Happy Pride Month, everyone! I’m sending this out while attending the ALA Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago this weekend. I probably should’ve posted something about that sooner, but I was short on time and did very little preparation (I barely got more comics printed! Lol). If nothing else, I’ll be sure to include some thoughts next month.
In this issue: What We’re Reading - About What We’ve Read - Shameless Self-Promotion - Some Thoughts on “Selfishness”
We had to change up this month’s selection with only a little more than a week before meeting (my copy of I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together arrived at my local library branch the day after we met), but everyone managed to finish this book in time. I admitted to being surprised by the cartoonier style of the interior artwork compared to the cover, but the chibi character design allowed for a great range of expression and flights of fancy that many felt made this a quintessential example of comics, inviting positive comparisons to the Love and Rockets volume we read last month. One person pointed out that the color palette was limited to that of the trans flag (and black), which was a revelation to others present. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed that right away, myself. The glossary at the end was seen as helpful and led to a couple of digressions in our discussion that were nevertheless entertaining. The translation by Silvia Perea Labayen was universally praised as seamless despite the complex subject matter. One person didn’t even realize it was a translation until they almost completed the comic. We were all glad Diana and Sara have each other and a strong support system and found their story heartwarming overall.
Our next meeting will be Wednesday, July 15 to discuss Search and Destroy, Volume 1.
July 15 - Search and Destroy, Volume 1 by Atsushi Kaneko, based on Dororo by Osamu Tezuka
August 19 - Cosmoknights by Hannah Templer
September 16 - Bug Wars, Volume 1: Lost in the Yard by Jason Aaron and Mahmud Asrar
October 21 - Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? by Harold Schechter and Eric Powell
November 18 - The Power Fantasy, Volume 1: The Superpowers by Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard
December 16 - Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath
The sudden change in titles was due to a shortage in transfer delivery drivers for the Chicago Public Library, and we’ve shuffled around our selections for the next few months until that clears up. For the foreseeable future, we’ll only be reading comics that are available on hoopla.
I did take this as an opportunity to suggest a couple of titles that don’t have many physical copies. Support your local libraries, everyone! We’re still hoping to read I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together by Maurice Vellekoop in 2027.
Us was named one of the Best Graphic Novels for Adults in 2023 in the Non-Fiction category by the American Library Association’s Graphic Novels & Comics Round Table. It’s also won several awards, including Best Work and Best Script by an Aragonese author at the Aragonese Comic Awards in 2021 and was nominated for Best National Work at the Comic Barcelona Awards in 2022. You can follow Sara Soler on Instagram here.
The latest NEWS digest is available here. The next NEWS digest will be posted in two weeks on Friday, July 10.
I experienced a bit more rejection this past month. First, I didn’t make it into another anthology to which I had submitted a pitch. Second, I did not get approved for a DCASE grant with the City of Chicago. I had a feeling they were both longshots, but I’m going to keep working on my comics. My submissions for two different four-issue miniseries are still making the rounds to publishers.
Not much else, honestly, as I wait for news on submissions and keep plugging away at new projects. I’ll be attending FlameCon in August, which should be a lot of fun, and I’m part of a panel submission to New York Comic Con, so I may make it back to that convention sooner than expected.
I did have another contribution to The Comic Jam back in March with art by Ryan “Dougal” Devine and letters by Kevin D. Lintz. The theme was Failed Batman Sidekicks, and I went with Spoiler. I’ve always felt this character was underused and underappreciated and this helped clear cobwebs from my head.
The villain in panel 4 is supposed to be Condiment King, by the way. I had several suggestions in the script, but I loved that Ryan went with him. XD
Rise of the Flightless, the penguins versus robots anthology for which I wrote a four-page comic, will be launching on Kickstarter in less than three weeks. Sign up to follow the campaign today!
I have a storefront on comix.one! They’re selling my self-published comics digitally and via print on demand.
The Dreamlands Anthology from Warden Comics has shipped!
Geek Collective’s Archetypes #2 has gone out!
The Prism anthology is available on Global Comix!
The first anthology to publish a comic I wrote, CyberSync, is available for purchase. It went into a second printing! You can also find it in my online shop.
One of the first times I learned about trans people was while I was in college. I was the president of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter, and the staff member told me a story about someone who had tried to challenge him about Christianity and its applicability (or lack thereof) to certain situations. He said this person proceeded to talk about their sister, who had recently come out as a trans lesbian. Their sister had realized that she loved women but as a woman, and they’d supposedly said that Christianity had nothing to offer them.
My mentor obviously disagreed, but played the rhetorical trick of pivoting to something else. He said the Bible may not address trans people directly (more on that later), but that it had plenty to say about selfishness. This is where the topic of this month’s essay is coming from.
My mentor said that he told this person (who may or may not have been real; the more I think about what a straw man argument this whole story was and how unlike a real conversation, the more ridiculous it seems) that their sister was being selfish to put her desires above everyone else’s comfort. She was only thinking of herself, and that’s how the Bible could guide her family in dealing with her and her transition. As you can probably guess, he misgendered and deadnamed this person in every telling of the story.
I’ve thought about this conversation a lot over the years. Framing gender transition as selfish has become easier to disregard with the more trans people I’ve met and the more I’ve learned. How is someone transitioning more selfish than someone else insisting that they don’t or shouldn’t? Or forcing them not to? Who gets to be selfish? How is it defined?
In Us, Diana tried for two years to stop being trans or ignore the realities of her gender and all it did was make her miserable. Of course, death from depression is also seen as selfish by the Christian extremists who want to eradicate trans people altogether. Conveniently, the only action they see as unselfish is their own forcing of their narrow religious beliefs onto other people.
Trans people and Christianity are not as irreconcilable as the extremists would have people believe, though. I’ve read some scholarship that tried to argue that the Ethiopian eunuch encountered by Philip in the Book of Acts counts as trans representation in the Bible, but that feels like a stretch at best and offensive at worst. It makes me think of a book I saw once collecting gay representation in poetry that inexplicably included Canto 15 of Dante’s Inferno. But I digress.
My college friend had it wrong. It’s not that the Bible has “plenty to say about selfishness,” but that it has lessons about love, acceptance, compassion, patience, kindness, and several other virtues that it would be good for the friends and family members of trans people to remember. I wish I’d had the insight and courage to explain that to him at the time.
Thanks for reading! How do you define selfishness? Can you relate to Sara or Diana in Us? Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Take care of each other. Make sure to be here next month for Search and Destroy, Volume 1 by Atsushi Kaneko, based on Dororo by Osamu Tezuka!
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