This Land is My Land: Big Dreams, Micro-nations, and Other Self-Made States
Nib Contributing Editor and Bay-Area artist Andy Warner is a nonfiction cartoonist, writer, and editor extraordinaire. His work is fascinating, a little depressing, and always entertaining. He’s the bestselling author of Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, and recently released This Land Is My Land: A Graphic History of Big Dreams, Micronations, and Other Self-Made States with former Nib editorial assistant Sofie Louise Dam. Nib Associate Editor Matt Lubchansky interviewed Andy about the new book.
So This Land is My Land started out as a piece for The Nib. Tell me a little bit about how it was turned into a book!
Sofie Dam and I met first in Denmark in 2016, where I was teaching a comics class and she was a student of mine. Later that same year, she worked as an editorial assistant at The Nib, and we collaborated on a story about people founding their own micronations called “Think Small.” It was meant as a funny relief from the very bad election season everyone having. We didn’t expect it to go anywhere further, but that winter we were contacted by a British publisher, who’d seen the original web version and wanted us to pitch it to them to turn it into a book.
Weirdly, the pitch ended up going nowhere, but luckily for us (and thanks to the diligence of our awesome agent, Farley Chase), we found a home for it with Chronicle Books. That was really exciting, because Chronicle’s known for its beautifully produced books, and we knew they’d do justice to Sofie’s amazing art.
I took stock of all the different Wikipedia holes I’d fallen down, and figured out how to structure the book, trying to tell as many stories about as many different kinds of people from as many different places as I could. The utopian urge to make better your society is about as universal a human thing as you can get, so the cutting all the ideas down to a tight 160 pages was the key. Some great stuff, like Biosphere 2, which Steve Bannon drove into the ground, ended up on the cutting room floor. But that just gives me more material for comics in the future!
You’re obviously at this point used to writing for others to draw. The layouts are really interesting and beautifully done . In your process, how much of that is writing really particular visuals, and how much of it is letting Sofie have some free rein?
Sofie had pretty much free rein in her art. I sent over some suggestions, and we talked a lot about her thumbnails, but I try to not visually direct artists that I work with too much. I write very spare scripts for myself, just mapping out the beats of the panels. When working with others, I’ll occasionally suggest a specific way of portraying something, but that’s pretty rare. As a cartoonist myself, I always love to see what other people do with my words because it’s so different from what I’d do, so I try to give their process as much space as I can.
How did you decide which details to leave in and which ones to cut? I feel three quarters of these could have been entire graphic novels on their own.
Our editor at Chronicle, Julia Patrick, was a great help with that. Whittling something down to the bone is also one of my favorite things to do with nonfiction. That was even sort of the design constraint of my first book, Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, where I limited myself to only four pages per history. I gave myself a little more space to do longer (or shorter) stories with This Land is My Land, but still tried to keep it tight. One thing that I love about nonfiction is that because your raw material is all there already, you can make the story as big or as small as you need to in order to tell it right. Some stories made it quite a while before getting cut, like the Jewish Autonomous Oblast project in the insanely utopian focused early days of the USSR. That one ended up both being too big a story, and too dark of one, to fit into the final book (which does contain some pretty grim stories). But maybe it’ll be comic I’ll do some day for The Nib.
You make note a couple times in the book about some British law that makes it easy to found a new country so long as it’s a vassal state of the Queen. Let’s have some service journalism for all our readers in the commonwealth — how do they declare themselves a monarch?
Nothing’s easy. But His Majesty Prince Leonard I of Hutt (formerly Leonard Casely of Western Australia), pulled an amazing legal maneuver in 1970. He dug up a law that’s called “Imperial Treasons Act of 1495” and which reads “An Acte that noe person going wth the Kinge to the Warres shalbe attaynt of treason.”
This means that if you declare yourself a monarch, but remain subject to the Queen’s sovereignty (and thus her laws), your family and confederates are legally protected during a state of war. So Prince Leonard declared himself a prince, still subject to the Queen, and promptly declared war on Australia, which protected his family and friends being prosecuted for attempting secession. When Australia refused to respond to the declared hostilities, Prince Leonard declared victory and pointed to another legal loophole in the Laws of War that automatically conferred sovereignty to a country undefeated in a state of war. A good idea has legs, and the same tactic was later used in the establishment of the Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands.
Another recurring theme in the book is that basically whatever the prevailing status quo — whether it be an imperialist government, or capitalism, or just common sense — end up steamrolling these places, and often in very ironic way! Do you think a more intentionally-built world is even possible?
Many of these places do get obliterated, either through state power or human failing, but a few do survive. I find that inspirational. And it’s also important to remember that human progress isn’t a steady march towards a brilliant future. It’s messy, just as full of backslides as “progress.” And the idea that there’s a single idea of what utopia or progress means is false–there are so many visions, and many are utterly incompatible. But even given all of that, it’s still moments of radical change, driven by the same sense of idealism and hope that led these weirdos to found their own micronations, that end up having a lasting effect of our society. It just never, ever shakes out the way anybody actually expected to.
Which Utopia was your favorite one to research?
Sealand probably has the most dramatic history, which involves gun battles, helicopters, mercenaries on jet skis, kidnapping, a diplomatic incident between England and Germany, and pirate radio stations. But I’m really partial to Freedom Cove, because it’s a love story, and I like love stories, but I don’t often get to write them.
Which of these would you want to live in the most? What about the least?
I think I’d most like to live in the Temples of Humankind. I’d have to buy into their strange spiritual practice, but their psychedelic tunnels under the Alps are beautiful, their dances are kind of cool, and they seem to grow nice vegetables. Also, they’re one of the few places that wasn’t either blown up or destroyed by the venal human frailty of their founder.
As for the least, Seasteading just seems awful. As a resident of the Bay Area, I already have to deal with these douchebags enough. When they all set sail for their floating libertarian utopia, I’d just as soon stay on dry land.
We’re currently including free copies of This Land is My Land for readers who join our membership program, The Inkwell. Sign up at the $8 level or higher to get Andy’s new book, a copy of the latest Nib magazine, and help us support cartooning for the long haul.
