Once again, there’s a timelapse drawing video! Go watch me change my mind again… and again… and again!
Sometimes, the drawing of a comic is just stuck in a low gear.
This one, for example, took FOREVER to draw. I’m not even sure why.
I mean, sure there were seven panels instead of four… and sure, I somehow decided to draw a background of some sort in every panel… and sure, I kept being super indecisive about what to draw. And I began feeling frustrated, which made it harder to motivate myself to spend enough hours drawing. So I guess all of that could add up to some slow drawing.
Sometimes, that’s just how it goes.
Despite it all, the drawing was still fun to do. I had a great time especially drawing the head of the first character in the last panel; I really like how (to my eyes, at least) his ridiculous mouth shape nonetheless looks like a three dimensional opening in the body – an orifice, in other words – rather than a flat shape on the surface of the face. It’s something that original MAD artists like Jack Davis did so well, and I’m always trying to get a similar feel in my work.
Originally this was a four-panel strip with the same idea but a very different script, and the first three panels were all on the wordy side. I eventually decided to try and cut the word count for all but the last panel as much as I could.
But if the words aren’t telling the story, then the pictures had to. In an attempt to make the visual storytelling clearer, the script evolved into a bunch of fairly identical scenes set in front of doorways. (Panels 1-4 and 6). So then the artistic challenge became, how could I do five tiny panels, all depicting someone being turned away at a door, without replicating the exact same layout five times over?
Here’s the drawing process for the final character in the cartoon:
This is what I meant when I said I was delayed by being indecisive; I essentially drew and rejected two entire figures before I figured out what I wanted here.
This cartoon was inspired by a conversation I’ve had multiple times over the years, talking to transphobes on the internet. As we argue, I often ask “what’s it to you, anyway? How have you been harmed by any of this?”
And as often or not, put on a spot, the example of harm they can come up with is… pronouns. They’re expected to use someone else’s preferred pronouns. That’s the harm.
It’s so ridiculous, in the face of the constant and in many ways increasing bigotry against trans people in our culture, to think that pronouns count at all as a harm. It actually renders me speechless (or textless, more literally). I sputter, I write answers that include a lot of swearing and delete them before posting (I do that a lot, actually). I want to meet them in the real world, grab both sides of their face, and scream “CAN YOU EVEN HEAR YOURSELF?”
But I can’t do that, so I drew this cartoon.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has seven panels, each panel showing a different scene.
PANEL ONE
A teenage girl stands in front of a house. The front door of the house is open, and a hand is sticking out, pointing in a “get out” gesture. A word balloon comes from inside the house (i.e., from the unseen person the hand belongs to).
POINTING PERSON: No son of mine is “trans”!
PANEL TWO
A dark-haired woman wearing a hoodie and a red skirt is pushing open a ladies’ room door, but another woman is standing blocking her way, her arms folded.
BLOCKING WOMAN: Nope!
PANEL THREE
Two men are standing in front of a church. One, with carefully combed blonde hair and a white suit, looks like he might be a preacher. The other has messy brown hair and a little beard, and is dressed in darker colors. The preacher-type is holding up a hand in a “stop!” gesture, preventing the annoyed-looking guy from proceeding to the church.
PREACHER: Hell no.
PANEL FOUR
In the foreground, we see a hand holding a smartphone. On the smartphone screen is a page entitled “Rooms for Rent.”
In the background, a woman with curly reddish hair is standing in front of a door marked “office,” blocking the way.
WOMAN: Nope!
PANEL FIVE
We’re inside a store of some kind; a man wearing an apron over a red shirt is standing behind the counter, talking to a woman on the other side of the counter. The counter man is an expression between angry and panicked; the woman, who stands with her arms folded, looks annoyed and surprised.
A big sign hanging from the counter says “HELP WANTED.”
COUNTER MAN: Get out!
PANEL SIX
There are no characters in this panel. We’re looking at a doorway. The doorway is blocked by long crisscrossed strips of that black-and-yellow “emergency” tape. A sign taped to the door says “Closed by Government Order.” A more permanent looking sign is attached to the wall above the door; this sign says “Center for Transgender Medicine.”
PANEL SEVEN
Three very distressed people are talking to each other in what might be someone’s living room. The first man, I’ll call him BEARDY, has his hands clapped to either side of his face and an expression of existential horror. He is crying, and some snot drips out of his nose. Nearby, a woman stares at him with a shocked expression, a hand held over her open mouth. And behind the woman, a bald man with a red shirt is angrily declaiming, his hands spread wide.
BEARDY: And then he asked me to- to- to use his pronouns!
REDSHIRT: See? WE’RE the real victims!
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is old-timey cartoonists’ slang for unimportant but perhaps amusing details.
Panel two: A notice posted on the wall says “Notice: Posting of Notices Strictly Forbidden. I mean it! I’ll tell Mom!!”
Panel three: “Woodstock” from Peanuts is sitting on the sill of a second-story window.
Panel five: There’s a cat in a hat playing with a Switch on the shelves in the background. Also on those shelves: A decapitated head with an enormous mustache, two boxes shelved next to each other, the first says on the side “Don’t cry” and the second says “for me Argentina.” A glass jar of some sort of powdered substance has two eyeballs in it. The charge pad on the counter says “Rudolf the red knows rain, dear.”
Also in panel five, tattoos! The clerk’s tattoos include what looks like a Muppet Harry Potter. (The clerk’s a transphobe, so the JKR related tattoo seemed appropriate). The woman there about the job has a tattoo of Lucy from Peanuts.
Panel seven: On the wall in the background is a portrait of Daddy Warbucks from the comic strip “Annie.”
Perfectly on point, as always. Aside from pronouns there’s “I can’t win a gold medal at the olympics! This is discrimination!”
Re-using my ‘joke’ from Daily-K…
Mom always liked you best!
RandomTroll
@1 – Well, yes. There’s always the complaint about men transitioning solely for the purpose of coming in 5th in a high level college track event. Whatsername, the right wing swimming also-ran has that as her complaint. Of course, Lia Thomas isn’t a man, didn’t solely transition to do well in college sports and will not be detransitioning. Not that that matters to the fascists.