The Process of Making Comics with Amy Kurzweil

The Process of Making Comics is a series that examines how comics artists put together their work for the magazine. In this entry, Amy Kurzweil shares what it was like to make (Me)chanical Reproduction for the December/January 2021 issue. To view more photos from the trip, see the full gallery here. 

THE BELIEVER: How did this comic start?

AMY KURZWEIL: The seeds of (Me)chanical Reproduction were planted almost two decades ago, when I met Martine Rothblatt and her wife Bina Aspen. My father was working with Martine on a film, and we all went out to dinner one night in Brookline, Massachusetts. I was a teenager, and Martine and Bina were some of the most interesting people I’d ever met. Martine was known for starting Sirius XM radio, and developing a cure for pulmonary hypertension, which saved her daughter’s life. In my memory, Martine was tall and calm and ethereally commanding, long hair pulled back, dressed in a grey featureless suit, like a 90s vision of future fashion. In contrast, Bina was quiet and regally pretty. In my mind she wears gold earrings and a black dress. Martine was a champion of transgender rights in the 90s. After her transition, she and Bina had publicly modelled a kind of love that transcends physical identity. I remember Martine on the radio, responding to an incredulous Howard Stern who asked Martine about her sexuality post-transition. “So what are you?” he pressed. Martine responded: “I’m a Bina-sexual.”

So Bina48, Bina’s robot doppelgänger, was born from love. Martine looked forward to a world where our virtual selves live beyond our bodies. She wanted to get ahead of this development by building Bina48, a repository of her beloved’s mind, in a replica of her beloved’s body. 

My interest in Bina48 corresponded with my interest in my father’s writing about the future. Martine and The Terasem Movement Foundation have grounded one aspect of his vision—that it will be brimming with digital people—in specific action. Their website hosts a repository for people’s memories, and their headquarters holds a “biolab” for their genes, so people can potentially “live on” in the digital future. This repository stands in contrast to profitable companies like Facebook, who may host your memories, while also trying to sell you things. The Terasem Foundation is closer to a religious group than a publicly traded company. Bina48 is a figurehead for this mission, and she lives about as far away from Silicon Valley as you can get without leaving the United States.

Bina48 was created in 2007. I used to teach a summer writing class called “Utopias and Dystopias” and I’d share videos...