Jailed American journalist Danny Fenster spent six months as a political prisoner during the 2021 coup in Myanmar. During most of his captivity he struggled with boredom and fear, relying on meditation and podcasts on an SD card sent by mail by his girlfriend Juliana.
Now, almost five years after its release, he has collaborated with his cousin Amy Kurzweil, a renowned New Yorker Cartoonist and graphic memoirist, on a long-form interactive comic The Verge About his imprisonment. I chatted with Kurzweil via email about his role as illustrator and storyteller in this ambitious long-term project, the responsibilities inherent in telling someone else’s story, and how he created rich, multilayered illustrations using only a pencil.
The Verge: Your work often focuses on family histories like yours Grandmother’s Survival in the Warsaw Ghetto And Using AI to recreate your grandfather’s voice. What was your experience like helping tell Danny’s story?
Koi Kurzweil: When Danny was first imprisoned, I called my friend Ahmed Naji, a writer who was imprisoned for nine months by Egypt’s authoritarian regime in 2016. He told me that the experience of unjust imprisonment can be even worse for people on the outside; You care about the people detained but have no idea about what is happening. I’m not sure I believe him, but I appreciated Ahmed’s confirmation that not knowing It was a special kind of torture. This was part of my motivation for wanting to collaborate with Danny on this piece. I wanted to know what her experience was like, to know it in detail, and to allow myself some informed imagination of the reality that I had blindly groped in my mind.
As you can imagine, Danny’s case was a big part of my family’s life in 2021. With Juliana, our family formed a kind of impromptu SWAT team dedicated to figuring out what to do. We met regularly with our embassy, and called on every resource we could think of. (We were organized — we had a Slack channel!) We met others who had experienced this particular torture, and we united a community of people invested in the #BringDannyHome and #ProtectThePress missions.
But we didn’t really know what Danny was experiencing. There was a deep disconnect between our ordinary daily realities and the unknowns of Danny’s custody. I have a vivid memory of taking early-morning meetings with former ambassadors while on vacation to Disney World with my brother’s family, standing in line for It’s a Small World while posting about my cousin’s incarceration. The disorientation of this experience had a deep impact on everyone in my family. We felt like we were out of control. Helping to create a work of art that testifies to the details and specifics of what happened feels deeply orienting. It is therapeutic. This is why creative and deep storytelling is so important: it makes us feel like we are, for longer periods of time. Oh, it was like that.
How did this creative collaboration between you and Danny work out?
Danny is a talented writer, and I was happy to take advantage of his desire to document his experiences and his openness to doing it in a multimedia way. We started by talking, and worked together to uncover bits of her experience that would translate well into a story. The Verge. We knew we wanted to highlight the importance of storytelling and media, both as a way to deal with uncertainty and as a way to connect people both literally and metaphorically. Danny started by writing prose, then we worked together to turn his essays and selections from his prison journals into a comic script on Google Docs, and then I started sketching.
Tell us about your drawing process.
For two reasons, drawing has always been my way of connecting with a sense of truth. The first is that drawing is embodied; It helps me feel and transmit emotions. The second is that the drawing reveals details.
Danny sent me all the relevant photos of Myanmar along with his journals, including some sketches, but no public photos of Insein Prison. We looked at the Google Maps satellite view of the Panopticon together and he showed me his ward and told me what had happened where. He made several maps for me – of his and Juliana’s apartment, of his ward, and of his cell, but the only other visual resource I could rely on was a collection of drawings made by Maung Pho, a former prisoner of a different ward.
When I create something I can’t see, even a simple style, I need answers to a lot of questions: What was the floor of your closet made of? What was the structure of the walls like and what was written on them? What did you see through the bars of your cell? Where was your bed and where did you keep your things? oh you actually had one New Yorker Stuff in your cell for six months? Cold. Every drawing requires revision; Sometimes Danny needed to see me building something – in detail – before he could remember what the place actually looked like. That wall was high, and there was barbed wire on that wall, and there were weeds, and there were no trees here… This comic required more frequent revisions of the sketches than anything I had ever done. That’s partly why I drew the final in pencil.
But it was very gratifying when I really got something right, and I thought, Wow, painting is the most magical technique.
“But it was very gratifying when I really got something right, and I thought, Wow, painting is the most magical technique.“
How does technology play a role in your drawing?
Danny and I relied heavily on texting to share photos and clarify things while I was working. We were able to spend some time working in person and sharing notes, but most of our process took place with us across the world from each other: me in the US, Danny in Vietnam, where he was living until recently. We also organized all of our visual and text resources (somewhat haphazardly) into Google Drive folders.
I draw by hand. I love the direct connection with paper, and I especially love drawing in pencil because of the friction and feel of the line. I figure out a lot, like how I put paper on my computer screen from scans of Danny’s prison journals to trace his handwriting. For my final, I created an under-draft with blue pencil, and then I “inked” with Blackwing pencils, which are thick and create beautiful dark colors.
A good scanner (and good scanner software) is very important: I use Epson wide format with Epson Scan 2 software. Then in Photoshop, I removed the blue pencil underlayer and changed the levels, so that the dark pencil became higher contrast without losing the grayscale and texture. Photoshop also became my canvas for playing with layouts and estimating how the flow of layers would work in the final animated version. I’m obsessed with how pencil marks look on a digital screen, and I find that “inking” in pencil relieves me of a lot of process headaches and retains the initial feeling and flow of a spontaneous drawing.
How was technology a part of Danny’s experience in prison?
When Danny got out of jail one of the first things he said to me, which I’ll never forget, was that it was okay to be without his phone. This is not to minimize the pain, but this kind of observation is typical of Danny, coming out of captivity to see that he was offered something. One of the questions we wanted to explore in this story was: If we are so inundated with information, filled with stories of suffering, hardship and injustice, how do we actually respect an individual news story? In a democracy, we need access to all these stories, but how can we care About any one of them?
This is to say nothing of all the untold stories. Danny and I are only in a position to tell his Myanmar story because he was lucky enough to be an American with some resources. We think the answer here has something to do with the craft and the emotion and immersion we hope this story provides to readers, but it also has something to do with the mindset of the recipient of the story.
In the climax of this comic, Danny receives a story from Juliana that really affected him: a this american life Episode about another American imprisoned abroad. Danny had lost steady access to pen and paper, the basic techniques he originally relied on to make meaning and fill his time, so he was meditating, preparing his brain for boredom, and then here comes… a podcast!
<a href