It does not work as a comic.

It does not work as a fantasy story, even a “cozy” one.

It does not work as a romance.

Let’s explore why and how.

The world of the graphic novel is explained in a two-page text introduction before the story even starts, something that is not necessary given that the entire concept is basically “completely identical to our world but there’s dragons now”. The bookseller is constantly namedropping real books and authors that exist in our world: Ash by Malinda Lo, Emily Henry, The Hobbit. This could be funny if they were Fantasy Malinda Lo or Emily Dragon-Henry, but nope, straight-up just the authors you have already heard of. Technology is identical to that of our society too: smartphones and cars and everything. Except sometimes there’s dragons and sometimes a dragon accidentally sets fire to half your bookshop and it’s resolved in 2 pages.

Which brings me to my next point:

The Pacing

The graphic novel is structured as a series of sequential vignettes in the lives of Luci and Aster, the cute sapphic couple in the title. Scenes are generally around 1-2 pages long, because the author appears to be trying to be maximally efficient with the page count to an extent that just makes each page feel flat. Like, look at this. Who talks like this.

Fictional characters who need to deliver exposition to their reader, that’s who.

August The Employee mostly disappears after this vignette, except to be visible in the background and humorously walk in on Luci and Aster in the stockroom, and then to get into an “instalove” relationship with a nameless dude the group met on the beach. His funny shirts gain some prominence after the climax, but his background, why he makes funny shirts, what attracted him to his new beau are all left unexplored. Anyway.

Some of the vignettes are just cute moments, like when the ice dragon accidentally freezes a tray of cupcakes fresh out of the oven, but some should be major plot beats, like Luci and Aster officially going on their first date, having their first kiss, or having their first time, but they feel insignificant because of how quickly the sequences end. Luci’s Employee tells the reader that Luci and Aster had been pining mutually for a while on the first page, but they confess their feelings and go on their first date within the first 30 pages. The reader is denied the pleasure of experiencing the friends to lovers slow burn the character claims they went through.

The first kiss page (page 24 out of 157, by the way), I’m going to analyze in detail how much it doesn’t work, because I read and make a lot of comics about girls kissing and feel very strongly about them.

I sent this page to my girlfriend asking if I was being overly critical and they said “no you’re right that’s cringe.”

First of all, the placement of the “No” balloon is confusing, it should be in between Luci’s first and second balloon so it’s clearer when to read it.

Second, this should not all happen in a single page. The reason it is happening in a single page is because the writer does not understand how comics work and the artist is not experienced enough to expand on the script. Luci’s question and then reaction needs at least two different expressions, which means the first panel should’ve been at least two panels to make the joke work.

There’s not enough build-up to the Big Kiss. Luci is only anticipating it for half a panel, and then the moment is immediately undercut with a joke so it doesn’t even have time to land. The pretext for the kiss is also flimsy. If we had a moment of Aster hesitating, steeling her nerves to do it, I’d be rooting for her more. As it is, it just feels contrived. We also don’t get to know what book prompted this reaction, probably because no matter what the book was the reaction would be “really? Over that book?”

When it comes to girls kissing, the manga Whisper me A Love Song has some really nice kiss scenes. Eku Takeshima packs so much desire into each expression, and knows when to decompress with big close-up panels to let a moment hit. There’s buildup!

When BICSD has a big panel, it’s always a splash or a two-page spread, and instead of a decompression it compresses scenes even further. When (spoilers, I guess) the shops are destroyed by a hurricane, there’s a two-page spread to show the gang rebuilding the bookstore and another spread to show them rebuilding the shop, both without text, and then immediately after that is the reopening. This makes it unclear how much time has passed and makes the process of rebuilding seem easy and insignificant.

The First Time between Luci and Aster is also… presented poorly. The conversation is awkwardly detached and the characters don’t look like they’re about to have sex. They look like they’re having a kiss hello or goodbye more than anything else.

I’m not saying they need to be naked on the coffee shop counter or anything, but like. Luci’s shirt’s not even riding up. Come on. The entire encounter is condensed into this one page- the next page they’re waking up in bed together, fully clothed. Most of the panels on this page are small and have the characters presented at a distance, which makes it harder for the reader to get in the characters’ mindset and believe these characters are into each other and about to have sex with each other for the first time. It doesn’t have to be hot, but it does have to be believable! They have to look like they like each other!

Also, why are you having the pregnancy conversation now? Is Aster on hormones? Is Luci’s PCOS affecting her fertility, as implied in the on-page conversation? Both of those mean possible pregnancy should be a distant second to the much more pertinent first-time-fucking conversation topic of STDs. Unless the idea of sexual health is too spicy for a sweet sapphic summer romance! Come on!!

While we’re on the subject, let’s talk about Luci and Aster. Aster is trans and not white, Luci is chubby and has PCOS. Aster runs the coffeeshop while Luci runs the bookstore inside the lighthouse, but her bookstore is not getting a lot of traffic because everyone’s going to the big chain bookstore in town. Luci’s PCOS hurts her sometimes. Aster’s mom is dating a conservative, so Aster’s not going to visit her for a while, but then she dumps him off screen so that’s resolved without incident. Luci likes The Hobbit, Aster likes Ash by Malinda Lo and the romance novels of Emily Henry. They both have pet dragons. Neither of them really have anything that can be described as personality traits. Are they shy or outgoing, calm or excitable, anything that isn’t a medical diagnosis or a job or a goodreads profile?

Not really!

Without personalities, watching them get together is like watching two Barbie dolls kiss while the camera focuses on the hands holding the dolls. I feel like I see this a lot in indie yuri work– all surface, no substance. There’s a Webtoon Canvas comic I’m thinking about specifically here that’s more like a collection of beautiful illustrations of two girls together but not much else, but I don’t want to hold a self-published comic to the same standards as a comic put out by a traditional publisher with editorial involvement.

The character with the most distinct personality is an elderly regular customer named George whose gimmick is that he returns every book he buys until a dragon imprints on him and he changes his ways. He’s kind of a grump, but not too grumpy because that could make him unlikeable. But at least he has strong opinions. He and August are the only named human characters besides the two leads, which makes the “town coming together to save the struggling bookstore” ending a lot less satisfying because we don’t know any of these people. We don’t know most of the guests at their wedding (because they propose at the end of the summer and then get married a year later, apparently) because we only really see Luci and Aster spending time with each other!

The author doesn’t seem to fully understand what words in comics are for: the dialogue often restates things that can be shown in images, but pages where a conversation could add personality are just still illustrations. Or the conversations that take place feel like they’re talking to the reader to communicate information more than the two characters are talking to each other.

Some of the people I’ve shown pages of this book to said the art style looks overly commercialized, resembling relatable Facebook comics that “seem to have sold out to nobody in particular” or the genericute style of cartoony AI art. I don’t totally disagree– I do think it lacks a sense of distinctiveness or uniqueness, but I think the colors are really nice to look at and the designs of the dragons and some outfits are very appealing. She does reuse similar shots often, and most of the panels frame the characters from the waist up, which ends up feeling flat and boring as the comic goes on. Comics need visual variety! Big close-ups make it easier to connect with what the characters are feeling!

From the artist’s sample comic pages on Instagram, it’s clear she’s capable of more interesting comics than this book. I’m not sure the author is capable of writing a more interesting comic. The appeal of the style of poetry Lovelace writes is their generic relatable voice, which in autobiographical poetry or autobio comics creates a sense of connection to the text for the reader. When the comic is fictional, static, and moves very quickly, that kind of voice is boring. Fiction usually needs multiple different characters in it to be interesting.

But is the overall story any good? No, not really. Luci’s a terrible business owner if she can’t make a bookstore inside a lighthouse profitable during peak tourist season. I don’t care if she’s scared of Instagram, make one reel and tag one influencer and you’re set. And Aster doesn’t do iced coffee because… it’s hard? Scary? Unclear. It takes her the whole book to realize Luci’s ice dragon can just chill the coffee for her. Somehow.

We sapphic romance comic-enjoyers deserve so much better than this! How convenient, then, that the Yuri Comic Jam will be happening next year, for everyone to make brand-new sapphic romance comics for us to enjoy! If you think you might want to go for it, sign up now to get a reminder when it opens!

Leave a comment

So I went to Anime NYC last Thursday and Saturday but not Friday or Sunday because my partner and I are moving in together and I needed to haul furniture to the new apartment1.

I’ve written some articles for Comics Beat and K-Comics Beat about the show, but this is my personal newsletter so here’s how the convention went for ME, SPECIFICALLY.

Thursday morning the first two trains I planned to take are cancelled and I end up arriving at the Javits just minutes ahead of Heidi, EIC of Comics Beat, and just minutes after my friend Adam of Yatta-Tachi and also sometimes Comics Beat but here at ANYC for Yatta-Tachi stuff. There is a Licensing Summit today that Heidi is going to that costs $200 extra to attend unless you are Heidi. I tell the badge-hander-outers I am with Heidi and they wave me through, then Heidi gets there and we get personally escorted by the press liaison who does not give us the Licensing Summit Special Badge Add-ons. This will matter later.

We miss the opening-opening remarks but make it in time for Anime by the Numbers Richardson Handjaja’s presentation about the state of animanga merchandising, which is interesting. I take photos of a lot of his slides. Pouches and wallets are due to be the next big AA merch trend.

The licensing summit is interesting because I’ve never considered anime and manga from this side before: as a foundation for products. Half the presentations are people with IPs trying to convince licensees they need to hop on this manga or anime before it’s too late, and half of them are people who do licensed products telling other licensees how to get in with the licensors to do collabs that’ll make everyone rich. How to spot a good licensable IP comes up a few times: you want something with a distinct visual identity, a good story, and an engaged fandom (niche shows are okay if the fans are insane about them).

VIZ does a presentation that clarifies some things that baffled me about their marketing choices. They push the mid shows Rooster Fighter and Zom 100 really hard because they co-produced the anime, and they don’t do Haikyu!! Marketing pushes in the US because they do not have the merchandising rights to Haikyu!! Here. Leaving money on the table with that one, VIZ.

Kurt Hassler from Yen Press and James Killen from Manga Spot talk about Manga Spot and mention there’s one opening in American Dream Mall which I still haven’t been to despite constantly talking about going to check it out with my girlfriend. Guess I’ll go when Manga Spot opens.

The lunch break is when me and Heidi learn we need a special extra badge to get into a) the Skyline Lounge space where the food is and b) the room where the food is within the Skyline Lounge. Brigid Alverson from ICv2 lets us borrow hers because she’s not hungry. We eat and chat with some licensing representatives.

Heidi leaves to deal with a clogged sink at her place so I take over live-skeeting duties for the rest of the event. There’s no good point for me to leave early and the panels are just interesting enough I want to stick around– the ones of no relevance to me, like Rob Pereyda’s licensing basics panel for aspiring licensees, ended up being interesting because of the presenters’ energy. Pereyda’s an incredible public speaker.

But the whole event runs way overtime and I end up with about 15-20 minutes before I have to book it across town to the Japan Society for the American Manga Awards. I run to the Artists Alley first because my friend Meg requested some sticker sheets from a specific table and get distracted on my way over. By the time I make it to the specified table I have also acquired a charm of a specific cover of a specific vocal synth song I really like2 and a Daiya no Ace print. Then I spot my mutual Fend13th and get a comic from them, and then I book it across town for the AMAs.

It’s drizzling a bit as I exit the Javits, but I have a raincoat and umbrella. I’ll be fine.

By the time I exit the subway it’s absolutely downpouring. I have 12 minutes to walk to the Japan Society from the subway and the forecast predicts it will not let up.

So I go for it.

By the time I make it to the Japan Society my shoes are sloshing, my pants are soaking wet, my $7 umbrella is totally busted, and the only things I’ve managed to really protect from the elements are the things deep in the middle of my backpack, my phone, and my white t-shirt. My business cards, chewing gum and house keys in my front pocket are destroyed. I immediately run into people I know and the flow of traffic and conversation slides me into the auditorium instead of to the bathroom where I could have at least dried my feet a little bit.

The awards go fine– except when they messed up the credits on A Cat is a Cat in Any Life (terrible) and some minor tech hiccups. Jan Mitsuko Cash steals the show by calling on publishers to double and triple their rates for freelancers when she accepts her Best Translation award (and she’s right!)

Afterwards they run out of food faster than expected, probably because the licensing summit people were all invited to the post-AMA networking also and they miscalculated how much food everyone needs. I have one inarizushi, a teriyaki chicken skewer, and a California roll. The fried food is bad for me, the grilled leeks are worse, but my doctor’s office still hasn’t called me back with the results of the labwork I’d had a week prior so whatever.

Subscribe now

My feet are still wet, I barely slept the night before, and I have a long train ride back home. I feel cold and miserable and every conversation I have seems wrong. I have one okay conversation and decide to go out on a high note. It’s still drizzling outside. My feet get wetter, I can feel the water sloshing around inside my sneakers. My train gets delayed by half an hour and they still collect tickets afterwards. My girlfriend picks me up from the train station.

On Friday, I take the still-wet stuff out of my backpack, move some boxes, file a story, and go to bed early.

Saturday morning, the sneakers I wore on Thursday are still damp. I get a mango green tea at the Penn Station Gong Cha and finish it before I reach the show. I attach my new charm to my Press badge and instead of wearing any of my designated Convention Shirts, I try to dress nice. Nice enough. Because I’ll be interviewing Akiko Higashimura at the end of the day and I want her to think I’m cool.

Of course, I am a sweaty mess by the time I walk into the Javits, but it’s the thought that counts.

First thing on my agenda for Saturday is the Haikyu!! main stage panel, but that’s at 12:15 and I get to the con around eleven, so I have more time for the AA. I ask a bunch of artists if they’d heard about the thefts, and everyone I talked to has, but mostly on Twitter like me. The artist whose cashbox got stolen has a huge line to deal with, so I can’t talk to them. I search for artists I want to buy stuff from and my friends from Comics Camp tabling in the AA, and I randomly bump into my friend Vicky from high school and catch up with her too. I spend too much money.

By the time I get in line for the Haikyu!! panel the line is already way too long. I read En Correia’s Boon of the Beacon Maker volume 1 while I wait for the doors to open. A lot of people in line are cosplaying.

The panel is fun, even though I’ve seen all the clips and teasers already, because Yuki Kaji (Kenma’s voice actor) is there in person to do live readings of Kenma’s greatest moments from the movie. He even reads the “this is fun” line in English, and then says that was his first and last time voice acting in English. He drops some juicy tidbits like how composer Yuki Hayashi cried when he heard Kaji voicing Kenma’s last scene. He also thinks he’d be friends with Kenma in real life because they could play games together, and Kuroo would make him be more active. He mentions the Karasuno cast took a volleyball class together before recording started. Producer Saito says the animation studio has a rec volleyball team now. Someone asked if Kaji could voice another character for one scene who’d it be and he immediately did a perfect Hinata impression (the “I won’t lose” scene) and then a perfect bokuto HEY HEY HEY before saying that he thinks the cast is perfect as it is and he can’t imagine being anyone but Kenma after so long. He’s recorded all of his Kenma lines for the next movie already and is looking forward to seeing it with everyone.

The panel ends with a giveaway of a poster signed by Yuki Kaji, a set of Japan-exclusive Hinata and Kageyama figurines, and some Haikyu!! trading cards. They call some cosplayers up to the stage to play Japanese-style rock paper scissors against Kaji. It takes way too long, and a lot of people leave early.

After the panel I turn right back around to wait in the same line again for the Colorful Stage panel. I kind of have to pee, but the bathroom lines at this show are abysmal, and while I could use my Skyline lounge pass to take advantage of the Good Bathroom up there it’d take me at least ten minutes just to get over there, so I’ll have to hold it until after the panel.

This time I’m closer to the front. I can hear the full Nightcord cover of Heat Abnormal playing from somewhere– either sound check inside the panel room or a congoer’s speaker. Then Bug, then FUN!, then the music cuts off for some reason. Someone is cosplaying Nene with a Tsukasa ita bag, which is very funny. I read more of my zines and comics. At the entrance, I get a single-use purple lightstick and a silver pack of trading cards containing Toya, Emu and Mafuyu three-star cards from the game. I immediately trade the Mafuyu for a Saki from the person sitting to my left.

The panel starts. Tomori Kusonoki and Rui Tanabe are very pretty and sound nothing like their characters when they speak. They enjoyed visiting the Statue of Liberty and eating pizza on their trip. Tanabe says Bug is the hardest song to sing, while Kusonoki says Kanadetomusozora was the most memorable. They do a little skit about Kanade and Mafuyu at the Statue of Liberty with an audience participation element. Then it’s time for the concert.

The concert consists of six 3D-animated performances of the full versions of every unit song from the Colorful Stage movie, with no subtitles for the skits Wonderlands x Showtime does. Some people in the audience know exactly what to do and everyone else copies them.

There’s a break, and then the voice actresses come back out to direct everyone in singalong versions of the game cuts of D/N/A and Phony. All the romaji lyrics are on screen for those, with additional cues for clapping and chanting. That’s pretty fun. Good songs.

Then some announcements: collabs with Vtubers I have no interest in (Ironmouse and Mori Calliope) and Crusher-P will be doing the next global server anniversary song.

Then, even though the panel is already over time, one last singalong: the full-length version of Bug.

By the time we’re out of there, it’s almost 3 pm, I’m starving, and I need to pee.

It’s Saturday. Crowds everywhere. The River Pavilion is almost unnavigable.

I elbow my way to the Skyline Lounge, pee quickly, and get out before anyone notices I’m hardly professional enough to get in there. Back to the Artists Alley, where I saw a stand selling onigiri on the back wall. They’re sold out of umeboshi onigiri, but I buy a kombu one and open it wrong, so I’m stuck eating a messy lump of rice and seaweed on the edge of the aisle.

Wandering through the Artists Alley, it’s hard to keep track of where I am, what I’ve looked at and what I’ve skipped, because a lot of the tables, frankly, look very similar. Everyone has the same grids covered in hundreds of plastic charms and stickers, everyone has riso prints in the same fluorescent colors. The goth tables stand out because there’s not many of them. All of the tables are so full, so tall, so dense.

I do manage to talk to someone who got robbed on Thursday about it and take notes for my piece.

I end up buying two overpriced mushroom-spinach-cheese empanadas from the stand next to the onigiri. They are not very good and will hurt me later.

I find the press lounge to take a break and charge my phone, but it’s all video guys in there, locked into a conversation about something I don’t know or care much about. I read a bit and wait for my friend to get the autograph they came to the show for.

My friend gets their autograph and we walk around a bit together– I want to take them to Helen Peanut’s table for some Haikyu!! fanart I know they’d like. The table that got its cashbox stolen is busy again. We say hi to some more friends tabling. Then they have to leave, so I see them off and go spend too much money at the Inklore Exhibitor booth (I buy two books my friends hyped up) so I can get the cute tote bag and free merch that comes with it). I’m meeting Adam at 6 to walk over to the Japan Society again for the Blank Canvas screening and our separate one-on-one interviews, but I run out of things I want to do on the show floor by 5, so I meet him in the tea room, a place I did not realize existed.

Tiina from Kana is there too so we hang out and chat for a bit. The tea room is sponsored by Ito-En and they are out of tea by the time I get there. I think they’re brewing more, but we end up leaving for the Japan Society before it’s ready. It’s drizzling again, but much lighter this time. My umbrella is useless, and Adam’s is too small to share.

At the Japan Society, we have no idea where we’re supposed to wait. Anyone who can answer that question is unavailable. We run into Caitlin Moore on her way out of her own interview with Higashimura, and then a bunch of other manga industry people we know on their way into the screening. Eventually Deb appears and says we can just sit in the back and she’ll tap us when they’re ready for us– besides me and Adam, there’s a few film-focused outlets also interviewing Higashimura today.

Higashimura comes in to introduce the film, and then the movie starts. I get to see the first forty minutes or so before Deb leads me upstairs for the interview.

I am very nervous.

Most “interviews” I’ve done over email, Discord, or Zoom, or, if in person, it was a roundtable with three other reporters asking the same questions I was going to ask. This time, it’s me, Deb, Akiko Higashimura, her son, her publicists, and an interpreter. I feel sweaty and awkward.

I do my best.

After the interview, Higashimura signs my copy of Tokyo Tarareba Girls with a drawing of Kuranosuke from Princess Jellyfish and an Anime NYC-exclusive poster with a drawing of herself and a little jellyfish. I reverently carry both objects back to my seat in the theater as everyone else is busy escorting the next set of interviewers in. I watch the rest of the movie. It’s… fine. I think the comedy is a little too over the top for live action. The scenery is nice– Higashimura personally scouted every location.

After the movie there is a Q and A session with Peter Tarara from the Japan Society and Akiko Higashimura. She’s really funny. When Peter mentions the stage at the Japan Society has had presidents and prime ministers stand on it before, Higashimura says, “I want a list of names.”

“I was surprised to see so many otakus in New York,” she says. “It really freaked me out. I didn’t see any in Sex and the City, so where did you all come from?”

After the Q and A, everyone else gets their stuff signed by Higashimura in the lobby, but I want to be home before midnight so I just leave. I grab a Japanese-language newspaper from the lobby to protect my poster from the elements, but the rain seems to have stopped. I say goodbye to Adam and take the subway back to Penn Station, where I end up buying a Playa Bowls smoothie for dinner.

The train gets delayed and I get home at 12:15.

On Sunday I file a story and move furniture.

And that was my Anime NYC.

Remember the AI in popular Heated Rivalry longfic thing?

There have been additional developments in the field.

The main one being: someone figured out that copypasting text directly from Claude to AO3 leaves a hidden tag that can be found by Ctrl-Fing the fic for that tag, and made an AO3 skin that automatically detects that tag and turns the page red if it’s present in a fic.

This completely vindicated the I_Hate_AI_fics bookmarker on account of more than half of the fics they’d bookmarked on suspicion of AI use had that marker in them, often more than once, sometimes hundreds of times. Like they were generating the fic paragraph by paragraph and just going straight from the prompt window to the “Post New Work” window. And racking up thousands of kudos about it.

One of the authors caught by this was very, very popular, and was in fact in the process of retooling her most popular fic for traditional publication... with her friends editing it. She made a lot of posts decrying the use of AI for writing fic and posting about how she’d never ever do it, so when a bunch of her fics were found to have this Claude tag in them, people felt very betrayed! Especially the friends she’d pulled into scrubbing her slop of AI quirks. A lot of people were lamenting the loss of their beloved fic and complaining that now they’ll never know how it ends. Bro, just ask Claude about it.

So yeah, document went up, fandom melted down. Further information in the fucking New York Times, as well as other places. The big HR fanfics subreddit had extensive debate about what to do regarding reccing AI fics or authors, but they pivoted very quickly from calling the bookmarking account a witch hunter once foolproof evidence of witches was produced.

Everyone else has been opining on the macro scale of what this means for fandom as a whole, but I haven’t seen anyone talk about what it’s like to read these AI fics or what fans are doing about it.

Now that everyone knows about this Claude tell, most likely people will start pasting slop into Google Docs before putting in AO3, right? So you need another way to figure out if a fic is AI. The I_Hate_AI_fics bookmarker is diligent about flagging not just fics they find suspicious but also fics reported to them by people in other fandoms, which helps, but with a little practice, anyone can figure it out.

Because unedited or barely-edited AI fics all read exactly the same: bad. They’re all unreadably terrible and I have no idea how so many people keep getting sucked in by this garbage. Even if you edit out the most obvious tells (“Not x, not y, just z, the single-word sentences, etc.) There’s still something visibly wrong with it.

But if you’re not aware of what the tells are, it’s a lot more difficult to distinguish between “inexperienced human writer” and “A Computer Program”. A fanfiction writer did an experiment where they prompted Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT to generate something similar to a fic they’d written a few years earlier and then had readers guess which scene was written by a person, and only about 30% of respondents on Tumblr and Twitter guessed correctly (though the sample size for both polls was admittedly quite small). I guessed right, but that was because I’d learned what to look for.

But even if it is a real person writing something that sounds exactly like AI, that’s unfortunate for them, because AI writing is not good writing! You don’t have to read bad fics just because you’re fairly certain a person wrote them, or there’s an idea in there somewhere you think is interesting. You can take their interesting idea and write it better yourself.

I think this is the point a lot of the “you can never really tell if something is AI or not” people miss: even if it’s not AI, it’s still not very good. We don’t need to be giving awards to things that sound like AI because the things that make it sound like AI (vague, overwrought, overwritten, incoherent metaphors, using the word sharp 400 times in 300 pages) are also things that disqualify it from being good writing deserving of awards, whether those awards are AO3 kudos or 7-figure book deals. Although admittedly AO3 kudos are fairly low stakes and I do give one to every fic I read to the end and am not actively repelled by, fics full of AI-sounding prose are actively repellent to me, and so, I click out.

I’m not really active in the Heated Rivalry fandom as a whole, I’m more of a rubbernecker. There’s a forum I like with a dedicated thread for discussing the epidemic of AI fics in HR fandom (because it’s so popular and so active it’s probably the best fandom to hop into right now if you’re looking for a shortcut to Clout, or some kind of book deal). That’s where I got a lot of the info in this post.

One of the things the forum posters link for readers new to identifying AI tells is a fic specifically generated to walk you through Claude’s favorite quirks: Rose-Colored Glasses.

And it’s terrible! I first read it without knowing the punchline and ended up scrolling to the bottom after the first few paragraphs because it’s just boring, overdramatic, overwrought. Well, boring and I kept wanting to edit it harder, because the sentence “Shane tried to look like a person who was comfortable” contains twice as many words as it needs to.

As the original poster put it, “Scenes drag on for no apparent reason and details serve no function. Even on the sentence and paragraph level, AI will often say in 1000 words what would be more effectively said in 500.” There’s a lot of vagueness and a lot of meaninglessness and metaphors that make no sense because they were not created by a human mind.

And that’s the edited version! Chapter 2 is the author’s notes indicating what they’d cut and what they’d added before posting, and they’d gotten rid of some incredibly overwrought nonsense. “He would be here, or somewhere like here—some room, some chair, some version of stillness he didn’t have a good relationship with,” was one cut sentence for example. Some prompters don’t edit nearly as much as these authors did.

Heated Rivalry in particular is facing an epidemic of AI fanfics right now, but they’re popping up everywhere, from tiny dead fandoms to (I am making an educated guess here) Dramione. For some reason, dozens of authors, many new to fandom entirely, are generating fic after fic... and not saying they did so.

It’s not like there’s anything stopping them from tagging their slopfics as made with AI. The tag exists. But no one is willing to be honest and do that because then nobody would read their slop. AO3 is extremely customizable. It’s really easy to filter out tags you don’t like. So a lot of people are probably already filtering out the gen AI tags, and if you jumped in here to get the book deal you think you deserve, you need people to actually click on your AI assisted junk. And what you end up with is people saying shit like “I paid a beta reader real US Dollars to log into my AO3 account and copy-paste a paragraph straight from Claude into the middle of my fanfiction”, an objectively insane excuse that makes the original poster look even stupider than just pasting from Claude to AO3 did.

So some fanfic writers are lying about writing fanfics, who cares?

I think anyone who wants to learn what AI creative writing looks like can use the fics catalogued here as reference material to learn from for free, because it’s not just fanfic writers lying about this, it’s people submitting to literary magazines and querying agents and pitching articles. A lot of people are trying to strike it rich by pretending to write, and some of them are choosing to use fanfiction as their starting point for that.

Fueled by spite, I did try to write an AU Heated Rivalry fic that would make me fandom famous and get me a book deal. I ran out of stamina a whopping 3k words in, basically ensuring that no one would read it because everyone in this fandom prefers longfics. Maybe because I’ve been so focused on my comics these days my energy for prose has waned. But it’s a pretty good 3k, I think.1 I did research for it and snuck in references to my own childhood memories, which computers do not have. I left it open-ended enough that I could write a continuation if I wanted to later.

But right now I have a webcomic to thumbnail. By hand.

Leave a comment

Well, yeah, but.

A difference between how literary prose fiction and literary1 independent comics operate is that while in litfic self-publishing is generally looked down upon (or was until quite recently), in indie comics self-publishing is usually how people get started. You post your comics online or sell them at comics festivals and zine fests until a bigger fish scoops you up and gets you nicer printing quality, more distribution, more attention, and, if you’re lucky, more money.

To get the attention of the big fish, going to comics school and getting a BFA or MFA in comics can help you network and improve your craft, but it’s not anywhere near as necessary as it is in prose litfic. Agents, too, are only required if you’re interested in publication by a Big Five imprint like First Second or Pantheon. Some of the comics small press publishers (I’m mainly thinking of things I’ve heard Gary Groth from Fantagraphics and Tom Devlin from Drawn & Quarterly say on panels at conventions before) are still vaguely suspicious of agents as shady characters from another, more business-y world that don’t understand Comics as an Art Form.

Being published by Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly (or Avery Hill or Fieldmouse or even smaller small presses) will almost certainly not get you a lot of money unless you get extremely lucky, but what it does get you is legitimacy, which gets you invited to conventions, invited to speak at panels at conventions, nominated for awards, reviewed by the ever-dwindling number of comics journalism outlets, and, possibly, more books published in the future.

Cartoonists who just post comics on Instagram to a following several orders of magnitude larger than a hypothetical book readership could ever be are like… the romantasy authors of the indie comics world. Everyone looks down on them but is also kind of jealous of their financial success and visibility, a relationship clearly spelled out by Audra Stang’s comic series about a pair of fictional cartoonist cousins, Valley Valley and Idella Dell.

And also this BeanyTuesday “types of indie comics” post.

And then there are the comics festivals. Shows like Small Press Expo, MOCCAfest, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo always have big tables for the Important Small Press Publishers and the Literary Big Five imprints, as well as literary agents hunting for clients and editors wandering the show floor looking for cool new authors they might want to publish. So if you can get a table at one of these shows, your career could get a huge boost just from that!

Good luck, though. SPX is a “random” “lottery” everyone knows is not actually that random and MOCCA, TCAF and MICE are all juried, and all of these shows receive ten times as many applications as they have tables available.

And this year I got in to MICE for the first time ever! Which is super exciting. I got the acceptance email last week and I still can’t believe it. Some of my friends from grad school got in too and I’m really excited to see them again, and see my Boston friends again, and see Boston again because I really love Boston, and it’s gonna be so fun! I am trying not to expect it to change everything for me, but I know it has for other people. I know people who’ve met literary agents to represent their graphic novels at MICE, people who got publishers interested in picking up their self-published books. But I’m trying not to pin all of my hopes to one comics show.

In 2020, small press editor Zainab Akhtar created the Shortbox Digital Comics Fair, a virtual comics festival which would sell all-new comics from an international assortment of creators for exactly one month. It was wildly successful and so, she continues to organize it every year. After a break for 2026, it will return again in 2027. Over 2000 people applied and about 200 were offered spots, with the expectation that some of them will drop out before the final deadline. That’s an acceptance rate of less than ten percent of applicants.

And this year I got in! For the first time ever! I got the acceptance email this morning and the first thing I did was check to see if there was some kind of mistake sending out acceptances to everyone by accident.

And I saw a lot of people, many of whom are better, more celebrated cartoonists than me, posting about… getting rejected.

Subscribe now

The thing is, there’s a very small number of comics publishers that are more than just one or two people with access to a nice printer. There’s a lot of the latter, but relative to prose fiction publishing, your options for traditional publication are much more limited, which is another reason why a lot of people self-publish rather than bother with publishers that give you four-digit advances for projects that’ll take multiple years to complete. There’s no fancy comics magazines that aren’t just a bunch of friends banding together to publish their stuff as a collective, not nowadays, at least. RAW was 30 years ago and I don’t think it served the same kind of purpose as The Drift et al do in the literary scene now.

And other opportunities to make money and build your legitimacy are just as limited. With conventions as competitive to get into as they are and with table fees and travel expenses rising, digital-only events like Shortbox that take a cut of the final sales instead of an initial fee stand out as an opportunity to actually make some money off comics. It could, and has, made a huge difference to a lot of cartoonists!

So what prompted me to write this post was… why am I getting these opportunities now, four years after my MFA and with little externally-recognizable achievement in the space since besides continuing to make comics and hang out with other cartoonists?

I’ve been trying to appeal to the indie comics gatekeepers since I was in high school, actively applying to their events since college, and for most of that time it’s been rejection after rejection after rejection. I got into SPX twice in a row somehow (then waitlisted then rejected again) and I got waitlisted for TCAF a few times (and for MICE once or twice) but what made the winds blow in my direction now? My webcomic still has barely a dozen subscribers, but that’s the only thing I’m doing this year that I wasn’t doing last year. Could that really be it? Is an ongoing webcomic nobody reads all I need to legitimize me as a cartoonist enough to crack open the gates?

In the brief period between applying and hearing back from SBCF, my friend Julie and I came up with a yuri comics jam that would encourage people to make new yuri comics around a theme in a set time frame (they can then sell or distribute those comics for free as they wish, or participate in a group bundle sale.) I was motivated to come up with this not just because I want more yuri comics in this world but also because I want more digital comics creation events. Because there really aren’t many events that encourage making new comics like this in Western indie comics, although digital Japanese doujinshi events have been around for a long time. Anyone can participate in our comics jam, even if they’ve never made a comic before. It’s an event to encourage beginners and get people interested in making comics… about girls kissing, the best subject for comics.2

Indie comics can feel very narrow sometimes, and now that I’ve suddenly been allowed through the gates I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make the best use of the chances I’m given. But also… I want to open more opportunities for people to have fun making comics.

I’m tired of gates.

Leave a comment

But um, speaking of my winning streak, I came in third in Lillian’s Summer Birthdays Writing Contest! Thank you Lillian!

I have not won this many things in a row in a very long time and I feel like either the universe is apologizing for my ongoing stomach problems or something else terrible will come upon me to balance it out. But right now I feel very happy yay :)

Looking at this list you can probably pinpoint the exact moment when I downloaded Comicsplus and started inhaling as many comics as possible as fast as possible. I am not counting the number of books I read this month because it’s an embarrassingly high amount of manga volumes on the clock at my job, and also some Real Literature.

I LOVE COMICS SO MUCH!!!!

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Started this one in June and finished it at the start of July: I really liked it. I was impressed at how different it was from The Secret History and how real and believable all these very different elements were, especially Boris as a character and the Russian stuff all rang really true to me. Also the random Fullmetal Alchemist namedrop was crazy. My apologies Ms. Tartt I was not familiar with your game.

I think a lot of writers tend to write the same kind of thing over and over, but Donna Tartt appears to be the opposite of that.

The Bell by Iris Murdoch

This ruled. My selection for friend group book club. I’d heard a lot of good things about Iris Murdoch and then this was the Murdoch book available at my public library so I read it and then had a nice discussion about it with my fwends. It’s about a lay community outside a monastery and what happens when the abbey gets a new bell to replace the one it lost many years ago. I liked how complicated all of the characters were and how vivid and unusual the setting was. Very fun.

Go Gentle by Maria Semple

I wish there was more of the coven as promised on the cover. I liked some aspects and I think I enjoyed the reading experience overall (it went by very quickly) but it wasn’t as strong as Where’d You Go, Bernadette, which was my favorite in high school. There was a lot going on and it didn’t all hang together, but I do feel like I understand Stoicism a little better now.

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

Read as part of my food writing research binge… very entertaining and illuminating about what the culinary world was like in the latter half of the 20th century. It did read like an essay collection, but the essays hung together fairly cohesively. Bourdain had a very distinctive writing style and a knack for picking out memorable details.

The Group by Mary McCarthy

This also ruled and I also heard a lot of good things about Mary McCarthy before reading it. Really long but very detailed. I felt like I understood the world these women were living in very well, and it seemed startlingly similar to my own: the economic depression, the stress of figuring out how to live after college. I was very surprised by the sex and birth control and gay people of it all. Lots of scandalous things portrayed very frankly, with the judgement coming from the characters in the story and not from the author. I enjoyed reading it, but I read it quite slowly.

Bunny by Mona Awad

I think this kind of vivid sensory detail and intense metaphors is what a lot of people are trying and failing to imitate. They work because they’re consistent and make sense. I mostly enjoyed it, but I wish it was more of a grad school satire and less speculative stuff, or like, really got into critiquing the mystification of femininity… the creature creation and blood and murder stuff made the thesis bit feel tacked on when they got back to it at the end.

Olivia by Dorothy Bussy

Read because someone on Twitter mentioned it and my friend sent me an epub and I started it ages earlier but finally got around to finishing it. Some Toxic late 1800s Yuri inDEED.

Just Between Us by Adeline Kon

Figure skating yuri graphic novel much-hyped online. I really loved the art, it’s very clean and dramatic and uses spot yellow well, but…… 1) The actual text, like the dialogue and narration, was very stilted, reminding me more of fan translations from Japanese to English than how people speak in English. I think this needed more line editing. 2) There’s a rhyming poem-like thing explaining the Grand Prix series in the middle of the book that does not have a consistent meter and does not need to be there. 3) … I think Helen is implied to be trans? But then Elaine says she doesn’t understand what it’s like to be a visible minority? Even if she’s cis, she’s still visibly gender non-conforming, so that doesn’t… make sense… Also, like. She’s Russian-American, it’s very convenient her mom is totally fine and accepting of whatever’s going on with her gender/sexuality stuff1. So. I dunno that part did bug me personally.

But it was really pretty!

The Credits Roll Into the Sea by John Tarachine

Much-hyped manga about an old woman going to film school and discovering her love of filmmaking after her husband passes. This was really nice… I like Umiko and Kai both individually and as a pair of lead characters to follow. I want to root for them… and I liked the art also.

If You Could See Love Vol. 1 by Teren Mikami

Yuri manga about a girl who can see love arrows between people and discovers that both of her roommates at her new boarding school are in love with her in some way… Volume 2 on Comicsplus was for some reason volume 1 again so I guess my encounter with this series will end here. I thought it was cute enough and the spot color for the arrows is effective. Mei’s illness is an unusual trait for a protagonist to have and I like that it actually has an effect on how she interacts with the world. Overall it’s, like, fine.

My Life in 24 Frames per Second: A Manga Autobiography of a Japanese Animation Pioneer Rintarô by Rintaro

Reminded me of A Drifting Life but more fast-paced and without as much narrative flow… somehow you can tell this guy’s an animator and not a mangaka by trade. An interesting look at an aspect of animation history I didn’t know much about.

All the Living by Roman Muradov

Very pretty and vibesy, funny, bleak. Somehow kind of heartbreaking despite also being funny. The art is so nice… I wonder how he does it…

April Showers Bring May Flowers 1-5 by Roku Sakura

Another take on the shy girl x popular guy shoujo manga formula popularized by Kimi ni Todoke, but this one the shy girl is ugly and so full of self-loathing my god. I enjoyed watching Hana grow, but she is hard to deal with sometimes. I like the side couple and the flower theming.

Yuri Espoir, 2-4 by Mai Naoi

If you haven’t read this yuri you have to read this yuri. My explanation will not do it justice. It’s about a girl named Kokoro who’s entering an arranged marriage when she graduates high school, so she’s making up yuri stories about girls she sees around town and drawing them in a sketchbook with her bestie. And those girls she sees usually do have something yuriful going on but it’s never as simple and straightforward as Kokoro imagines. Also, her bestie is obsessed with her and her arranged husband-to-be is her gay art teacher’s best friend that her art teacher is in love with. And That’s Not All!

Mai Naoi is operating at a level higher than most people can even begin to fathom. There truly is no other yuri out there like this. In these later volumes the continued development of the adult characters and the introduction of Michiru and her family add a lot of complexity to an already fairly complex story and it’s… it’s like, so good, okay. It’s both intensely heightened and dramatic and really realistic and grounded at the same time somehow.

I read the first volume a while ago but just caught up now and I need the next volume ASAP…

You can’t just kiss anyone you want by Marzena Sowa

Graphic album about an incident in communist Poland I read a little bit as research for my webcomic and a little bit out of interest. The character designs were hard to keep track of, I think some of the same guys looked different and some of the different guys looked the same. Interesting overall though.

Raging Clouds by Yudori

Gorgeous art, really tight writing, so unhappy. Reminded me of Issak because of the setting, but stylistically I don’t think Yudori really has a close comparison. I’ll have to read her other book when it’s out.

Role Model by Rachel Reid

Better-written than Heated Rivalry or Game Changer but the couple is less interesting than Hollanov. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: I don’t want a guy with a problem dating a guy with no problems, I want guys with complementary problems that solve them by being together! I liked the little details in this one though and Harris’s apple cider thing is cute.

Time Under Tension by M.S. Harkness

My friend recommended this to me ages ago and I just finally got around to it… I did enjoy it, but I don’t really love Harkness’s art style. I think she wove together the different thematic elements well though and it’s a well-structured graphic memoir that reads like a story and not a collection of Things That Happened.

She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat 1-4 by Sakaomi Yuzaki

I like the characters and the slow build of the relationship, but I feel like the pacing in the first volume was kind of uneven… and I don’t like the art very much lol. I feel like for a food manga it doesn’t do a great job of selling the deliciousness of the food– the art feels kind of sterile and cold (thin lines, low-contrast tones, not a ton of expressive imagery), and the framing of Kasuga’s eating doesn’t do a great job of communicating that she’s really enjoying her meal. I wish it were more expressive… But I like that it tackles subjects you don’t see covered in manga a lot. Looking forward to the next volume.

Common-Sense Monster, Vol. 2 by Warugi Wanai, Shinobu Shinotsuki

I read Vol 1 a few months back and may have forgotten to write that down. Things are certainly heating up in this volume! The monsters are doing murders now. Very exciting… very tense. I like that Itou’s really genuinely strange. You think she’s just overly self-conscious and then she blurts out something and you’re like “oh. Yeah no wonder you have problems”. But she’s getting better! She’s growing! Good for her.

Also the monster sequences are genuinely very creepy and I like that.

SOTUS, Vol. 1-2 by Kei, based on the novel by BitterSweet

Please understand I watched the SOTUS live action TV show right after I finished undergrad and it rewired my brain chemistry so hard I fell into a Thai BL pit for like 4 years afterwards, so I cannot be normal about anything related to this franchise like at all.2 When Yen Press announced they licensed the manga adaptation a few years ago I screamed a lot and then ended up not reading it because… I don’t remember, but now that it’s available on Comicsplus I could check it out and see how different it is from the TV show of the same name!

First of all, SOTUS the manga is not adapting the TV show, it’s adapting the same novel the TV show was based on. Like the Run With The Wind manga/stage play/anime, which are all adapting the same novel and therefore have very different looks for the same characters. This means the character designs in the manga don’t look like how Krist and Singto played them in the show. Well, manga Arthit does look a bit like Krist, but manga Kongpob is a very generic alpha seme guy, which makes him less likeable to me because he’s less distinctive.

I think the mangaka did reference the TV show for the architecture and prop design (their dorm rooms are identical to the weirdly hotel-looking bedrooms in the show), but the characters, especially the side characters, all look pretty different.

Otherwise: I liked getting more of Arthit’s thought process than in the show, which I thought was more in Kongpob’s POV, and I think WadPrem is being set up more than it was in the TV show. There’s way less of the female characters, which is disappointing because I really liked May and Praepalin in the show (but maybe the show expanded on their roles from the novel?). I liked being reminded of the moments I liked in the show by looking at them in manga form. Problematic elements are still there and still problematic though. I will probably read Volume 3 if it’s added to Comicsplus later but I probably won’t buy it myself. Unsure if I would read a hypothetical English translation of the novel.

I probably would not recommend SOTUS as a show because it did not age great and there’s much, much better university-setting Thai BL out there now (Bad Buddy at the top of my list, personally), but Krist and Singto played a set of characters that may or may not be based on themselves in The Ex-Morning last year and that was really good.3

My Oh My, Atami-kun, Vol. 1 by Asa Tanuma

Atami-kun is so chill. It’s basically a slice of life manga about a guy who falls in love (with other guys) very easily and the friends he makes at school. Atami-kun is a little weird, and so are his friends, in different ways. It’s just very breezy and charming. Also, despite my summary, it’s not actually a BL. All of his crushes (as of Volume 3, which I finished today lol), go unrequited. Maybe it’ll end with him getting together with someone, maybe not, it’s unclear right now. But it’s so good… nothing happens, but nothing happens extremely well.

Desperate March for Love by Michika Tomizawa

If Taizan5 wrote a yuri manga it would probably go something like this, except it was very obviously cancelled at the last minute and the last chapter just rushes to try and tie off all the loose ends that should’ve just stayed loose. Toxic yuri but in the sense that stupid teenagers do not know how to make a relationship work, kind of insane sometimes, drawn in that mushy-shiny style that reminded me of Taizan5’s work.

And that is what I read in July! I love comics so much. Which reminds me, you should read my comic if you haven’t yet!

Also, in Substack news, Lillian picked my short story as a finalist for her Summer Birthdays Writing Contest! The last time I was a finalist in a writing contest was in middle school, so this is very exciting for me. Thank you Lillian!

I actually wrote the short story… Well, I wrote the very first iteration of it as the first assignment for a creative writing class in college and then forgot about it for almost a decade. And then I found it again and thought, “there’s something there,” and rewrote it from scratch with the intention of submitting it to a totally different contest, but then I chickened out and threw it back in my drawer for another few months. And then I pulled it out again and decided it was pretty good, and I’m glad Lillian thought so too!

… if you followed me from that please be aware I mostly write about comics (the general medium of sequential art, not just the superhero stuff. Including webcomics and manga and manhwa and everything else). I will make you love comics as much as I love comics and that is a threat.

… I can’t believe the book(s) I wrote the most about in this monthly roundup is the manga adaptation of a show I watched 7 years ago.

Leave a comment

(you may have to open the email in another tab because 18 vertically-oriented images is a long scroll lol)

Subscribe now

Chapter 2 starts on Monday (on ComicFury, Webtoon1, Tapas and my website), but if you want to read the full chapter NOW... it's on Namicomi!

Most importantly……tell me what you think! And if you liked it, please tell your friends about it!! Because I have scraped together approximately 20 subscribers across 4 platforms after two months and I would like more people to read my comic please. I think it’s pretty good but if you disagree feel free to angrily QRT me about it or something.

Of course, by the time I get around to writing up the discourse, it’s all over. But the core of this one is lingering like a troublesome scab, urged ever onward by the overlapping discourse of “Is Goodbye, Lara a yuri anime or not because if it is some MAL losers are going to whine and if it’s not some Twitter femcels are going to whine,” which spun off into “what even is yuri anyway” and none of these people know fucking anything about anything.

Fortunately, I do!

First of all, not every yuri is about characters discovering they’re lesbians, Read Another Book, etc. I think the Twitter replies did cover that one mostly. Yuri scholar Erica Friedman actually said at a Flamecon panel in 2019 that “The difference between yuri and lesbian comics is that the characters in yuri don’t generally self-identify as lesbians or part of the queer community.” This might’ve been the case in 2019, but the genre has evolved dramatically since then, and really exploded in popularity in recent years with the viral hits of Green Yuri (The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All) and Red Yuri (Love Bullet. Which, by the way, is not about characters discovering that they’re lesbians.) There’s more autobio work, more yuri authors advocating for gay marriage in Japan in their work and on social media, more yuri authors drawing characters with pride flags.

Anyway, some yuri not about discovering that they’re lesbians: How Do We Relationship?, SHWD, Ayaka is in love with Hiroko!, Today We Continue Our Lives Under The Same Roof, The Two of Them Are Pretty Much Like This.

I can keep going, because I’ve read a lot of yuri!

I started reading yuri manga about 15 years ago, the same way I started reading manga in general: by borrowing my cousin’s books. She had the first volume of Girl Friends by Milk Morinaga, and I inhaled it and then found volume 2 somewhere online. I didn’t know what “yuri” was yet. Somehow I stumbled on a tumblr blog titled “yuripics” or “yuricaps” or something– someone I followed reblogged a post of two girls with big shiny eyes and stupid hair holding hands from there, and I was… so captivated by the tenderness in that drawing, I clicked through to the original blog and scrolled all the way down to their first post. I didn’t understand why I was so fascinated by these images yet. I had no idea where they came from. But I liked them.

In the years that followed, I’d search for yuri anime and manga that suited my tastes… and I was often disappointed! A lot of the yuri anime adaptations that got greenlit in the mid-late 2010s were uh… moeslop, to put it rudely. Cloyingly cute and youthful character designs paired with squeaky voice acting and plausibly-deniable homoeroticism. I’m thinking of stuff like Comic Girls, Sakura Trick, Asteroid in Love, all of which I could not stand. There was also Citrus, which was definitely not cute or squeaky but was also about stepsister incest, an immediate hard no for my teenaged self.

But there was yuri manga I loved that occasionally broke through and got picked up in English. Bloom Into You, Whispered Words, Sweet Blue Flowers, were all about high school girls, yes, but they told complex, sensitive stories about teenagers coming of age, dealing with difficult topics like homophobia and mental illness.

Coming of age is just a good topic for a longform story! There’s a lot you can do with it. It’s a premade character conflict, a built-in story arc. Who goes through more character development than a teenager? Teenagers are the most emotionally volatile age group, beginning to experience independence and still shackled by what they don’t know and can’t do on their own. Why is every yuri about teenagers discovering they’re gay? Because that’s an interesting story to tell.

Heck, my webcomic is partly about teenagers discovering they’re gay too. But also the collapse of the Soviet Union, and time travel. Because it’s interesting to me, and hopefully it’s interesting to other people too. And because I want to explore the painful intersection of these core aspects of my identity, how I can never go back to the place where I was born, or show my friends the sights of my most precious childhood memories because of who I am.

For a long time, I felt very alone in my yuri fandom. Most of my friends liked BL if they had to pick, or just didn’t read romance at all. I didn’t know where the yuri enjoyers congregated, because on Tumblr it seemed like everyone posting about yuri was really into idol anime I had no interest in, and I didn’t know where to find the good stuff on other websites. It was hard to find femslash fandom content for the fandoms I was in, even the ones with canon f/f relationships, that didn’t take a backseat to the male characters.1

Everyone always said if you’re not seeing enough of the stuff you like in fandom, just make it yourself and hype up the stuff you do like! So I did… and it didn’t seem to do anything. I loved yuri enthusiastically, talked about it, tried to promote it to my friends and followers, but it seemed like nobody was listening. Every time a new yuri anime got traction I’d make buttons for it to bring to anime conventions, but no one ever bought them or started a conversation with me about them.

I tried to make a Discord server for yuri manga fans, but that ended up mostly populated by friends of mine interested in checking yuri out and not people who were as enthusiastic about it as I was. Most of the yuri manga I’d put up for discussion in that server received lukewarm to negative receptions for reasons I still don’t really understand, but which really depressed me (I still stand by those comics, by the way. They’re good comics and everyone else has bad taste, sorry!). So I left the server I created and resigned myself to my solitary enjoyment of yuri media.

Subscribe now

And then Green Yuri exploded and suddenly, overnight, words like “toxic yuri” and “himejoshis” suddenly went from niche to all over fandom Twitter. That was only part of the pendulum swing back towards yuri, of course. Korean, Chinese and Thai GL comics were being translated into English more often on platforms like Lezhin and Tappytoon. Still not as often as BL or het romance, but more often! Often enough that Tapas and Webtoon both finally caved and made distinct categories for GL at least. Gundam: Witch from Mercury, the latest installment in the mainline Gundam franchise (now followed by GQuuuuux), focused on a relationship between two women explicitly inspired by Revolutionary Girl Utena, which also prompted extensive debate on whether or not it was yuri and whether or not it was canon. And though these changes did not happen simultaneously, it still felt like very suddenly, people were posting and reading and talking about yuri, when they weren’t before.

On one hand, my friends are finally reading the comics I recommended over 5 years ago! Yuri mangaka Battan was a guest of honor at TCAF this past year! More yuri manga is getting licensed in English and posted on social media for free, and f/f comics inspired by yuri manga like Just Between Us by Adeline Kon get the benefit of comparison marketing and go viral too! How beautiful to live in this new yuriful world… where the loudest and most insistent voices are the least informed and most puritanical, with the narrowest view of what yuri should be.

“Why is all yuri” this! “This doesn’t count as yuri” that! “This BDSM yuri is problematic because I don’t understand how BDSM works and could not recognize a BDSM scene if it hit me with a riding crop!”2 “I’m tired of yuri that looks like this and I cannot be bothered to type a single fucking letter into a search engine to find literally anything else”!!!

I’ve been through all of this before, every single time I tried to get my friends to read yuri manga, right up until yuri manga became Cool Again.

And I’m tired.

The other half of the discourse, “is it yuri if the girls don’t kiss/call each other girlfriends”, has long been settled in the Japanese yuri fandom sphere. Revue Starlight is a yuri anime, even though nobody kisses in it. Madoka Magica is the patron saint of yuri anime and there’s no explicit textual confirmation of Madohomu in a romantic relationship (maybe Homura was rewinding time over and over again to try and save Madoka platonically!) In this interview with Iori Miyazawa, author of multiple yuri light novels (including Otherside Picnic), he mentions BL Metamorphosis as a yuri manga about an elderly woman and young girl who bond over their love of BL manga. Not romantic, but still yuri because it’s about the relationship between two women.

As Miyazawa put it,

This "relationship" doesn't necessarily have to be "love", love is one of the things this colossal "something" envelops within itself. I think at this point everyone can agree that the definition of yuri as just "love between two women" is no longer applicable. This "something" that connects two women together is sometimes referred to as an "unidentified enormous emotion". This concept dates back to around 2016. The better you depict the change in the "emotions", the more "high-resolution", the more real the work of fiction will feel. High-resolution yuri is "strong" yuri.

Can this sometimes disappoint people hoping for explicit lesbian content? Yeah! It’s disappointed me before. I think some works would be improved if the characters were textually confirmed to be lesbians, even if they weren’t dating each other about it. But it aligns with my values as a reader and a writer. I want to read and write about the relationships between women, as messy and complicated as they can be.

Anyway, yuri is a diverse enough genre that the only thing every yuri has in common is that it is about the relationship between two women. Enough arguing, go read some yuri!

And read my webcomic!

EDIT: YURI COMICS JAM COMING IN 2027 SIGN UP NOW TO GET REMINDER NOTIFICATIONS AS THE DATE APPROACHES

Since Haikyu!!, the best comic of all time forever, ended, Weekly Shonen Jump has been fighting for its goddamn life to fill the sports-shaped hole Haikyu!! left in the magazine. And every single attempt to do so spluttered flat in barely half a year.

Some WSJ sports manga that have started and ended since Haikyu!! ended include:

• 9 Dragons Ball Parade: baseball, 20 chapters

• Green Green Greens: golf, 26 chapters

• Two on Ice: pairs ice skating, 28 chapters

• Ping Pong Peril: gimmicky gonzo ping pong, 17 chapters

• Ekiden Bros: long-distance college relay racing, 14 chapters

• Embers: soccer, 20 chapters

• Harukaze Mound: baseball again, 30 chapters

The closest thing to a sports manga that managed to persist for multiple years in WSJ post-Haikyu!! is Blue Box, which is a romance manga with some sports in it and also just ended after 250 chapters on Sunday, July 12, 2026.

So then, why the hell are sports manga doing so well everywhere else?

Kodansha is currently publishing the soccer manga Blue Lock and the ice skating manga Medalist, as well as the volleyball manga Dig It. Dig It is pretty new, having launched just over a year ago, but it’s already well-received (and licensed for a print release in English!), and both Blue Lock and Medalist have been absolute smash hits, with spinoffs and awards and celebrity collaborations and multi-season anime adaptations.

But we don’t even need to look at Kodansha, which as another publisher might as well be another country. WSJ’s slightly older seinen brother Weekly Young Jump has Days of Diamond, another baseball manga that started in 2023 and is still ongoing, and Satoru Noda1’s new hockey manga Dogsred (a reboot of his debut series, Supinamarada!).

And Shonen Jump+, the digital-only arm of the Jump manga magazine family, is currently publishing 90 comics, some of which are also running in print form in WSJ and some of which2 are exclusive to the digital platform. One of these currently-running digital exclusive series is the baseball manga Oblivion Battery, which has been ongoing since 2018 and has an anime adaptation.

So what’s wrong with the sports manga in Weekly Shonen Jump that they can’t keep their readers’ interest for longer than 20 chapters?

Well.

Subscribe now

I elaborated on my problems with a few of the recent attempts at sports manga in my previous post, but since then, all three of the series I’d mentioned in that post have ended (even Harukaze Mound, which I’d had such high hopes for) and another one called Drawn to the Fire started, and I think it’s… it’s not going to last, sorry. It’s not going to last and here is why.

It’s not very good.

I feel like the rookie series in WSJ in the last couple of years have much rougher technical drawing skills than in years past. Maybe overreliance on digital shortcuts and younger, more desperate debuts are the cause, but while simplistic, minimally-expressive art works fine in a gag manga or a slice-of-life series like Someone Hertz, a sports manga needs to clearly sell the reader on the idea that the sport in question is awesome enough to devote your entire life to it.

Blue Box actually does this pretty well, I think– the badminton and basketball scenes are easy to follow and made more emotionally charged by following the audience as much as the players, and by devoting so much time to the activities outside of competitions (practicing, hanging out with teammates, balancing school and sports and personal lives), the reader gets a very full picture of what life as a student athlete looks like for these different characters.

Kodansha’s tentpole sports series are all outstanding at the visual side: Blue Lock especially goes really hard with the edgy teen visual symbolism of like, lions and skulls and snakes and whatnot representing people’s soccer skills. It’s so over the top and it’s so fun to look at. (I talked about that in a Dreamwidth post a few years ago here.) Dig It is a much more stripped down and minimalist sports manga (reminds me more of Fool Night than any other sports things I’ve read, honestly), but it uses big, black sound effects and action lines to make the impact of each spike and receive echo through the page to the readers. Medalist is just gorgeous. Harukaze Mound was also really well drawn, which I’d talked about in my previous post.

Drawn to the Fire is not as well drawn as any of these. The characters have CLAMPish long limbs and necks and big baby eyes, which are stylistic flourishes I personally find unappealing but like it’s fine if that’s what you’re going for on purpose. I feel like, for a sports manga, I want the characters to have more visible muscle, especially if they’re supposed to be good at the sport already. Like I understand they’re teenagers, but I was a teenager once and I remember the sixteen-year-old athletes in my classes were way more muscly than me, who was also an athlete at the time but not very good at it.

Less fine is the fact that multiple characters have solid black hair and similar enough faces that it’s difficult to tell them apart, which makes it even more difficult to follow the action in a game when these identical-ish characters are passing to each other. There’s an extended metaphor of like… bugs and fireflies, with the protagonist team being so good at guarding their opponents they’re sticking to them like bugs, but it doesn’t really work because the author’s not willing to actually draw the bugs out visually, just the little light balls, and the glowing lights don’t feel like lights when the shadows aren’t sharp enough either.

Haikyu!! had some absolutely iconic visual metaphors, the kind fanartists are still going crazy about six years after the final chapter dropped. Most of the volleyball teams had an animal associated with them: Crows, cats, foxes, etc., but also Furudate used weaponry as a visual metaphor for characters’ attack power and literal shields to represent the middle blockers’ blocking abilities, which led to some absolutely iconic panels I have not stopped thinking about for like eight years.

I actually elaborated on this in an article I wrote for WWAC a few years ago if you want to check it out.

But it’s not just that Drawn to the Fire is visually unimpressive, all of these new WSJ sports manga have been, with the possible exception of Harukaze Mound. They don’t make good use of the fact that manga is a visual medium and don’t make good use of their imagination to Make The Sports Look Cool.

Compare this skating scene from pair skating WSJ manga Two on Ice (28 chapters) to a skating sequence in Medalist.

Like, it’s fine, there’s a reasonable amount of energy to it, some cool foreshortening. But we don’t know who these guys are yet, and the angle makes it hard to tell how high the girl is being thrown, or in what direction.

The artist tends to draw the figure skaters in fixed poses, without a lot of motion lines on the characters or in the background, so they don’t feel like they’re moving as much.

Now here’s Inori skating for the first time in Medalist.

The first time Tsukasa sees Inori skate, it’s both visually and textually communicated to the readers exactly what Inori’s skills are at this point in the story. The reader also gets to see how Inori and Tsukasa are feeling about her skating right off the bat, and there’s a cool silent backgroundless panel as she takes off so you know you’re in for something Special. Speed lines and sparkles!

Chapter 1 of Medalist actually has very little skating because it’s all emotional setup, and it’s extremely emotionally expressive for that. It gets the reader sympathizing with Inori and identifying with Tsukasa pretty much immediately, even without seeing a lot of their skating.

But look how action-packed and expressive their first meeting is! Look at all that energy, those motion lines and sound effects, the raggedy balloons, the background dropping out as Tsukasa and Inori make contact. It really grabs you! If your paneling and character drawing are expressive enough on their own, you don’t even need visual metaphors. But achieving that level of expressiveness is a skill in itself.

So, aesthetically, the WSJ sports manga mostly just do not have The Juice. But do they have The Juice narratively?

Also no! And this is why:

They keep trying to re-squeeze Haruichi Furudate’s oranges.

Haikyu!! is a manga about a short guy who wants to play a sport that favors tall people, who finds himself at a middle school with no volleyball team and has to make his own opportunities, before ending up at a high school that used to be a volleyball powerhouse but has now fallen far down the rankings. It is about Shoyo Hinata, from the concrete, working hard, making friends, and developing the skills he needs to defeat top-tier private school rich boys before eventually standing at the top of the whole world. There are also female characters in Haikyu!! with depth and complexity who are not there to be Hinata’s love interests, unless you have zero reading comprehension and think Yachi likes men for some reason.

Drawn to the Fire is about a guy who made a promise to reconnect with his childhood girl bestie (and crush) at basketball nationals, but struggles on his middle school team because no one can connect with his passes… So he decides to quit basketball and just cheer his girlbestie on. When he ends up at the same high school as the Best basketball player of his generation, that best player connects with him immediately (because his passes were just TOO GOOD for his middle school teammates to catch!) and then they can play basketball so good their no-name school takes down all their powerhouse rivals right away.

Embers is about a thug whose middle school teacher notices his soccer potential and tricks him into practicing, and he loses in the middle school prelims to a powerhouse school but presses the powerhouse striker for the full game, and then in high school they end up on the same team, with the delinquent protagonist a defender to complement the striker. I only read the first two chapters of this one and it seemed Fine.

Ekiden Bros. is about a guy who grew up in a track and field team dorm because his dad’s the coach of the team, but he never felt an urge to run long distance himself because he suspected he didn’t have the innate talent necessary for it. Then he suddenly discovers he likes running long distance and is good at it, and so immediately goes to a different college and joins a totally different team from all of his friends he grew up with, for… some reason. This one really and truly did not work at all.

Two on Ice is about a guy who sees a girl skating and thinks she’s so cool he teaches himself how to skate, and then when he runs into her several years later he learns she’s doing pairs skating now and his self-taught abilities impress her so much she’s willing to pair up with him. I thought it was Fine, but I don’t think it balanced the romantic tension it was clearly going for with the sport progression, and it also seemed weirdly self-conscious about the fact that pairs skating is less popular than singles and I think that lack of confidence in its own premise tanked it.

Green Green Greens is about a guy who’s good at everything and has no goals in life but has a crush (ambiguously) on a cool girl in his class who’s aiming to be the best golfer ever and ends up accidentally following her to her part-time job at a driving range, where he tries it out and gets into it. This had a really strong first chapter, actually, and I liked the protagonist (reminded me of Yatora from Blue Period) but I think the fatal flaw for this one was it was realistic about how long it takes to get into a new sport and took too many chapters for the main character to actually get on a golf green in real life.

All of these series have plucky underdog protagonists with limited experience in the sport but prodigious natural talent whose talents blossom when they meet their new team or, worse, a cool girl. Both Embers and Drawn to the Fire have the underdog protagonist and their prodigy rival from middle school end up on the same high school team, which was a fun, unique idea when Haikyu!! did it over a decade ago but now just feels tired.3 I feel like, if the authors or their editors were genuinely attempting to create The Next Haikyu!! by incorporating elements that worked really well in Haikyu!! into different sports, they did so without understanding what made Haikyu!! work so well.

I did a detailed analysis of Haikyu!!’s first chapter here.

If step one of making a decent “dark academia” novel is to accept you’re not gonna write The Secret History 2, step one of making a decent sports manga is to accept you’re not gonna write Haikyu!! 2.

Dig It is also about volleyball, but it’s the polar opposite of Haikyu!! in every respect. The main character of Dig It is the son of Japan’s greatest living volleyball player, but… he’s not very good at spiking, so his dad writes him off as a loser and decides to mentor someone else. So the kid switches to being a libero with the goal of receiving his dad’s spikes and serves, and getting his revenge on all spikers that way. It’s got daddy issues and dark feelings and teenagers being dicks to each other, and it uses silences and space carefully to create a manga that feels cool.

Blue Lock also has a twisted take on the friendship-effort-victory aspect of shonen manga by putting its soccer players through a grueling training regimen to produce the greatest striker in the history of Japan. The characters still make friends and work hard and win things, but like, from an egotistical perspective. It feels very intense and honestly quite stupid a lot of the time, but it’s still cool. And interesting. And not like Haikyu!!.

Medalist focuses on the relationship between a coach and his skater, giving Tsukasa as much if not more point of view scenes than Inori. They make friends with other skaters and coaches and have rivals, but the structure is very different from more team-oriented sports stories, making it stand out further. Not at all like Haikyu!!.

So why can’t WSJ do a sports comic that has a different take on friendship-effort-victory through sports? Without frontloading it with romance? Other magazines are doing it!

Pacing a weekly manga is really hard, and honestly, probably where most of the problems with these new series arise. (Although Blue Lock is also weekly and seems to be doing just fine.) But it’s not impossible to do a sports manga in Weekly Shonen Jump that runs for several years and is hugely successful. I mean, before Haikyu!!, there was Kuroko’s Basketball, and before that, The Prince of Tennis, and before that, Slam Dunk. Legends, all; icons of the genre, tentpoles of the magazine. Why can’t there be a new Slam Dunk now? Drawn to the Fire clearly wants to be the new Slam Dunk, but there’s no way it’ll ever come close.

God, I want to make a sports manga…

I’m still working on my webcomic, of course, and I’m estimating it’ll be at least 100-200 pages which’ll hopefully collect into a cute little graphic novel when I’m done. But I feel like I’ve developed new insight into the wants and needs of sports manga, and I’m still extremely attached to my Pineborough High School Girl’s Epee squad from my previous, worse-drawn one-shot attempts. I’m gonna make a good one-shot with them and submit it… next year… it’s gonna happen…

In Her Spotlight by Amy Spalding

#4 in the Out in Hollywood series which I enjoyed books 1 through 3 of. I liked it! I don’t know if I could rank the 4 books in the series in any order, though. They’re all kind of equally… 8.5/10 for me. Nothing spectacular, but leaps and bounds better than most F/F tradpub romance novels by virtue of having distinct character dynamics and actual character development for their characters, and a specific, well-informed and fully realized setting (Silver Lake in LA). Book 4 focuses on Definitely Not Scarlett Johansson who gets cast in a stage play after getting famous for being The Action Girl in Definitely Not Marvel movies and has to gain the respect of her fellow cast members and also the director of the play is her college ex-situationship that no one else knows she dated because she’s very much not out! Whuh-oh! I think the friendship dynamics were a little weaker in this one than in her other books but I deeply respect the decision to not do flashbacks to the past relationship in this second chance romance. I didn’t realize how much that kind of flashback annoyed me until I got to read a book without them.

Famesick by Lena Dunham

I am a victim of the hype machine! I watched two episodes of Girls to prepare and I was not expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. I thought it’d be more dated than that. The book was also very compelling. She sure did go through a lot. I can’t believe she saw that powerpoint lol.

Hooked: A Novel of Obsession by Asako Yuzuki

I found Butter kind of lackluster but Hooked was crazy. Oh my god. First of all if you’ve read my stalker comic this novel actually has a weirdly similar premise to my stalker comic: a woman develops an obsession with a casual online poster and engineers a “chance encounter” in an attempt to con the other woman into friendship. But honestly the stalker in my comic did not nearly go as hard as she could’ve. Eriko, the stalker in Hooked, is absolutely off the wall. Sometimes the way she’s described it sounds like she’s just a very undiagnosed autistic person and then sometimes she does something so unhinged it’s like… why are you like this. Reminds me of the most annoying commenter on Dreamwidth lol. It also made me wonder, like, I’ve always struggled in social situations myself and worried about how everyone else is better friends with each other than with me, but I’ve never had any trouble making at least one female friend. Both Eriko and Shouko, the blogger she stalks, had never really had any friends before. Why is it so much harder for them than me?

Box Office Poison Omnibus #1 by Alex Robinson

Friend offhandedly mentioned this was the first graphic novel she read so I googled it and thought “oh this sounds fun” and then read the whole thing. It’s so 90s it’s practically a period drama. I like how there’s a guy in it who looks like Keanu Reeves looks today, but not at all like how he looked in the 90s. I like the art and the lettering, and the author’s commentary is interesting. Pretty fun! Very heterosexual though.

Hench by Natalie Walschots

I liked this one a lot, actually. It’s about the horrors of having a job, especially if the job is helping out a supervillain. Definitely playing in the Megamind space more than the Marvel/DC space. The exploration of collateral damage and disability definitely stood out and worked really well. I think there was something that didn’t totally land for me but thinking back on it now I can no longer recall what that was. So I guess the overall impression was pretty positive!

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

I am a victim of the hype machine again! It was okay. Parts of it definitely dragged, the final twist didn’t really land. I had a hard time believing in Natalie’s mindset for most of the story, I think. The child-raising parts and religious aspect did feel underdeveloped to me. I’ve never really been interested in tradwife videos even in the hatewatch way so I think I might just not be the target audience lol.

How to Rule the World by Theo Baker

I am a little bit of a victim of the hype machine for this one but I saw way less hype for it than for the other hype machine books I read in June. Honestly the primary emotion I have when seeing a 22 year old get a book published is like “Aw, good for you! You made a thing!” The writing is very competent and the narrative is coherent, which is an improvement on the many YA fantasy novels published by 22 year olds. Somehow I was expecting a YA fantasy novel level narrative about this guy’s freshman year at Stanford. Makes me feel better about not going to Stanford or wanting to go to Stanford when everyone else I knew was trying to get into Stanford.1 Realized I went to summer camp with a girl who makes an appearance in the book and looked her up on Facebook again to confirm and wow she has changed a lot since she was 15. It definitely clarified some things about Silicon Valley for me.

Not A Book: Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma, chapter-by-chapter on the Shonen Jump App

Fell off hard once the Cuisinieres Noires arc started, which made the subsequent quick wrap-up understandable. I think some of the fanservice was valid and necessary (it’s a very effective way to visually communicate the pleasure of good food!) and some of it (random panty-shots and panels carefully framed around the sexyparts of various teenage girls) detracted from the story. I don’t know if I like the Disrobing superpower bit lol. But I definitely liked the whole story overall, and I love that it did not end with any kind of romantic relationship confirmation for any character. Implied Soma/Erina, yeah, but also they’re all too busy cooking to date and I love that for them!

Speaking of reading things, you should read MY WEBCOMIC FRAGMENTATION! It is completely unrelated to any of the books I read last month but I worked really hard on it :) If you know of any good places to advertise webcomics or like podcasts to go on or whatever please let me know I am fighting for my life out here.

Available on My Website, Comicfury, Webtoon and Tapas! Page format updates Mondays and Thursdays, scroll formats Mondays. Or get a PDF of chapter 1 here!

You can also give me a vote on TopWebComics which is still a thing somehow.

Well, sort of. I read about five chapters of Oishinbo A La Carte to get an idea of what it was about2 and then decided to do the same for Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma, which I’d previously watched the first episode of back when I was in high school but was put off by the comedic nudity. I thought I would just read a few chapters and then be done with it.

Two days later, I’m 170 chapters into Food Wars and I cannot put it down. Every second I am not reading Food Wars I am thinking about how I want to get back to reading Food Wars (315 chapters total, so I’m about halfway through now.) It’s propulsively paced and dramatic and exciting, and the characters are all so fun to follow, and the antagonists are appropriately menacing.3

The comedic nudity/light eroticism is also more palatable to me because it’s equal opportunity and a great way to quickly show just how good a food is. I mean, they call it food porn for a reason, right? There is some fanservice, but it’s mostly not too distracting, and the girls it’s attached to have personalities and depth to them beyond their boobs. And the male characters within the story mostly don’t seem to pay attention to anything besides their cooking, which makes it a lot easier to just slide past it. I think I found the fanservice more offputting in animated form because you can’t fast-forward through it as easily as you can swipe through an uncomfortable page. Although I have noticed there’s more random shots of the girls changing as the manga continues, which makes me wonder if it was having a rough time in the rankings at that point.

Food Wars was serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump, a manga magazine geared towards teenage boys that determines which series get to continue based on the results of weekly reader surveys. Successful series can last for years and years (see: One Piece), unsuccessful series can get canned after less than 20 chapters. The pillars of Shonen Jump manga are “Friendship, Effort, and Victory,” and all of their most popular comics use these to propel the story forward. The goal of a Shonen Jump series is to keep going for as long as possible by adhering to these principles.4

Food Wars adheres to these pillars perfectly. Soma and his fellow chefs in training work together to improve their cooking and face off in one-on-on “Shokugeki” culinary battles (to say nothing of the many other wildly creative challenges they all face over the course of their first year at school), and Soma almost always wins, or, if he’s facing someone really and truly out of his league, he still comes very close. The Jump formula means he has to be constantly pursuing greater and greater heights. He’s not just trying to pass the challenges Totsuki Academy sets for their students, he’s trying to outcook the masters at their own specialties. It’s a manga about a guy trying to become the best chef he can be by learning from others and being himself. And it rules!

Food Wars reminded me of my other favorite food comic, Gourmet Hound by Leehama (Robyn Lee Hamada). (Print edition of Volume 1 is coming out in October, preorder now!) Gourmet Hound is also funny and emotional and hard to put down, with a large cast of fun characters and an expansive, entertaining look at food from all levels. But it’s a very different kind of story, too, created for a very different kind of audience.

Gourmet Hound was created as a Webtoon Original back in 2017, when Webtoon was a little smaller and a little more flexible in terms of the kinds of stories and genres it was willing to promote. Secure in the knowledge that the comic could be exactly as long as it needed to be to tell the full story, Gourmet Hound is tightly plotted and paced, driven by a central question with a concrete answer. There is no endless upward climb of achievements, just a straightforward path with its own ups and downs.

Gourmet Hound is about a 25 year old bookseller named Lucy whose grandmother recently passed away, and her quest to recreate a favorite meal she’d had with that grandmother at the restaurant Dimanche for her nineteenth birthday. All of the chefs who’d been working at Dimanche back then had since left for various reasons, so it’s up to Lucy to hunt them all down again and find out who made that special dinner for her. It’s emotionally propulsive, but much more grounded. The cooking school Lucy’s grandma ran was just a cooking school, not a super-elite academy that expels 80% of its students in their first year.

Lucy has no interest in working in the food industry in any capacity. Despite her incredible sense of taste and physical strength, she feels no need to turn her talents into a career. She likes working at the bookshop. She’s committed to her short-term goal, but she doesn’t have any big ambitions for her life besides eating well and staying close to the people she loves. Her interest in food is just a small part of who she is as a character, rather than her entire reason for being, and this makes her the perfect character to tell a story about food as connection, food as home, and food as love.

Food Wars is mostly about the pursuit of perfection in the culinary arts, with each character focusing on a particular type of cuisine they want to specialize in. Soma wants to perfect the casual Japanese restaurant, the Aldini twins do Italian food, Alice does off-the-walls molecular gastronomy. The characters presented as villains in the story are people who oppose innovation and creativity and restrict the students’ abilities to create new recipes. Soma, as a character, is almost bland in a way which really stands out. He’s not a goofy slacker or any of the other classic Jump protagonist archetypes. He never gets overemotional and is very aware of his shortcomings as a cook, and is always ready to learn from the other chefs around him. His pursuit of cooking is mostly because he loves his family restaurant, but also because he wants to surpass his father. And this pursuit means food is the only thing he thinks about.

I read a lot of hobby/sports manga because the way they talk about perfecting their passions reminds me of my relationship to comics. Food Wars and Gourmet Hound show a variety of ways someone can relate to the passion of food. For Lucy, food is one of the things that makes life worth living, but not her entire life. For Soma and the other Totsuki students, food is life.

I love comics so much, and I wish comics were my life. But my day job has nothing to do with comics at all, and the thought of making a career out of my passion seems increasingly unlikely with every ghosted job application and single-digit-engagement social media post. If I’m going to keep doing comics, I have to keep going because I love it. Because making comics feels like home, because it connects me to the people I love.

My webcomic Fragmentation is not about food, although there’s some food in it. It’s not an easily-marketable premise like a reincarnated villainess or fashionably dressed heterosexual hotties will-they-won’t-theying for 300 episodes. It’s a story about figuring out what kind of life you want for yourself in a world that doesn’t want you to live that way, and how you can make that happen. The characters in Food Wars and Gourmet Hound make it a point to stay true to themselves and make the food they want to make, and I’m making the comic I want to make, too.

Anyway, I’m gonna go back to reading Food Wars now.

Leave a comment

My cartoonist friends were alarmed to hear I usually publish a newsletter once a week, and said once a month is more than enough. I then tried to explain that I don’t really use my newsletter like a #MashaUpdates newsletter, I use it as a space to write about whatever I’ve been thinking about lately, like fanfiction or manga I’m reading, and not to update my #fans about my #art. Mostly because I don’t have that many #fans but love typing words. I use my newsletter more like how writers use newsletters, and most of all like kind of a blog, I think. But in any case I’ve been slacking on updating here partly because I’m easily influenced by what everyone else around me is doing and partly because I have been Busy With Several Things, and here are some of them.

Capital City Anime Fest

CCAF is a first-time anime convention held in Trenton, New Jersey, and organized by my friends who worked super hard to make sure it happened. The event was held at the Trenton campus of Mercer County Community College, which is very small, so ticket sales were capped at 700 due to capacity concerns and sold out near-instantly. People showed up for CCAF. Lucy @/opal_lines did all of the graphic design and branding and it looked so sleek and cool with the red-black-white color scheme. I even saw someone cosplaying the character she designed!

I was there as a representative of Princeton Comic Makers, the group I co-founded with two of my friends who could not be there that day due to other commitments.

We’d agreed to do a panel about Building Creative Communities, but two of the people who were going to be on that panel were unable to attend in person. So they made video recordings of the parts of the presentation they wanted to talk about and we played them, and I asked two of our members (Nishant and Liam) who’d been coming the longest if they wanted to help us out at the show. And they did! They did a great job speaking about their experiences with the group and helping out at the table. The panel was well-attended, maybe 15 or so people in a room built to seat 20. Attendees were engaged and asked follow-up questions and came to find us at our table after it was done.

The table was intended to seat two people so I spent most of the time hovering, fetching lunch, and in a nearby parking garage repeatedly calling my doctor’s office to get them to solve an issue with the medication I’d just gotten prescribed for a digestive problem I’ve had for several months at this point. That’s the other thing I’ve been busy with. Emotionally.

The show itself was PACKED. People were coming through constantly, a lot of cosplayers, a lot of young people. We ran out of promotional postcards before the end of the day, and gave away all 20 of the free anthology sampler zines I’d printed the night before (zines designed by my group co-founder Christina). But… very few sales, despite the crowds. I think partly because we were with the Organizations Tables on the first floor (across from the Trenton Pride Center, which also had a mix of free stickers and paid items few people were buying) and next to Anime Social Nexus (which I don’t think was selling anything.)

The Artist Alley was on the fourth floor of the same building. There were maybe a dozen or so tables arranged around the perimeter of a fairly small room? I forgot to take pictures, it was very hot and crowded up there. I traded prints with an artist who had a lot of Project Sekai merch <3 and bought some stuff from them, but didn’t see anything else that really called to me. Not many zines, mostly acrylic charm-type merch things, a mix of original and fanart work, and a good variety of aesthetics (well curated!)

It was stupid hot outside, over 90 degrees, but outside contained food stalls and a stage. The food stalls had long lines for bubble tea and water ice and absolutely no lines for the actual food, which was funny. The outdoor stage had J-rock cover bands, taiko performers, and idol dancers, and somehow they did draw viewers and no one passed out despite the heat.

I did a second solo panel towards the end of the day about How To Write About Comics: A guide to media analysis for people who like stuff. It was really fun and went really well! The room filled up and people told me after my panel how much they’d been looking forward to it and how much they’d enjoyed it. People asked a lot of questions. Something that came up a few times was the idea of “I really want to write about a comic I’ve loved for a long time, how do I stay objective” and I was like “don’t. Write about how you’ve loved it for a long time. That’s the interesting part.” And Everyone Clapped!! I felt so powerful.

The panels went super smoothly which was great because I’d never paneled at a con before. I’d done the presentation for Writing About Comics at Comics Camp and that went okay, but it was a small group of creators and not twenty strangers in cosplay. Volunteers were on hand to troubleshoot and give us water.

My table ended up packing up about an hour before AA closed to avoid a thunderstorm, and a nice day was had by all.

Exactly one week and one day after that was…

Trenton Charity Comic Con

Where I shared a table with the two co-founders of my group who couldn’t make it to CCAF. Same city, different venue, very different vibe. Trenton Charity Comic Con is an annual event held at the gymnasium of Trenton’s public high school, with students volunteering to help run the event. The school has a culinary program and the culinary students even make lunch for the exhibitors! I was very worried about this because I did not have dietary restrictions when I filled out the lunch survey and then by the weekend this event rolled around I was primarily subsisting on crackers, bread, and unseasoned udon noodles, because of my agonies. But I made it through somehow!

Traffic was slow all day- another scorcher, and very little signage outside of the event pointing visitors in the direction of the show (my girlfriend was sure they’d gone to the wrong place when they popped in to visit.) But there were some relatively big-name artists and writers exhibiting, in addition to my friends, the area’s premier comic shop Final Boss Comics, and local teenagers. Our table was next to some really impressive high school juniors who’d managed to put out eight issues of their comic series in one year! I wish I was that driven when I was their age. They were really sweet and had such a great attitude, I hope they keep making comics forever and ever.

After the show there was a Pasta Social for the exhibitors which did test the limits of my medication a little bit but the pasta was delicious and hanging out with my pals some more was of course very fun. I love cartoonists and comics fans! I love Floyd and Griffin at Final Boss! I want to make comics forever!

… I sold like three things at the show but, I mean, it was fun.

And six days after that was…

Princeton Zine Fest

I proposed the idea of a zine fest to the Princeton Public Library in fall 2023, and designed the logo for the event in 2024. I had to skip last year’s iteration because of a prior commitment, so I was excited to be back for this year’s version!

Feather organized a stamp rally for members of our meetup group, and Anita designed the stamp sheet for it. Five people completed the rally and got Feather’s event-exclusive print and sticker! That was fun too.

The tables were a little narrower than I was expecting, but there was a lot of space behind them for stuff. The zine fest also had a strict “60% of things on the table must be zines” rule that seemed to be mostly followed, and a decent variety of content. There was a really cool table of biology zines that had a functional microscope with a rat hippocampus sample on it for people to look at.

The show was all of four hours long, which, for a comics show, feels like the blink of an eye. I sold less than I did the first year of the event, but there was steady traffic. Highlights include multiple library patrons who wandered in and exclaimed “I just learned what a zine is today!” That’s the kind of thing I love about zine fests.

Afterwards I walked to Ooika matcha shop with my friends for a treat and it was nice if too hot outside.

Besides the shows, I’ve also been surprisingly busy in terms of paid work, which is great! But a little annoying because what I want to do is work on…

Subscribe now

MY WEBCOMIC!!

WHICH IS LIVE NOW WHEREVER COMICS ARE READ!!!

It’s called Fragmentation! Please read it or I’ll cry!

It’s about being a lesbian teenager in a closed Soviet city on the verge of the collapse of the Soviet Union... on the site of the Tunguska event, which causes Strange Things to happen in town and gives the teenage lesbian protagonist glimpses of her terrifying future. It’s gonna be super awesome I promise!

You can get a high-res PDF of the complete first chapter here! Or read page format updates Mondays and Thursdays on my website or comicfury

And scroll format updates Mondays on Webtoon and Tapas!

The annoying thing about serializing webcomics is that it takes a while for a comic to get going if you’re posting it two pages a week. But if my comic gets super popular, wouldn’t it be cool to say you were reading it before it got big? I started reading Check, Please! when Bitty’s twitter was still public and I still brag about that.

Please read my comic! Here’s the first few pages if you need more convincing.

Also, I’m working on a longform piece about Artist Alleys for a paid (!) publication. If you have a lot of experience with Artist Alleys as a vendor or as a fan, please let me know! I’d love to chat about it.

Leave a comment

Woman of Letters

If you let AI do your writing...

Johanna’s job as a producer of literary novels had finally been automated…

Read more

3 months ago · 70 likes · 10 comments · Naomi Kanakia

Disclaimer: I don’t care about superhero comics to any extent I just thought it worked for my idea.1

By 2060, fanfiction at large had split more or less neatly into two distinct groups: readers, and writers.

Unlike the old days, when readers of fanfiction needed writers to create material for them to read, now they could just prompt the AI for whatever they wanted. The general-use AIs were usually blocked from generating text with copyrighted elements in them by the big corporations controlling them, but that was easy enough to work around. If you really liked something– a show, a movie, a book– so much that all you wanted was to spend more time with those characters, in that world, you didn’t mind putting in a little work to get an AI to give you exactly what you wanted more of. Some people shared the results online, some just kept their fics to themselves. After all, if it was made just for you to read, why does it matter if anyone else read it?

Some of these prompters, with particularly clever prompts and particularly deft editing skills regarding pacing and continuity, easily made the leap to original e-novels, and even mainstream novels. But literary novels and literary journals, with their invisible gates and hidden hoops everyone needed to jump through to even begin to be considered viable as a writer, those were beyond even the consideration of most fanfiction writers, AI-assisted or not.

Cheri didn’t know much about literature, or writing. She did exactly as much writing in school as everyone else did, meaning, enough to get past the AI detectors her teachers used and get a passing grade. But one night at college, she went to go see Batman and Superman 7: The Dark Knight’s Return IV with her friends (who said it was a total franchise reboot and didn’t need any prior knowledge to make sense), and… something clicked. Something about Superman and Batman’s relationship in that movie really moved her.

So she did what she usually did when she enjoyed a movie, and talked to her friends about it. But her friends weren’t that into BS7TDKR4; one of them thought the effects were cheap and the other one didn’t like how it interpreted the original comics. But Cheri really wanted to keep talking about it! So what if the effects were cheap and the characterization was off? There was something there, she thought.

She joined the official franchise Discord server. She was in a lot of servers like that for video games she played, mostly because game servers usually came with various freebies and in-game perks. This server had thousands of members, but only a handful of active participants, the discussion carried primarily by a type of bot called Chatterbots designed to keep the conversation pleasant and on-topic. That was also normal.

There was a #fanfiction channel with a generative AI bot custom-made by the rights-holders for fans of this iteration of the DC Comics Cinematic Universe Starring This Iteration of Superman and This Iteration of Batman, which was exciting because if you tried to generate a story about Batman and Superman (or Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent) with the AI built into your word processor, you’d get a “sorry, those characters are copyrighted.” And to protect their intellectual property, you couldn’t copy-paste the generated text from that Discord channel anywhere else.

Most of the people in the channel were prompting the bot for sample scripts of action scenes or crossovers between random elements of the DCCU. That wasn’t what Cheri was interested in, though. She wanted a story about the way Superman and Batman looked at each other.

But when she tried to generate it, she got a message saying this prompt was outside of the AI’s parameters and a warning for soliciting explicit content (Explicit how? She didn’t even ask for a kiss!). She posted in the #ask-a-mod channel about it and was told that “while we understand that noncanonical romantic relationships are a key part of fandom engagement, we cannot promote or endorse these kinds of relationship dynamics in our capacity as an official server.”

And then a moderator, Myn, DMed her with a link to a different, much smaller server. “No AI bots in here, but lots of SuperBat writers and fanartists, and everyone’s really nice!”

So Cheri joined that server too.

It felt like accidentally walking into the wrong classroom, only to realize that was the class you should’ve signed up for all along. No AI bots, like Myn said, but plenty of people were posting in every channel: about SuperBat, about DC comics and movies both recent and ancient, about their school lives or their jobs. There was a channel full of links to PDFs of classic SuperBat fanfiction and official books that focused on the two of them. Everyone was excited to welcome Cheri into this new world and tell her, “That look between Superman and Batman? We saw it too.”

Most of the people in this server wrote their own fanfiction. The AIs couldn’t make what they wanted to read without significant reworking anyway, and it was fun to write together. The server had timer bots so everyone could try to write at the same time every day, and channels for everyone to share what they’ve written and talk about their stories. They always made sure to like and comment on each other’s stories on the fanfiction-sharing platform everyone used. There weren’t that many likes or comments from people outside of the server, though. This was something fanfiction writers had been complaining about for decades by this point, and no amount of pleading Tumblr posts could fix it. Except now, the Twitter users who complained about fanfiction writers not updating fast enough just generated as much of their own fic as they wanted and ignored the fic written by humans, with their sporadic schedules and capricious updating habits. So it turned out that almost everybody using the fanfiction site was using it to post fic they’d written, not to read fic by other people. If you were reading fic, you were reading fic your friends wrote or recommended to you specifically.

But there was still so much fic for Cheri to read! She read the fic her new friends wrote. She read the PDFs of classic SuperBat fic from before Cheri’s mom was even born. She read the scans of the comics, both the new AI-illustrated ones and the old human-illustrated ones, and the fancomics people made sometimes too. She read the not-SuperBat books her friends said inspired their writing. And with her friends encouraging her and giving her advice, she took a stab at writing a fic of her own, thinking about what drew her to this in the first place.

Some months later, when Cheri was no longer the newest person in the server, fanzines were coming back into style, again. Other sci-fi and superhero-adjacent fan servers had started publishing annual booklets of the best work their fan-group had produced that year and mailing them out to contributors, and anyone else who wanted a copy. Myn, who was in a lot of fan servers, proposed the idea in the SuperBat server. Paper was expensive, so they couldn’t make anything very long, but enough members of the group had experience with this kind of book production work that they managed to pull together a zine relatively quickly. Cheri’s first fic was in it, along with a note from the editor celebrating that she’d written her first fic ever for SuperBat.

When they polled the server, they discovered that a good chunk of them lived in or near New York City, so to save on shipping costs, Myn proposed having a launch party for their fanzine at a nice cafe near Midtown Comics (the one near Bryant Park). Nothing fancy, just a handful of fans getting together, picking up their copies of the zine and having a drink or two. She printed as many copies of the zine as her office printer allowed her to print for free and then sat in the cafe stapling them while she waited for the rest of the group to arrive.

As she sat there stapling, an employee of the cafe came over to introduce themself. “Are you with the literary magazine?”

“Literary magazine?” Myn repeated.

The employee explained that a small but prestigious literary magazine was having a launch party for its new issue at the cafe later that night. Now that they mentioned it, Myn noticed the sign by the register saying the cafe would be closing earlier than the time listed on its Instagram page for a private event.

Myn gathered up her zines and started messaging the server to figure out a different location. As she did, the editors of the literary magazine came in to set up for their event. One of them dropped a stack of their magazines on the front table.

“How much for a magazine?” Myn asked. The editors told her.

“What about a trade, magazine for magazine?” She held up the SuperBat fanzine, which, despite being in black and white, looked quite artsy and professional thanks to the number of contributors who worked in graphic design and publishing.

“You know what, sure,” said one of them, picking up the zine. “Wow, I haven’t thought about Superman since I was a kid!”

I’ll also be doing some panels at Capital City Anime Fest on Saturday if anyone’s going to that! Tickets sold out very fast because the venue has a tiny capacity, so. We’ll see!

Also I wrote this follow-up to my piece on webcomics platforms for KCBeat, and a review of the inking techniques book I’ve been using. Please check those out too!

Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes

Didn’t enjoy reading the medievalist pastiche, didn’t get the references. As a glimpse into lesbian life in the interwar period it’s way too stylized for me to actually get anything from it. Djuna Barnes is not my thing.

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

Read this on my own two weeks before my book club decided to read it for book club. I liked it overall I think. It’s about a girl whose identical twin is suddenly getting married and she’s being very normal about it.

On Guard! by Cassidy Wasserman

Read at comics camp! Nice middle-grade graphic novel about fencing, toxic mothers, and being a child of divorce by a nice person :)

California Dreamin’: Cass Elliot Before the Mamas & the Papas by Pénélope Bagieu

Also read at comics camp and I must admit I didn’t realize Cass Elliot was a real person until the afterword. I like how Bagieu draws.

Behind the Scenes!!, Vol. 1 by Bisco Hatori

Purchased at a secondhand bookshop in Juneau because I did not realize Bisco Hatori made anything after Ouran High School Host Club and have never ever heard of this series at all. I thought it was… fine? Definitely not OHSHC level instant classic, though. I kind of understand why no one talks about this one. It’s about a group of college students who make props and costumes and stuff for the film-making clubs at their school, and they’re all quirky in different ways, but the main character’s kind of annoying and it’s just not as funny as OHSHC was. Even if we don’t count the severely dated gay jokes.

Girlfriends by Emily Zhou

Short story collection by a young trans woman about young trans women in and around college towns/collegey environments. Fine I guess. The narrators all felt kind of like the same character over and over, and in a short story collection that makes the stories all blend together a bit… Easy to read, though.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The people were right: this does go hard. I was surprised at how modern the language was sometimes. I felt really bad for Catherine Junior. Girl get out of there. You do not have to marry your cousin.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Two days before my hold came in from the library I saw a girl reading this book on the train and thought it must be a sign. The kind of life described in this book reminded me of how I played with my dolls as a kid: I had a shoebox full of Kellys and pretended the box was an orphanage for them and they had nothing to their names and needed to survive on very limited resources. The dystopia in IWHKM is much bleaker than my doll orphanage was, but it was enjoyable to read about. It wasn’t as… I don’t know. I’m not sure what I expected, but I enjoyed reading this more than I thought I would.

Once Upon a Glashma by Kumiko Suekane

I’m a simple person: I see a manga with a cool cover from a now-defunct publisher at Book-Off for 5 bucks, I pick it up. This was not very good, like, at all, but it was definitely interesting. Deeply 2005-feeling. Once Upon a Glashma is about a world where all the women have vanished and the men start to develop magic powers, and the main character works for the wizard-containment department. There’s a genderbender chapter and ambiguous homoerotic subtext. The ending is kind of a “women be crazy” type of ending and made the rest of the book worse in retrospect, but the art was cool and the holofoil on the cover was gorgeous.

The Academy by Elin Hilderbrand, Shelby Cunningham

Well I read this very quickly for some reason. It was funny, kind of satirical kind of serious boarding school book, not Dark or Light Academia by any means. I kept expecting it to get darker and I read the whole thing waiting for the other shoe to drop but it never really did. I think there were a few focal characters too many but at least one of them was a lesbian. Though I wish there were more lesbians. Annoyingly obvious sequel hooks, so I guess I have to read the sequel eventually.

Strange Buildings by Uketsu

Chewed through this in one sitting somehow. Definitely stronger than Strange Houses or Strange Pictures. The deliberate curation of linked mysteries worked really well here, and even though it was pretty insane it didn’t feel as convoluted as the resolution to Strange Pictures.

You will read my webcomic when it comes out.

Leave a comment

Anyway!

I went to Alaska a few weeks ago for comics camp. My second time there. I couldn’t afford to apply again last year, and the feeling of missing out was so painful I ended up muting the discord chat for the few months leading up to and immediately after last year’s camp session. I had so much fun. I felt like I belonged. I wanted to be there again.

This year, I got my wish.

This time was slightly less fun through no fault of anyone’s: it was unseasonably cold and wet, the water pump at the campsite broke, and I caught a sinus infection going around a couple of days in and ended up trying my best to isolate and not infect everyone else with it. But everyone was really nice and I did ultimately have a good time. Despite the cold and the wet and the mud on everything I owned.

I did a talk about how I write about comics with Gary Tyrell, which was SO cool because he’s been doing this way longer than me and knows a lot more about basically everything. But people said the stuff I talked about was useful which was nice!

On the last night of camp everyone who wants to gives a little speech about what this time meant to them. I opted out because my voice was already getting weaker1, but I could still listen. People talked about how they’d never felt so welcomed in a space in such a short time, how they’d never had this kind of camp experience growing up and how much it meant to experience it as an adult.

Which reminded me that I did have this kind of camp experience growing up. Down to the last-day speeches and everything.

When I was a teenager, I went to summer camp. It was the kind of summer camp where you sign up to take a class for the three-week duration of the program, and you qualify to attend by taking and scoring highly on a standardized test designed for teenagers several years older than you. The program runs at several small liberal arts colleges on the east coast of the US and one or two locations elsewhere (there was a Hong Kong one when I was a kid but I’m not sure if it’s still active?). The first year, I chose to attend a different location than my friend who told me to go because the other location offered a class on writing murder mysteries I really wanted to take. I had a good time, made some friends, bought Understanding Comics2 by Scott McCloud, and came home reasonably satisfied.

My friend came home obsessed with the campsite she went to. She told me about bizarre traditions and wild people she met, and convinced me to go there the following summer.

When I arrived, I met a bunch of people who liked the same things I liked: Homestuck, Discworld, Doctor Who. (It was 2012.) People complimented my Nyan Cat shirt and laughed at my jokes and praised the drawings I did in my sketchbook on the floor at dances. And when the summer camp ended, we stayed in touch on Facebook and at fairly frequent “reunion” gatherings throughout the year, until those of us that hadn’t aged out yet went back to camp the next summer. And I understood why my friend was so obsessed with camp. That was the first time I felt like I belonged somewhere.

That feeling of belonging didn’t last, though. We grew apart as we got older, as teenagers do. Some of us went into tech and got jobs at defense contractors, some of us went into student loan debt, some of us moved to California, to Scotland. And most of us dropped Facebook entirely. The deeper I got into comics, the less I had in common with the people I’d befriended on the basis of liking the same webcomic in 2012. 3 I opened my social media pages and felt those social threads fraying.

The summer camp had a tradition where, early on the final morning, everyone gathered on a specific quad and those campers who were aging out and would not be able to return the following year gave speeches about what the camp meant to them. I don’t remember what I said in mine anymore, if I ended up giving one at all. I wasn’t sure if I was going to come back the next year or not because, with my autumn birthday, I’d be turning 17 after their cutoff date and I could go an extra year. But I ended up doing an art school precollege program the next year instead.

Leave a comment

At the art precollege program, I didn’t really click with anyone as deeply as I clicked with my friends at that summer camp. A lot of international students, a lot of visibly Cool Art Students doing stick and pokes on each other in the dorm rooms and smuggling in alcohol somehow? I liked the course I took and the Oakland, California location (my first time in the Bay Area), and I did feel like I’d made a good choice for my career development, but I missed the camp experience I was used to. I missed the feeling of belonging in a space.

I had a difficult time socially in undergrad. Grad school was easier in that I’d learned from undergrad how to avoid making enemies, but I still had a hard time making new close friends. After grad school ended, I missed having a friend group so much I called two of my art friends in the area who did not know each other and invited them both to draw with me at a cafe. This spun out into the weekly meetup group we run together, and thus I helped create a space that does feel like a place where I belong. Sort of. It’s really loud in there.

At comics camp, I met a bunch of people who liked the same things I liked: making comics, reading comics, talking about comics. I met someone who had the same exact Kenshi Yonezu shirt as me. People laughed at my jokes and praised the drawings I did in my sketchbook, while they were also drawing in their own sketchbooks. Everyone at comics camp is drawing all of the time and it makes it so easy to sit down and draw, the way I want to sit down and draw all the time but sometimes get social-pressured out of. And when comics camp ended, we stayed in touch on Discord and Instagram.

On the last full day, the organizers of the camp held an Organizer Chat where everyone who organizes zine fests and meetups and activities for cartoonists in their hometowns got together to compare notes, and that’s how I learned everyone else’s meetup groups are monthly and not weekly. It was so reassuring to hear that other people are doing the same things I’m doing, from Cincinnati to Portland, and it was so nice to learn from people with decades more experience doing this kind of thing than me.

Juneau is a fairly small town, and the Alaska Robotics Gallery crew has close ties with a lot of the businesses in its downtown. For comics camp, they offer a list of places where you can get a little freebie in exchange for a drawing. Draw your drink at the Amalga Gin Distillery and drink for free! Draw a ninja for the ice cream shop and get a free cone! Design a themed bra for the bra shop and get $15 off your purchase! So much fun, great way to engage with the town, and makes me wish Princeton was a little less hostile to everyone not attached to the university or made of money. We also got a graveyard tour and a behind the scenes tour of the State Museum which was SO COOL. (Not really related to my main point but I wanted to share.)

Comics Camp in Alaska has no age cutoff, no attendance maximum. Some people have been going for four, five, six years in a row. Some people went a few times then took a break for a few years then came back. Some people are just getting into comics and eager to learn more. Scott McCloud went last year. It’s open to anyone who wants to be part of this specific community, who’s not afraid of a little nature and doesn’t mind getting cut off from the internet for three whole days. I love that everyone who goes leaves with a desire to come back.

I’m not the same person I was when I was fifteen, but I still want some of the same things. I want to belong somewhere. I want to be surrounded by people who like the same things I like and want to talk to me about them. I want to talk to people who are doing the same things as me, and can share their knowledge on how to do those things better.

Comics camp made me feel like I belonged somewhere. I was lucky to have experienced that glow of belonging before, but I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I had it again. I always leave feeling inspired and motivated to work on my comics and on my community-building, and I really, really like that feeling.

I love making comics, I love cartoonists, I want to make comics forever and ever!!!

In my first year of art school, I showed my comics to the Editor-in-Chief of a small but respectable local comics publisher, and he looked at them and said, “You need to draw a lot more.”

This made me cry. But also, I did not understand what he meant by that. I already drew a lot!

I filled up like 4 or 5 sketchbooks in that first year at art school, I was drawing stuff for two different extracurriculars on top of my assignments, I was making personal comics and fanart and things outside of class, I’d started and abandoned two webcomics already! Look at all this stuff I drew! What do you mean I need to “draw more”?

Anyway, about a decade later, I think I finally figured it out. But let’s rewind a little to how I got into this whole thing in the first place.

I started drawing comics young: I had a subscription to Nickelodeon magazine as a kid, and when I was in around third grade, they did a special all-comics issue which had a step-by-step guide on how to make your own comics. I followed all of the directions and created Candy the Scaredy Witch: The witch who was afraid of everything! I drew a few comics about her in a composition notebook my mother threw out sometime later. But I kept drawing comics, and around eighth grade or so, I learned that drawing comics was something people did when they grew up.

I read Anya’s Ghost, which is about a Russian-American left-handed girl with a last name Americans can’t pronounce (just like me!) and decided “I wanna make comics when I grow up”. Then I read the author’s bio on the back of Anya’s Ghost and learned that Vera Brosgol is a storyboard artist at LAIKA when she’s not making comics, and decided that I too, will become a storyboard artist who makes comics on the side.

To facilitate this grand plan, I started drawing a lot more, filling up sketchbooks in weeks, signing up for an art class outside of school my friend went to. The art class wasn’t as rigorous as I was hoping it would be– the teacher would draw over my mistakes instead of telling me how to fix them and improve. The goal was more to make solid portfolio pieces than develop technique.

In high school, I started taking art classes and joined the school literary magazine. Both of my school art teachers advised me to “slow down”. I kept finishing my assignments early, even when I made it a goal to work slower the next time, I still worked faster than everyone else.

I started posting art online, but I never seemed to be getting better, and it was frustrating. So I decided I would go to art school (for animation) and learn how to draw better. And I tried making a webcomic! I did not get very far into it but I made an attempt.

I signed up for a figure drawing class at SVA on the weekends and got a scholarship to attend. I won a gold key at the state level in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for a comic I drew one year, I think maybe due to the novelty (no one was really doing those in 2014, I think).

I went to figure drawing sessions at my local arts council, at the Art Student’s League in New York. I drew a lot of figures. But I couldn’t figure out how to translate what I observed to the characters I drew from my head. No matter how much I drew.

So I focused on improving my colors, because that seemed like an easier fix. And it was, somehow! I started getting compliments on my colors relatively early, so I must have solved something there. Mostly thanks to a DeviantArt tutorial that was scrubbed from the internet when its creator got cancelled a few years back. I understood colors and I liked them, and I filled my sketchbooks with colorful doodles of my classmates and whatever I was thinking about at the time.

I took my sketchbooks and things to portfolio reviews, and some reviewers were complimentary, some weren’t. The CalArts rep really was not fond of my sketchbook at all: she liked my figure drawings, but thought my sketchbook pages were poorly thought-out and poorly composed. This was not great to hear just weeks before their application deadline, but I tried to improve on it and did not succeed.

I got rejected from the three most selective (and most expensive) schools on my list: CalArts, USC, and RISD. But I got scholarships to everywhere else, and I picked SCAD because it was the cheapest after their financial aid package and they’d let me graduate a year early and save even more money that way1. I switched from Animation to Sequential Art because the course list of the Sequential Art program appealed to me more than the required animation classes. Because all I ever really wanted to do was draw comics.

At SCAD I got… some instruction, but not as much specific direction as I felt like I needed. Most of my professors graded based on completion and turning in your shit on time– which was easy for me, because I drew fast. I started another webcomic. I joined the student newspaper and the drawing club, which had some speed-drawing activities I did great at. I joined the comics club. I did Inktober and Huevember and Mermay and 24-hour Comic Day and all those challenges. I got into anime again and drew fanart for stuff I liked. I’d copy anatomy drawings out of textbooks and illustrations that I liked, I’d do studies of photos and drawings and draw people around me. I started and abandoned some more webcomics. I did daily comics one summer vacation. I kept filling sketchbooks.

But… my art still wasn’t good enough, and I knew it wasn’t good enough, and I didn’t know what I could do to make it good enough. And no one had any advice for me that made sense, that I could apply easily. That editor at my first Editor’s Day just said the quiet part out loud.

You can tell, in a small cohort of cartoonists, who’s ready for prime time by graduation and who still has a ways to go. Usually, there’s about three to five students in a year who could get a graphic novel deal right out of school, and then there’s everyone else.

I was an everyone else, but I wanted that graphic novel deal more than anything else in the world.

For my “senior project” (which, in our program, was really just a 10-week quarter-long thing), I made a pitch for a YA/middle grade book and sent it to some agents and small press publishers. One agent responded with interest, and agreed to represent the book.

At my last Editor’s Day, I saw that editor again. This time, knowing I was graduating, he was politely encouraging, telling me to keep it up and stay in touch, but in that way you encourage people you know are probably not gonna make it. The other editor that was really nice to everybody else was… very visibly disinterested in my work.

I kept drawing minicomics, unwilling to let the end of school kill my momentum. I started tabling at conventions and entered contests and started another webcomic. But I quickly found myself missing being around cartoonists and artists, so I applied to grad schools. For more comics. I picked CCS- The Center for Cartoon Studies.

Then COVID happened. My book pitch died on submission. Those two things, I think, were unrelated.

At CCS we did have some life drawing/figure drawing sessions and some instruction on drawing technique, but most of the focus was on more abstract comics principles and more concrete book-assembly. I made more minicomics which did not impress noted comics critic Rob Clough, and one which some people did have an emotional response to– it got an honorable mention at the first annual Minicomics Awards in the sci-fi category and my professors liked it. My first year final project and my second year thesis project were both positively received in terms of the concept and story, but at the final critique, my professor said I’m still struggling with drawing people in poses and in spaces. Which is also something Rob Clough said about my drawings. And also something every art instructor I’d ever had said about my drawings.

By this point, hearing the same feedback over and over with no solution that seemed to actually help was like pushing a button to make me cry instantly. I’ve been doing figure drawing! I’ve been copying anatomy books! Why was my art still not good enough! I’ve been drawing for so long!

I had noticed that cartoonists with less technically skilled art were getting published and lauded, but the kinds of stories they were telling were not the kinds of stories I wanted to tell. I wanted to do trendy romantic shojo-manga-inspired YA! Which has a very high technical bar to clear relative to like, slice of life literary indie comics. And I didn’t want to get by with “less commercial” art, I wanted to make stuff that would make people say I was a good artist, because the sunk cost fallacy had at some point become a core part of my self-conception as a human being.

After grad school, I kept drawing comics because I… had to. I don’t know how to stop. I tried my luck with the VIZ originals thing and got rejected at the pitch stage three separate times because my art was not good enough. I went to figure drawing sessions, I copied anatomy books, I copied art I liked. I kept. Trying. Whatever I could. And nothing worked, and people who did not know my extensive history of All This kept giving me the same well-meaning advice to try figure drawing or copy artists I liked or read that anatomy book I’ve read three times. And just draw more. I cried a LOT about my art being bad. Like multiple times a week, every week. I tried not to make this obvious to the people around me.

It’s only now, four years later, that I think I figured it out: I draw fast, and I draw fast because I don’t think enough about what I’m drawing.

I went through all of my old sketchbooks from high school, and while I loved seeing all the colors and experimentation, I realized a lot of it was like… doodling. Just drawing the people around me because they were there, not because I was trying to learn anything in particular from them. I remembered how much fun I had playing with markers and watercolors and things, but I didn’t even rotate any cubes.

I need to rotate more cubes if I want to draw things from imagination.

And because I draw fast, even if I’m filling up sketchbooks, I am not spending nearly as many hours of my day (or of my week, since I don’t even draw every day) drawing as some people are. I need to put the hours in. I can’t just figure draw a few times and be done with it, I need to keep doing it. I need to draw the damn cubes even if I feel like I understand how perspective works, I need to rotate the skulls.

I literally just did not draw as much as I need to draw to improve. I need to draw more, time-wise, not draw more, page-wise. I need to put more time into my drawings.

I’m trying to do that now. We’ll see if it works, I guess.

Comics Camp post coming sometime later this month or even next month because I have to figure out how to structure my Thoughts on Camping. Hope you enjoyed my Thoughts on Drawing because I will never get this personally vulnerable again!

Leave a comment

Star Shipped by Cat Sebastian

I went to the library and saw this in the new releases and grabbed it without even reading the summary because You Should Be So Lucky was so perfectly matched to my personal tastes I just knew anything new by Cat Sebastian would be incredible and it WAS. Grumpy/less grumpy, grump has severe anxiety OCD and also migraines, less grumpy has a tragic past and is also younger and more social, and there’s a life-changing road trip, and they’re kind of like Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner playing Spock and Kirk on a contemporary trashy sci-fi show and everyone’s arguing about whether it’s queerbaiting or the ship will actually become canon, and then it does because this is a romance novel, and it’s great. Funny and cozy and I would lay down my life for Cat Sebastian probably.

Contract Season by Cait Nary

At a disadvantage due to being read immediately after Peak^ alas. It’s fine. Country star and hockey player have to fake-date for the public after having a real one-night stand. I didn’t feel like Sea or Brody grew enough over the course of the story, and I think I’m seeing a pattern in Nary’s work where one partner (Brody, in this book) has everything together and is just kinda patiently waiting for the other party to catch up instead of them both having flaws they need to work through (although Brody does have flaws, most of them aren’t treated as flaws the same way Sea’s are). Similar issue to Lucky Bounce where it’s not very like… pacey, even though things happen it’s lacking a sense of forward motion. Didn’t feel as excited to keep reading it as I did when I read Star Shipped above, or even Season’s Change.

The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

And now for something completely different! Man. Kind of demoralizing to learn how much better the world could have been if America hadn’t spent so much energy meddling in places that had nothing to do with it. Maybe we’ll be able to undo the damage eventually, though that does seem increasingly less likely given the. Everything. The book was very clear, straightforward, easy to read, and I liked the interviews with different people from all parts of Indonesia and Latin America. I knew a little about Indonesia going into this book (internet friends and people from college) and I knew about the similar mass terror period in Malaysia from a Webtoon, but I didn’t know the details, or causes, or the horrible extent. Man.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

PLEASE CLAP. IT’S DONE.

I dunno. By the time I finished reading I was just tired of the whole thing and wanted it to be over. I feel like all the deeper meanings and themes and things just went over my head because I have no interest in the religious arguments everyone was having. The Garnett translation sucks, sorry Joseph Conrad and Hemingway you’re wrong she made some extremely baffling localization decisions (the “wisp of tow” being the most memorably perplexing one) and her general, like, writing style is not very good. I feel like Dostoyevsky’s dialogue reads more naturally in Russian, but I ended up reading the last couple hundred pages in English only because I was lazy and just wanted to be done with it. I don’t think I’m a Dostoyevsky person, sorry! You can call me shallow if you want.

Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett

Another reason to call me shallow I guess: I didn’t like reading this very highly praised book. Her long stream of consciousness monologues were annoying and difficult to follow, a lot of words but not a lot of Things Happening, just a lot of being in someone’s head, and it wasn’t even that fun of a head to be in. I liked the parts where things did happen more than the rest of it. The beginning was an absolute slog, but it did pick up more towards the end. There were some sentences I liked and some scenery descriptions I enjoyed but overall it felt much longer than the 250ish pages it was.

Leave a comment

Bury Me Already (It’s Nice Down Here) by Julia Wertz

I’m a simple person. I see a new Julia Wertz book I hit buy on Google Play books (because my library never carries them and I have no physical space for a hardcover of that size.) This one’s a lot more text-heavy than her previous work, which is understandable given the circumstances of its production (which are also what the book is about). It’s still very funny and incisive. Feels fresh and interesting despite being not the first book about parenting or being a new mother I’ve read.

Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Read for friend book club! I liked it overall I think (though it was not funny despite the cover promising “wickedly funny” lol), but I can’t help wishing it was a little less. Heteronormative. The addition of one single queer character would’ve improved the book significantly. I understand Nigeria is insanely homophobic but still it would’ve made the book better. More detailed thoughts saved for the besties <3

No post next week because I will be in ALASKA for COMICS CAMP!

I started reading Heartstopper fairly early on (before Nick and Charlie even got together). Since then, I’ve watched it become a massive phenomenon, getting a wildly popular Netflix live-action adaptation and prompting Oseman to rewrite the book that the webcomic was originally a spinoff of to tie into the comic better.

With the comic becoming insanely popular came the usual price of internet fame: fans and anti-fans, neither better than the other. The fans gloated about how pure and innocent and unproblematic their faves are (while simultaneously forcing one of the TV show’s leads to out himself) and the anti-fans complained about how only toothless fluffy Western BL can become successful in today’s media landscape and how more people need to read Asada Nemui and watch Kinnporsche. Both sides regularly drag out this comment the author made on Tapas in 2017 and as far as I know hasn’t addressed since:

The characters did eventually start having sex (often), and fans vociferously complained and tried to cancel Oseman for it when they did, even though the sex scenes were not explicit, because implying teenagers have sex is just as bad for some people apparently.

But here’s the crazy thing: Heartstopper is simultaneously more and less fluffy than it seems to the outside observer. The early chapters especially had all the classic tropes of melodramatic school BL: bullying! Secret relationship! Homophobia! And later arcs would cover eating disorders and self-harm, extensively. The main character gets inpatient treatment at a psych facility! But somehow, even while having darker content on page than most BLs I’ve read, the overall impression from fans, haters, and the author themself is of a cozy-comfy happy story world where everything is okay. How is that possible?

At first I thought it was a quantity thing. 400 pages of Intensity obviously get drowned out by 1600 pages of cuddles and flowery effects. But that didn’t seem right. Wouldn’t the contrast make the intense parts stand out more?

Not exactly. Everything intense is carefully framed at a distance or quickly resolved. Charlie’s visit to the psych ward is told from Nick’s outside perspective and then recounted in Charlie’s journal as a past event. We never experience the worst of his mental health problems from his direct perspective, which softens the impact and allows the reader to focus on Nick soothing and comforting Charlie through his crises. When people are jerks, they get told off for it within a few updates. Everything smooths over to a mean of Nick and Charlie smiling at each other and (eventually) having tastefully implied sex.

In the final arc, Charlie and Nick’s relationship is tested by the fact that Nick’s going to university in Leeds while Charlie still has a year of school left, but the tension isn’t… real. Kind of like Robby threatening to kill himself in the Pitt. We know he’s not gonna do it because his actor made the show, and we know Nick and Charlie won’t break up because this is a romance comic and that’s literally not allowed. Everyone in and outside of the story knows Nick and Charlie aren’t going to break up because they’re “Nick and Charlie”, their relationship is special and magical even as the other relationships around them are strained by end of school pressure.

If either of them feel even a little doubt, it’s because they’re too in love. Nick is worried he doesn’t have anything going on besides Charlie and Charlie immediately reassures him about it. They can overcome anything and everything with the power of their love to the point that Nick is confused it doesn’t work that way for Elle and Tao, who decide to end their relationship rather than try long distance when Elle goes to college.

This overall sameness makes it a great comic to read serially, three updates a month, but difficult to binge as the perfection of their relationship gets kind of cloying. Too much cake.

So are the haters right? Is Heartstopper at fault for the downfall of queer media as a whole?

No, obviously not, it’s a fucking webcomic. It hasn’t even inspired any imitators I’m aware of. The school BL webtoons/webcomics I know all either started before/simultaneously to Heartstopper, or are explicitly inspired by the East Asian BL media Oseman denounced in 2017. For all of its popularity, the fact that it’s basically comfort food for everyone who consumes this comic means there’s not a whole lot of analysis or discussion being done about it. It’s not a comic that makes you think anything beyond “aw, cute!” because it refuses to linger on anything that might be upsetting to anybody.

Anyway, I thought it was fine, and now that it’s done I probably won’t think about it again.

BICS is the Brooklyn Independent Comics Showcase, a show I’ve avoided for the past four years mostly because getting to Brooklyn from New Jersey is kind of a pain, but also because I only heard horrible things about it from my friends, who continue to vend there despite the horrors because they live in Brooklyn and so for them it’s much easier to get there.

BICS is interesting because it’s one of those comics shows that everyone complains about but still goes to, and unlike the other shows that fall into that category (generally the Big Three Comic Cons1 and stuff like Anime Expo, where the complaints are the heat, the crowds, and the exorbitant table/hotel costs), it’s also a show where you will not make any money. Tables start at $175 for the weekend and some people I talked to had sold 2 stickers by 5 PM on Saturday2. But everyone still goes, because it’s in Brooklyn and that’s where cartoonists live, apparently.

Subscribe now

Tables are first-come first-serve, but they don’t close the application after they fill up, so when I applied a few weeks late last year they just... never got back to me. This year, though, I think I might’ve been approved if I’d applied last minute, because on Saturday, there were at least a dozen empty tables spread across all three exhibitor rooms.

The three exhibitor rooms

This was actually an improvement on previous years, according to my friends who’d done BICS before. The first three years they were outside, where it was dusty, windy and cold.

Last year, memorably, they were indoors, but half the exhibitors were on the sixth floor of a building where the elevator broke down shortly into the event. (The website conspicuously lacks any photos of BICS 2025). This year, the show was indoors, in a massive converted warehouse in Industry City (where the previous events also were but like, in a different part of Industry City this time). No air conditioning or heat, but with the open doors and number of people coming in it was only mildly stuffy instead of MOCCAfest sweltering3... unless you happened to be assigned to a table directly beneath one of the big glass windows.

There were three rooms: the main Red Room (red wristbands for exhibitors), the Yellow Room (yellow wristbands) to the right of it, and the Blue Room (blue wristbands) to the left. The Blue Room looked the worst upon entry: not enough tables for the size of the space, least foot traffic. One guy I talked to decided to not return for Sunday and table somewhere else instead. The Yellow and Red Rooms were more full, but there were still empty tables in both, and plenty of room to walk between rows.

Tables for the Red Room cost $215 for the weekend, and while some people did make that cost back, I heard sales were low across the board.

First-come first-serve

BICS’s approach to curation can best be described as “none really”, and this is the most interesting part of it. You have seasoned artists with decades of experience sitting next to teenagers whose parents accompanied them to their very first time tabling. You have people with no comics at a Comics Showcase next to micropresses with shelves full of zines, complicated color-coded Artist Alley Displays next to a bare table with five books on it. Anecdotally, I heard stickers were selling the best for everyone.

Including for me as a consumer, apparently. I bought a bunch of The Amazing Digital Circus stickers for my little sister who was mad at me,4 stuff to support my friends (who are all very cool and make great stuff!), and not much else. A very intense salesperson successfully pressured me into buying a comic I had no interest in. I did notice a sharp increase in Vocaloid merch, which at the shows I usually do I’m often the only person selling. So that was interesting.

I didn’t really see anything that made me feel “I have to get this,” but also I didn’t spend all that much time wandering the floor solo so I’m sure I missed a lot. I’d attended the show to catch up with my friends.

And to catch a Comics Industry Networking Mixer5! The mixer was interesting. I talked to a lot of people in the comics industry I hadn’t had a chance to meet before, and I learned a little more about what a Publisher’s Assistant even does6. I made some new acquaintances! I learned that it is in fact really normal to spend years fruitlessly applying for entry level publishing jobs and I am not a failure forever just because it’s been almost a year since my internship with only freelance to show for it.

I do want to work in The Publishing Industry, because I want a steady paycheck and benefits and I’m good at reading and writing. What I really want most of all is for my comics to somehow pay all my bills. I don’t know if I’ll ever get either, but the former sounds a little more likely than the latter.

I don’t know if I’m going to try to table at BICS next year. Hilariously, there’s another Brooklyn-based Comics Event happening in November: The Brooklyn Expo of Comics, organized by BODEGA, a new nonprofit founded by the same people who used to do Comic Arts Brooklyn back in the day. I have reason to expect BEC will be more smoothly-run than BICS, and if it is, it might put BICS out of operation entirely. Is Brooklyn really big enough for two indie comics shows?

I don’t think so! Stop having events in Brooklyn! Start having them in New Jersey, preferably within 20 minutes of me!

Usually when I’m working on a project the driving emotion is a desire to get it done. I have to get the idea out of my head and in front of me so it stops taking up space in my mind. Less enjoyment than exorcism.

When I make a comic, that ends up all tied up with what I think would be popular and how I expect people to react to it. Every comic I make is unfairly saddled with my foolish hope that this’ll be the one that goes megaviral, the one that gets an Ignatz nomination or a Comics Journal profile or whatever, the one that people fucking read. This probably makes them worse.

I made my very first faltering attempt at a webcomic when I was in high school and severely depressed. I couldn’t see a future for myself. I wanted to make comics, but I didn’t see a way for me to do that and keep the respect of the people around me, or even just have a career after high school. The webcomic gave me a sense of purpose, a reason to keep going.

I panicked and dropped it when my plot outline led to two girls kissing and the thought of drawing that gave me emotions I was not ready to unpack at the age of 15. I got around forty pages into it, which is pretty impressive for a teenager with extremely limited comicking experience, and I managed to come up with a concept (a riff on the cartoon ChalkZone if anyone remembers that) that didn’t require me to be good at drawing. The lettering was really bad though.

Subscribe now

After Doodleland, I’ve tried to make a webcomic, like. 6 times. A sports comic about fencing,1 my narrative white whale. A daily diary comic (which I will count as a success because at least I did that one for the length of time I intended to do it). A college shenanigans comic. A graphic adaptation of my little-known favorite book, just to see if I could do it (I could not and ended up deleting this one because I got worried about copyright). Several Webtoon contest entries that performed terribly. A BL webtoon where I tried to integrate Twitter conversations into the narrative, which actually worked out better than it had any right to but I lost all motivation once lockdown hit (and, honestly, even before that).

None of these ever broke 100 updates or 100 subscribers. And all of them, while I found some part of making them fun (coming up with the character concepts and jokes, usually), became chores instead of joys very quickly. I’d start the comic without too much preplanning and make it episodic so I’d only need to come up with one short Bit at a time, and then run out of Bits after a few dozen posts and use the low subscriber count as an excuse to end the experiment without notice or fanfare. And then do it again a few years later, knowing I’d learned from my past attempts, not realizing I hadn’t learned enough.

When I tried promoting these webcomic attempts to drum up readers, I felt horrible, weirdly guilty and so embarrassed of showing my work to anyone anywhere. Partly because at least half of these attempts were more desperate grabs at some form of structure in my creative life than a genuine effort to tell a specific story, and partly because, deep down, I knew they weren’t ready for the masses of the internet. But I feel weirdly excited about promoting my new webcomic project. I think it’s the best thing I’ve made yet and I want everyone to read it!

Since my last attempt at a serialized webcomic in fall 2019, I’ve made dozens of minicomics and a 114-page graphic novella for my grad school thesis. I’ve written a few novels. I know how to plan a longform story now, and I know what parts of comic-making bring me joy.

I came up with the idea for this comic a while ago, but I hadn’t figured out the magnet-click synergy of Plot and Theme until recently. That and doing my manga chapter studies gave me confidence in my ability to plot and lay out this story, at least the first arc. The more chapter studies I did, the more ideas I got about my own comic, and the more excited I got about doing it. Writing it makes me feel happy. Drawing it also makes me feel happy. I’m enjoying working on it.

For this webcomic, I switched from inking digitally to inking on paper, and that’s been a lot more satisfying than working digitally. Also, I think it looks better. I’m still coloring digitally because that part I do like, being able to play with layer modes and effects brushes to make everything all sparkly and magical. Lettering digitally, hand-drawing the balloons.

I want to serialize it as a webcomic because I know the basic concept (soviet-set science fiction plus queer teens) would be a hard sell for traditional graphic novel publishers or manga publishers, but the digital space has clear comps. The video games Z.A.T.O and Flesh, Blood and Concrete especially, though those both lean more horror than my comic idea. Still, I think fans of either would enjoy checking out my comic.

It’s about a girl who lives in a closed city on the site of the Tunguska event, where weird things keep happening even 80 years after the meteor exploded. Shortly after a new girl joins her class, mysterious anomalies start appearing in the air. If you touch one, you get a glimpse of your future. And this girl does not like the future she sees for herself.

I’m currently about thirty pages into the script, 12 pages into inking, but I think I will be able to get to at least 50. My goal is to reach 100 pages drawn, and if I can pass 100 subscribers on the way, even better. If I happen to catch the attention of a publisher along the way, that’d be a nice bonus, but that’s not my endgame here. I want to make this comic, and I want it to be fun.

Fragmentation is launching June 8.

What I did finish this month:

Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood

I checked this out because I wanted to learn what the Ali Hazelwood fuss was about but refused to read reskinned Reylo and you know what maybe I should’ve taken my chances on the Reylo. The narrative voice was actually fine. I thought it’d be cringe/overly twee from what I’ve heard about her writing, but I thought it sounded very standard-issue het romance novel.

But oh my god. It’s an age gap romance where instead of the two central characters having character flaws they develop past over the course of the narrative, the two central characters are just perfect for each other and the only, THE ONLY point of conflict is that one of them is older. Not even that he has different values because he’s older. Age in this book is pretty much literally just a number. All their arguments are just “I’m too old 4 u” “no ur not” and it’s so repetitive and so POINTLESS because the age gap has NO CONSEQUENCES. He’s her older brother’s best friend and the older brother doesn’t even object to the relationship!

I did like the Sicily setting and there’s some fun set pieces and comic misfortunes that occur. The side characters are fine. Honestly even the main characters are fine in isolation, I just feel like the whole concept of an age gap romance was fumbled here. The book probably would’ve been better if they were the same age just because that way the author would’ve had to find a more interesting conflict for them. The rest of it mostly worked though!

Season’s Change by Cait Nary

I really liked this book mostly because it reminded me of Crossfire, my favorite fanfiction, except if Miyuki was more traumatized and Sawamura was into yoga and therapy. I also liked Nary’s writing style, much less detailed than AO3 user Kittebasu’s but still very evocative. I think the author and I might have a mutual acquaintance? There was a familiar name in the acknowledgements section. Pretty good friends-to-lovers hockey romance novel, would recommend!

Us by Sara Soler
This was on hold from the QLL on Libby for at least a year and I don’t think it was worth it. Very “Trans 101”, interesting for the Barcelona-specific angle mostly, but I checked it out because I really liked Soler’s art style in the sample pages and I think she has a good graphic-memoir picture-voice. I would read more memoir from her. I like looking at her pictures. Worth maybe a month or two on Libby hold but not nearly a year of Libby hold lol.

Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyễn

Honestly was not expecting to like this one as much as I did. This is a satire about two Asian American trans girls playing men’s indoor volleyball and being internet influencers, while also being in a relationship with each other and dealing with so many levels of rivalry and jealousy. The no-quotation-marks style really works here, even if it was a little confusing sometimes, because it flattens the social media dialogue, internal dialogue, and spoken dialogue all into one thing, making them all seem equally important. The internet bits felt realistic and believable. It’s trying to do a lot and I think it mostly succeeds. I enjoyed it, actually! Even though there were somehow zero Haikyuu references. Minus half a point for not mentioning Haikyuu</3

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Read this for friend group book club and am thus saving all my best takes for the besties sorry. Reminded me of Sorokin’s work a little, but slightly less gross.

Lucky Bounce by Cait Nary

Finished reading this and then went to Nary’s website to be surprised that this was published after Season’s Change, because it feels like a step down from her earlier book. I liked how colorfully and specifically she described Philly (a town I feel an affinity with because I live near-ish to it lol) but there’s not a whole lot of… plot. I kept waiting for something to happen, like character development for either protagonist, maybe their secret relationship getting discovered or the kid’s mom coming back or something, but nope. Straightforward relationship progression with maybe half a conversation’s worth of friction between sex scenes. It wasn’t an unpleasant reading experience by any means, but it was much less memorable than Season’s Change. The overall story structure reminded me more of fanfiction than anything else I’ve read recently, including the former Reylo BNF.

Ok now back to working on my webcomic and doomscrolling Linkedin1