No One’s Rose by Emily Horn, Zac Thompson, Alberto Jimenez Alburquerque, Raúl Angulo and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou is an adventure story that explores ecology, utopia and life after calamity. I spoke with Horn and Thompson about the series and their perspectives on utopian fiction, climate change, destructive cycles, Waterworld and more.
RS: There’s one more thematic topic I want to get to, but since you brought it up, could you expand on the V for Vendetta connection a little bit more? Because that was not something I would have thought of when I first read it. I mean, both are dystopias. But beyond that, what dialogue do you see between your work and Moore’s and Lloyd’s?
EH: There’s the anarchist bent that you have with the group that’s coming up in the Dome, and — I don’t love the term “eco-fascism,” I think it’s used too frequently, but I think in the Dome you have a utopian society because there is no dissent, and because there’s total control over the environment, and total control over the resources. There’s total control culturally and socially. And yes, it creates a really pleasant environment for people, but that internal group of rebels is still tackling that problem of totalitarianism. And there are a few incidents that I think mirror the chaos that you see in V for Vendetta. But maybe Zac’s got a better take on that?
ZT: No, I think you summed it up. I think if we had more room, and were able to follow the Drasil for us a lot more time, then it would be a very different story, and those parallels would be even more clear. But a lot of what we wanted to do was: How do you take that anarchism and apply it to environmentalism? The Drasil represent some of that, “We believe in nothing, we believe everything should be growing in the wild and free,” and this [attempt] to marry that progressive ideology with environmentalism in a way that we haven’t really seen in fiction, really, at all right now. Emily and I really got into the nitty gritty of like, what do the Drasil believe in if they believe in the symbiotic real, and only the symbiotic real, and that anarchistic perspective of, “We just need to let nature run wild and we’ll adapt,” [a perspective that] inherently has flaws within it. And we want to show that, you know, by and large, anarchism is dope and cool, but is it practical? Does it work? And the answer is often: not as a unified movement towards change. Maybe individual anarchists can make change.
EH: Yeah, and I think like V in V for Vendetta causes a lot of just pure chaos, right? And it’s through that chaos, through destabilizing the status quo, you have these actors who can create real change. So like, I think that the Drasil, like Zac said, they don’t really have a plan. They’re just sort of like, “Let’s just create chaos.” They have a bad plan, I should say, or not a bad plan — it’s just a plan that isn’t super well-thought out. So I think that that chaos that’s created there gives the people with the plan the cover to move forward as a society. I think that maybe anarchists work best in that way: destabilizing so that people with a real plan can get things done, and you can use it for good or for evil. Maybe it’s similar in that respect, too.
ZT: And in complete opposition to V for Vendetta, one of the things that we wanted to do, at least with Tenn’s character, is show someone who works within a system who believes in progressive change, and is part of that party or group and believes in the ideology. And yes, the ideology that may control the group is flawed, but the individual’s perspective within the group is working towards a greater good. That is something that we do not see in narratives right now. Typically, what happens is if someone’s part of a political party, they either believe in it dyed-in-the-wool, and they have no issues with what they’ve aligned themselves with, or they don’t believe in it, but they’re the one person sort of like acting — it was just important to show someone who was in a party who believed in working within the system. Because, you know, not that I believe in the way that government works towards the people in North America; there’s lots of problems. But you have to believe that if you get involved in the system, and you believe in the right things, that you can affect change. Otherwise, what’s the point? And I think that that was something that we didn’t see in narratives are like this that we really wanted to put in. And then, you know, we [also] get the anarchist perspective, so you have your cake and eat it, too.
RS: The final topic I want to cover is the last perspective we see in the series, which — if you’re reading and you’re freaking out about spoilers, this is the time to tune out, I think. The final group we encounter in No One’s Rose: Is it fair to describe it as a kind of group that parallels or replicates Indigenous people’s attitudes toward ecology and environmentalism? If we’re looking at an eco-fascist perspective and an anarchist perspective, would it be fair to summarize the final perspective as an Indigenous approach?
ZT: We’re wary of “Indigenous” qualifiers simply because we want to [avoid] the noble savage [trope]. But you’re right to scratch at that. The inspiration behind the Selvern was: How do we look at people who, maybe not the Indigenous perspective [specifically], but are land keepers, or people who understand how to work symbiotically and understand that, you know — there’s a line I think in the book that says, “We are all Selvern here” or something to that effect. That’s how they see themselves; they do not see themselves as separate from the natural environment that they are working within. They see themselves as an equal part of a large and complicated process. And, you know, when you look at Indigenous perspectives, that is, by and large, how they see themselves as well. They seem to understand the intricacies of how things are related. They understand because they spent a long time there. And the Selvern are supposed to represent people who ultimately have progressed beyond the petty bullshit that you see within the Dome; they’ve kind of figured it out, and they get crushed because of it.
EH: Yeah, I think there are parallels to be made there. Definitely. But Zac put it really well; I don’t think that we had any specific Indigenous group in mind when we were thinking about it.
RS: So the Selvern weren’t written as an Indigenous peoples metaphor, but they do acknowledge aspects of that perspective that are important. Is that fair?
EH: Yes. The system works, right? The system that a lot of Indigenous peoples used in relation to the Earth works. They were very effective. And they had long-term potential in a way that a lot of our plans in colonial capitalism — we don’t really have a long-term plan. But I think land keepers have a very long-term perspective on living on planet Earth.
ZT: And that’s exactly it: The action that I take today might not come to fruition until 5, 10, 15 years from now, but I know that I have to do it today because I’m thinking about countless other generations; not only of my people, but of plants, of animals, all kinds of things. We really wanted to show a holistic perspective. You want readers to believe [at first] that the Green Zone is this holistic perspective where they have it all figured out, but then you see that there’s this very mechanical view of how they operate. They treat nature like something that needs to be dominated and set aside or futzed with. That’s one of the reasons that we introduced the almanac — there’s this reveal later on in the book that shows that this is very carefully calculated, and almost dialed in to a point where it’s like, it’s not quite nature anymore. It’s nature by design, and nature doesn’t work that way. If you do design nature, then you wouldn’t have to continually adjust those dials all the time, because nature is incredibly unpredictable. All you can do is jump into the river and then figure out how you interact with all these things that are in that raging river with you, and all go down on your merry way. You can’t just build a dam and then say like, “We’ll sort out all this stuff that’s in the water. And then we’ll only let the things we like through,” and all the other stuff — where does it go? Well, anyway, I’m getting lost on a tangent.
RS: It seems like that response of giving up control and taking more of a humility-based approach to your environment, responding to nature, taking a step back — that approach also applies to the societal problems at the end of this book, where we see reparation and unity, but only through taking that step back. We see that same kind of humility, but letting those you’ve harmed take the lead, listening to what they have to say and what they have to teach. So yeah, it seems like that fundamental tension of control vs. humility potentially resolves in all the aspects of the comic, not just the environmental strand, by the end.
EH: That’s such a great insight. I think that works really well for Tenn’s character arc, too, because she is quite arrogant. And you could say the same thing about Seren, but Tenn really reaches farther than she can grasp, because she wants to move quite high in the existing government, and that ends up breaking a lot of her interpersonal relationships.
ZT: Yeah, and I think one of the things we talked about in the end as well was this, like, rejection of this individual victory, this idea that this young girl can come and be the Great Uniterm and she gives a speech, and then everyone throws down their tools! We just wanted to bring it to a more thematically resonant place, which is like: There is work to be done around climate change, but it takes communities that are engaged around issues. And you know, that humility of listening to the people that were hurt, listening to the people that have bared the burden of these problems, and letting them lead the way. If you look at [the genre of] cyberpunk, or a lot of sci-fi, it’s predicated on these individual victories. The protagonist sort of leads the way, and they go through this personal change, and by virtue of their personal change, society is going to be better off or they’re going to be this great decider of what happens next. All too often, that’s all you get. I think the big thing for us was, how do you show a society changing? How do you show a collective victory and a moral change amongst a group of people, rather than a very sort of binary [story] where just one person’s better, and you know, [gesturing sarcastically] I’m sure things will get better from here!
EH: I think one of the cringiest moments of Game of Thrones, if I can pull that in — Khaleesi moves so far because she worked to earn the trust of these groups, and they were the ones that carried her forward. And then there’s that scene where Khaleesi is like, basically crowd-surfing.
RS: Everyone has their hands outstretched toward her? That scene? Oof.
EH: And it was so I just, it could not have been cringier. Just having this extremely white woman with this extremely blonde hair just being like, carried forward in this savior position by these people who actually did all of the hard work to get to where she is!
ZT: And it also moved in conflict with what her character was always trying to achieve, right?! I think the thing that was interesting about her early on was that she did understand that you had to appeal to the people who are broken, and you have to continually amass these groups of people who were hurt by these old systems of Westeros. And then in the end, she’s like, “You know what, fuck it all. I’m worse than everyone else.” Like, Ah, great.
EH: That last season. My god.
RS: It seems like it instantly dropped off the cultural map, and yet, I feel like that last season is so horrible, that it’s going to carry forward in our cultural consciousness forever. Like, it is going to live on in textbooks as a literal textbook example of bad endings.
OK. So. As we begin to wrap up, here are three questions that didn’t really fit neatly into the previous topics. First is, just: Why Walt Whitman?
EH: I think that is a fair question. We should explain that the book was originally a novel, and we had very explicitly a cultural policing aspect to this world (and is implied in the comic). There is a rejection of the old world and a rejection of the old texts, so you see that with the Drasil, they have these forbidden texts. So Walt Whitman in my mind is representative of this free spirit of America; he embodies the individual roaming the natural world and really celebrating it. The poem itself that we use, I felt like fit that scene quite well: It was a being in nature, being with nature. I think that Walt Whitman, if you read a lot of his work, he celebrates himself, he celebrates the world, and there isn’t a strong distinction between the two. So I think that he was a natural candidate for that. I don’t know if you have anything to add, Zac?
ZT: No, I think you nailed it.
RS: Now that I’m seeing the dialogue between V for Vendetta and No One’s Rose, the other thing that scene reminded me of was V’s revelation to Evie of the hidden books and cultural texts. But I just can’t imagine Alan Moore having V waltz in with Walt Whitman. That’s an interesting — I wonder what Moore would think of Walt Whitman? I bet he hates him.
ZT: I would say so, yeah.
RS: Honestly, I don’t know how to feel about Walt Whitman, because like, in my mind, I think I also hate Walt Whitman? But then whenever I actually sit down and read Walt Whitman, I’m like, ah, these are good words, though!
ZT: Yeah. I’m not a huge fan, either, but I really liked that poem. And I thought it embodied everything Emily said, it worked so well, especially for that ideology that they subscribe to.
EH: I think Walt Whitman just kind of got pulled into the canon of writers who represent America as well. (If I can make that assumption — I’m Canadian, so I don’t know). So there might be a particular kind of patriotic baggage in America that we don’t necessarily experience in Canada. He connects a bit with that, like, cowboy-on-the-plains lifestyle, I think, in his reputation, but I think if you look at him as an individual outside of that, he’s pretty much just a naturalist who celebrates the natural world. And I think that’s the connection that we made.
RS: From my perspective, as an American, I think that’s about right. Though, most of the ultra-patriots have no idea who Walt Whitman is. That helps him avoid too much of that stain today.
EH: There’s no MAGA Walt Whitman fan.
RS: If there is, I want to meet them.
ZT: That sounds great!
RS: No, I — I know they’d be a horrible person, but I need to have that bizarre conversation.
So just two more of these miscellaneous questions. The first one is about cycles — which I just — I don’t know — with the election cycle, with the turn of the seasons, and as I’ve been playing Hades a lot…
ZT: So have I.
RS: Yeah, It’s good, right?
ZT: It’s fucking awesome. Took me 38 tries, but I finally beat daddy.
RS: In all these, cycles are important, and I think they’re important to Zac in your other comic coming out right now, Lonely Receiver. So what am I saying, I’m seeing cycles everywhere, but I think in No One’s Rose you’re also thinking a lot about cycles, so I’m wondering if you both could talk about what you see right now as the most important or the most destructive cycles that we’re dealing with. (Whether as a culture, or as a comics industry, or whatever perspective you want to bring to this). And also, do you see any possibility of breaking out of those cycles?
ZT: So what I see as a big cycle that’s happening right now in society that disturbs me greatly — and this might actually be because I’ve been doing a ton of research for I Breathed a Body — but I see a huge disproportionate blame of what’s going on in North American society on Big Tech. And what I want to put out into the aether is that what we are calling “Big Tech” or the problems that Big Tech is perpetrating on us, are the systematic failures of state institutions and government institutions, and people who have trauma from those things. So like: “My health care fucking sucks, I pay this much, I have trauma about that. So I believe in Trump, and then I’m going to propagate all those beliefs on Facebook.” We’re actually seeing people’s trauma come out in real time on social networking, we’re asking social networks to police that trauma and control it, and it’s a never-ending cycle. And the thing is, if we give Facebook or Twitter the power to control free speech, they don’t go away, they become deputized to become arms of the government, and then they control the ability to talk about things. I think that we have this idea that if we only change the way that we use social media, it will change us, and that social media has been changing us. But I think what’s happening is social media has come to the forefront at a time where so much of us have so much trauma, that we’re experiencing each other’s trauma through social media, and then blaming social media for the rise of white nationalism, when in reality, it’s a failure of institutions. Yes, it sucks that your uncle goes and talks about MAGA bullshit on Facebook. Yes, there’s all kinds of problems with how Facebook feeds people information. 100%. But I do believe that those views are not inherent to the existence of Facebook; it’s not like Facebook created white nationalism. It’s become a means to spread it, but I do think that the trauma that has resulted from these institutional failures is something that we’re not addressing, and like, we’re looking at these gigantic monopolistic tech companies and going, “We got to do something about them!” And it’s like, the problems that we are looking at actually exist over here. I could go on forever. I’m writing a whole book about it right now.
RS: Bigotry precedes the algorithm, right?
ZT: Yeah, yeah. Those data points belong to the people spreading them, not the networks allowing them to spread.
EH: I think my answer might be a little counter to that. I think the cycle that I see that probably needs to break, and I think that the book embodies, too, is that — Tenn and Seren instead of fighting together, fought against each other, within the lower classes of their society. And that’s a cycle that I see: people in positions of power incentivizing people with no power to fight each other so that they can maintain that power. And I think one of the things that we do that is a cycle that we need to break out of is believing the worst in people. And I think that social media does a really good job of actually incentivizing us to fight each other, to please the algorithm that will continue to make people fight together. So you will be directed to content that will make you upset. And then it will bring you into conflict with someone who has an opposing viewpoint. And I think it creates this confirmation bias that all people outside of your inner circle are bad people, and that the world is populated by mostly bad people. The thing that grounds me — this is a personal story — but my grandpa was blind from the time that he was 10 years old to the time that he was 96 years old. He would tell me, and it was during the Bush years and there was just always shit going on, and the media was always showing us the worst of what’s happening. And he would turn to me, and he’d be like, “You know, they say that people are bad. They’re not.” And this is a man who literally lived through World War I, the Depression, World War II, and then into the 2000s. And living as a blind person, or sight-impaired person, he experienced a lot of people helping him on and off of buses, helping him navigate where he needed to go — a lot of kindness came out of people all the time, because they saw that he needed assistance. That’s something that I hold close to my heart. I see that we are stuck in a cycle of believing the algorithm that’s telling us that people have inherently bad intentions, and [I see the possibility of] being able to look outside of that. And I think the experience Zac and I talk about a lot is like, you go on Twitter, you get really mad, and you’re like, “Fuck everyone! The world is going to shit.” And then you go out to the outside world, where people are being polite to each other in the street, and they’re waiting in line for the bus. And they’re, you know, maybe apologizing for bumping into each other. I think that there’s a lot of day-to-day kindnesses that are just not included in the media, not included on Twitter. I don’t think that’s a mistake. I think it helps people [in power] when, you know, the everyday person is fighting the everyday person. It’s helping institutions of power perpetuate themselves.
ZT: I think that dovetails with what I’m talking about, too. We direct a lot of anger at each other in cycles, rather than directing anger at the institutions that create the problems in the first place.
EH: And to cap this off, we actually saw this yesterday in a corner store.
ZT: OH. Yeah!
EH: We went to go get snacks at a corner store, and there was a guy who wasn’t wearing a mask. We have a mask policy here where everyone has to wear masks. It’s now government mandated, everyone has to wear masks indoors. So we go to the corner store, and this guy’s not wearing a mask, and we’re just listening as we go in. The guy waiting behind him in line says, “Oh, you know, you have to wear a mask in here?”
ZT: He said, “Don’t start with that shit!”
EH: And then so we’re both just like, oh, here’s it comes. You know, we’ve all seen the videos of anti-maskers freaking out, and the Karens and stuff. And then the guy who spoke about the masks pulls out an [extra mask], and he says, “Hey, you can have this mask.” “Oh, thank you so much!” And he puts on the mask!
ZT: And they just went about their day! It was great! It was very Canadian as well.
RS: I was about to say, I would like to hope that that would happen in my country, though, I’m not so sure.
EH: It did feel a little bit Canadian. But. I’m willing to bet that Americans on a day-to-day basis, when they’re going around in their neighborhoods, are probably much nicer to each other than they are on Twitter. You know what I mean?
ZT: And the thing that was interesting is like, the guy met him with aggression, and then the man who offered the mask was calm. And he just said, well, I have a mask if you need one. And then the guy gladly took it and put it on. And I think that was something that I — like, my heart dropped. I was like, here we fucking go. We’re gonna have to step in and say like, “Fuck off.” But then he was just like, “Oh, thank you very much.” And I was like, all right, cool.
EH: We’ve been trained to expect the worst out of people.
RS: When it comes to institutional failures — like, it’s also striking to me that, I don’t believe Canada has provided masks to its citizens, correct?
ZT: No.
RS: Yeah, so then it’s just a mandate of, “You need to do this, and we’re not going to give you the materials or tools to make sure that every person, no matter their position, has access to them, has the ability to do this.” It’s putting the onus on the individual again.
EH: yeah, I think that’s a fair point. I mean, we should start with free menstrual products, and then move on to free masks! But I think that’s another example; you need this thing, but we’re not going to take care of you. We’re not going to provide that. The masks, I guess, impacts the society at large a bit more. But yeah, similar.
RS: Final question. This is how I try to end these interviews. I’d like to ask each of you to pick two other pieces of media — texts, books, movies, films, poems, works of art of any kind — just any other two things that you would really like people to read or engage with or see after they finish No One’s Rose.
ZT: So I’m a huge fan — and Emily can attest to this because I haven’t shut the hell up about it for like the last year and a half — of Peter Wohlleben’s The Secret Wisdom of Nature. Peter Wohlleben is a German forestry ranger, I think. And he basically looks over a 180 hectare plot of land in Germany, and he writes about his history of enacting change in the natural environment and looking at how nature is a system of interconnected species that — you know, you touch one thing, you affect all things. It really helped me expand my perspective on what it means to interfere with nature, or what it means to live in symbiosis with nature. And it also helped me understand some of the trees that are in my neighborhood and get more climatized to the natural environment that’s right around me.
I’m also going to recommend something that is a little different, but I really enjoyed it. The Seventh Mansion by Maryse Meijer is a new eco-horror novel that was released just in October of this year. It’s about a young boy who recently becomes vegan and realizes the totality of climate change, and it radicalizes him in a very huge way. He changes his name, he joins a group of people that might actually turn out to be eco-terrorists, And it is embodied in this narrative about faith, but also about what it means to be an environmentalist and what it means to believe in a higher calling outside of yourself. And it’s horrifying. It’s very different than No One’s Rose, but it’s also very urgent. It really, really resonated with me. I didn’t read it while we were writing the book; I actually just finished reading it like two or three weeks ago, but it’s exceptional. And it’s like 170 pages. So it’s a very quick read.
EH: There’s a Merlin Sheldrake book out called The Entangled Life. He’s like a philosopher-poet-mycologist, and he writes a really amazing account of how fungus works, how the future of the planet may be in the hands of mushrooms, which we touch on a little bit in, in No One’s Rose with the fungal city, but I think he does a really good job of explaining how mycelium interconnects everything on the planet. He talks about how there are funguses that will grow and eat nuclear waste, they’ll eat plastic waste. They’re great for building blocks for buildings or for furniture. It’s just a really comprehensive book about the ways that mycelium and mushrooms can help us in the future. And then also for anyone who’s not a vegan, (I’m a vegan), a really great way to reduce your impact on the planet and climate change is to go vegan. I feel like vegans have a bad rap because there are a lot of angry-for-the-right-reasons vegans (But I mean, you can’t be angry all the time). There’s a really good YouTuber and Instagrammer called Zachary Bird. And he does really fun recipe videos for junk vegan food. I feel like he’s a good representation of vegans today. There’s a lot of people from a lot of different walks of life that are transitioning to the lifestyle, and I feel like he’s a really good intro. He’s fun, he’s funny and takes a sour taste out of your mouth when you think of the word “vegan.”
No One’s Rose is available in trade from Vault Comics.
Robert Secundus is an amateur-angelologist-for-hire.
