So convention season is over. Now what?

Hello hello hello there. So, lot's of things going on here.


1. Baltimore Book Festival was all right. It was pouring rain the day of the Zine Pavilion and not really anyone stopped by. The talk, however, went really well. The Pavilion was empty when I started, and then filled up to about 25 or so people. Red Emma's said they'd invite me to their shop to give an in-store talk as well, which would be a lot of fun. It was really exciting to share my process (is there no way to sound more pompous than by saying "my process?") and the history of Gay Kid with so many people.

The rain mirrored my emotions.

2. I stopped writing Office Bitch for TheNewGay. I was feeling a bit burnt out with the story and was having some issues with the overall vibe/feeling of the site. I'm going to start a weekly comic here in the next few weeks. It took a while to realize it, but no one I know really reads TNG. It's not really my scene; think HRC vs the radical queer collective that throws potluck fundraisers and you'll know what I'm talking about.

The new strip has yet to be determined, but I'm excited to figure that out and get started!

3. There are two new comics that will be started in the next month or so: Gay Kid 4 and Culver. Culver is a book I'm going to be illustrating, and is written by Matt Smith.Gay Kid 4 will be the next installment in the series, following issues on Seventeen Magazine, Fashion, and Anxiety. I'm thinking it may be about friends and/or family.

In the meanwhile, here are some doodles I've done at work while talking on the phone.

I'm working on a short comic about getting my wisdom teeth out. This is me feeling anxious. DUH.

Molly, our old beagle, in a Santa costume looking doleful.

Ok, that looks better.

In case you missed it: Glee needs to be Gayer

The Office Bitch comic from last week did really well; there was lots of gay love coming from Glee fans who still think the show has room to improve.

Lady Gaga.

  I hate how reactionary my cartoons can be sometimes ("whoa, this thing happened, and it really pissed me off! LET ME DRAW ABOUT IT."), a knee-jerk reaction to a looming deadline and a lack of inspiration. It's easiest to think back to what has recently made you mad and work from that, but you don't always want to sound like such a Debbie Downer (who wants to hear about cat AIDS, anyways?).

  This cartoon came out of a recent series of posts on The New Gay, where gay dudes were bitching about how Lady Gaga is a problem. It seems like the cool thing to do is to think her advocating is passe and a farce, instead of her being an actual supporter (she's been to marches and uses her publicity to talk about our issues). Whatever, I don't need to get on my soapbox here, but it seemed pretty dumb to me. Why would you shoot someone like that--with so much fame and power and is a huge ally--in the back?

  So I let the cartoon do the talking, and was happy to have it posted on TNG along side all the Gaga negativity. There wasn't much conversation about it, which I was kind of bummed out by, but at least I got to say my piece.

As much as I love her, that line makes NO sense.

Review in the Washington City Paper

Mike Rhode from the Washington City Paper's interview with me is up! Click here to check it out. It's mostly chatty, but he does a bit of editorializing:

"[her] Office Bitch webcomic reminds me favorably of the early days of Dykes to Watch Out For."

Recent "Office Bitch"

Review of Gay Kid

Rob McMonigal, the comic aficionado behind Panel Patter recently reviewed Gay Kid. I think it's a really accurate review (except I would rather call my style "loose" or "casual" instead of "basic!"), and I'm glad to hear that Gay Kid is making an impression as a comic describing the times before you come out. One of the reasons that I wrote it is because that was the time that felt the most lonely. I mean, once I had a name for what was going on (Gay Kid #1) and had processed it (upcoming Gay Kids), I at least was not freaking out about what I was thinking.

A lot of gay comics (especially about being a gay youth) are focused on what happened after one comes out. But what happens before it is just as interesting. It's all about how kids make sense of the world. Like in the City Kids strip in Candy or Medicine Vol. 10, kids have crazy way of explaining things. Being gay is just one more thing you don't understand, that you try to understand by creating a story for it. I had a friend in college who thought that you fell asleep when ants came out of your ears and dropped bits of sand onto your eyelids until they became heavy (some funky interpretation of the "sandman"). Gay Kid will hopefully give some insight into this thought process.

Come see me at PIX!

Hello out there!

This weekend there is going to be a comic convention in Pittsburgh, PA called PIX (Pittsburgh Indy Comic Expo 2010). And I will be there! It's happening the same weekend as APE, so all you poor folks that don't have the money or time to go out to San Fransisco will have something that's destined to be equally awesome closer to home! Also, I will be there selling my comics.


Click here for a link to the PIX site.
Click here for an article about it in the Tribune Review.


And here is a copy of my It Gets Better strip I did last week for the new gay. I will be selling copies of this at PIX for $10, $8 of which will go to the Trevor Project. If you are not able to come but would like to get a copy, send me an email at katie.omberg at gmail.com.

It gets better

I'm a huge fan of the campaign that Dan Savage started. No matter what flaws it has, and no matter how imperfectly better it gets, lets be honest: not being in high school is an improvement. Here's a link to my it gets better strip at the new gay.

Things I am up to related to comics

Here is a recent iteration of Office Bitch, the weekly strip I do for The New Gay. I am really loving working for them and having a deadline that is enforced by someone other than me. Without it, I have a really hard time getting my act together and producing work (as you can tell by my really intense presence here on my blog).

I went to SPX a few weeks ago and LOVED. IT. It was so great to see so many people just zoned out on comics. I met a lot of awesome people, and don't know what a single one of them does for their day jobs. It's so awesome to make connections like that. People responded really well to "Gay Kid," which is now the formal name for the coming out comic. I actually sold out and had to make more copies half-way through the convention to keep it going!

Next on the docket, is PIX (Pittsburgh Indy Comics Expo) which is Oct 16 - 17. I'm not sure I'll have anything brand new for it, but I will have all my old minis, as well as the first issue of Gay Kid, which was finished in September. If any of you will be around then, please please please come check out my table! It's free to get into the show, which is rare in comic cons.

Already excited

I got an email earlier this week from the SPX coordinator saying that tables are up for reservation for SPX 2010. For those of you who do not know what SPX is, it is basically the Promised Land of indie cartoonists and self-published cartoonists and zine-sters. Click here for more info. It's not going on until the weekend after Labor Day, but my joy is already set to an overwhelming level.

I have really done some soul-searching (cause I'm deep like that, shut up) about the next big project that I'll be working on for the fall show. I recently had a working date with a friend of mine and as I started just doodling before she came over, an old story that I have heard popping out of the back of my head for a while finally took hold. I've thought a lot about making a comic that has a really heavy personal meaning, and the 0ne that really takes the cake is the story of coming out and of knowing that I was a big gay basically from the start. I remembered that one of the reasons why I got so into comics in the first place when I was in high school was that was the closest place to where I felt someone "got" me. I didn't need to know them, and the story didn't even need to be real (in the case of Terry Moore's "Strangers in Paradise" series) or really that terribly decipherable to a 14 year old who has a hard time reading other people's handwriting and knows nothing about drugs (Ariel Schrag's high school comic books.)

All differences aside, these were the books that I could bury my nose in and feel the "holy-shit-I'm-different" anxiety come down from the break-neck speed at which it would attack.

There will definitely be more to come as I work on this. I just really needed to get this out of my system.