Month: January 2025

As you may have read in the Philadelphia Gay News, I gave testimony at a Philadelphia City Council meeting to speak up about the importance of protecting gender-affirming care. I made a comic about it; you can read it on my Patreon.

Giving testimony is a strange endeavor; it’s important to alert lawmakers to your concerns, but it feels meaningless. How can I express everything I’m worried about in less than two minutes? The architecture of government buildings, designed for pomp and grandeur, can make you feel very small when you’re inside them. It can make what you have to say feel unimportant. It can make you feel unimportant.

You have to remember that you are important, that what you have to say is worth saying, and that you can and will say it with your whole chest. And to treat that time limit seriously.

If nothing else, coming to the City Council meeting reassured me about the immediate future. Things are not heading in a good direction, and I do not trust all of my elected officials. But hearing the testimony of others, especially those representing larger organizations in the city who have plans with how to deal with the recent attacks on immigration and LGBTQIA+ rights. I’m not alone in my concerns, and that knowledge was worth the trip all by itself.

I think in the coming years, it would behoove us all to get more involved in local government. And small ways like giving testimony at open sessions is great way to start.

Here’s the comic for this week. BRICKS was something I’ve been tossing around for awhile now: What if DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR but also Hergé and about trans people? I’m not sure if all jives, but I think there’s enough there that its worth developing further.

I wasn’t planning on writing about the inauguration, but when there’s a member of the president’s inner circle throwing Nazi salutes while Trump himself is pardoning everyone who tried to overthrow the government four years ago, ending birthright citizenship and setting the stage for undoing every legal trans protection we’ve gotten in the last 20 years, everything else seems inconsequential.

The point of fascism is to rule utterly, to perform horrors with no consequence and to deny that they are horrors at all. It is the power that comes from control, not just political control but narrative control. They define the truth is, even if what they say flies in the face of what you witnessed with your own eyes.

Now, I have studied fascism, but I cannot claim to be a political expert. I am, however, a narrative expert. I can claim that one. So believe me when I tell you that the most important things you can do to armor yourself in the coming years to remember one thing: they get off on your despair.

Gross, right? Good. These horrible little boys with old men’s faces wearing their father’s ill-fitting suits are going to try to convince us they are invincible, they are inevitable, that they are somehow than human, or at the very least more human than we are. They will get into our heads. But not if we know what sick little puppies they are, desperately jerking off to the sadness and panic they create.

I know its ridiculous, but we live in ridiculous times. And if telling myself that by not dissolving into sadness I am denying a disgusting power-grabber from getting an erection keeps me from succumbing to despair, maybe it will do the same for you.

Another thing you can do is quit Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and TikTok, as it has become quite clear that they intend to be the propaganda arm of the new regime. I’m just down to Bluesky, but I’m prepared to leave that, too, if needs must. Get the phone numbers and emails of the folks you want to stay in touch with, and delete your accounts. Keeping our minds clear is going to be hard enough as it is, without the manufactured outrage that is these services stock and trade.

Here’s a comic about mice with swords. Seems silly to post it now, but we also need silliness in our lives.

I’ve been reading Brian Jacques’s REDWALL series to my daughter, and while it is just as delightful as I remember from when I read it at her age, I can’t fail to notice that the girls don’t do anything as cool as what the boys do. This is lessoned somewhat in the later books, but it’s still a boy’s world. That got me thinking about a fantasy world full of female mice who are funny and clever and others who wield swords, and what if those two of those mousemaids were in love?

So, that’s COWSILK. I haven’t thought of a larger story with Cowsilk and Mayblossom yet, but I already love these characters, so I imagine one will come to me.

Over at my Patreon, there’s something completely different, an riff on Alison Bechdel and Hergé about being a trans woman in 2025. Maybe you should check it out.

2024 was, upon reflection, not a great year.

It was a year of opportunities dangled and then taken away, of projects indefinitely delayed, of working hard and ending up with very little to show for it. My body kept the score, as it always does, and I ended in up in the emergency room for organ failure. The part of me that gave up the ghost was removed—not without struggle, according to the surgeons, who had to make a bigger incision than expected. Now one organ lighter, my recovery necessitated diet free from animal products. So, we can add “meet” and “cheese” to the long list of things I lost in 2024, along with organs, jobs, etcetera.

But if I may find a silver lining to an essential part of my body ceasing to function, I think to switch to veganism has been good for me and its something I intend to continue. Painful events can sometimes lead to positive changes. So I’m going to look to 2025 with an open heart.

The following year, 2026, will see the release of my next book with DC Comics (which should be announced soon!) and I have a pretty good idea of what that year is going to look like because of it. But 2025 could be anything. It will no doubt be difficult—yesterday, the US House of Representatives voted 218-206 to ban transgender girls from girls sports in federally funded schools, so we’re not off to a great start—but perhaps it will also be rewarding. Maybe things will get better, maybe I’ll get better. Or maybe I’ll just stay the same. That would be a victory, in its way, after all the changes of the past year and the possible horrors that are lying in wait in this one.

Here’s to the new year, and the same me.

I cannot say that all of 2024 was bad. After all, it saw two publications with my name on it: HAWKGIRL-ONCE UPON A GALAXY, which collects the 2023 HAWKGIRL miniseries in one tidy volume, and “Secret Identity,” a story in the anthology WHEN I WAS YOUNG… which I wrote and drew and was colored by the remarkably talented Robin Fasel.

Drawing that story was wonderful, but it also drove home how rusty my visual art muscles are. Practice makes permanent, as my daughter’s music instructor says, so I am challenging myself to draw 50 comic pages this year. That’s not a whole lot, but last year I only did 4, so, baby steps.

I’m going to start with a few stand-alone pages, not connected to a larger story, but featuring characters I’ve been meaning to work with. These characters could go on to larger stories—after all, I’ve got 50 pages to fill—but mainly I just want to play around. I want to see what gets me excited about drawing, and do that.

These comics will go up on my Patreon—the first one is already there—which now only has a $1 a month tier. If you can’t swing it, don’t worry! The comics will show up in this very newsletter and on my website the following week.

I want 2025 to be a good year for me, as much as an extensive arbitrarily-selected length of time can be. Let’s see how it goes.