Kayla E.

Kayla E. arrived on the comics scene like a four-color atomic bomb. Her debut graphic memoir Precious Rubbish, published by Fantagraphics in April 2025, immediately garnered the kind of critical attention usually reserved for cartoonists with decades of work behind them. The book—which took home the 2025 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel—reconfigured the impersonal visual language of 20th-century commercial art into the harrowing story of a childhood shaped by maternal emotional dysregulation, rural poverty, and incest.

Born in Texas and raised between estranged parents, young Kayla found herself navigating a world of Pentecostal fanaticism and family dysfunction. Her story, told in the fragmented, playful visual language of mid-century children’s comics—Archie, Little Dot, and their contemporaries—transforms trauma into something almost bearable. The book is punctuated with interactive elements: paper dolls, satirical advertisements, word searches, recipe cards. A word search invites readers to find “vodka,” “dissociation,” and “PTSD.” An advertisement reads: “Do You Need Money? Consider robbing your child’s piggy bank!”

Critics have been unanimous in their praise. “This four-color atomic bomb of a comic signals the arrival of a formidable talent,” wrote Publishers Weekly in a starred review. The New York Times called it “a scream as precisely pitched as a middle C from a tuning fork.” Ivan Brunetti, whose own work Preceded the book in influence, praised it as “a triumph of pure resilience—a psychic thick, dark syrup of personal pain, humiliation, and suffering. And it will make you laugh inappropriately (and guiltily), which is the highest praise I can give.”

Before Precious Rubbish, Kayla spent nearly a decade as editor-in-chief of Nat. Brut, the Whiting Award–winning literary magazine. She served as Art Director for the Harvard Lampoon during her undergraduate years at Harvard University, where she earned her BA in Visual and Environmental Studies and won the Albert Alcalay Prize in Visual Arts. In 2023-2024, she held the prestigious Hodder Fellowship in Creative Writing at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, NOW (the New Comics Anthology), Ecotone Magazine, and The Comics Journal. She designed Bill Ward: The Fantagraphics Studio Edition, earning an Eisner Award nomination for Best Book Design. She also contributed “You Cannot Live on Bread Alone,” a short story to NOW #13, earning a second Eisner nomination. Her introduction to Popeye Vol. 4 appeared in 2024.

Kayla now serves as Creative Director at Fantagraphics, where she’s also the cover artist for the NOW anthology series and contributed additional art including “Gift From Uncle Ben” and “If It Will Do Ya.” Her exhibition history includes the North Carolina Museum of Art, Culture Hole, Central Server Works / Marian Cramer Projects, Marfa Invitational, and the Goss-Michael Foundation / Hignite Projects.

In 2026, she received a Creative Capital Award for her forthcoming graphic memoir, I Will Give You Rest. She also co-edited a collection of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy comic strips for Fantagraphics, published in 2026.

The influence on her work is clear: Publishers Weekly noted the “flawless pastiche of commercial art and design, drenched in cheery primary colors, suggests the influence of Chris Ware and Ivan Brunetti while establishing an aesthetic all its own.” That aesthetic—the clean lines and primary colors of mid-twentieth-century commercial illustration repurposed for personal testimony—has made Precious Rubbish one of the most discussed and acclaimed graphic novels of the decade. The book was named one of the best of 2025 by the New York Public Library, Booklist, A.V. Club, Literary Hub, and The Guardian, with translations forthcoming in Spanish and French.

Perfect for fans of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, Ivan Brunetti’s Schizo, or graphic medicine works like Eula Biss’s “The Pain Scale”—comics that use the formal properties of the medium itself as tools for meaning-making. Readers who appreciate work that transforms the disposable aesthetics of commercial comics into vessels for personal and cultural memory will find much to treasure in Kayla E.’s singular voice.

Explore Kayla E.’s comics: Precious Rubbish, they-never-loved-you.