Nate Powell is the epitome of a creative. On top of making comics as a teen since the early ’90s, Nate was also a part of the punk rock band Soophie Nun Squad from 1992 to 2007. Shows accented with costumes, puppets, and crowd participation were par for the course for the Little Rock, AR collective, taking his love for making art in different directions. After years of plugging away at comics, Powell’s projects grew in size; working with names like Cecil Castellucci and Jeff Lemire led to him becoming the artist on three volumes of March. March tells the story of the civil rights movement from leader and Congressman John Lewis’s perspective, written by Lewis and writer Andrew Aydin.
Nate’s latest graphic novel, Diana: The Punk Singer Who Ripped Through Time, is the final book written in a trilogy of stories that take place in the Arkansas punk rock scene. Preceded in publication by Come Again and Fall Through, Diana takes place chronologically before Fall Through in the story. Below, Nate Powell takes on the journey of creating this world and the Arkansas punk rock scene that helped form it (edited for clarity)
Dying Scene: (Forrest Gaddis): This was a fantastic book.
Nate Powell: Oh, thank you, I appreciate it.
Dying Scene: I dug the art. Are you a paper person, or do you draw on a tablet?
Nate Powell: Everything that I do is physically on paper, except for basic cleanup of my scans in Photoshop. A lot of that is really just the product of my precise age. I was born in ‘78, so when I graduated from high school, it was the very last class before there was a computer in my school. Even going to art school for cartooning, my class was the last class that was not required to take at least some type of computer class. Occasionally I’ll get in some kind of a jam, and one of my best friends is a graphic designer, and usually I’m like, “Can you please save me?” Thirty seconds later, I’ll just get the corrected file back, and she’s like, “Yeah, don’t worry about it, man.”
Dying Scene: Where did the idea for Diana come from?
Nate Powell: Well, it’s been quite a long path, or it actually goes back like fifteen years and multiple books. Back in 2018, I published this sort of horror-tinged graphic novel called Come Again. All my solo fiction stuff takes place in a fictionalized Arkansas, which is my home state. I grew up in the Little Rock area, but basically in this book, there’s kind of a random ten-page scene that features the band Diamond Mine, who are featured in Diana and Fall Through. At the time, I wanted to do a little tribute to one of my favorite bands with a bunch of my friends here in Bloomington, Indiana. They were called Fat Shadow, and they had just broken up. So I made this band, Diamond Mine, basically as a tribute to them playing a Fat Shadow song. They rode off into the sunset, and the story moved on, but I was like, Wait a minute, who are these characters? Where do they come from?”
I needed to know more myself. Following those curiosities led to the book that came out a couple of years ago, Fall Through. These are all standalone books, but Diana is basically a prequel to Fall Through as well. It picks up essentially where Diana leaves us, but it really gets into the nuts and bolts of the dynamics between the two main characters, Jodi and Diana, in this band, Diamond Mine. It gets into this spell that Diana embeds into a song that Diamond Mine plays.
On their one stinky little tour with one seven-inch out in a minivan, they basically find themselves in this sort of interdimensional pickle, where this one month-long tour winds up sort of eternally looping. They’re stuck in what should be like the most awesome experience of their lives together, except that they can never leave that experience. So as they’re trying to find their way out, they know that it ultimately comes at the price of the end of this beautiful thing they’d built together. That was the end of the story. More or less, like no spoilers.
When that was done, months went by, and I was genuinely depressed that there was no more of the story between Diana and Jodi that I get to work on. I had to wait a few more months, and then basically a few ideas started dropping into place. Over the summer of 2023, I spent every afternoon just turning this web of ideas into a story, and really kind of committed myself to it. A lot of that is that Fall Through is very much about connection, and Diana is sort of the inverse of it. It’s very much about loneliness, and it’s about the self-alienating impulse. It’s about feelings of imposter syndrome. It’s about trying to escape some of the stuff that made you and shaped you, but falling back into those patterns well into adulthood.
Dying Scene: Does it take place in the 1990s just because that’s the era of punk rock you grew up in?
Nate Powell: Yeah, it was this confluence of events where I wanted to figure out who these characters were, but Fall Through essentially was the book I’d been trying to make for decades. All the way from self-publishing and everything. It was my way of actually processing a lot of the underground community building and what it was like to have a band family, especially in the pre-internet South. A lot of it was like in the HeartattaCk zine era. Really getting into what it’s like to be in a transitional moment in any type of creative community. Sort of like when you grow up inside underground music as a community and as an ethos, it shapes you, and you shape each other.
And then obviously we all carry that well into our lives, and it reverberates throughout the rest of our lives. I knew that this had to take place at that formative stage in my life because I was ready to explore that. Once these ideas started popping for Diana, I realized that it needed to take place in the year or year and a half before Fall Through.
Dying Scene: Did it take some time for Diana’s voice to come to you, or was it something you had in your system from Fall Through?
Nate Powell: I thought I had these characters figured out. I’d spent a lot of time watching them grow on the page and everything, but actually it’s kind of surprising. As I got to the second half of Fall Through, I realized there was a much darker, sadder side to Diana than I thought. It made sense with this sort of character tension between Jodi and Diana and their notion of being a part of a creative community like punk or simply being misfits and finding your people. Diana was a very surprising creative experience. I’ve been making comics for 35 years, but it was one of those actually magical moments where, over the course of two years, these characters grew enough that they actually kind of surprised me as I was writing and drawing.
A lot of it is like noticing when something is changing in your creation and being able to kind of pivot with it. I draw comics for a full-time living now, and I feel very fortunate to be able to do that, but that also kind of locks you into a much more rigid schedule. I’m a parent, and I’m locked into that as a schedule and a structure for my life. Diana really became like a free space for me. I just feel very thankful that I was able to kind of have the bandwidth to watch these characters kind of grow and change in front of me.
Dying Scene: Was there any specific memory from your own youth that kind of unlocked the story for you at all? Was there anything that you went back to?
Nate Powell: Actually, yes. There’s a lot of stuff throughout Diana and throughout Fall Through that are like direct anecdotes or moments from whether it was my time in Soophie Nun Squad or just being a young person in punk, especially in Arkansas. For Diana, the very first scene that popped into my head, it was a morning where I had like one extra cup of coffee, and then things just started working really fast. There was, in real life, an early show that my band Soophie Nun Squad played back in, like, the fall of ‘94 down at this gazebo on the Arkansas River in Little Rock. It’s a place where hundreds and hundreds of bands played, like free outdoors, public, illegal, pirated shows. This other band called the Big Cats was playing, as well, and at the end of their set, the bass player of that band just chucked his bass into the Arkansas River. We all saw it; we were like, “Whoa.”
This other kid, Rhett, who’s in a band called Class of ‘84, just sees the bass go in the river and dives into the Arkansas River. The Arkansas River has all this undertow. It’s actually fairly dangerous. Someone dies on an annual basis trying to swim in the river. Everybody’s like, “Rhett, come back, come back.” He dives under, he disappears for a minute, and he comes back up with the bass, and the bass works once he dries it out. That’s the bass he used for the rest of the decade. I had this moment where all of a sudden I was thinking about the way that memory works, the older we get. Especially moving up and through punk as a community and as a network.
The way that we remember and communicate about things involves that tension where you want to avoid mythologizing things. At the same time, the more stories get passed around and the more that collective memory kind of solidifies, the more you fall into myth-making. That was a real Excalibur, Lady of the Lake moment where our teenage friend Rhett gets this bass out of the river. He’s like, “This is my divine instrument.” I’m like, this could be Jodi from Diamond Mine’s origin story of how she gets her Rickenbacker bass. From there, I was like, “Okay, it is on.”
Dying Scene: Was it a Rickenbacker that got thrown into the river?
Nate Powell: No, it was like a Fender P bass.
Dying Scene: I was about to say, that’s a crime against humanity.
Nate Powell: I did have that moment where I was like, “It’s not the correct bass,” but the Rickenbacker is like the prettiest of all basses.
Dying Scene: You’re not wrong. It feels like 1990s punk is getting a lot more attention in the last couple of years. Why do you think that’s finally happening?
Nate Powell: I mean, I think a lot of it is a natural product of people born in the 70s entering middle age, but also when we’re really talking about underground punk and hardcore in the 90s, we’re talking about developing an entirely separate system of sustaining ourselves, an entirely separate network that was very consciously anti-corporate and seeking to be self-sustaining. That was a lot easier to do in a pre-Katrina era when gas was a dollar a gallon. There’s a lot of romance attached to it, especially in a pre-internet era, being connected by phones and pen pals and passing along lists of strangers’ phone numbers who can be vouched for. I think a lot of it is realizing that, perhaps like the HeartattaCk era, 90s underground hardcore was so good at remaining underground.
That there actually for many years was not enough interest from outwards looking in at the thing we had built. Where at a certain point, you kind of realize we actually successfully remained an obscure sub-subgenre of music and a movement. If we’re going to kind of reissue the art and the music that we’ve made, we’re going to be able to talk about it and look back on it again, we’re gonna have to do it ourselves. I think a lot of that is people being like, “I’m 50 years old. I can get back together with my three friends in this band, and we’ll play a couple of shows. If we can do that, why don’t we just press a couple hundred copies of our record so that it exists for a couple more decades.”
I think it’s kind of a natural extension. It’s a middle-aged extension of DIY, recognizing all those skills that shaped us, that changed our lives. We still have them. We have often enough stability in our lives that we’re able to be like, “We’re adults, let’s just do this shit.” So I think a lot of it is actually coming from a DIY place, but because of the massive amount of musical and cultural influence that some of this has had, it hit that critical mass. I know record labels like Numero Group are doing a really good job at reissuing records and being able to provide writing and context that goes with some of these reissues, that help kind of like fill out a broader view of that time.
It was weird to make Fall Through, especially where there was like a primordial ooze of interest. Once the book came out, it was like the same year that a lot of the reissues started exploding and bands started playing again. Definitely a weird time to start this thing in solitude and be like, “Oh, there actually is a pool of interest about this.” It is funny because I remember distinctly for myself, throughout my teens and well into my 20s, there was an assumption of the stability of some of the more successful and established record labels, for example. I would never sweat it if I didn’t have an extra $7 to buy an album by a band that was on Dischord or on Lookout or something. They’re on Lookout. I can get that anytime I want. I can always get an album from Lookout. Then by the mid 2000s, Lookout doesn’t exist.
There’s a band from Little Rock that started in the late 80s called Trusty. That was part of this sort of transitional kind of melodic hardcore of the time. They ended up moving to DC and put out a few records on Dischord. They’re definitely the outliers of the Dischord catalog, a fantastic band. What’s interesting is as the decades have gone on, especially being a pre-internet band, it’s incredible how easy it is to lose the thread of documentation for any of these bands, especially in that sort of transitional window that might be from like ‘87 to ‘95 or something. Recently somebody did a four and a half hour interview with the three surviving members of Trusty. It’s fascinating because I started digging around on the internet. I’m like, oh, this is like basically the only interview with Trusty that exists in the digital era.
It’s interesting, though; with what we do, with what motivated us, especially as young people and in decades past, to make music together, set up shows, actually build this liberated space where other weird young people can get together and make something. There really wasn’t much of a concept of documenting what you were doing. There wasn’t a sense of posterity. It comes back to sort of bite you on the ass a little bit, where you’re like, “I’m sure I can find 10 people who were at that show who have vivid, similar memories of something that happened.” There is no documentation that this thing or that evening or this show ever actually occurred; and I find that fascinating. It’s kind of refreshing in 2026, in this onslaught of documentation and information, that things can actually remain obscure. I just find it fascinating.
Dying Scene: Without spoiling the story, how would you describe the rules of the time travel in the book?
Nate Powell: Basically, there’s this bootleg magic-infused kind of wormhole situation. The singer, who also writes the lyrics, embedded a spell in the lyrics of one of the songs on the seven-inch. When the band plays the song by singing the lyrics, she invokes a spell which has unpredictable results. To use a layperson’s idea of quantum physics. What I’m saying is I’m not a genius. I’m saying I’ve read a few Michio Kaku books about quantum physics and time travel and stuff. Basically, there’s a random chance that the band, through invoking this kind of wormhole situation, magically will pop into a bubble universe or some parallel universe.
When they’re on tour, often it seems like nothing has changed at all because these bubble universes are virtually indistinguishable from the universe that we might occupy. They may discover they’re a little bit displaced in time or a little bit displaced by location. Because it’s hard to tell when you’re inside these little bubble universes where you are and where you’re going, it then becomes a challenge to figure out how on earth to break out of that.
This is where, to me, writing stories is a way to talk about what you really care about, and plot is simply a way to let the writing happen. So for me, all this stuff where the band is stuck in this eternally looping tour, a lot of it is about the experience of touring with your best friends who are also your family; especially in a pre-internet kind of DIY underground. Once you leave home, you can go to a pay phone, and you can call your friends or a family member or something, but the rest of the world kind of stops existing outside of your van. By following cues and suggestions from other people across the map, you wind up in towns that seem eerily similar to the place you came from; you can wind up in towns that seem precisely like the last town you were in. So a lot of the themes of Fall Through and Diana have to do with disorientation. Everything seems fine except we know that we’re in a really bad situation that we can’t understand. We don’t know how we’re gonna get out of this, but beyond that, it’s okay. And so the reading experience is kind of disorienting because the characters are feeling disoriented. I like mysteries that are not focused on solving the mystery. I like mysteries that are about being in a state of mystery.
Dying Scene: It’s just such a strange idea. It’s not time travel via sci-fi.
Nate Powell: That’s one thing I really enjoy about comics. They’re so accessible in terms of being able to do really wild shit with just paper, an idea, and something to draw with. You don’t even need to draw well to express yourself through comics, but it also means you can try some really wild stuff. If it doesn’t work, it’s not a big deal. If it does work, then you can really see some payoff creatively. It encourages you to take bigger chances. Lately, I’ve been thinking about this phrase that I’m ripping off someone. I don’t know where it comes from, but I keep thinking about it. “If it can be drawn, it can be believed.” I like thinking about that in terms of comics. It’s sort of like a contract. When you’re entering a story, you’re basically being invited to have enough mental flexibility to kind of go with this world and figure it out as you’re moving through it. That’s a good guiding principle for making weird books that are trying to figure out their own logic.
It is amazing when you think about the economy of storytelling. By that, I don’t mean being efficient storytellers. I mean, like the economy of storytelling and filmmaking. Like the idea that you’re entering this corporate-controlled world of stage and screen. You’re entering this very, like, corporate-controlled, business-decision-dictated realm. It is interesting because Hollywood does view comics as an IP farm, basically. This is the part that’s inherently punk about comics. Comics are almost always dismissed and almost always sort of underestimated. If something doesn’t appear to already be some kind of potential hit, more established Hollywood storytelling forces are really not going to pay much attention to what you’re doing.
This sort of sets us free to actually swing for the fences. Occasionally, some indie graphic novels, like The End of the Fucking World by Charles Forsman, will wind up getting a Netflix series that’ll be totally awesome. Amazingly, to kind of watch shows like that happen, or Sweet Tooth by Jeff Lemire. Creators are able to actually work within this bigger kind of Hollywood sphere to tell their story.
Dying Scene: Regarding time travel, were there any books, films, or comics that influenced the time travel element?
Nate Powell: I mean, I’m definitely influenced a good amount through books like Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. That’s more like a dreamscape, interdimensional book, but there’s some Ray Bradbury stories that definitely made an impact, but I really think about Fall Through in particular as being part of a wave of storytelling. Like a movement in storytelling that started happening about a decade ago as ideas were coming together for this whole trilogy of books. Once I kind of nailed down the interdimensional looping, circular storytelling, I feel like, in general, a lot of movies, TV shows, books in the last decade have been exploring and tapping into this notion that, essentially, we have fallen off of what should have been the proper timeline as democracy has crumbled and as we are now fighting an actual Terminator-style future: techno-fascism and the rise of possibly being destroyed by artificial intelligence.
Sometimes it comes from a lot of different sources, just thinking about TV shows as different as Stranger Things, The Flight Attendant, Search Party, and Dark. I feel like there have been dozens of shows where I feel a little bit of kinship with what I’ve been doing with these books because a lot of people are trying to process our disorientation, where nothing makes sense anymore. A lot of the assumptions we’ve had about how we’re going to spend the rest of our lives. Even a lot of this is the breakdown of American privilege and the geopolitical stability of living our days in the United States. A lot of that has become so tenuous and so uncertain that I feel like this is just part of that movement of questioning and processing how crazy and disorienting and terrifying everything is. Another really good one that did directly leave a mark on Fall Through in particular is Russian Doll with Natasha Lyonne. That’s a major touchstone where I was already writing Fall Through, and I had it pretty together. There were a couple of shows I’ll watch where, for the first few episodes, I’ll be like, “This is bad news. This is like 75% of the story that I’m doing right now.” At a certain point it diverges, but it’s also a good proof of concept where this person is concerned with the same stuff I’m concerned with. When Diana popped into my head and I started working on that book.
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, was also just freshly out. I entered it knowing nothing about it, and I felt transformed as I left the theater. I think that really set the tone for me. I’d already started the groundwork of writing the book, but it allowed me to sweep everything off the table. What do I really want to do with this story? And a lot of it was thanks to that movie.
Dying Scene: Diana becomes deeply interested in the occult. Why was that the path she followed?
Nate Powell: This is where I feel that writing is often mostly problem-solving. You figure out how to get around to talking about what you care about and what you’re concerned with. Then figuring out how that is going to set itself up so that you can actually get the stuff off your chest. With Diana, basically, once I had arrived at a point in Fall Through where I knew that the best way to solve this time paradox was just through bootleg magic. This is where the comic is going to shine. I’ll be able to communicate it in a way so that people can go with it. Especially coming from Arkansas, I grew up in a moderate, fairly theologically liberal Presbyterian church as a kid, and then I found my own way.
I did not have this extremely repressive religious experience. My dad broke free from that with his family. His parents were both great people. I loved my grandparents, but he was always very clear as soon as I was old enough. He would talk to me about fundamentalism and rigid, inflexible thinking, and worked on sharpening up my critical thinking skills at a pretty young age. A lot of it is growing up in a very closed, cult-like, repressive religious environment and being able to escape it, but being empowered to escape it basically through music and comics.
A lot of that is just paying service to the way that we are transformed by music and art, but this is where you often struggle with the things that you did escape from. The things you’re running from, they continue to follow you. This is where her tendency is to always fall back into rigid, inflexible thinking, magical thinking, and a cult-like mindset. There is a part of punk scene by scene or crew by crew. My whole ass band was like this; You develop a way of speaking and doing things. You become sort of a closed system, and as much as punk is really built on individualism and interconnectedness in equal parts, there is this part that can be cult-adjacent.
Usually, that’s the type of stuff that’s easiest to see with people losing their goddamn minds when straight edge becomes super conservative, repressive bullshit. It can be really far out there, high-concept movements. Bands can develop enough of a fervor and momentum that people begin to attach themselves to them in kind of a cult-like fashion. Some people play with that. In the late 80s to early 90s, the Nation of Ulysses perfected riding that line between having this sort of cult-like apparatus that was making fun of cool, but it was extremely cool.
Then, in San Diego in the 90s, the way that Antioch Arrow actually became cult-adjacent as their influence permeated through the hardcore scene. It’s interesting because that was an early moment of watching fashion change in a matter of months, just based on a wave of influence from a band. A lot of that for me was processing how, even being in underground punk and being guided by this ethos of resisting cult-like thinking, we are still susceptible to it. It’s still a very personal struggle for a lot of people.
Diana develops this magical practice that works for her. Trying to build her own life, she was never really accepted by even the Wiccan subculture or any established group of magic practitioners who were around her. She found herself outside of all those modes of identification or thinking. She basically stumbled across punk as a way of establishing her own way of doing things and sort of just fell in with punk-oriented people because that’s the direction that she was taking her life in anyway.
Dying Scene: Was there a version of the story where she maybe went towards more science or rationalism instead, or was it always the occult?
Nate Powell: It was all like once I realized there was going to be magic at play, a lot of this was being a cartoonist. I wanted to draw the visual effects of magic. I especially wanted to tie that into my visual expression of music throughout Fall Through as bands were playing. A lot of it was getting to draw what I wanted to draw and then working backwards from that to develop a story that would prop that up. I was never interested in her actually pursuing anything more rational because it seemed to make sense that this mysterious kind of hippie-adjacent charisma machine would be gravitating towards magic. I also liked the idea that her magic was unpredictable and that it wasn’t something that she could necessarily control, but she wasn’t really ready to admit that she couldn’t control it.
Dying Scene: Does the occult function as rebellion, healing, curiosity, or a little bit of all of those?
Nate Powell: I feel the healing part maybe that’s the outlier there. I’d say a lot of it is curiosity. A lot of it is watching new, unpredictable things unfold and being a part of that. A lot of it really is control. It’s being able to control unpredictable things. I think for the character of Diana, that really comes into human relationships and centers a lot more around the type of vulnerability you develop with your friends and with the people who you love and who show you love. That’s terrifying for some people. I think there is a component of her cult-like thinking, sort of the magnetism that she is able to utilize that’s not magical. That’s just a part of her personality. It’s the function of her charisma, but a lot of that serves the purpose of control.
Dying Scene: For being the hero of the story, I like that the relationships she has with people are pretty gray at some points. It’s very human that way. Her humanity shines very much in this fantastical story of time travel in this weird, off-the-wall way that you haven’t seen before.
Nate Powell: Thank you. I appreciate that. I feel like this book was sort of the first time where I feel like I finally spread my wings as a 48-year-old and allowed my characters to make mistakes, to figure out things as they went along, allowed them to have half-baked ideas, very much like in the way that I would have when I was 22 or whatever. I feel like now, there’s a lot of social and parasocial pressure that I’ll see online, especially with younger people. This idea that a creator needs to have their characters and have their creation be an extension of their own values, ethics, morals. A lot of this just has to do with the constriction and binary nature, like the extreme social pressure to have a binary take on everything where there are only two possible positions. I feel like I really enjoyed working on Diana because I finally felt set free to allow characters to more authentically be, often, like 22-year-old idiots, much in the way that we are all idiots when we’re 22. A lot of that means, whether it’s at the time or later, recognizing what capacity you have to hurt the people you love the most.
A lot of Fall Through centers around this idea of building something together, like a band that all of you are putting your energy and your ideas into, and being guided by the pretense that it’s a collective effort that is egalitarian and that is felt equally by all parties involved. In reality, a lot of endeavors like a band are pushed along by people who have more drive to establish and control the direction of things. That cross-section of people is always in a dynamic tension with people who go with the flow and people who are more interested in simply putting work into the music or the art or whatever. I think it was very satisfying to process a lot of those young adult missteps, because I was finally just allowing myself to be an extension of myself.
Dying Scene: Diana has a very clear vision for her band, despite her influences being kind of disconnected; there are Siouxsie and the Banshees, Rites of Spring, Bikini Kill, and Lungfish. She sees them all as pure. Why is she searching for purity through music?
Nate Powell: I think a lot of that goes back to her falling back into kind of rigid, inflexible nodes of the repressive fundamentalist Christian baggage that she escaped or thought she escaped as an adolescent. There’s a scene that sort of lays out these different philosophical outlooks between Diana and Jodi in terms of how to conceive of something like punk as a continuum of people having these moments of creativity and what it means to take influence from things and to give influence into bands or artists whose work will come later. Diana sees things in a very linear fashion that’s very self-focused. Whatever she is doing is the natural endpoint of the entire history, let’s say, of punk.
Everything leads into her moment of what she is doing. So she kind of filters her entire concept of history and inspiration through what she is focused on in that moment. Jodi has a very different idea that’s sort of like getting back into bootleg quantum physics. It’s kind of like a multi-dimensional way of conceiving of something as weird and nebulous as what we call punk. I often just say the thing we call punk doesn’t actually exist, maybe never existed. Jodi’s outlook is that it’s sort of visualizing a tree, both above ground and below ground. You see all the branches and all the roots, and the moment where the trunk touches the ground is where you are with whatever you’re doing. All the influences as roots, that are merging into this moment come out with whatever you make. How that becomes a part of the world and impacts the people around you are like the branches, except that there are like thousands of bands doing that every single day. It’s impossible to see things through such a narrow scope. I enjoyed visualizing that. I was like, “I’m gonna have to just go ahead and lay this out visually to illustrate this philosophical difference between the two characters.”
Dying Scene: Did you imagine an actual sound for the band while you were writing it? Like, if they existed, what would their first record sound like?
Nate Powell: I do have a sense of what Diamond Mine sounds like, especially in Fall Through. There are clues around, like certain aesthetic clues with their record or flyers. Really just like the type of scene, the type of town in the year 1994. I wanted to avoid explicitly outlining what type of band they were. As a comic book nerd and a music nerd, I instantly recognize that people would get unnecessarily hung up on what type of punk band this was or precisely where they fit in the canon. It happened anyway. As soon as the book came out, I actually stopped reading reviews because it would just be like, middle-aged punk nerds splitting hairs
I imagine this is an exclusive for Dying Scene. I imagine that Diana’s voice is actually a mix between Tracy Wilson from the bands Dahlia Seed and Positive No, and hair metal power pop band Scandal. There was the vocalist for that band named Patti Smythe. They did like the songs “Warrior” and “Goodbye to You.” I think musically, there are components that are very like Moss Icon and Hoover adjacent, but also the Santa Cruz band from the mid-90s, Fisticuffs Bluff. I think there’s a good dose of Fisticuffs Bluff in Diamond Mine.
Dying Scene: The political discussion in the book that they have when they’re going to see Clinton’s acceptance speech stood out to me. What interested you about that moment?
Nate Powell: Well, it’s important to remember the like, growing up in Little Rock in fall ‘92. I was 14 years old, and the Clintons had been in everybody’s lives for like a long time. Without exaggeration, I can say that the governor of Arkansas suddenly becoming the President of the United States was a very local affair. Everyone was just one Kevin Bacon away from the Clintons. My best friend and bandmate was Chelsea Clinton’s chemistry lab partner and had to show her how to, like, work her locker. Everyone had some kind of encounter, if not multiple encounters, with every single member of the Clinton family. That actually skewed my own concept of politics on a social level for like 15 years. Just the notion that two miles down the road we’re having this massive street party because Bill Clinton is now somehow the President of the United States.
The street party that’s in Diana actually occurred. I didn’t go because I had homework that night, and I was 14. Like, I couldn’t drive myself, but a lot of Diana is about this transitional era and the way in which we look back on a huge moment of transition, like the mid-90s. For example, the 90s are often misremembered, like the 60s were. The 90s were still a pretty deeply racist and homophobic time. Especially with most of the characters in this book emerging or already existing in different strata or forms of queerness in their lives. A lot of times it comes out in kind of a stilted binary way, as they’re trying to figure out what their own deal is, how they feel, how they’re going to live, how it all fits in.
It should seem a little bit jarring to someone who wasn’t alive at that time. A lot of it is to show the difference on a society-wide level that 30 years makes. Like the hate group, the Westboro Baptist Church showed up. They’re based out of Topeka, Kansas, and were about seven hours away from Little Rock, but they would show up all the time all throughout the breadbasket. We were very familiar with them at a very early age. If shitheads like the Klan didn’t show up at some event, then Westboro Baptist Church would. The way all that incorporates the essay, The End of History, and the concept that set up the neoliberal ‘90s, and the notion that we can forget our past. Western democratic capitalism being that final form of society, it’s one of those things that obviously rings hollow to us as we’re fighting tooth and nail to prevent fascism from permanently ingraining itself in our society.
It also sort of shows that in that transitional moment, especially in the early mid 90s. People were still at a much slower pace, trying to figure out exactly what the relevance and what the implications would be one generation down the line. That was this really weird window that was very local to us, which actually wound up having this global significance, but it didn’t seem like it at the time. It was just a bunch of Arkansans partying in the street one night.
Dying Scene: What does the Arkansas punk rock scene bring to the story that a larger punk city couldn’t?
Nate Powell: In the 90s, and well into the 2000s, Little Rock’s DIY scene was very much one of the primary hubs in the middle of the country for bands who were on tour and people traveling through. It was very deeply ingrained into this DIY network, but because Arkansas is Arkansas, it’s taken for granted cultural and social cues. I don’t know, I guess the best way to put it is Arkansas often never quite gets never quite gets it right. Little Rock, for example, it’s a small- to medium-sized city; the metropolitan area is about 300,000 people, but it’s not a college town. There are some colleges there, but people don’t move there to go to college.
In general, the young people who are in Little Rock have to figure out they have to make their own cool thing if a cool thing is going to happen. There is a sense of gravity, especially as I was going from age 13 to 14 to 15. My own developing interests all of a sudden clicked when I discovered punk in eighth grade, as a young metalhead crossing over into punk. Then I realized the older kids who are seniors at my school, or that weird kid who goes to my parents’ church. That’s why they’re weird. They’re punk.
The weird kid from my parents’ church is in four bands; they’ve put out all these tapes. Basically, you’re invited into this secret society of teenagers, and you realize that the weird stuff that you thought that you were doing by yourself or with your best friend was being echoed by dozens of little pockets of other little weirdos. At a certain point, you find each other, and it does have this sort of magical revelation, where all of a sudden, we’re just all making this weird stuff together. So let’s build something out of it.
Arkansas is like the butt of many jokes, and we deserve all of that. What’s cool is people kind of ignore us. The music and the art that we made at the time was usually very central in underground emo hardcore networks. Even within that, my main band, Soophie Nun Squad, were very much a part of that and at the center of that. We were a weird mix of the Big Boys and Public Enemy, and the whole Muppet Show. It was counteracting that sense of teenagers being very focused on being very sad and taking themselves very seriously and losing that sense of kinetic energy and fighting back against the notion of how you are or are not supposed to be at a show or in public. We developed this kind of concept band that was pushing back on the idea of coolness. Weirdly, it wound up being a band that existed for like 13 years and toured a bunch. It’s the name that we stumbled across when we were 14 years old, and we were just stuck with this dumb name.
Dying Scene: Is there a hidden reference in the book that longtime members of the Arkansas scene would immediately recognize like a little Easter egg or anything?
Nate Powell: The scene that I was mentioning earlier, with the Excalibur-like scene where Jodi fishes her bass out of the Arkansas River. The band that’s playing is a band called Substance at the time. The drummer of that band is actually the drummer of Samiam now. They were massively influential on us as a local community, but also, like, they never quite fit into any precise subgenre of music, especially for the first half of the 90s. The fact that our most influential local band was a biracial band was incredibly powerful as a young teenager getting into punk, and it really helps set the stage for basically like punk being a microcosm of what type of world do you want to live in? What do you want to build together? I knew that I had to have Substance featured in the comic for multiple reasons.
Part of it was to recognize that I took for granted that punk was this actively multiracial, highly diverse community of creative young people to more established scenes, like in DC and New York City. Not only discovered that the music tended to be a little more boring, conservative, and formulaic, but that a lot of the same social structures of stratification- a lot more of the segregation racially and by gender was in effect in more established scenes. They didn’t have to figure out their own way to make a community work. That made me really appreciate my weird scene in Arkansas, like recognizing how fucked up it is that your whole scene is just a bunch of white boys.
Dying Scene: You dedicated the book to the memory of Andy Conrad. Can you tell us a little bit about him?
Nate Powell: Andy was in a ton of bands and was like five years older than me. When I made that crossover from metal into punk, he had already been in several bands. I connected the dots when I realized that’s the weird guy who always used to smash my friend’s parents’ mailbox or that was an actual punk in the neighborhood. Andy was just like a true individual who always had his heart on his sleeve and started out by being in this band called the Numbskulls. As a kid in Arkansas, that band was sort of like Econochrist was really like the central Little Rock band that then moved to California and continued. Numbskulls was like the first generation of children being in bands. So Colin, who’s now in Samiam, was in Numbskulls, and Jason White was in Green Day and Pinhead Gunpowder, was also.
Andy was in some other bands, but importantly, he was in this band called Five. We played our first several shows with them. They put out a seven-inch called All Through. A lot of that is woven in because the art that they stole from a book in the library for their seven-inch comes from this early, prototypical graphic novelist named Lin Ward, who was making graphic novels in the 1920s and 1930s. When I started working on Fall Through, I recognized this art that is influencing what I’m doing.
Andy was a person who’s beloved, but also gets into arguments with the people he loved the most, and lived a very interesting, storied existence as like a long-distance trucker for a while, always coming back to music. Yet struggled with substance abuse. He passed away last year, just about a week after I finished Diana. He’d been on my mind so much. He’s actually in multiple panels in Diana in crowd scenes in some of the shows. He was a sweet, compassionate guy, but he could be very prickly.
Little Rock is the type of town where you either leave and you never come back, or you leave and you come back one time, and you stay there the rest of your life. There’s always that type of tension of trying to find your place in the world, but knowing that Little Rock is always waiting for you and hoping it’s not like a vortex or functioning like a black hole or whatever. He was always very proud that at least in my creative endeavors. I found a way to kind of just escape the little microcosm of Little Rock. The last time I saw him was about three years ago at a memorial for the drummer of Trustee who had passed away at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s the kind of thing you always think you’re going to see someone again, and then you don’t.
Nate Powell’s Diana: The Punk Singer Who Ripped Through Time is published through Abrams ComicArts.
Discover more from Dying Scene
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
