Artist Matt Huynh works with brush and ink, pulling technical inspiration from Western comics and Eastern sumi-e (ink brush painting). He frequently uses his art to explore and amplify stories of refugees, of migrants and asylum seekers and their communities. For the October/November issue of The Believer, Huynh created Cabramatta, pulling readers into the Australian city he grew up in. 

For this first episode of Season 3 of our podcast Holly Dunn interviews cover designer, graphic novelist, and Art Director, Kristen Radtke. The conversation includes Radtke’s process on design, writing Imagine Wanting Only This, and how she works with other artists for The Believer Magazine.

“The aesthetic sensibility of The Believer is pretty legendary,” Kristen Radtke, fresh from her honeymoon, tells me of the bimonthly, five-time National Magazine Award finalist, literature, arts, and culture mag. “It’s always had such a cool, crisp, throwback look, thanks largely to Dave Eggers and Charles Burns, the design and illustration gurus behind the original magazine.” 

Kristen Radtke is a writer. Also, she's an illustrator and she designs book covers. Plus, she works as a film and video editor. And she's the managing editor of Sarabande Publishing. 

Radtke created the graphic novel Imagine Wanting Only This, described by the New York Times as "a story of the young writer's growing fascination with ruins and abandoned places, as she attempts to come to terms with death." The review continues on to call Radtke "a superhuman of illustration, a grandmaster." But even superhumans have to put pen to paper, have to start with a speck of a concept and grow it and grow.