Mattie Lubchansky on Libertarianism and the Humongous Asterisk of Vegas

This week on The Maris Review, Mattie Lubchansky joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Boys Weekend, out now from Pantheon.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts.

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From the episode:

Maris Kreizman: It just so happens that Boys Weekend features a character who may or may not share qualities with you and a character who may or may not share qualities with your spouse.

Mattie Lubchansky: Yeah, it’s very different because most of my work up until now, you’d have to call it nonfiction. We only run nonfiction on The Nib, humor or satire. My personal work that’s on my social media and Patreon—and a website until I stopped using websites, because who looks at a website—that character that appears a lot of the time is supposed to be me. That is the point of view of the comic. It is often a very exaggerated version of me. Or when I want to make fun of myself, or generally if I just need a protagonist for a comic strip and do not feel like designing one, I can draw myself very fast because I’m practiced at it.

However, the main character of Boys Weekend, Sammy, is vaguely based on… So the premise of the book is that a transfeminine person is asked to be their old friend’s best man at a bachelor party, and they go to Las Vegas. It’s vaguely, very loosely based on something that happened to me when I was at my friend’s bachelor party right after I came out.

And I need to keep stressing this in every interview: it was a very different situation. Those friends are still my friends. I was out to them in a way. I had not been out for a long time. I was not presenting much differently. It was a very different situation. We’re all different people. It was a long time ago now. So Sammy’s a little different than I am. They’re a lot less confident. Not like I’m a very confident person, but I try to tease out the weakest parts of myself at the time of my life and deposit into a person. And yeah, they do look a little bit like the way I draw myself. Crucially, no glasses and my wife in the comic, and crucially, not in real life, but in the book, glasses! So I think it’s pretty easy to tell us apart.

MK: My mouth is hanging open cause I really hadn’t put that together.

ML: I also hadn’t until just now, so I’m just realizing this is what I did. But I tried to do some things that felt a little different, but yeah, it kind of just looks like me.

MK: And so we see a wedding photo from the year 2027, so we know that this book is taking place in the near future.

ML: Yeah, I think you actually see the date on Sammy’s plane ticket. I think it’s the early 2030s, was what I was shooting for: near future, very near.

MK: The world in which this is set feels dystopian, and yet it seems like we’re getting closer to it every day. Take us inside the world of El Campo and how you conceived of it.

ML: What was interesting to me about this experience that I had is that I do not like the Las Vegas, Nevada. I do not have a good time when I’m there. The times I’ve been there it’s just not for me. I understand there are things about it. There’s like a weird part of it where there’s weird stuff, there’s like a neon museum or whatever. I know there’s stuff to do there that is fun and weird and strange and gay and all that. However, the main sense that I get when I’m there is existential dread and terror and an absolute fear response. Have you read The Dispossessed?

MK: Yes!

ML: It’s one of my very favorite books. So much of that book is someone describing seeing capitalism for the first time. And you, the reader, are supposed to be like, holy moly, this is a totally insane way for us to organize our lives. And that’s how I feel about going to Las Vegas. It’s like I’ve never actually experienced America, I’ve never experienced capital and its effects on it. There’s something about this sort of everything goes environment, but it’s everything goes with a humongous asterisk: as long as you are adhering to a certain set of social norms or mores or whatever you wanna call them. It’s very, very straight. I mean, it’s not necessarily very white or anything, but there’s something about the place that it’s like, anything goes as long as you are normal, with a capital N.

MK: And as long as you spend money.

ML: And as long as you spend an ungodly amount of money. But you can do whatever you want. If you want to pony up for the hotel where everything’s clowns, you can. It feels very last days of Rome there, where it’s like this complete orgy of being overstimulated, and all this literal shit that looks like the last days of Rome, quite literally. I was trying to distill the feeling of that to a person that doesn’t experience that or has never been, to really tease out the sort of things I do not like about this kind of place, an absolute nightmare hellscape.

MK: One of the defining features of El Campo, of course, is that it’s in international waters. Tell me about that. First from a behavioral point of view but also from a visual point of view. Tell me about making a world at sea.

ML: I think the idea of it existing somewhere very remote made a lot of sense to me because there’s some stuff that is absolutely wacky in terms of things you were able to do there. There’s some pretty screwy stuff going on. And the desert is taken already by Las Vegas.

And there also is this strain to the book where there is some sort of cult activity going on on the island. That’s the main thrust of the plot of the book. The cult is like libertarian tech guys, and I’ve been very, very long obsessed with libertarianism for some reason. I’m just fascinated by a political movement whose whole thrust is we don’t owe anything to each other. Actually, your life should be worse. I’ve long joked about making an unofficial sequel to Atlas Shrugged, where all the libertarians go somewhere where there’s no poor people anymore, and like, who has to operate the oven at the restaurant? If it’s all billionaires it’s the guy who’s the least rich…

But because of that, there was a very long stretch where they were very obsessed with seasteading as a concept. So, I was working on my long obsession with this idea that you can sort of escape society and put it somewhere new. And yeah, I think it feels so much more hopeless and inescapable if you are literally in the middle of the ocean and you probably don’t have enough money to change your flight home. So if everything’s bad and you need to get away, what do you do? Where do you go? You are quite literally surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean.

MK: And in the midst of the action in the book, we get to see some of the ads that perhaps Sammy is seeing in El Campo. Tell me a little bit about them. Seems like you had fun.

ML: Oh, I had a blast. Not to keep bringing up The Simpsons, but there are legendary background gags in that show. That always fascinated me. Futurama is also very good at this. And it’s just a really good way to immerse yourself in the world. I think advertisements are a really quick way to sort of set a scene in terms of what society is like if you’re gonna put somebody in the future, in the past, or whatever.

And also it was just a very fun opportunity to… there’s not a lot of funny stuff happening in the book. But I’m so used to making funny comics that I need to just excise that somewhere. So there’s an ad for a service where you can engrave the moon. It just seemed like it was a nice way to fill the background in both a visual and also a metaphysical sense.

It sounds so much more pompous than like, I thought of a stupid joke and I wanted everyone to see it.

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Recommended Reading:

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin • Embassytown by China Mieville • Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed

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Mattie Lubchansky is a cartoonist and illustrator and the Associate Editor of Ignatz award-winning magazine and website. They live in beautiful Queens, NY, with their spouse, and their new graphic novel is called Boys Weekend.