What is a "Comics Community"?

Jan 20 2024

I’ve been rereading my prospectus to pull out some ideas for blog posts. My thought was that if I do little bits-and-bats of writing, eventually they’ll build up into, you know, big writing, more or less. Anyway, I’ve been re-reading it since I had to go through it for the December episode of Drawing a Dialogue and thinking about it and our interview with Emma one of the things I’m circling around is what-is-community-anyway. Who’s comics community is it anyway. So on.

“Community” is central in my prospectus, or I guess I also say like, network, counterpublic, you know, various words to try and look at the different ways groups of people relate to each other socially. When I asked Emma if she thought there was a trans community in comics, she said:

"That's interesting, because in the independent comic scene, I would say like, every year it feels like there's certainly more trans cartoonists contributing work to like, the body of independent comics, but. I don't know if really. I've seen a really concrete community around it, like sometimes you'll see it with a certain micro press or something. […] Yeah, it's interesting because I don't necessarily feel like the independent comics community is a, a community per se […] You have a group of friends and there are people you know and like. You meet friends of friends. But a lot of the times it's not like we are all centered around this one specific like group or organization.”

This has stuck with me, because it poses an interesting difference in the way I was thinking about community when I asked that and how Emma was. And community does feel like one of those words that gets used in nine thousand different ways, right? In my prospectus, I’m thinking of “community” as a network of queer/trans people who read each others work/share/trade/buy/distribute etc. So for instance, I make a comic, Diskette Press run by Carta Monir publishes it, Diskette puts it on their table at a show, and so do I, and oh, Radiator Comics distributes for Diskette, so Radiator also puts it on their table, and so that text is moving through three different processes - the artist, the publisher, and a distributor - to more or less the same audience (people at the show). So there’s a physical connection between these three entities. Or like, at SPX 2023, my partner and I shared a table with our friend Rosemary Valero O’Connell, who had a book by her friend Ezra on our table too. So even though Ezra wasn’t there, his work was being moved through our network by being on our table and so forth. I think that’s why I find the show space so interesting, because the physical presence of a book on a table is like…a map, right, of these relationships, which can be personal/intimate or business or whatever.

So what makes a community then? In their introduction to the section “Queer in Common” in The LGBTQ+ Comic Studies Reader, editors Alison Halsall and Jonathan Warren say:

We should not forget to acknowledge the affirmative and rallying effect of queer comics simply greeting their readers as queer citizens together. By addressing and thereby helping to assemble their implied audience, LGBTQ+ comics establish a sense of readers’ shared affinity. Their community-promoting function….

Suggesting that at least one form of comics community is queer readers and (presumably) authors, or at least texts (another interesting idea: as a comic can be queer, let’s say, regardless of whether the creator is, can a community be a queer person or persons and a text they identify as queer?) They also point to Darieck Scott and Ramzi Fawaz’s critical introductory essay “Queer about Comics” (2018), wherein they suggest that comics status as a “marginal” medium—a perceived outsider medium, that is—“thus hails counterpublics,” a .. well, to come back to the word, community that is aware of its’ subordinate, outsider status within a larger public/community. Honestly, I’m not really interested in the comics-itself-as-marginalized thing, I think that’s quite an oversimplification, so I’m not going to spend time with that idea right now, with apologies for Scott and Fawaz. But this does get me back to community/counterpublics situated around the text - important to Michael Warner’s formulation, publics and counterpublics are formed through circulation of ideas/media/rhetoric, that is, texts, in the broadest sense of the world.

Anyway, I’m starting to meander and I need to re-read Publics and Counterpublics before I get any further. To get back to the point - Emma’s opinion and mine - it’s more like - okay, how do you put yourself in community, right? Are all trans cartoonists automatically in community—if you define community as “shared gender status” and “shared creative output” then yeah, absolutely. Does that, in the practical sense, mean anything? That I don’t know. So it’s probably less about the theory and more the function. When I think of the artists I’d put myself in community with, the functionality is: I know them, I know we pull from a similar lineage of work, I know we engage in similar or shared production. Other self-published or zine artists. Other trans artists who engage with transness politically. Which is along the lines of what Emma said, being centered around a group or organization, though I wouldn’t necessarily think of a formally existing group as a requisite.

There’s more to dig in to here, but I’m sleepy now.

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