The Process of Making Comics is a series that examines how comics artists put together their work for the magazine. In this entry, Peter Quach and Carolina Alonso Bejarano  share what it was like to make Pinan for the December/January 2018 issue.

THE BELIEVER: How did this comic start?

PETER QUACH: I had just moved to Chicago, and I was talking with one of my roommates about her dating life using Tinder. And at the same time, I was grappling with new stories of sexual assault from people in my life and trying to understand it in a more concrete rather than abstract way. I process the world through comics, and it felt necessary to write this story to better understand what the women in my life had been through. So I called Carolina, who has been my frequent collaborator, and asked what she thought.

CAROLINA ALONSO BEJARANO: When Peter told me of his new comic idea, I asked him, as a hetero, cis-gender man who’s never been harassed, what he could say about sexual harassment from the perspective of a woman. I asked him how he planned to do his research, and I told Peter, “It’s time for men to listen.” He replied, “It’s time for men to speak up,” and then he hung up. I was really skeptical of what he would write, especially when I didn’t hear from him for a few days. When he called me back, he asked me to collaborate in writing this with him. I thought that was a good idea.

BLVR: What’s your process like?

CAB: Peter and I have been collaborating in comics since 2014. Our process starts with a conversation where we outline the main plot points and discuss the takeaways from the story. Pinan was different because the story was commissioned as a fifteen page comic, and in that limited space we knew we couldn’t do justice to the full experience of dealing with life after a sexual assault, so instead we chose to focus on just a moment in time.

PQ: After we determined the main plot, I wrote out a very rough first draft of the story in script form. I had to think of a visual way for Juliana, the main character, to deal with her trauma, and it suddenly came to me that we could have her practice karate as a way to cope. We could use my own knowledge as a karate practitioner, and karate could serve as an overarching metaphor for Juliana’s healing process and state of mind. I sent Caro the first draft, and we discussed it. She thought my first...