5 Questions with Lee Lai
Lee Lai is an Australian cartoonist living in Tio’tia:ke (colonially known as Montreal, Canada).
In 2021, she was selected as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 for her debut graphic novel, Stone Fruit, which went on to win several awards, including the Lambda Literary Award, the Cartoonist Studio Prize, the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize, and two Ignatz Awards.
Her comics have appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, Granta, and the Museum of Modern Art’s Magazine.
Her second graphic novel, Cannon, was released by Giramondo in September 2025.
No.1
How would you describe your artistic philosophy?
I’m not sure if I can say I’ve developed a deep philosophy, but certainly the last decade of freelancing as a comics artist has helped me to develop a pretty reliable process. I’m very attached to the process: I love drawing and writing, and I care a lot about continuing to develop technique. In whatever amount of life I have left to work on comics, I won’t discover a fraction of what I’d like to in terms of visual storytelling.
I think I would be in trouble if I didn’t enjoy doing those things because ultimately, I’m never fond of the final outcome. Similar to a lot of makers I know, I tend to obsess over the faults of my work—the bar of what is the best I can do is constantly shifting as I learn more about how I want to tell stories. So a love of the process keeps me motivated (and grateful) to be working on it each day.
No.2
It’s been 4 years since Stone Fruit, your graphic novel debut. You have been working on Cannon since we interviewed you about Stone Fruit not long after its publication, which you said “unlocked the satisfaction of long-form writing” for you. What ended up surprising you during the process of making Cannon?
I think the big surprise in working on Cannon came in the form of the pandemic! I started thinking about Cannon as a story seed in 2019: I wanted to write a story about a long-term friendship forged in shared experiences and identity, [and which was gradually being] put under strain by the day-to-day dirt of life and adulthood. And then lockdown happened and everyone’s friendships were under strain, and I suddenly felt quite differently about my commitment to a story about a friendship in strife.
I think it was maybe Jillian Tamaki who talked once about how trying to change your drawing style is like moving a giant ship in a different direction—slowly and with great resistance. I think it felt the same trying to redirect a storyline that was once on a different trajectory. I wanted to inject more hope and optimism into the story than I’d first planned, but in shifting it, I realised how much that affected all the side characters, everyone’s past contexts, the pacing—everything. I’m pretty sure I spent a lot of time screaming to my roommates about how difficult and annoying it was, but in retrospect, doing rewrites on this book was a thrill. I think I threw out about 70 already-drawn pages.
No.3
Your stories are often so filled with tenderheartedness, humour and grief in a way that feels natural and moving. We asked you about your physical process last time, but what was your process in discovering how to tell a story?
Thank you! I’m really glad those things land for you. My process for Cannon in this sense was similar to that of Stone Fruit but maybe more involved, because there were more characters. Talking with friends and loved ones in real life about the made-up characters (i.e., gossiping about them) helped me understand their function in the story.
The side character of Kam, for example, was developed between my roommate Tariq and I. We were eating cheese pie in our neighbourhood park and talking about our own experiences of casual intimacy—their perils, pleasures and ambiguity involved—and speculated about how that might look between Kam and Trish, what kind of assumptions she as a queer woman might make of him as a cis man, and how that would actually look in their dialogue and intimacy. I had many more conversations with my partner Samia about Cannon and Trish’s friendship: how their families of origins might affect their understanding of how to show up in friendship, and what exactly conflict might look like [between them]. All these conversations helped me flesh out the characters’ idiosyncrasies, motivations, hangups. Given Cannon is a pretty character-driven story, this all helped me figure out what was going to happen.
No.4
When you have a seed for an idea, how do you know it’s worth pursuing?
I try to give myself a good six months before starting a project to side-eye an idea and see if it holds, or if it fizzles out into something that might just make a good short comic and be left at that. If it does stick, I try to do some poking around internally to figure out why it’s holding: what’s the draw, what am I trying to figure out? Usually there’s something personal in there for me that ends up being parsed out and better articulated by turning it into a fictional story. With Cannon, the book was my motivation to better understand the useful functions of anger and confrontation, and the ways they can protect ourselves and our relationships (as well as destroy them).
No.5
The comics landscape has changed dramatically in the past decade, in the sense that it seems more possible for young people to publish, whether with traditional publishers or otherwise, and more interest from readers too. What are your hopes for indie comics writing?
It has changed so much and I think it’s wonderful! My hope is that indie comics writing doesn’t lose its connection to DIY, punk, and political spaces [where they originated]. I feel indebted to the zine culture of the 2000s as spaces that helped me develop my radical politics just as much as my visual storytelling skills. These days, I think a lot about physical spaces as social infrastructure for political capacity-building; I guess I hope that comics don’t only prosper online, but that cartoonists continue to get together to make small presses, collaborate creatively, and talk in-person about how best to be artists (and support our larger communities) in this actually quite terrifying political landscape.
(Credit: Bee Elton)
Find Out More
The highly anticipated follow-up to the Stella-shortlisted Stone Fruit, Cannon, by acclaimed Australian cartoonist Lee Lai, is a mordantly funny and emotionally turbulent slice of friendship strife.
This graphic novel, featuring black-and-white and colour panels over 300 pages, is available in hardback.
We arrive to wreckage – a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heatwave, we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, she destroyed it. The horror-scape left in her wake is not unlike the films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror movies on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their relationship. In high school, they were each other’s lifeline – two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down. Yet when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself very uncharacteristically surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her out.
In Cannon, Lee Lai’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed and award-winning Stone Fruit, the full palette of a nervous breakdown is just a part of what is on offer. Lai’s sharp sense of humour and sensitive eye produce a story that explores the intimacy of queer friendship and the weight of family responsibility, and breaks open the question of what we owe both to each other and to ourselves.
Get it from Giramondo here.