WHEN TO PICK A POMEGRANATE - SerioComics 64 + Q&A with Author Yasmeen Abedifard
I'll be at The LA Times Book Festival Saturday/Sunday April 26th-27th - Orange 709!
I’ll be at The LA Times Book Festival this weekend
The LA Times Book Festival is this weekend.
April 26-27th.
There’s some amazing stuff happening.
Poet Amanda Gorman will be there.
Graphic novelist Sammy Harkham.
Percival Everett, Jenny Slate, the list could go on and on.
And I WILL BE THERE ;0
Running a small booth at Orange 709.
Here are my planned offerings!
SerioComics
Should We Buy A Gun?
A graphic novel 11 years in the making, written by a left author and illustrated by a right artist.
A couple’s first fight. The country’s most polarizing issue.
A serious comic about love, fear, and common ground.
“Like Maus meets Marriage Story”
$35 – Paperback, 2025
$25 – Proof, 2024
$6 – eBook panel by panel, 2025
PARODY HAGGADAHS - $9 each
The Office Haggadah
Michael tries to convince Maxwell House to use Dunder Mifflin as their paper supplier.
The Yada Yada Haggadah
A Seinfeld Seder—featured in The New York Times.
Curb Your Haggadah
Larry David meets Kabbalah. Very funny. Surprisingly substantive.
The Spoof Seder Haggadah
A parody of Mel Brooks parodies... of parodies.
The Trump Passover Haggadah
The 2018, still-somehow-relevant satire featured in The New York Times.
The Biden-Harris Haggadah
The 2021 no-longer-relevant but still-pretty-funny parody.
The Meshugah Kanye Haggadah
A musical where Kanye joins a Passover hosted by Rick Rubin, Bob Dylan, and other legendary Jewish musicians.
11:11s
$11
Spiritual Instagram
A meme memoir. The fleeting and the eternal. A book for phone lovers.
This Book Is the Longest Sentence Ever Written and Then Published
A manic, hilarious, and surprisingly emotional single-sentence memoir.
Breaks every rule to become the longest, and maybe the most honest, sentence ever published.
Fake History!
A very Drunk History, Columbus as Trump in a surreal satirical anti-colonial screed.
The Dollar Menu
I Bought A Little Story – $1
A Donald Barthelme remix making fun of Elon Musk.
Ask The Music – $1
A live reading (like Tarot, but with Music). You ask a question of my 100,000+ song playlist and we see how there’s Synchronicity in the Shuffle and how it can guide us.
Bibliomancy – $1
You ask a question of my books or my curated used books, we open a random page, whatever it says just might have some guidance…
Numerology/Astrology – $1
I’ll tell you about your Numerology/Astrology!
Instagram/TikTok Reading – $1
We ask a question, swipe with intention, reveal the spirit in the algorithm, and how it can guide…
SUBSTACKS
SerioComics – Free / $5 per month
Weekly enthusiasms for the best in graphic literature, Q&As with makers, monthly gun debate updates in support of Should We Buy A Gun? and forthcoming The Enneagram Superheroes, Tennis vs. Pickleball…
seriocomics.substack.com
Shuffle Synchronicities – Free / $5 per month
NPR-celebrated, former top 25, how meaningful music coincidences can help guide your life.
shufflesynchronicities.substack.com
CURATED USED BOOKS
$5-$35
Handpicked recommendations from my personal collection.
Weird, wonderful…worth it.
If you’re in LA, I recommend stopping by.
It’s free!
And very fun.
How I Met Yasmeen Abedifard
Like Nick Winn, I met Yasmeen Abedifard at CALA in December.
She was also part of the Silver Sprocket panel.
And I was really moved by her origin story behind her offering When To Pick A Pomegranate.
Like Nick’s Catholicism, Yasmeen found inspiration in her Sufi Islam.
Hafez was a Sufi poet who had a tremendous influence on me in the early 2020s.
And the fact that her Persian heritage found its way into a graphic novel.
Immediately intrigued me.
I sought her out after, had a great conversation, bought and greatly enjoyed her book.
We kept in touch a bit via Instagram.
She’s up north in the bay area and I’m really excited to have her as a guest.
And talk about what I enjoyed in her work.
Yasmeen Abedifard
Yasmeen Abedifard (b. 1996) is an Iranian-American artist born in the San Francisco Bay Area and is currently based in Oakland, CA, USA. She holds an MFA from Cornell University. Her work is centered around storytelling mediums, including comics, illustrations, and animation.
She is currently teaching in the Comics program at The California College of the Arts (CCA), the UC Berkeley Art Studio, CCA Extension, and Dominican University. Her work has been featured in various spaces, such as the SF Art Book Fair, Rubenstein Arts Center, Shapeshifters Cinema, Jack Hanley Gallery, and San Francisco Center for the Book, and has received various accolades, including the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Minicomic for Death Bloom in 2023. She has taught comic workshops at BAMPFA, Secret Room, Kala Art Institute, Sequential Artists Workshop, and Black Mountain Institute. She has created several published comics, such as When to Pick a Pomegranate (pub. Silver Sprocket), Death Bloom (pub. Lucky Pocket), and Burnt (pub. Wiggle Bird Mailing Club).
She is also part of a comics collective called D.R.Y. with her peers, Daniel Zhou and Raul Higuera, aimed at fostering community and highlighting the Bay Area comics scene.
WHEN TO PICK A POMEGRANATE
“I want to tear these thoughts out of my flesh. How could I forget just how rotten I am?”
In this collection of contemplative and cathartic short comics, the pomegranate Anar and the woman Guli exist as reflections of each other — repellent to one another and yet inexorably drawn together once more. As they evolve through each story, proceeding through the stages of the plant life cycle, they take on new roles: muse and artist, gardener and seed, lover and fruit. The iterations reveal new revelations, exploring the themes of shame, grief, destiny, and survival at each turn.
Abedifard’s comic form evokes Persianate storytelling and draws on stylistic elements found in illuminated manuscripts, building an experience as rich and complex as the taste of pomegranate on one’s tongue.
Attraction, Disgust
There is something achingly true about Yasmeen’s relationship between a woman and pomegranate.
Our greatest desires are also our deepest sufferings.
Our attractions sometimes leave us disgusted.
Layers and layers, Texture and meaning
For instance, down below, we have a beautiful background in green that seems like a kaleidoscopic garden, then hands that are otherworldly simple blue and white, then our beautiful naked goddess woman seems to be lovingly held while the more grotesque pomegranate is dropped. Their names are in English. And then in Farsi.
This kind of attention detail and design makes Yasmeen’s book feel dense and poetic yet still breezy and approachable.
Relationships…Can’t Live With Them/Can’t Live Without Them
Probably the greatest takeaway I received from the Yasmeen’s work this read.
Is that wholeness doesn’t come through hyper-individuation.
But through forms of relationship.
In the following page after this one.
The pomegranate laments how can he even dance with the idea that he could remain whole once he saw her.
For all the modern talk of self-love and individuation.
It seems unlikely that we were all brought here not to be in forms of loving relationship with each other.
Even if the entanglements of it all can be heartbreaking…
Q&A with Yasmeen Abedifard!
1. SerioComics: I saw you speak at a CALA and panel and was incredibly impressed by your comparison of your work to Sufi mystics. I recently read a new translation of Hafez I picked up at AWP. Can you tell us more about how you see your When To Pick a Pomegranate in relation to that tradition? Personally, the aforementioned new translation greatly highlighted the romantic qualities of his work over the previous more mystical one I had read, which helped me see your work in a new light again.
Yasmeen Abedifard: I think that growing up in America means being influenced by a variety of artists who help shape the visual and written iconography of the landscape—often in ways we’re not even aware of. That’s true for me too, but I also carry the additional influences of Iran. When I was growing up, we celebrated Shabeh Yaldah and read Hafez. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what those things meant, but they planted seeds. When I walked through my house and saw mystical figures woven into the Persian carpets under my feet, I kept walking—but again, more seeds were planted. It wasn’t until adulthood that I began to study and understand the artists and traditions that had been quietly shaping me all along. I also believe that Farsi holds a kind of depth that English doesn’t—it’s a language full of poetry and metaphor, even in the most mundane expressions. For example, when we say “thank you,” we say I hope your hands do not hurt. I’m hoping that some of that lyrical quality comes through in the writing of the comic.
2. SerioComics: Have you ever felt like Anar (the pomegranate)? What about Guli (the woman)? What can we learn about attraction, repulsion, destiny and anything else in their relationship?
Yasmeen Abedifard: I’ve definitely felt like both. I think of these characters as “actors” of sorts—more precisely, sock puppets on either of my hands. They each carry qualities of me, manifested in different ways, and allow me to explore those parts of myself. As you mentioned, their existence is bound together through their relationship; the book and their narrative wouldn’t exist without the other. I wanted to explore how we can push and pull each other in a variety of ways, both positive and negative. I wanted to show how deeply someone can hurt you, and also how wonderfully someone can make you feel. Regardless of how they treat each other, they were destined to meet and be together—they’re sock puppets, after all, stuck on either of my hands.
3. SerioComics: I looked up the metaphor of the pomegranate and there are various and some of the different ones seem to mirror the episodes of your narrative structure. Talk to us about how you view the episodic quality of the story?
Yasmeen Abedifard: Love that you called it episodes! I think about TV and film a lot when it comes to comics. A student once told me I was teaching them the "cinematography of comics," which felt like high praise. I can attribute this mini-story structure to two things: first, I wanted to tell a story that mirrored Persianate storytelling—multiple stories woven within a larger narrative. Second, I’m really drawn to telling stories with constraints and limitations. The one I return to most often is the challenge of making stories shorter rather than longer. Ultimately, I see episodic storytelling as a form of cyclical storytelling. Each story exists within its own boundaries, but also connects back to the larger whole. I suppose this structure does a good job of holding multiplicity—I don’t have just one “meaning”; there are many, just like you noted how a pomegranate itself carries multiple meanings.
4. SerioComics: The art design is hypnotic and kaleidoscopic, can you tell us about the mechanics of how you drew it?
Yasmeen Abedifard: I appreciate that! I’m happy to share that the comic was made 100% digitally. I use Procreate for most of the drawing and Photoshop to finalize everything. For this book, I thought a lot about how it would be printed. I knew it would be printed using offset printing, so I mixed CMYK colors to create each tone. I also had a Pantone color added. Color was important to the story, so I wanted every choice to feel deliberate.
5. SerioComics: What else should we know about your back catalogue and future work? Who else should we be reading and who has influenced you?
Yasmeen Abedifard: I’ve mostly self-published smaller works, which are all available to read on my website. My comic Death Bloom was published by Lucky Pocket, and I released a zine called Ablaze through Wiggle Bird Mailing Club. My comics have also appeared in several anthologies, such as D.R.Y. Vol. 1 (which I helped create!), Trickshot, and š! #54. I’m probably forgetting a few things, but for the most part, I self-publish or work with small presses—I truly believe that’s the future of comics. As for future work, it’ll happen once I can pull myself away from teaching full-time haha. I do have an idea for something new with Secret Room Press. I’m heavily influenced by my friends—you should definitely check out Daniel Zhou and Raul Higuera. Easy answer.
Super interesting interview, David. I’ve seen Yasmeen’s book in my LCS and may have to pick a copy up!