Hey pals 'n gals,

So that several-years-in-the-making documentary about queer cartoonists (based on Justin Hall's hit 2012 book), will be debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival on 6/13/21 and you can get a virtual ticket! (I just did that very thing earlier today)

Here's cut 'n paste info:

Tickets are on sale for online streaming here:

Tribeca Film Festival, NYC - Sunday, June 13 - 6:00 PM -- $15 https://tribecafilm.com/films/no-straight-lines-the-rise-of-queer-comics-2021

Frameline, San Francisco - Sunday June 27, 2021- 6:30 PM -- $10 https://www.frameline.org/festival/film-guide/no-straight-lines-the-rise-of-queer-comics-(streaming)

No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Cartoonists A lively look at five LGBTQ+ comic book artists whose careers go from the underground scene to the cover of Time Magazine and the international stage. In this adaption of Justin Hall’s anthology of the same name, No Straight Lines invites Alison Bechdel (Fun Home), Jennifer Camper (Rude Girls and Dangerous Women), Howard Cruse (Gay Comix), Rupert Kinnard (B.B. And The Diva) and Mary Wings (Come Out Comix) to share their stories and observations on everything from the AIDS crisis and workplace discrimination, to the search for love and a good haircut.

Film website and trailer:

https://www.nostraightlinesthefilm.com/

Hi there, the amazingly talented cartoonist Sarah Firth did this visual summary of our discussion last week launching Covid Chronicles: A Comic Anthology. I love when cartoonists draw these, and even more so when I get to be in them (well, obviously)! I'm still waiting for my contributor copy to get here (when o when) but in the meantime here are links to both the recorded event and to ordering the book itself:

Watch the video https://youtu.be/0a_q4Q4Klsg

Buy the book https://graphicmundi.org/books/978-0-271-09014-6.html…

Hi folks, this Friday 2/19/21 at 6pm CST there will be a virtual book launch event for Covid Chronicles: A Comics Anthology with several contributors, including me! Go here for more info and to register to attend. It’s obviously free, and I’d love it if you would join us for a listen! I haven’t gotten my copy just yet but the book has already gotten a starred review in Kirkus along with several other fine notices and I can't wait to read it. Anyway, hope you can give the event a listen and that you’ll check out Covid Chronicles!

Hi folks, just a reminder that The Covid Chronicles, a comics anthology about you-know-what, is coming out in February from a new press called Graphic Mundi, an imprint of Penn State University press. I have five pages in it and I’m excited to see the rest of the book—helps that it features several other contributors who I admire, including Thi Bui, Joe Decie, MK Czerwiec, & Seth Tobocman. You can order it soon but please go with an indie bookseller rather than you-know-who (seriously, they are not good for our economy or our culture)! Ok, more soon!

Hey kids, there’s a neat interview with me up on Smash Pages right now, courtesy of Alex Dueben, cartoonist-interviewer extraordinaire. Check it out here!

Ok! l just launched a Patreon page! If you are interested in being my Patreon for a very small monthly fee, go here. I will be previewing Marry Me pages (working on a new page as I type this!), exclusive diary comics, and who knows what else! There are different tiers, so pick n choose. And even if you don’t do this, I love ya anyway!

Yes, this means I probably won’t be posting too many previews on this site any longer, but just wait and see, I have to see how this all shakes out (I mean, I literally launched about 40 minutes ago, and need some time to get used to this strange new world). I’ll be seeing you…

Hey pals n gals, I’m the Cartoonist Diary person on The Comics Journal starting 5/18, so you should go to that site every day through Friday 5/22 to read each installment. Ok? Then you can see for yourself how I dealt with mid-April job stress, newly-moved in stress, and general stress in the midst of a terrifying pandemic that may finish off our country once and for all! Ok, that may all be sounding like a series of rather dire comics, but don’t worry, they’re funny too, imbued with that certain je ne sais quoi aesthetic of mine. Happy reading! Oh, and BTW, I’m gearing up to get back to Marry Me a Little again - page 38 awaits me! I’m trying not to let myself down, stick to my guns, and get cracking, etc etc etc. I got that momentum thing going for me (yeah yeah, how many times have you heard that before. But still).

Still plugging away on that series of diary comics I done told you about the other day. Here’s a panel from episode #3…I’m just about halfway done now. Oh, I did find them a home: they will run up on the TCJ site, thanks to my cool editor there. I hope it’ll be sometime next month. But gosh I work slowly! I started them 8 days ago and only have 2+ pages to show for myself! But it’s been a good (and distracting) project for me. Obviously I’ll post the link when they’re all up and at ‘em.

Well, as the song goes, It’s not right, but it’s ok. I am doing better than I was last time. I think it gets to a point where adapting to a tough situation is all that’s left to do.

So that’s the plan going forward.

I also wanted to record this moment in history in my own fashion. Thus, here’s a panel from a diary comic I just completed - I wrote out a series of five such comics, one episode per day from 4/11 to 4/15. I’m currently in the process of rendering them on paper. Four more to go! I’ll get them posted online when they’re all done—either on this site, Instagram, or somewhere else. I’m enjoying drawing again, and these are cathartic. I hope everyone reading this is doing well and stayin’ alive, stayin alive. Until next time, which should be fairly soon! xo

Well. What a difference a month and a half makes, right? Last you heard from me, I was trying to reconcile like, drawing deadlines and showing off that wow, I finished another page. Now I laugh when I think about the angst I felt about all of that. Flash forward to the here and now where we’re engulfed in a total global health/financial/existential crisis. Like everyone else I am feeling utterly upended and frightened about the future weeks, months, even years. It’s all going to be hard. And the epically inept, supremely corrupt federal leadership of this country is making everything feel even more awful and more uncertain. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. So I’m trying to take it just one day at a time - I’m limiting my intake of the daily headlines in the morning, just to keep sane.

Due the economic challenges we’re facing (John and I just moved into a condo in St Paul - great timing huh!), I may have to stop with this website in the near future. I don’t want to but it’s definitely in line for the chopping block. But I will still be around, drawing and writing, and dreaming hopefully of the day when this is all over. I have no new drawings to show you right now - who could draw at such a time! - but I will likely attempt to do some daily diary comics while working only half time at my day job (grateful to have even that) and writing reviews for extra bux. I really do want to draw some, so watch my instagram account, esp, that’s where they’ll likely first turn up.

Please stay well, everyone. Let’s make it through, let’s have interesting survival stories to tell in the future. xo

At least now I can say I did not wait until summer to get something done on Marry Me. Right now the pace is slow n steady, and that’s cool. This is page #36, by the way.

Hi there, I was on MPR News today, hosted by Chris Farrell, talking about comics and graphic novels - you know, whatever you want to call them. Professor Barbara Schulz, a comics educator (and delightful person) was there too. You can give us a listen any time you want here. It was a good time, with lots of cool, articulate and interesting callers.

It’s 2020 now (gosh). I was looking over some of my past blog posts up here, with all of their many promises and declarations, and now have to finally admit, where my work-in-progress Marry Me a Little is concerned there are some things over which I have less control than I’d like. I keep fretting and fussing over deadlines. When I meet them it’s great and when I don’t, I feel bad. But my flow doesn’t always flow the way I want it to. In 2019 I got off to a rocky start, with a long and complicated move (do not recommend selling your house mid-winter, my people) and pet-grief (had to put our beloved Ginger down in January). I ended up basically abandoning Marry Me until bloody July, when I finally cranked out five pages, which is a lot for me in one month.

Moving forward, I promised on this very blog that I’d draw no less than two pages per month, every month, until the book was finished. By the end of ’19 I’d kept my promise. Well, other than in November, when I barely managed one page because I’d committed to several writing assignments and a commissioned drawing for an upcoming gender health comic (more about that later, it’ll be out very soon). That was understandable, certainly. But here we are in mid-January and I feel as if I’m starting from scratch all over again. A vastly empty new page awaits.

First reason: my husband and I are moving again. This time we’re switching from our temporary experience of apartment life to being homeowners again. We’re buying a condo…in St. Paul! As we creep closer and closer to retirement age, a mortgage—aka an investment—sounds like a better plan than renting. We close in mid-March and move in April. So that’s taking up a lot of psychic energy and will soon be requiring no small measure of physical energy as well. How much I’ll feel up to drawing is an open question right now.

My natural work process is not always conducive. With long-form projects like Marry Me, I generally work page-by-page, not heavily scripting anything out very far in advance. This allows for on-the-fly, in-the-moment inspirations, which sounds very artistic doesn’t it, except that when you feel uninspired it is even harder to regain that momentum again. Apparently, I need a lot of revving up to get really revved up. When I’ve tried to script ahead of time it hasn’t generally worked too well.

Ever since I started this story, I’ve stopped tabling at festivals and expos, as I have no new books or comics to hawk. The longer I’ve been gone from it the farther away it all seems. I have no skin in that game right now and that is actually quite ok. But I very much want to have the finished Marry Me to sell at SPX and CAKE and the Twin Cities Book Festival! Someday…

So yeah, it’s 2020 now. We cartoonists and artists really like to talk about ourselves and how we’re doing and what we have accomplished and in the end it’s to little avail. I’ve come to the momentous realization that I’m going to get done what I’m going to get done when I get it done. I’ve seriously bored the hell out of myself going on and on about deadline angst and such and for those of you who stuck with me I thank you kindly. I hope I haven’t been too tiresome.

Ok then!

Leaving you with a panel from a recently finished page. See you soon!

On November 26th, the day before Thanksgiving, we lost the legendary cartoonist Howard Cruse to lymphoma. He was 75. Howard was one of the kindest, most supportive cartoonists in all of everdom.

I first met Howie at an OutWrite conference in Boston in the early 90s. Any trepidation I felt upon meeting this master of the art form—while I was still trying to get established—quickly vanished under his relaxed southern charm. He was always supportive of me and scores of other cartoonists. Later, when I moved to NYC in 1995, he and the rest of the NYC cartoonist queers (Jen Camper, Joan Hilty and Ivan Velez Jr.) welcomed me into their fold. Every now and again we’d all get together, usually at Jen’s apartment, and talk about whatever we were working on over drinks and snacks. It was all super-caszh, but it fed my always-hungry artistic soul. One time Alison Bechdel came, and another time Andrea “Stonewall Riots” Natalie showed up. Those meetings left me with some really happy memories. Howard always made the long trek in to Manhattan from Queens. He was that kind of person; he showed up. He was such a gentleman.

One time in spring of 1998, Howard had me over to his apartment in Jackson Heights to help me color the cover of my first Curbside book. Howard had just learned this exotic new coloring app called “Photoshop” and was happy to show me the ropes (ah, yes, those early the days of the internet. Happy to report that I am now rudimentarily proficient with that there Photoshop). Over the years Howard would draw for a couple of my anthologies like The Book of Boy Trouble 2 and QU33R. In 2007 my husband John got both Howard and I a good-paying gig drawing comics for this weird Onion parody newspaper that Marriott Hotels would use for internal trainings (though it turned out to be too edgy and didn’t see the light of day - as both John and I suspected, it was a one-and-done campaign). I will put up a couple of Howard’s single-panels in another post sometime soon. John just unearthed them and they’re pretty great.

The photo below, from that Out/Write conference I mentioned, features all of us, in our younger days. That’s Howard on the far right.

It hurts to know he’s no longer around. But his legacy, which includes above all else his magnum opus, Stuck Rubber Baby, will continue to inspire people for years to come. I don’t know how else to end this ramble except to say goodbye one more time. Thanks for everything, dear Howie, may you rest in peace.

(L-R): Jen Camper, Diane DiMassa, Alison Bechdel, Rob Kirby, Joan Hilty, & Howard Cruse; Boston, MA, probably 1992 or ‘93

Latest excerpt from Marry Me: talking about outfits

Got my contributor’s copy yesterday and it looks great! I’m proud to be in the book and really happy with my little story (3 pages). There’s some great artists in here, like Justin Hubbell and Jeffrey Macklin, and a lot of thought-provoking, empathic stories shared. I also really appreciate the 3-pages of references in the back - turns out there are tons of books and articles delving into this important, very timely topic (many of the contributors are non cis men). Anyway, I hope you’ll consider checking it all out at your leisure - you can order your own copy here.

Cover art is © by James Neish

Getting to what I think will be a fun part of the book to draw: all the nuts ‘n bolts wedding preparation, along with its attendant angst.

Finished another page today, the 9th since I finally got back in gear in July (My vow: At least two pages per month, no matter what!). Here’s an excerpt, an exaggerated moment from when we went to get our marriage license at the government center back in September of ‘13. Last week I had John look at the 30 pages I’ve produced thus far and he said the issue of privilege seems to come up a lot. I think he’s right. We took so much for granted. We just didn’t know.

Everyone was so nice to us, wtf?! © 2019 Rob Kirby

I told you I wasn’t messing around anymore, I’m still working diligently on “my story.” For those of you new around here, that story is my graphic memoir about my experience of getting (gay) married in 2013, and all the socio-cultural conflicts my spouse and I had about doing such a thing. I started the project in July of 2017 and then proceeded to work in fits and starts, continually letting myself get sidetracked until nearly two years later when I looked at what little I had to show for myself and sort of panicked, wondering if I really had what it takes to complete a long-form work. But that’s all changed now. I have what it takes and TIME‘S A’ WASTIN’! I’m on track, and intend to stay that way until I finish (I think) late next year. Below is an excerpt from another freshly-finished page (and yes, yet another new page is in progress as I type this).

Hey, a reminder that Rainbow Reflections: Body Image Comics for Queer Men is out this very month! I have a three-page piece within called “My Queer Body (Issues).” You should get it! I received a digital pre-print copy of the book a couple months ago and I’m really happy with how it turned out. The book’s messages are beautifully presented and the variety of creators and stories within are truly impressive. I look forward to getting my contributor’s copy. Spreadin’ the word!

Okay, back to work. I actually have to draw Kim Davis’s stupid face, ugh.

I seem to be drawing different iterations of this scene in Marry Me a Little over and over again.