Back from TCAF

[lb_lee]

It was, I think, my first time in Canada! (As children, we once went to Niagara Falls, but it was a long time ago and I don't remember if we crossed the border.) I got to visit the Glad Days bookstore, a gay bookstore established in 1970, and I also got to meet Ava Pun, the creator of Academy 118, an adorable science comic about the periodic table as a school and the elements as the students who study there! (She hired me last month to sensitivity read for an upcoming chapter with a multiple character, and I was charmed by the comic's concept and its cuteness. It's also fully alt-texted! Stay tuned!)

I also spent more money than usual, because I wanted Canadian comics without the brutal international shipping. The highlights:

• Pass Me By: Electric Vice, by Simmers and Owens, a 1973 glam rock queer love story. I shelled out for the limited Risograph edition because it used the technology with more finesse and subtlety than I have ever seen and I am a sucker for florescent pink and teal apparently. This is the second book of the series, but they don't have to be read in order, and I'm going to be buying the first book, which is about the main character in 2017 as an old man in rural Canada with dementia.
• Duty Must Be Done, by Diana Tamblyn. A short nonfiction about Frederick Banting, a national hero of Canada who helped discover insulin and thus made diabetes treatable.
• Extinction, by Tas Mukanik. Illustrated poetry zine on the idea of irreversible gone-ness. Also done in Riso, black and metallic gold. Came with a couple beautiful mini-prints inside too!
• Sam Medlock was the only American I bought books from at TCAF; I got Mixed, a short comic about their experiences as a mixed Cherokee/Polish person reconnecting with their ancestry, and War Zone, a short magical realism comic about suicidal ideation and community. Medlock uses abstraction, reality-mashing, and non-literal imagery to great affect and I really look forward to seeing what else they make in the future!

I also bought a Riso swatch book from a Chicago press because I'm hoping to Riso a later run of my new comic, Red and Blue (formerly known as Spontaneous Abortion). Right now, the ebook is mostly black and white, with spots of blue and red, and the paper run has a red, black, and blue cover with black and white interior. Mac won me over to the idea of Riso-ing it entirely in two colors with the comment, "a comic so much about American politics should be in red and blue." That's a task for the future, though; I'm going to put the current editions up for sale once I have the text-only version finished, and today is a rest day. Y'all are going to have to wait a few days for the super-bleak grim comic about filicide and abortion politics.

There's also the other project I'm hoping to debut this month. See, I've been performing soul-CPR the past few months by branching out into prose pornography. I've exhausted my nobler motives; only horny id sustains me now. My debut will be a 10,000 word short transgender omegaverse porn taking place in a fantastical college Gulf coast beach town where the cops aren't armed, nobody gets murdered, and the biggest annoyance you deal with are alpha bros Chad and Chaz getting into flex-offs in the middle of traffic. Expect codpieces, giant rodeo belt buckles, alpha girls, and lots of banging.

Comments

[lb_lee]

Pass Me By looks even more amazing in person. I'll show you the books next time we hang out!