A trans frog girl in her early thirties encounters trouble on a snowy New Year’s on her bike, which sets off a chain of memories.

CW: hit & run accident, mild blood, suicide reference

I, Lancelot

Content Warning: themes & discussion of parental abuse

[This essay was funded through Patreon under the ZEAL project. ZEAL aims to provide high quality criticism of rarely discussed games and comics, and showcase the talents of exciting new writers and artists. For details and information on how to donate, please check out our Patreon!]

THE LANGUAGES OF DRAWING

Everybody codeswitches all the time, often without thinking about it. How someone talks to their mom (if they talk to their mom) differs from how they talk to friends, how they talk to their teacher or a boss. When I was first getting laser hair removal, I told a couple of non-trans lady friends…

Dollhouses

Koji Kondo’s familiar refrain from Zelda picks up quickly in the beginning of the Nintendo 3DS game The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (2013). The game uses the same overworld as the popular Super Nintendo entry The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991), and the same top-down oblique view. The view gives the effect of little figurines traversing a landscape.

The Nintendo 3DS is the great-grandchild of the Game Boy (I still call the 3DS a Game Boy), which produces a stereoscopic 3D effect without special glasses. I felt high when I first tried it.

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Two early queer graphic novels, racism in early comics, and the next generation of radical cartoonists

[This essay was written by Annie Mok and funded through Patreon under the ZEAL project. ZEAL aims to provide high quality criticism of rarely discussed games and comics, and showcase the talents of exciting new writers and artists. For details and information on how to donate, please check out our Patreon!]

Cartoonists and other image makers often wield a cloak of neutrality, or the armor of satire. Robert Crumb makes women into headless shrews, happy to be abused. The French Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, taking pages from Crumb, drew racist caricatures with what they called anti-racist intent — and as we…

On Tove Jansson, love, loss, the Moomins, and making it through the winter

Secret Names

I poured myself into drawings and stories, always, especially when my body and speech felt too small to contain the galaxies inside me. When people foisted narratives onto me, I locked onto fictions that held the possibilities that seemed too scary to name, or that I lacked the language for to begin with. When a feeling looked too painful or beautiful or both, a cipher, a protagonist carried it for me. …