Red and Blue: a comic about spontaneous abortion

[lb_lee]

Here we go! Red and Blue is up for sale in ebook and paper forms, $6 USD either way! And boy is it grim; content warnings (with spoilers) will be in the comments below.

 

The leading cause of death for pregnant people in the United States in 2018-2019 was homicide. That risk was heightened for Black folks and young people (age 10-24) of all ethnicities. Two-thirds of the life-ending injuries took place in the home, and strangulation was the third most common means of murder. (Source: Wallace et all, "Homicide During Pregnancy and the Postpartum Period in the United States, 2018–2019")

This is a reality-mashing horror comic about being that kind of statistic. 32 pages, black and white with spot color, mostly red and blue.

This was a comic I made by accident, over three different periods. The first scene I drew was the garbage bag one, penciled in November when dealing with the memories involved. In a similar state, I horked up the cover images and all but one of the full-page illustrations this past December and January, done in raw ink. They then lay in my sketchbook, unrelated fragments, for months, until May, when I heard about the leaked Roe vs. Wade documents. Something inside me began to scream and scream, and the rest poured out of me in the following weeks, and I debuted it at the Toronto Comics Arts Festival.

Every attempt I have made to convey my experience of miscarriage in my own words has failed. It is unspeakable. So I made the creative choice to not speak in the comic myself. Everyone speaks but me, and the scene breaks are quotes from academic articles, the Texas governor, and a Planned Parenthood blogger. I also have a brief playlist.

I did not make this comic with the intent of convincing pro-life people. I cannot, and it cannot. Instead, I made it because I had no idea that my experience, however lurid, is statistically documented as... if not normal, not nearly as rare as I thought. Many, many pregnancies become miscarriages. Only luck and incompetence prevented me from becoming another statistic in the "third most common" bracket.

This comic is not a reasoned argument. It is a scream. Sometimes I feel like my heart is still screaming. But I hope it proves useful to others.

Comments

Content Warnings

[lb_lee]

Blood, vomit, rape, miscarriage, violence, attempted murder, suffocation, and strangulation.

[lb_lee]

Also I just crunched the numbers and realized that yes. Yes, this was a portion of why I dropped off the face of the digital fucking earth in November.

It's been a bad seven months.

[the_broken_tower]

Ordered a copy for Yoshiya. He has some... related baggage... that he doesn't talk about.

As morbid as it is to say, I'm glad you were able to get *something* productive out of the wreckage. Those stories are important. They hit differently than just statistics. And they do help people.

It's woefully inadequate but there's tea over [here] if you want some.

- Red Jake (he/him)

[lb_lee]

The stories are how we remember. And even though it's hard, it's okay. As fucked up as it was, at least I didn't become a parent in my teens the way my cousins did.

--Rogan

[talewisefellowship]

❤️

--Janusz

[feotakahari]

It seems like everyone I know is scared and angry. So if nothing else, you’re not alone. A lot of people are going to fight this by whatever methods are available to them. I hope that provides some degree of comfort.

[lb_lee]

Yeah, we are all screaming rats in an overstuffed cage right now, I think. A lot of things are scary right now.

But we're still here.

[itsamellama]

♥

[talewisefellowship]

Now that I've read it, I have to ask, were you influenced by Art Spiegelman? Some of your art here reminds me of the art in MAUS.

--Janusz

[lb_lee]

I mean, Art Spiegelman is huge in the comics world, so even though I have only read MAUS, and only once in high school, I wouldn't be surprised if his stylistic choices have spread far beyond him and I absorbed them through subcultural osmosis.

But no, it wasn't something I did on purpose. If I had to name names, I'd say I was more influenced by Sam Kieth's works like the Maxx and Zero Girl, and he used abstraction very differently. Bryan Talbot was far more restrained but did some reality-mashing in The Tale of One Bad Rat that also stuck with me, though I was way less disciplined about it.

Rogan

[talewisefellowship]

That makes a lot of sense. It's really nice work

--Janusz

[lb_lee]

Thank you. People are responding more positively than I expected, which is very nice of them!

[beepbird]

The emotion of it definitely came across. It's almost more effective than a reasoned argument as a result- sometimes a scream says more than logic ever could. I haven't had this experience, but I feel for you, and I hope you're hanging in there.

Good choice of scene breaks, by the way. I honestly didn't know the statistics were that grim, and it added a lot of impact.

[lb_lee]

Thank you! At first I tried to use my own words for scene breaks, but it was a total failure. I ended up defaulting to other people's quotes instead, out of desperation, but that proved a much better decision all around. The last one I dug up was the pregnancy homicide statistic, which I found through link-jumping from a post by minoanmiss, at the very end of when I was finishing the book.

Plus I do truly want people to read the works I got those quotes from, since they were a huge help for me, putting my experience into context so it wasn't just this bubble of shame or a freak lightning strike that had no relevance to society as a whole. (Which reminds me, I should go into the healthymultiplicity.com coding and add clickable links for the online cites right now. *goes and does so*)

--Rogan