Recent "Office Bitch"

random drawing

I did this at SPACE, about the different customers who pick up and buy "Gay Kid."

SPACE recap

Hey everyone!

So SPACE went pretty well, albeit a bit slow. I made back the cost of my table, and met some awesome people! I picked up a few really cool comics:

• Siamese Grandson by Daniel McCloskey, a collection of shorts, ranging from funny to disturbing and have really interesting lines in them
• Yonder by Jeremy Massie, which has great short stories based in his native Appalachia  (I met Jeremy through Matthew Smith, who does the Adventurers of Liberty City and works with me on Suggestion Box)
• Herk by O'Ryan, who I can't find a site for! All I know is that he lives in Pittsburgh and has a great smile.
• The Book on Me written by Todd Goodman and illustrated by Briana Higgins. Todd was a great next door neighbor at the con (much more conversational than the pillar on my other side :)) and wrote this fast-paced story line
• Mean Goat Comics by Kris Lachowski, which are hilarious!
• two cartoons and a t-shirt about coelacanths by Pam Bliss, which are always appreciated!

Gay Kid #2 got a REALLY great reception; it was the top seller of the show! I'm glad that people seemed to like it so much, since this project is so personal and has taken a lot of work. The storyline for this one was easier for me to write--it is an overview of my childhood life through dress--and the drawings turned out pretty well. I'm especially pleased with the cover, especially since covers and I have a difficult relationship. I have a hard time navigating them: how do I make it interesting? eye catching? flashy? not busy?. This one really does what I wanted it to: it tells you what it is, who did it, and gives your eye plenty of interesting space to rest in.


Ok, enough talking! Here is the cover, plus an interior page that gives you the jist of the book:

 

PS: the illustration on the cover is from a picture of myself and my sister Liz on a first day of school. I am feeling pretty good about by green suede vest/dragon necklace/moccasins. And I would have been a child hipster, except none of this is worn with irony:

Gearing up for SPACE!

The past few weeks have been crazy: we have a huge conference happening at work next week (800 attendees, we host). The week after that, is SPACE! I have been able to check off most  of my "new comics to-do list" for it:

• Mini for candy or medicine vol. 12 (here)
• Entry for the SPACE anthology (downloadable on their homepage as a sweet pdf)
• Gay Kid #2

Unsurprisingly, the longest and hardest one is that which I saved for last.  I don't want to get ahead of myself and start uploading pages from it here, so I will just leave you with a link to my Office Bitch page, which has been seeing a lot of traffic recently, and with the SPACE anthology piece:

An Office Bitch I'm particularly proud of

Hey all,

This is from two weeks ago, but I LOVE it! This was one of those strips that just kind of came out of nowhere and really hit a chord with me (and my housemates, who it's almost entirely based off of). The original The New Gay  post is here, or see below:

It's in color, too, which is a rarity. I almost never work in color, but I decided that the strip may be a bit too boring and hard to read if it was just black and white. For example, the taco seasoning bag would be hard to understand if it didn't have the yellow taco shells right on the bag, standing out against the red background.

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.

more Suggestion Box

Here are two more pages from the new Suggestion Box. Enjoy!