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Kat Leyh is the kind of cyclist who carries extra tools in case she runs into someone in need of assistance. No wonder, then, that her passion for bicycles and eagerness to help others are at the core of her new graphic novel, Spoke, which traces a year in the postapocalyptic life of a deaf bike courier.
In her vision of a future devoid of electronic technology, danger comes from crumbling infrastructure and resource scarcity, but Leyh offers an optimistic blueprint for survival through collaboration. There’s also a budding romance: Spoke, the titular protagonist who delivers food and supplies across a dispersed community, slowly learns how to open up to an artist creating a dossier on the medicinal uses of plants. That’s a nod to Leyh’s wife, a medical illustrator.
The book began as an early pandemic reverie. “What if you could just think about these things that bring you joy in really small ways?” Leyh recalls thinking. Now 37 and living in Forest Glen, she grew up moving around the rural Midwest, landing in a big city for the first time when she came to Columbia College Chicago to study illustration. “I almost exclusively discovered the nature around here through riding my bike,” Leyh says. During the difficult COVID time, she spun her new story out of activities that comforted her, including volunteering at forest preserves and practicing back-to-the-earth hobbies like weaving, gardening, and canning.
Twice nominated for an Eisner Award (the Pulitzers of comic books) for her quirky, magic-steeped graphic novels Snapdragon and Thirsty Mermaids, Leyh is a longtime fan of dystopian fiction. Fascinated by the underlying questions of how survivors acclimate, she became increasingly attracted to solarpunk narratives, which posit a future rooted in sustainability rather than strife. “It’s more refreshing to read about the ways that people are resilient and creative and come together,” she notes. Spoke uses her rusty relic as an opportunity to finally find her purpose, showing how much of a difference one person on two wheels can make.
Spoke comes out October 13.
Oliver Sava is a freelance writer for Chicago magazine.
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