of good, strong women, who do the right thing and keep on without crushing people along their way, even when so many people try to put obstacles on her. And she was hilarious! That’s the best thing you can wish for a young woman growing up: brave, kind and funny. Right?

Filed under: Graphic Novels, Interviews, Young Adult