This is a 12 page comic book story I was invited to submit to an anthology of LGBT Horror Comics. I told a haunted house story starring a character that looks remarkably like myself. Digital ink and color. It is for sale at Northwest Press.
See my art website Secret Fan Base for more.
Invisible Men was story I did for the Prism Comics “Alphabet” Queer Comics Anthology edited by Jon Macy and Tara Madison Avery. I started the story when I was still in the midst of struggling with what it means to be a bisexual married man and to give some feel for the discussions and conflicts I had with my wife. By the time I finished the story I was already into transition and moving into a completely different category of person which I do not address. I leave my character in his life as bisexual cis-male and wish he and his partner luck and peace whatever they decide to do. I think the story does a great job of distilling most of my thoughts around being a bisexual man in a monogamous relationship and in the society at large. I’m proud of how the story is structured and how the characters are revealed. I am glad to be out of that particular closet and gender, but I am a big believer in bisexual liberation and in bi-men in particular being more visible and seen with honesty and compassion.
Read the PDF story here and please consider buying the Anthology, it’s filled with work by amazing queer artists. I was flattered to be asked to contribute by my longtime friend Jon Macy. It dragged me out of retirement from queer comics and I am hopeful I will manifest some new stories soon.
When I first encountered drag queens I immediately thought of them as super heroes. Statuesque, larger than life, colorfully dressed for battle of one kind or another. I wanted a way to fit in the queer culture of San Francisco in the early 1990s, to contribute my talents to the cause. I was not inspired to lip-synch or do Judy Garland numbers. I wanted to draw!
I started drawing drag and gender bending superheroes and rediscovered my love for illustration along the way. Working on this book inspired my return to art school where I completed a degree in illustration and went on to a decent career as an artist in the animation industry.
I had been a wanna-be comic book artist my whole life and had spent my teen years steeped in 80s X-Men comics and their epic battle as an oppressed minority in a world that hates mutants.
I had a great deal of anxiety about joining the queer movement and I poured that anxiety into a comic book about a dystopian future world where a team of drag queens and transsexuals in a queer ghetto fought against a homophobic totalitarian system. It was occasionally fun, energetically drawn, very wordy, violently dramatic and politically paranoid. I loved the characters and am amazed to this day by the amount of time and energy I put into the 3 issues I completed before abandoning the project to focus on school and the struggles of my life. I feel like I let my characters down, I wanted to do so much more with them.
Homozone 5 became a guarded secret along with the rest of my past, probably less from shame about sexuality and gender identity than shame over the artwork and writing “not being good enough” for the horrible critic that lives in my head.
The first issue is online at Homozone5.com, here are a few sample pages….
