Her clandestine radio project called Interior was never meant to leave the supply closet. Dared by Aisha Qureshi to stop hiding behind mixtapes and found sounds, June Park starts composing her own layered songs and broadcasting them after midnight from a dented PA salvaged off Central Ave in Albuquerque. But when a clip of June singing under the evaporative coolers in the shuttered Winrock Mall gets boosted on VidLoop, she turns into the girl everyone recognizes in the cafeteria line. Aisha is elated and unsettled—her favorite person is no longer just for late buses and cracked phone speakers—while June endures curious stares, a vice-principal who smells opportunity, and the rattle of her mother's college brochures. As senior year burns down like a summer monsoon, the two map their city with a field recorder, trade zines at Astro-Zip on Lomas, and wrestle with what to keep private and what to air. The horizon they run toward isn't fame but a choice: the desert at dawn, a flat white saltpan, and the first song they made together playing from a thrifted speaker tower.
Named to the ZineWest 2025 Critics' Top Ten, longlisted for the 2025 Ignatz Awards, and celebrated across social feeds as a luminous, queer coming-of-age told in maps, receipts, and margin notes—Dispatches from the Interior is a graphic chronicle of two voices learning to be heard.
Emma Jones is a cartoonist and sound artist from Santa Fe, New Mexico, now based in Portland, Oregon. A graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies (MFA, 2015) and a former community radio engineer, she blends reportage, collage, and hand-lettered essays to explore place, memory, and listening. Her webcomic series Paper Weather built a dedicated readership from 2019 to 2021 before being collected by a micro-press.
Jones's illustrations and comics have appeared in The Nib, ShortBox, and multiple small-press anthologies. She received a Society of Illustrators Silver Medal (2023) and was nominated for an Ignatz Award (2025) for Outstanding Artist. When not drawing, she leads zine-making workshops at the Independent Publishing Resource Center and bikes the Springwater Corridor with a handheld recorder in her bag.
An honest tangle about privacy and performance that parks the mic between two teens and asks who gets to listen. Beautiful premise, uneven execution, but the last image hums.
Más que una historia de ascenso, es un mapa sonoro de Albuquerque, con postes llenos de flyers, la frescura rara de los enfriadores en el Winrock Mall cerrado, autos bajos en Central y el trueque de zines en Astro-Zip sobre Lomas. El trazo limpio y las texturas de recibos y tickets anclan cada esquina, y el uso del grabador para cartografiar la ciudad da una sensación de territorio compartido; cuando llegan al desierto y la canción suena desde una torre de bocinas de segunda, el aire mismo parece ilustrado.
I wanted to feel June and Aisha as more than outlines in a clever scrapbook.
June is everywhere in the frame yet feels distant. The sudden hallway fame plays like a motif without heat.
Aisha's delight curdles into worry, but their conversations keep getting cut off by design tricks. I needed a scene that holds, not another caption chasing a mixtape memory.
The vice-principal sniffing opportunity, the brochures on the kitchen table, the cafeteria eyes all circle them, and still I cannot hear either voice for more than a beat.
I kept waiting to be let in, and the door never opened.
Fans of John Porcellino's travel zines and Tillie Walden's introspective sci-fi will recognize the hush here, with collage layouts that chase mood over momentum and a tender eye for small urban geographies. I admired the ambition, even as the high school virality beats loop one too many times.
I kept wanting the melody to breathe, but the layouts keep shoving more ephemera into the margins.
Interior as a late-night broadcast should hum in sequence, yet many spreads feel like channel surfing, with panels clipped mid-thought and jump cuts that swallow cause and effect.
The sound-on-paper problem is real. Lettering crowds balloons, lyric snippets sit on top of dialogue, and several pages bury the radio log so deep I lost the thread.
There are striking moments. June under the mall coolers, the empty concourse echoing like a tin can, and the sunrise over the saltpan hint at a steadier rhythm the book rarely holds.
I kept begging for a clear station.
