I spent ten years building up a following on Tumblr. I had 30k+ followers, great engagement, it helped my career thrive like nothing else. I could quit my day job and live off the fan base I’d accrued.

Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.

This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.

So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.

The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.

People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.

I don’t want to make “content,” I want to make comics, I want to make art, and I want to do it in a space that is mine. I’m not sure there’s a place for that anymore.

As Twitter empties out, I am once again a digital nomad, trying to rebuild a following on yet another site I don’t own (Bluesky, which is nice and you should follow me but also I am just so tired.) Every single time I move to a new site, maybe only 10% of old followers keep following me to the new place. Having done this several times, I barely have anything anymore.

YU+ME, at its peak in 2007, had 250,000 regular readers that came to my own personal website. Today, I have 450 followers on Bluesky. To say that I feel absolute existential despair is an understatement. I am making the best work of my life and nobody is seeing it.

God is Love

The Greatest Generation

Support me on Patreon

On the Women’s March ‘Guiding Vision’ and its inclusion of Sex Workers

I am proud of the work I’ve done as part of the Women’s March policy table – a collection of women and folk engaged in crucial feminist, racial and social justice work across various intersections in our country. I helped draft the vision and I wrote the line “…and we stand in solidarity with sex workers’ rights movements.” It is not a statement that is controversial to me because as a trans woman of color who grew up in low-income communities and who advocates, resists, dreams and writes alongside these communities, I know that underground economies are essential parts of the lived realities of women and folk. I know sex work to be work. It’s not something I need to tiptoe around. It’s not a radical statement. It’s a fact. My work and my feminism rejects respectability politics, whorephobia, slut-shaming and the misconception that sex workers, or folks engaged in the sex trades by choice or circumstance, need to be saved, that they are colluding with the patriarchy by “selling their bodies.” I reject the continual erasure of sex workers from our feminisms because we continue to conflate sex work with the brutal reality of coercion and trafficking. I reject the policing within and outside women’s movements that shames, scapegoats, rejects, erases and shuns sex workers. I cannot speak to the internal conflicts at the Women’s March that have led to the erasure of the line I wrote for our collective vision but I have been assured that the line will remain in OUR document. The conflicts that may have led to its temporary editing will not leave until we, as feminists, respect THE rights of every woman and person to do what they want with their body and their lives. We will not be free until those most marginalized, most policed, most ridiculed, pushed out and judged are centered. There are no throwaway people, and I hope every sex worker who has felt shamed by this momentarily erasure shows up to their local March and holds the collective accountable to our vast, diverse, complicated realities.

I know sex work to be work. <--- THIS.

ride or die

Conventions can feel like a days long performative party at which everyone but me can have fun. It spends energy in exchange for gratitude which, while great, ain’t energy. I like seeing friends on either side of the table, old and new. I like to shake hands and sign my name and say thank you to the people that afford me this ridiculous lifestyle. I like to hug people, total strangers, who look at me and i can see in their eyes that we are alike in ways other people can’t see, don’t know about, can’t understand. Mostly, though, I try to smile and say thank you and to occupy as little space as possible. I try hard to not ask for that exchange, for that transaction, with others who, like me, find themselves on the other side of the table.

I made an exception at Dragon*Con last year. Congressman John Lewis walked by me and I shouted – I mean straight-up SHOUTED – “Congressman!”

He stopped and turned and smiled, all pro. I told him that in a place that was all about superheroes it was nice to meet a real one, and I shook his hand. I said, “You know my wife. Red hair. We were all supposed to have dinner together –”

The Congressman cut me off as we shook.  He brought his other hand up to mine and embraced it, turning a handshake into a – into I don’t know what. A gesture of sincerity. “Last year. And your father passed. I’m sorry. That’s terrible,” he said and, shaking his head said very quietly, again, “Terrible.”

He was right. I was a guest at the show the previous year when my father’s tenuous grip on his health slipped for the last time. I left the show and raced the reaper from Atlanta to Charlotte to be at his – and my mother’s – side when his time came that evening.

And indeed, had I stayed, the Congressman, writer/aide-de-camp Andrew Aydin, wunderartist Nate Powell, and Kel and I were supposed to have dinner together. In fact it was during that meal that I texted my wife to tell her dad had died.

And a year later the Congressman remembered. 

I praised his book MARCH (Leigh Walton of Top Shelf, who shepherded the project, gave me a copy of the freshly-minted v3 then and there and the March team signed it and you coulda knocked me over) and thanked him for teaching me the virtues of “good trouble.”

Then, to make Kel laugh, Leigh and the Congressman and I took this:

In a crazy sea of humanity, where everyone’s got their game-face on, where everyone’s on their grind, when everyone’s hustling literally and figuratively, this man, this hero, straight-up remembered why, a year ago, we were supposed to meet but did not. 

Put aside the man’s career, his history, his legacy – that small, true moment of humanity from anyone would’ve meant the world. That it came from him meant all the more.

So yeah, I’m pretty ride-or-die for Congressman John Lewis, you goddamn butterscotch nazi pissmagnet. Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

(Pardon my language, Congressman.)

Ride. Or. Die.

  Here’s a few more from The Bus, by Paul Kirchner

SHONEN. TRUMP.

Some may say we took it too far.

This is a web-based zine/anthology based around Donald Trump x Shonen Jump. The pun itself is merely a starting point; there are no genre rules other than it just has to involve Señor Trump!

We’ll be posting sketches and process images throughout September, and final comics and illustrations will go up early October! We want Donarudo Turumpu to be proud (no we don’t).

We will also put out a small zine collection at Cartoon Crossroads Columbus!

Now I’m sure by now you’re all sick of hearing about Trump and all of his awful shenanigans, but imagine it this way: It’s close to election time and there would be no better time to push this monster of a thing out. I mean, if Clinton gets elected, Donny Boy will just fade out of fashion, no longer a hot topic. And if Trump gets elected by some freak collapse of good-will, well that’s the End of Days and no longer funny.

Get ready, it’s gonna be yuge.

OMG. I. Love. The. Comics. BABIES.

MEAN. GIRL. GANG.

Another strip about a contemporary issue (gun control) that hasn’t changed significantly in over twenty years.

(Heavy Metal issue #144, May 1993 - Page 81 C'mon America! Lay Down Your Guns by Fleener)

Do androids dream of electric sheep?

Ghost Girl (by Kevin Francis Gray)

Via

man but this photoset ignores some of my favorite things about this piece

like this

and this

it gives it more of a story i think

Strip Club Gothic

A customer licks your nipple during a lap dance. This is the third time tonight. You wonder when it will end.

There are thirteen dancers and two customers. It is hopeless, you say to yourself, opening Neko Atsume at the bar.

The DJ plays you a wack song. Suddenly time stands still. This is the longest four minutes of your life. You curse the fact that you will inevitably be required to tip the son of a bitch out $10 at the end of the night despite this.

Your back is turned to a customer while you’re on stage. You are shaking your ass for him. Suddenly he smacks a dollar onto your bare ass. The bouncer does not notice. He never notices. You “accidentally” knock the customers beer into his lap as revenge.

A customer mocks a girl on stage while complimenting you. You grit your teeth and resist the urge to bury your heel in his crotch until he screams. You give her an extra hug later. She did not deserve that.

You are on your period and have just removed your g string on stage. You give another dancer The Look™ as you spread your legs. She silently flashes you a thumbs up. Your tampon string did not fall out of its neatly tucked position. Nobody can see it. You are safe. This time.

A couple comes to the club. The girlfriend looks miserable, she has clearly been dragged along. You can hear her call you a trashy pig from a mile away. You almost feel bad for her.

A baby stripper has coated the pole with lotion and her body glitter is all over the stage, and now it’s all over everyone else too. This is what hell looks like.

A customer tells you that you’re too smart to be working in a place like this. What he doesn’t know is that you’ve already strategically plotted the ways you will manipulate him into emptying his bank account. You will leave with fat stacks of cash. He will go home drunk and broke.

You take someone to do a lap dance. He is wearing basketball shorts. You switch from contact to air dance the moment you feel every intricate detail of his boner against your ass.

A group of sloppy straight female customers sits at the stage. They scream and get embarrassingly rowdy every time you bust out a move. One of them tries to “tip” you by putting a dollar between her boobs to see if she can force you to take it out with your mouth. You don’t need the dollar that badly.

This is good but it’s not gothic, it’s just an average shift at the club.

Strip Club Gothic

This guy is old and smells a little funny, but it’s the middle of a slow night and you’re too motivated to turn him down. You smile and laugh and grind his lap, but nothing makes him smile. Annoyed, you work harder, rubbing his head, massaging the tight tendons in his neck and shoulders, running your nails lightly down his arm. It’s when your nails encounter resistance that you feel the first twinge of fear. Then you feel wetness, and you look down at your fingers on his arm: His arm is crusted in green scabs, scabs your nails opened with the lightest of caresses. He’s bleeding freely, but his face hasn’t changed. You know you will be punished if you end the dance early, but you can’t shake the fear that you’re dancing for a reanimated corpse. You look at your fingers in horror and remind yourself you have no cuts. You keep dancing. At the end of your song, he jerks stiffly upright, bows, and walks away. In the dressing room the manager laughs a light little giggle. “That’s why we have alcohol pads!” she chirps.

You count your money carefully after you get offstage, check each single, and make sure that you don’t have That Bill. That Bill is back in circulation at the club. They warned you about it, you thought it was a joke, and then Antoinette got it. …Antoinette. You miss her, but it’s best not to think about her. It’s best not to think about That Bill at all. Check your dollars, heave a sigh of relief, and hope you don’t have to go onstage again. The less time you spend onstage, the lower the odds of getting tipped That Bill.

The guy with the claws is back! You’re excited because Andy didn’t believe you last time, that he ran his fingers along your arm and you saw his nails were thick talons lined with green. He likes you, so on your word he agrees to get dances with Andy after you. You push her into the room, and fist pump when she comes out later wide eyed and apologetic. Sometimes your brain needs backup, it just can’t absorb everything that happens here.

You know better than to work with the Friday night staff. You know better, but sometimes you just need the money. You need the money enough to bite down on your fears and risk it. And at one am tonight, like one am every one of Friday, you hear the opening bars of that song, that one song. The light goes dark blue even though there are no blue lights in the club, blue is unflattering! and the air seems to get thicker and harder to move through and mental restraint keeping the customers people is gone, the minors who’ve gotten used to working this shift are hiding in the back, hoping they don’t get called to the floor. At one am on Saturday mornings all the rules are off, the bouncers turn into wolves, and it’s every dancer for herself for the next hour and a half. You hide your money and switch into sneakers, holding your shoe as a cudgel, and swear again never to work this shift. Again. Only an hour and fifteen minutes to go.

...Well, now I want a whole book of gothic horror stripper stories!

Shirley Chisholm, U.S. Congresswoman photographed by richard avedon

“Small Magic”

by piddydood.tumblr.com