Read new comics!

Class Highlight

What is Queer Ecology? Artist Franky Frances Cannon is running an upcoming workshop called Drawing Queer Ecology. Queer ecology is an approach to thinking about the world in less human-focused and binary ways. It’s a recognition that while gender and sexual fluidity have been seen as “deviant” and “unnatural” in Western societies, plant, animal, and fungi life are all about gender and sexual diversity. When you start to look for examples of fluidity in nature, it’s everywhere! Queer ecologists also try to think about a world where human and nonhuman beings are less divided and more entangled and dependent on one another than ever. So how does that relate to comics? Franky, who’s currently the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellow at Kenyon College, will lead drawing exercises to imagine new queer creatures and lead the workshop through creating a four-panel comic about queerness in nature.

Exciting things

Artist Spotlight

Joaquin Golez describes himself as an “illustration artist, tattooist in training, and a mixed-race unsortable gender goblin with a gentle heart and a neurospicy brain.” He is leading the upcoming workshop Sexy Comics for Shy People and the six-session class Visual Voice: Storytelling for Comics. 

What do you love about making comics? 

I have an unconventional interpretation of comics, in the sense that I think comics can be just one panel long or made accidentally. We could make a comic by arranging and labeling photos or drawing with a stick in the sand. This is to say that I think comics can look like just about anything and happen anywhere, that’s what I love about them. Comics to me are not only a means to tell a story but also a way to honor a moment or reconfigure time. I think comics are a language that anyone can use. The diversity of ways people approach making them is what makes comics special to me.

Since you’re leading “Sexy Comics for Shy People,” do you ever feel shy about drawing erotic comics?

I was a bit of a loner in grade school, so I’d spend recess at a blue lunch table where other kids would commission me with quarters and chocolate muffins to draw Sailor Moon characters in salacious articulations. In addition to this paid work, I also kept a big wide ruled journal I called my “sex book”, in which I would draw whatever the hell I imagined sex to look like. My overprotective Mom eventually found this book and confronted me about its contents when I returned home from school one day. Ashamed and panicked, I grabbed the book from her and threw it into the blazing fireplace, where my whole family watched in total silence as it melted.  Secrecy, shame, and the desire to turn private fantasies into pictures are core to my origins as an artist. Drawing in general is always a little bit scary anyways, might as well get freaky with it and go all in.

Why do you think it's important to have a workshop on sexy comics? 

I just learned that many species of crabs will molt in groups in an effort to protect one another during a time of great vulnerability. I’m finding that when I am able to do vulnerable things in a safe group, it actually becomes really fun and less tense. I think that shame thrives alone. I hope that through the prompts, exercises, and conversations, we are able to find joy and whimsy with a subject that has potential to be tense or taboo. I want to laugh, have fun, and express ourselves without the weight of judgment or fear.

 Upcoming classes

What we’re reading

 Opportunities for artists