ten years

on webcomics, advertising, and being trans for a whole decade

On September 26th, 2014, I drove down to Wichita for a doctor’s appointment. I went to the room for a few minutes and then the doctor came in and she said, “So, you wanna start taking testosterone! Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You know what it does?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve done a lot of research. On the internet.”

“Great! Well, anyway, here’s a piece of paper that tells you what changes to expect at what time. Just so you have it.” She gave me a table that listed which physical things would happen during what timespan, measured in weeks and months from start-date. I already knew all of this, but it felt nice to have confirmation from an actual doctor. She gave me a prescription, sent me off for a blood draw, told me to come back in six months and call if I had any questions.

And that was it. A three-hour drive for an appointment that didn’t even take ten minutes.

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Let’s talk about something else. Webcomics were big in the early 2010s. Starting in 2011, I made a weekly webcomic to keep myself busy for a year while my parents waffled about whether they were going to let me go to art school. Not a gag-a-day-strip, but one of those pulpy graphic-novel-style comics, you know, a gangster story about a police detective who secretly worked for the mob.

During my isolated teen years, the internet had put me in contact with dedicated people who wanted to make and see good art, and a lot of them were making webcomics. These artists devoted many hours a week to complex and difficult work just because they wanted that art to exist and they wanted it to be Of Quality. And it was— I was reading The Meek and Hanna Is Not A Boy’s Name and Lackadaisy and TJ & Amal as they were updating, each a beautiful one-person passion project. My friends and peers were people like Amy King, Tish Doolin, and Dirk Grundy, creating these high-effort labors of love that we all knew were unlikely to make any money, let alone enough to live on. Making money seemed impossible, so it was mostly an afterthought, and so webcomics filtered in only those who felt compelled to create anyway.¹

That was changing, though. Around the time I was starting art school, the artists I admired were getting noticed by the world outside of the internet. Kate Beaton won multiple awards for Hark! A Vagrant, as did Em Carroll for her innovative horror webcomics like His Face All Red and Margot’s Room. Sakana artist Mad Rupert got hired to create a miniseries for Cartoon Network’s Regular Show comic spinoff, proving that being good at webcomics could get you a job. Iron Circus published the first Smut Peddler anthology through a Kickstarter campaign that pulled in $80,000, whereby Spike Trotman proclaimed with great pride that she had proven the impossible was possible.² You could in fact pile up a fat five figures by putting good art on the adolescent internet and asking people to support it, even if that art was cartoon pornography made by and for women, most of whom had never even been published before. It wasn’t gonna get you on the shelves at Barnes & Noble, sure, but nobody was asking for that. Making a couple months’ rent all at once was a wild enough success in indie comics that you might even be able to go on and make something else the next year, and then keep riding that cycle until it became something one might reasonably call a career. That was the dream, anyway.

Slightly separated from my scene of graphic-novelist-hopefuls were the newspaper-strip comics, but they also found success through crowdfunding around the same time. 2012 was the year for a Kickstarter campaign to fund a print collection of Pictures For Sad Children. The strip was primarily about feeling bad at work or in public, and was mostly characterized as “for depressed people.” It was funny and bleak and had even gotten the attention of the New Yorker a few years earlier, and the people wanted it on their shelves.

Pictures For Sad Children

The irony of turning a webcomic about capitalist ennui into a commodity loomed large over the fundraiser. Contributors could purchase a special edition of the book that included a dead wasp, a demonstration against the Kickstarter trend of coaxing out more-expensive pledges by tacking on useless merch that nobody had asked for. The dead wasp seemed to say, Fine. You can have your bullshit collectibles, since that’s how we do things here— but I am not going to do extra work to make something else just to squeeze a few more dollars out of you, nor am I going to lie to you about the “value” of this “reward.” You already know what you’re willing to spend on me, and I refuse to grovel for it. Pay me or don’t, who cares.

From the start, Pictures For Sad Children seemed to follow the predictable path of Kickstarters that run into logistical or financial hurdles after the campaign is over, and then fail to fulfill their promises to backers. Two years passed, and still not everyone had received their books, and still they demanded what they had paid for.

So she started burning the books, and promised to burn another book for every email that someone sent her to ask about it. A video of the fire was uploaded to Kickstarter, at the top of a long post that opened with

AFFLUENT PEOPLE: PLEASE DEFEND YOUR DESIRE FOR AFFLUENCE AND PARTICIPATION IN CAPITALISM

She explained some of what had gone awry in the last two years, but she also wrote about the absurdity of money, the pointless unhappiness of wealthy people, and the entitlement of consumers who wanted “a return on their investment.” She wrote about her discomfort with her own attempt to leverage her identity so that strangers on the internet might find her “deserving” of the additional money she needed to ship out the books as promised. All of this made people very angry. She also—very briefly and with much chagrin— came out to the public as trans. Her new name would be Simone Veil.

“I do not need more wealth or property than what fulfills my needs. I do not need to increase my income as I age,” she wrote. “If you have negative feelings about the actions I am taking, that is part of what I am protesting against. I am protesting the values you use to determine how you feel about and interact with the world.”

And I think about her all the time.

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I feel like I am supposed to acknowledge my decade-in-transition milestone by writing some navel-gazing retelling of my gender-feelings and what I did about them. I am supposed to say something encouraging and paternal about growing up, mellowing out, facing change. I could do some condescending humblebrags about how I can prove that !!!sexism is real!!! and I know it better than anyone because I’ve seen it from both sides. Or about how I am a better kind of man, one you should totally listen to because he’s not like other boys. I am supposed to tell you how starting testosterone saved me from suicide and unlocked my self-esteem, because I always knew what I wanted and what I was meant for and I really only needed permission to Be Myself.

I’m sorry, but I am not going to do that. That shit did not happen. A lot of other things happened in 2014 that I remember a lot more clearly than the day I started hormones. On the other side of the state, a few hours away from my campus in KCMO, Ferguson burned with protests against police brutality. Numerous women alleged that Bill Cosby had raped them, and soon after, his name was mud and he was buried in lawsuits. 35 states had legalized same-sex marriage, and Time magazine declared 2014 “the trans tipping point.” It really looked like maybe we were in an era where change for the better was possible. Back then, when I looked around at everything that sucked, I thought, things can’t stay as they are, there’s no way it can last, something has to give. Someone with means is going to see how bad it is, and they are going to do something. If only we are loud enough with our opinions and our castigation of those who don’t share them, if only we spend our money the right way, progress will happen.

And then the change didn’t come. And then it all got worse. Jobs became gigs, products became subscriptions, and advertising became ever-more intrusive. Gamergate became the Alt-Right became the election of Donald Trump. Our attention moved on from endless police shootings of black citizens to border patrol committing atrocities that we will probably not know the full scope of for years to come, if ever. Trans identity became part of the landscape of self-help lifestyle brands and inconsequential DEI consultancy jobs. American progressives were so sure of our own obvious goodness that when we inevitably faced pushback, we balked. We gave up, because our enemies were actually serious and rebuffing them in any serious way was simply too hard. We are still giving up every day.

In the present, the best our one non-senile presidential hopeful can offer is the devoutly-wished “return to normalcy.” As if “normal” has been a desirable state of affairs at any point in my adult life. As if “normal” is not exactly what I was fleeing from when I chose to start hormones. As if there have been no broken promises or abandoned responsibilities, no generation of devastated political will, no unabated economic takeover by shameless con artists. There is no need to repent or repair or prove that the politicians gunning for our votes really do mean it this time, about that whole “change” thing.

The only thing we have left is the nostalgic memory of a fantasy that progress would happen ambiently, like the weather or the slow march of time, and we really only had to sit back and wait for everyone else to see sense. We trusted the powerful to use their power for good, and when they refused, we didn’t even get that mad about it. How can they fleece us when they’re so authentic? Surely it was an accident, an oversight, a moment of weakness. Surely, next time it would be different.

Karl Kerschl, The Abominable Charles Christopher

The year I started testosterone, I was in art school and fantasizing about becoming an in-house illustrator at a design firm somewhere. If I had actually succeeded, I think I would still be an alcoholic anyway, because I would consider every day whether I had dedicated my life to an evil cause. American society is now heavily dependent on technology as a scaffold for our social and intellectual lives, and ads are the coal we burn to keep the culture’s lights on. And it should be abundantly clear by now that advertisers (and the product devs who listen to them) are doing the devil’s work. Their job is to manipulate their target audiences, and they have proven time and time again that they will go as far as possible to achieve this end, especially if their product is fundamentally rancid.³ Working as an advertiser, I would have had to think about whether I could stand to let that money go once I had gotten used to having it, and I don’t know that I would have had the stones to make a righteous choice there.

Advertising’s ubiquity has a corrosive effect on culture because it turns us all into advertisers, which makes us incapable of speaking to the current moment with any truthful complexity. When creative output, advertisements, and the products they live on are all so deeply intertwined, enforcing regulations (or even behaving ethically as an individual trying to make a living) is effectively impossible. If I am trying to sell you something, I have little reason to tell you all the things that are wrong with it, who was exploited in its creation, or where that money goes after you give it to me. Because we know that ads are everywhere we have become distrustful and demanding consumers, but mostly towards the individual people trying to crowdfund their art or their rent or their medical bills. Not the billion-dollar companies that poison the earth and spy on us so they can more easily squeeze us for whatever we’ve got, not the landlords and banking execs and copyright hoarders that produce nothing and care only to make maximum money on minimal effort.

Our critical consumerism continues in spite of the fact that trying to be conscious of what we buy and where our money goes is utterly futile. Good luck confirming that any company does not exploit its workers, does not have ties to some evil enterprise or another— and that includes the ones that make the things we use for free, like email hosts and social media. Politically-themed branding has made all of this worse, inflating our spending decisions with an undue sense of moral weight and allowing profiteers to turn our politics into just another selling point.

I flunked out of comics, and out of “real” employment, because I was just not capable of performing to the standard of branding and advertising and overproduction that is required of career illustrators. I am positioned to reject these things largely because I am already not built to succeed at them. Making t-shirts and prints and stickers does not feel fun to me, it feels degrading and exhausting and pointless, and I cannot even find out if vendor-manufacturers like Society6 or RedBubble or INPRNT aren’t basically sweat shops. Trying to present myself as a product to a sea of judgemental consumers makes me scared and nauseous and I lock up, unable to create anything at all. All of the things I like and am good at art-wise are seen as different marketing categories, and I am unwilling to excise one part of me in order to sell another.

All of this shit makes me want to scream, and I can feel myself growing misanthropic when I repeatedly discover that most people— including those who call themselves “radical” or “queer”— do not feel the same way. They are fine with it, or at least have developed a grudging tolerance for inhumanity so long as they themselves can hack it. It’s like I am in They Live, but when I put the glasses on, youtube and instagram turn into a stream of web 1.0 pop-ups for gambling websites and porn-themed browser games. A rainbow filter does not make it any easier on the eyes.

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I see my decade on testosterone as an era marked by truly incredible waste. There is too much content, too much stuff. Self-awareness, ennui, trans identity— it’s all been turned into chum. Everything is disposable, including people. Everyone is doing Pictures For Sad Children style capitalism-cringe now, especially the capitalists. This is not as contradictory as it might seem. Ennui is and has always been great for sales of whatever you can present as a solution— conspiracy theory podcasts, boutique hormone subscription services, a season pass to Disney World, whatever.

I have seen what people make when the profit motive is not a worry in their minds, and quite a lot of it was more excellent than anyone would believe. I fear that the pillaging of the internet will see most of those creative endeavors lost forever. We cannot count what all was lost during Yahoo’s Tumblr buyout and subsequent porn ban, and you cannot read Pictures For Sad Children in full anywhere unless you somehow stumble across one of the few print copies that still exist. I fear that things that made me want to both care about politics and become an artist, and all the wonderful strangers who made those things, will be gone from the earth before I am.

All of this is waste. A waste of genuine motivation towards making a better world, a waste of creative and intellectual potential, a waste of the precious gift of life which has been given to us by science.

Pictures For Sad Children

I have no idea what to do about all of this. I am just one guy, and I mostly just want a way to exist in the world without betraying my principles in order to get things like top surgery and a two-bedroom apartment and attention from people that I want to like me. I want the option to escape from systems which allow me to enrich myself at the expense of others, or by contorting myself into an unnatural shape. I want liars to stop hassling me for my money and devotion. I want meaningful labor that lets me flex what I’m good at without devoting myself to something vapid or destructive, and I want other people close to me so they can benefit from my dedication to a unique craft, and so I can benefit from their input— my best work has always been collaborative to some degree. I do not want all of this just for me, but for anyone who wants it like I do, and to make that possible would require collective action— and a societal-scale value-shift— which would take much longer than a decade. So I don’t know what to do, and I do not believe my own sinlessness means anything to anyone but me, but I also can’t do nothing. I can at least make decisions about what I am not going to do.

I have no choice but to recuse myself from the pursuit of wealth and awards and lines on my resume. I will not produce more useless garbage and then bullshit you as if buying it equates to “supporting trans art,” but I will tell you that buying art from a random trans person is a better use of your dollars than whatever military propaganda Marvel shat out this season. I will not advertise trans identity as if it is a product whose primary purpose is to make you feel better about the dumpster fire all around us, although I will encourage everyone to pursue whatever uniqueness brings them joy. I will not lie to you as if your gender, your art, your politics, and your consumption can all be neatly compartmentalized, although I recognize that none of us has the luxury of a world that allows us to be moral with every move we make. I will not encourage you that everything you are already doing is good and fine and that you deserve whatever it is you think you deserve for whatever reason you think you have earned it. I will not mislead the next generation into misplacing their political will by devoting themselves to narcissistic projects that turn their backs on us the instant we are unprofitable or inconvenient. Where I am obligated to do this kind of work in order to make my rent, I promise to do so with utmost contempt, and to undermine it in every way that I think I can get away with until I get fired for it.

Transitioning did not make me happy and hormones did not fix me, because that is not what hormones are for. You do not need me to tell you that sexism is real and your feelings are #valid, and it would insult us both for me to do apologetics for what is already self-evident. You do not need another grifting motherfucker coming at you like feminism or queerness or art are a brand identity, things to buy to make yourself cozy while someone else gets chewed up by the machine that made them what they are today. You do not need another person affirming that you will definitely totally act on your principles if only you could be just a little more comfortable first, as if that isn’t directly backwards. If that is what you want to hear, I do not owe you a goddamn thing, and you will be just fine without my approval. You can get that shit somewhere else. The world is so full of advertisements that, even if you hold perfectly still, they will clambor at your doors and windows to come find you.

As Simone Veil wrote, I am looking for people who understand that money is a bad joke we use to hurt each other. I am looking for trans people who want the rejection of “normalcy” to mean a change beyond the scale of the personal and internal. And I am looking for people who want to make Art. If that’s you, maybe get in touch.

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If you would like to start hormones: Planned Parenthood, Erin’s Informed Consent Map, and diyhrt.wiki are excellent resources. If you’re curious for the full story, here is a retrospective with Pictures For Sad Children author Simone Veil.

Thank you to Tish and Dirk and Amy and all the rest for teaching me the value of working very hard at things you care about. Thank you to Sfe Monster and Jey Barnes for being trans comic artists in line-of-sight for an angry, isolated child, and to Mad Rupert and Tess Stone for so generously sharing their tools and techniques with anyone who asked. Thank you to Andy for giving me that phone number for the clinic, and to Sawyer for telling me where to get T on the internet, and to everyone else who has ever done me a solid by putting my agency in my own two hands and staying out of my way.

Part one, maybe? I still haven’t even talked about Dworkin, or the Simone Weil that the comic artist named herself after. We’ll see if I have time for another before the end of the month.

1. Before I get too sparkly-eyed about the value of hard work, it’s worth noting that most of the people I knew who were creating truly excellent webcomics had either a spouse who paid the bills or a full time job that occupied all of their non-art-making time. When I previously mentioned that transition obligated me to foreclose on the possibility of marrying someone in order to fund my artistic livelihood, it’s because that was exactly what enabled many of my “female” peers to put incredible time and energy into their artistic output. I use scare quotes here because a nonzero number of them were people bubbling under the surface with fraught transmasculine inclinations, people I learned had (quite understandably) decided they could not afford to rock the boat with their spouses or families by embodying their masculinity via hormones. Anyway. No artist I have ever met has had a comic, an offline social life, and money at the same time— if you are very lucky, you get to pick two. Maybe one and a half.

2. Spike was right to be proud— she was a pioneer in porn publishing and giving money to indie comic artists, and she was and is very good at it. Iron Circus has now repeated its Kickstarter success some thirty times over. This includes publishing the only English-language artbook of Kaneoya Sachiko’s work, as well as the 10th anniversary volume of Smut Peddler. This certainly won’t last forever, but I’m glad it exists at the same time as I do.

3. Think nicotine and delta-8 vapes with candy flavors and Naruto on the box. Or phone games that barely function as games because they only exist to be vehicles for microtransactions and making you watch ads every twelve seconds. Or Microsoft installing AI apps without asking or even telling you they’re doing it, or Malwarebytes putting pop-ups on your desktop exactly like the malware it is supposed to get rid of. Technology is rife with examples because of its relative newness— an unregulated frontier makes rapacious profiteers salivate. Think Thank You For Smoking and Wolf Of Wall Street. An ad-based economy is a scam-based economy.