Presented by the Level Ground Comics Workshop Committee
Cover image by Avery Hick
In celebration of Pride Month, the Level Ground Comics workshop committee has gathered some statements from LGBT comic artists. These statements come from both editors in Level Ground and contributors to our current projects. In this article, our artists share what it means to them to be an LGBT creator in comics, their journey, and what their goals are in the future to make comics a more welcoming and diverse space. Happy Pride from Level Ground Comics!
One of the main reasons I am passionate about small press and self published comics is that they allow for a wide range of diverse stories. It’s all too common in the mainstream media for LGBT experiences to be watered down– or even erased altogether– in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. Independent publishers, however, focus on making content for a small, niche audience, which allows for true experiences and raw stories unfiltered by censors and PR teams. As there is a greater push for LGBT representation in media, we must realize that it can only go so far if that representation must be “respectable” to the general public. No one LGBT story is the same. This is why, in my comics career, I want to support and uplift small creators. Otherwise the diverse experiences that so enrich our community will be stifled.
- Avery Hick
An important part of my art journey was understanding my relationship with love and sexuality. In fact, it has been integral in shaping the stories I now create. As embracing and accepting my queerness made me more introspective of myself, that same introspection extended itself to my view of the world. I edit and create to bring in the representation that I had been starved of. Learning about and loving the part of myself I hid so deeply for so long made me realize why I create art in the first place. Even though being a queer woman of color is a struggle to say the least, these struggles resulted in self reflection and awareness which made me into the person and artist I am today.
- Anonymous
In college, I had a professor tell our class that “if you’re going to have trans characters, you need to have a reason in the story for them to be trans.” He then made a passing complaint that he had students making stories where their whole cast was trans. That is an expectation he never placed on cis characters. We are constantly told we need to represent this nuclear, mainstream American version of the world, otherwise we’re falsely labeled as ‘unrealistic.’ This is a mindset that is all too present in comics. Even when LGBT+ people are able to share our stories, we’re asked do it in a way that parallels the cis, straight experience.
I am a trans man. I am disabled. If I want to share those experiences in my comics, why would I do so through a cis and abled filter? Readers are fully capable of understanding things outside of their lived experiences. You don’t have to be a cat to read Garfield.
- K. Rosser
I’m a non-binary queer artist. One of my goals as a comic artist is to write queer characters into my stories. When I was a kid and questioning my sexuality and gender, I would have loved to read stories about people who had the same struggles as me, to validate my feelings and experiences. Even seeing characters in sci-fi and fantasy stories that were more diverse than your boring cis straight default would have made it a lot easier growing up. My hope is to give kids today that experience of seeing queer identities normalized in society.
- Amelia
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