Helen Keremos, Pulp Fiction’s First Dyke Detective, Is Getting Her Own Graphic Novel
There’s something special happening in world of comics and animation, and it’s obvious in storylines and character design, from Lumberjanes and Heavy Vinyl to Netflix’s reboots of She-Ra and Carmen Sandiego. Queer people are in the room where it happens. A haircut, an outfit, the way a character holds herself: you can just tell the person who drew them is queer. Most recently, my gaydar pinged on the art from Work for a Million, the graphic novel adaptation of Eve Zaremba’s pulp series about dyke detective Helen Keremos. The jeans, the belt, the button-up; her sunglasses, her hair, the way she leans. The lesbian energy coming off her is unmistakable.
Which makes sense: Zaremba, who is now 88, published six novels about PI Helen Keremos starting in 1978, while she was also busy organizing and writing and fighting for gay and trans rights in Toronto. She helped organize the city’s first Pride parades and marched in protest against the bathhouse raids in the ’80s. Zaremba was also a founding member of the Broadside collective, which published a monthly feminist paper for a decade. Zaremba is a lesbian legacy, is what I am saying, and her most celebrated PI Helen Keremos novel, Work for a Million, is being adapted into a graphic novel by queer artist Selena Goulding and lesbian writer Amanda Deibert (along with help from Zaremba and her wife, Ottie Lockey).
A three-generation collective! Queerness upon queerness!
Work for a Million, which was originally published in 1984, follows pulp fiction’s first lesbian detective as she leaves her home in Vancouver to investigate threats against singer (and newly minted millionaire) Sonia Deerfield. As the two women grow closer, the mystery gets thicker and the danger more distinct. Helen’s got a Shane-esque swagger and a soft spot for redheads. Her chemistry with Sonia sizzles the second they share a frame!
PI Helen Keremos has always had a cult following, but her books have been out of print for decades. Zaremba and Lockey chatted with Quill & Quire about the decision to turn Work for a Million into a graphic novel and to release the print edition of the original book. “Our community was busy with politics and that’s what really mattered [in the ’70s and ’80s],” Lockey said. It was Margaret Atwood who convinced Zaremba to revive the character; she connected her with Bedside Press’ Hope Nicholson, who assembled the creative team and launched a Kickstarter to show publishers there’s a market for books like these.
And of course there is. The first few pages of Work for a Million have a real Strangers in Paradise vibe to them. Terry Moore successfully published that series for 13 years, and even recently revived it. Plus, with the success of shows Jessica Jones and Killing Eve there’s never been a better moment for complex stories about complicated women. And with The L Word on the way back, you know that Shane archetype is never going away.
With a few days left in its Kickstarter, Work for a Million is only a few hundred dollars short of its $21,000 goal. You can pre-order a digital copy of the graphic novel for $10, or go all in for around $60 and get a hard copy of the graphic novel and the original book, plus pin-ups from artists like Selena Goulding, Barbara Guttman, Marguerite Sauvage, Elizabeth Beals, Sara Richard, Sami Kivelä, Bev Johnson, Vic Maholtra, Joana Neves, Caroline Dougherty, and more.
Carly Usdin’s “Avant-Guards” Is the Women’s Basketball Comic Book You’ve Been Waiting for Since Before You Knew You Were Gay
If you told me just the premise of BOOM! Studios’ newest comic, The Avant-Guards, I’d be able to tell you who wrote it. Here, you try: Charlene “Charlie” Bravo, a seemingly queer girl with a complicated relationship with her past, shows up at an art school, The Georgia O’Keefe College of Arts and Subtle Dramatics, and, despite her reluctance, finds herself drawn to a legitimately diverse ragtag basketball team called The Avant-Guards. Did you guess Carly Usdin wrote this thing? You did, didn’t you? Well, you’re right!
The truth is, Charlie doesn’t want to be a transfer student at this new school and she doesn’t want any friends. While her roommate’s already got Audrey Hepburn framed above her unicorn throw pillows, Charlie refuses to unpack. She wanders around the orientation fair aimlessly and without any real interest in the clubs — Higher Art, Living Dramatically, Artpeggios — though she does pause at The Coven. That’s when a basketball thumps down beside her and she meets Jay, a student who towers over her and points to three other pals hanging out at the Avant-Guards table, trying to recruit a fifth person so they have enough players to fill out a basketball team.
Liv is their leader; she makes Hermione Granger look like an underprepared underachiever. The lengths she’s gone to to get the school to agree to allow sports teams in the first place is impressive, and her relentless enthusiasm for basketball and her optimism that Charlie’s going to crack and join them is legitimately contagious. I was as excited as she was — well, almost! — when Charlie showed up at the gym at the end of the issue.
The Avant-Guards #1 landed this week, and while I no longer keep a pull list going at my local comic shop, I rushed out to get my hands on a physical copy of this book. Carly isn’t just a friend; she’s the writer of Heavy Vinyl, one of my favorite comic books from 2018, and the director of Suicide Kale, one of my favorite queer movies of all time. She’s proven that she’s committed to portraying all kinds of bodies and genders and sexualities and racial identities in her work, and everything she creates is just so very queer it’s impossible not to love it. Filling out this comic book team is Noah Hayes (Goldie Vance) on illustration, Rebecca Nalty (who you’ll immediately recognize from Heavy Vinyl) on coloring, and Ed Dukeshire (Buffy) on lettering.
The book is warm and inviting, the characters pop, and there’s so many hidden feminist and queer jokes — does Charlie’s roommate have pink pussy hat (TM White Feminism) on her bedpost? — you’ll read it more than once plucking them out to chuckle at them. My favorite detail of issue #1 is the way Liv plays basketball. She’s a shorty and she shoots two-handed, even from the free-throw line, which means that even though she loves the game, she’s not super-skilled at it. Also, she calls Charlie Diana Taurasi, which is especially excellent because Charlie has Diana Taurasi’s exact form (but she’s left-handed). (Because she’s an athlete and an artist.)
Sports comics and queer athletes are still far too rare in the wide world of representation. If you like either or both of those things, my guess is Avant-Guards is going to scratch an itch you didn’t even know you had.
Queering D&D: How “Critical Role” Helped Me Find My Way
If you had told me two years ago that someday one of my top five favorite things to watch would be a bunch of (self-proclaimed) nerdy-ass voice actors playing Dungeons & Dragons live for 4-5 hours every week, I would have laughed in your face. I barely even knew what D&D was; the entirety of my knowledge came from Big Bang Theory (and media like it), so I assumed it was for very nerdy, women-fearing and/or women-hating straight men shouting rules about magic at each other. What place would a queer woman have in that?
But then, toward the end of 2017 my friend Taylor started sending me gifs of these very cute nerdy girls and telling me about this show she’s obsessed with called Critical Role. I was knee-deep in scripted series but she mounted a patient defense and a steady attack of gifs, stories, and clips. Her goal was to prime me and convince me to watch by the time the new campaign started in early 2018, but she severely underestimated the pull of the Keyleth vs the Cliff clip, so she sent me a one-shot that involved some of Critical Role’s main players so I could get a sense of what an episode would feel like.
And at first it felt a little like they were speaking a different language – I had never heard the term “D20” and what the hell is an “arcana check” anyway? – but before long two things stood out to me: D&D is about storytelling, and those stories can be as queer as you want them to be.
While not a regular part of the Critical Role cast, the one-shot in question guest starred Ashly Burch, who you might recognize as the voice of queer icon Chloe Price in Life is Strange. In this one-shot, her character was in love with regular-cast-member Laura Bailey’s character. We learn this almost as soon as the game begins, and as soon as I realized it, it felt a little like someone came and unlocked the door to a wing of my house I didn’t even know was there. I had so much to learn, and boi do I love learning.
The ladies of Critical Role, my beautiful nerds.
So instead of waiting for the new campaign, I dove headfirst into the nearly 500 hours worth of gameplay from the first Critical Role campaign, Vox Machina. Now spanning more than one sitting or one mission, the storytelling was even more apparent. The livestreamed campaign had started as a home game beforehand, so the players were already comfortable with each other, the characters already established, and since the players were all voice actors, they’re really in it. So it’s not only storytelling and acting, but also during the moments they’re not in character, there are moments of true friendship. There were men and women, queer and straight, and throughout the game, whether it was the Dungeon Master Matt Mercer playing non-player side characters (NPCs) or guests (like Lumberjanes and She-Ra creator Noelle Stevenson who played the butch and badass Tova), there were characters of all races (in the way we understand race as being about where you’re from, and also in the way the fantasy realm classifies it as being about whether you’re an elf or a gnome), and sexualities. There was no gatekeeping or shaming and even though these adorable nerds had been playing the game for years, they still had to ask questions like “which dice do I roll for that?” and the DM is patient with all of them.
While I was home for Christmas that year, I was watching episodes of the Vox Machina campaign every time I found myself alone, and sometimes even when I wasn’t. My parents and brother all asked in turn what I was watching, and they all scoffed when I told them I was watching people I don’t know play D&D. And while the concept itself is a little out-there, I admit, it was the way they said, “As in Dungeons & Dragons?” that irked me. I couldn’t hold it against them, because I had been the same way mere months before. No, I held more issue with the toxic culture that has followed the game through time.
The cast of Critical Role certainly aren’t the first open-minded group of players ever. It wasn’t exclusively a boys’ game—in fact, Matt’s mom even played—but it was portrayed that way. I can’t say how toxic actually playing with men was, but I can say that what I heard, and what I saw on TV or in movies, didn’t make me feel like it was the kind of game I’d feel comfortable playing, or even talking about outside carefully curated groups.
Of course by the time I clocked 24 hours of Critical Role, I was ready to play D&D myself. My friend said maybe someday we could start a game, and listed some of our mutual friends who would be interested. And I realized it would be a game of all queer women. Taylor helped me build my first character, and she was queer as heck. In September, I played my first one-shot, DM’d by fellow Autostraddler Jenna, with her wife Steph and Dufrau as fellow adventurers. D&D is about storytelling, and queer people have plenty of amazing stories to tell.
When Critical Role’s second campaign started in January 2018, I had no idea what it would come to mean to me. It was just a new and fun thing to see these same actors playing brand new characters. But 2018 ended up being a really shitty year. For the world at large, and for me on a personal level. But as my year got worse, Critical Role got better. Marisha Ray’s character Beau was coded queer from the start but I wasn’t sure if it was me projecting…until it was made clear she very much is queer.
Marisha is constantly perched on my heart.
Ashly Burch guested again, for a multi-episode arc, and played queer again. Ashley Johnson’s character is also queer. And on top of all that, there was still this underlying sense that these actors, every one of them, was having fun. They seemed to love each other and truly enjoy playing this silly, nerdy game together. They just happened to be livestreaming to hundreds of thousands of people.
They dressed up as NPCs for Halloween because of course they did.
Critical Role became my happy place. The days where real life felt too hard, and writing felt too hard, and scripted TV felt too hard, Critical Role was a soft place to land. Or, if I’m being dramatic, it was the pressure on the wounds during a time I felt like I was getting a new wound weekly. But Critical Role was staunching the bleeding, keeping me going, giving me enough joy to fuel me for another day.
I was watching both campaigns concurrently, so I always had as many hours available as I needed. (In fact, I still haven’t finished the Vox Machina campaign…only half a dozen episodes left!) These actors weren’t my friends, but they were each other’s friends, and I took great comfort in that. And I had friends who had already seen these episodes, and me shouting my emotions in their general direction and then responding in kind brought us closer. At this past New York Comic Con, I met Marisha and Laura briefly to get their autographs, and I thanked Marisha for showing me that queer women had a place in D&D, and I thanked Laura for bringing me lightness in a dark year, and they both made eye contact with me and smiled at me and told me they understood that we need all the joy we can get, especially now, and I could tell in their eyes that they really did understand; I felt seen, and I finally, finally, felt like maybe the wounds were starting to heal.
I still can’t explain it, not really. Why I love Critical Role as much as I do. Except to say that D&D is about storytelling. And I love stories.
They love it, too. Promise.
If you want to get into Critical Role, I highly recommend starting with the Mighty Nein campaign. While there is still quite a bit to catch up on, it’s less than 200 hours of gameplay instead of almost 500. And there are always one-shots you can check out to see if watching people play D&D is even your jam. The one I started with is called The Return of Liam (at least on YouTube). If you want to learn the basics of D&D from these very same nerdy-ass voice actors but NOT through the jump-in-the-deep-end method, they have an ongoing series called Handbooker Helper that starts from what the hell those multi-sided dice are about and slowly works up to building a character and beyond.
And if you already know you love D&D but have been waiting for a troll to open a gate for you…wait no more. There’s another way in, and it’s troll-free and proud. Create your own story, and make it as queer as your little heart desires.
“Goddess Mode” Is The Cyberpunk Magical Girl Comic of My Dreams and Also My Reality
I need to be real: there was almost no universe in which I didn’t love Goddess Mode, a new comic for DC Vertigo written by Zoë Quinn (with Robbi Rodriguez and Rico Renzi rocking the art like they’re playing the drums). First off, during NYCC 2018 I asked Quinn how gay the comic was going to be. Her reply? She described a character as the one that “makes all the gay ladies say, ‘step on me.’” With an introduction to the world like that one, I was already hooked. But hearing Quinn talk about the role of technology in the book was something additionally special —I am often found in dive bars shouting about how code is the closest thing we’ll get to Harry Potter magic, for it is language making stuff happen, and what is magic other than words coming to bear in our reality? The cross between Cyberpunk and Magical Girl seemed as natural to me as breathing. So when I received my Goddess Mode in an adorable bright pink envelope, I was eager to read it immediately and boy howdy, it sure didn’t disappoint.
We open, truly, with a mysterious battle between a monster and what looks to be a queer person in a very good hat. But that’s not who we hear first — we hear our protagonist, Cass, speaking to her father about her trials and tribulations in his absence (he’s been a coma for many years, and many folks are suffering from the same). And quickly we are set into the world, one where life is largely lived virtually and with the assistance of a self-learning AI called Azoth and its human-ish-face, Psyche (a hologram-y Alexa that Cass’s father helped program and train). Azoth suddenly crashes and Cass is caught visiting her father in a place she doesn’t belong. Rather than being punished for it, Cass ascends from her grunt-work position providing tech support for Azoth to a bigger, “better” job making sure the head of the company — also suffering from the coma-inducing-illness — is taken care of in the aftermath.
As we follow Cass deeper into the world, it becomes very apparent that the class divide is uncrossable and unconscionable — if you’re rich, you’ve got trees and rocket boots and if you’re poor, you need your nanobots to help you breathe the poison air in your slum. If you’re rich, you have a person check up on you after your life support glitches, and if you’re poor, well. Fuck you then. It is truly the techno-utopia for which the wealthy Silicon Valley folks of today seem to advocate.
But the first issue of Goddess Mode (and, I would wager, the series on the whole) isn’t a huge bummer! Far from it, actually! The aesthetic provides the foundation for the vibe. The majority of the physical world is drab, colored with muted browns and blues; the corporate projections of Azoth and its accompanying physical spaces are sterile and white; the magical insides of the digital world are, however, candy colors so bright you might want to lick the page. Every time cyber-magic is afoot, it looks like a firework or a piñata exploded all over the page. The colors point the entire work toward an escape hatch. And speaking of escape hatch, the dynamic illustrations by Rodriguez in the moment a corporate higher-up bounces with the assistance of his rocket boots, screaming “remember excellence is a choice!” is one of the funniest moments in the issue.
Which brings us to the dialogue. It’s just fucking clever. It’s got zing and life. It breathes. Multiple characters comment on Cass’s love for garbage and each time she replies, “I love trash, it’s different.” When Psyche tells on Cass for all the illegal modifications, Cass groans, “Don’t be a cop.” There’s an unabashed love for words and understanding of comedic timing present in the text of the thing; Quinn should be jumping for joy, it works so so well. I absolutely adore all parts of this comic because all elements of it perfectly straddle two tones. The first, a serious critique of actual modern issues of socially applied technology; and the second, something we’re all in serious need of these days: a good gay romp.
If you think about it, that combination is a winning one because that’s the world we live in. We can’t be depressed about what a garbage (or is it trash? There’s a difference!) fire we’re living in all the time. We have to have some candy colors in our life. And so we, the real human people of this world who have hearts, speak like Cass speaks. We engage with the world as it is and as we wish it would be. We are as the protagonist is: equal parts acerbic and earnest. This is a comic for 2018 and 2019, for the Millennial and the Gen Z-er, for the era in which we live. And I’ll be adding it to my pull.
Goddess Mode #1 is available now and you can buy it from DC, Comixology or your local comic book shop. The second issue is set to release in January 2019.
If Democrats Win Back the House Silicon Valley Will Finally Face Some Regulation
Hello my sweet possums, this is an article particularly for folks who are able to vote in the 2018 U.S. Midterm Elections but honestly it’s good for anyone in any situation where you’ve got control over your governance in some capacity. I am here to tell you why you should vote for Democrats, aside from all the usual common sense reasons I and Autostraddle usually tell you to do that (raise the minimum wage, abortion access, the other party is White Nationalist, etc). This is the reason: Democrats promise that, if they win back the House, they’re going to start regulating Silicon Valley. Which sorely needs to happen.
Why does it need to happen? Well, Facebook and Twitter combined with Russian attempts to influence elections are the reason the United States is currently beset by 45, for example, but also because existing laws and regulations were never built for this era. A lot of the things that are possible, even normal, now would’ve been considered at least physical impossibilities and at most witchcraft when the laws were written. I reached out to Brianna Wu, game designer, technology expert and politician preparing for her 2020 Congressional run, for comment on why it’s important that we have leaders who know how to focus on technology policy. “Right now, tech policy is tilted towards the Verizons and the AT&Ts of the world,” she says. “There is almost no one in Washington that cares about your privacy, no one that cares about your cybersecurity. And things are not going to change until we have a generation of leaders that understand why this matters.”
Democrats do have a direction in which to travel, according to an op-ed written by Kara Swisher, technology journalist and co-founder of Recode, published in The New York Times on October 4th. Enter the Internet Bill of Rights, initially drafted by Rohit Khanna, U.S. Representative from California’s 17th District (where Apple, Intel and Yahoo all live). He’s the perfect Democratic Congressman to take a first swing at what we want the future of internet regulation to look like, given where he’s situated, and he has done. Here’s what the list of ten principles looks like:
Set of Principles for an Internet Bill of Rights
The internet age and digital revolution have changed Americans’ way of life. As our lives and the U.S. economy are more tied to the internet, it is essential to provide Americans with basic protections online.
You should have the right:
(1) to have access to and knowledge of all collection and uses of personal data by companies;
(2) to opt-in consent to the collection of personal data by any party and to the sharing of personal data with a third party;
(3) where context appropriate and with a fair process, to obtain, correct or delete personal data controlled by any company and to have those requests honored by third parties;
(4) to have personal data secured and to be notified in a timely manner when a security breach or unauthorized access of personal data is discovered;
(5) to move all personal data from one network to the next;
(6) to access and use the internet without internet service providers blocking, throttling, engaging in paid prioritization or otherwise unfairly favoring content, applications, services or devices;
(7) to internet service without the collection of data that is unnecessary for providing the requested service absent opt-in consent;
(8) to have access to multiple viable, affordable internet platforms, services and providers with clear and transparent pricing;
(9) not to be unfairly discriminated against or exploited based on your personal data; and
(10) to have an entity that collects your personal data have reasonable business practices and accountability to protect your privacy.
To my mind, the most significant is the sixth one, which would enshrine net neutrality as the law of the land. It is a position I have hammered home several times: net neutrality is a queer issue. And given what ad algorithms know or can guess about you (and how ubiquitous those tracking systems are), protection from discrimination based on your data is a pretty major deal as well. All of these points would certainly do a lot to tip the scales more toward individual humans and less toward the Verizons and AT&Ts of the world, as concerned Wu. All in all, I think it’s an excellent start and points to the future we wish we could have, rather than the technological dystopian hellscape promised to us by so many science fiction novels towards which we seem intent on marching. In order to make any of this into reality, for it to be anything other than a list drafted by a congress member from California, we need to retake the House in the midterm elections on November 6th. If you live in the United States and are able to vote, it is imperative that you do so. And you should vote for Democrats who both understand computers and are willing to regulate and legislate in the real, actual technological age that is upon us.
I’m talking mostly about the federal government, but this same exact sentiment applies to anyone running for a State governance position as well. In fact, when our country is working at its finest (and the federal government isn’t built entirely of bumbling appointees and fascists), the idea behind our system is that the States enact policies and laws, each trying out what is best for their particular State. The federal government sees how each State’s plan progresses and then simply takes the best one and builds federal regulation, policy or law on it. We’re starting to see a little of that happen with how each State regulates cryptocurrency, for example. Given that the idea is to eventually return to a time when our federal government isn’t bees, focusing on this issue at a State level isn’t a bad road to take (although I have misgivings about a single state’s power to do much and the time might already be here for far-reaching federal action, but that is BESIDE THE POINT TAKE EVERYTHING WE CAN OKAY?). Don’t only ask these questions of candidates for the U.S. House and Senate; ask them of candidates in State positions as well. Congressman Khanna’s list gives you a very convenient thing to point to—what does the platform say about it? Can you make it to an event and ask? Send an email? Be informed and hold all potential representatives accountable.
The Multifaceted Masculinity of the Dream Daddy Comics
I struggle a lot with my concept of masculinity, or at least with talking about it. In terms of enacting it, I approach my masculinity the same way I approach most other things: I do what I would like to do, and I do not do what I would not like to do. But it’s when I try to describe those things that I begin to sound like J. Alfred Prufrock. “That is not what I meant at all.” Because in trying to process what masculinity is made out of, I run up against the rigidity of it and my language falters. Sometimes in describing how I knew I was trans, I wind up accidentally narrowing the concepts of what a woman can be — and it’s simply not what I mean to do. Well, I never buy a stitch of clothing that isn’t from the men’s department…okay, some women don’t either. I bind. So do some women. I want top surgery; yes, sometimes people who use she/her pronouns also want that. My wife, a cis woman, grows frustrated in my ham-handed attempts to narrativize my experience because in describing how it is to me, am I bringing the already too-close walls around her gender even closer?
There are too few examples of masculinity. Or rather plenty of examples of exactly the same masculinity and not enough space to breathe in between them. I’m not going to call it alternative masculinity, because I think that’s bullshit, to label some masculinity as alternative and some as, what, normative? I think that’s part of why we’re in this masculinity predicament in the first place — that we talk about it as a binary of toxic and good, normative and strange. In or out of the box that we label. And yet — how do we talk about our experiences without making them rely on something that it’s not? For example: I know I am masculine because I don’t like x or I know I am trans because doing y makes me feel dysphoric. Why can’t masculinity just stand on its own, independent of any sort of negative space around it or theoretical opposite? It’s such a hairy thing to parse. And I’m not going to parse it in this essay, either.
I am simply going to advocate for more examples.
via NewNowNext.
Enter Dream Daddy as an entity. A computer game, developed by Game Grumps (originally a YouTube series, now additionally maker of this damn delight). The idea behind the game is to create your own dadsona (and your dad can even be a trans dad!) and date all the other hot dads in the neighborhood. I poked Al Monts until they played it for an Autostraddle review back in 2017, and they let us know when the comics were coming out earlier this year, but somehow I missed them until I showed up at New York Comic Con this month and Oni Press loaded me up with a tote bag full of gay books.
The game was pretty revolutionary in its depictions of masculinity; it let players try on a lot of different flavors of masculinity, and let them interact with other masculine folks in gentle and interesting ways. In the world of Dream Daddy, masculinity is both competitive and nurturing, physically fit and bear-tastic, trans and cis, and all of it is very, very gay. While the game introduced us to the world and allowed a player to try a plurality of masculinities on for size, the comics take this experience a step further away from the body of the reader, and does something a little bit different that I very much need right now as I quietly (but intensely) internally address what it means to be a trans masculine person. Spoilers for the game and comics ahead!
Rather than putting the reader in the shoes of Manda Panda’s dad, the first issue, Much Abird About Nothing, opens by introducing us to “our dad” or the character we would normally be playing, if it were the game. We actually never learn our protagonist’s name, at least not in issue one, but to be honest, he may not even really be our protagonist. There might not truly be one; this is an ensemble project, and that’s the first thing the comics do differently. Rather than emphasizing the relationship between two characters, the comics explore the dads as a community. They interact in even more varied ways with each other than in a game marketed as a dating sim. Less rom com, more How I Met Your Mother Father. Our Dad is going with Craig, a physically fit gym bro with three daughters, to a college reunion. I say “physically fit gym bro” as though Craig can be reduced to such a narrow definition, but the things the comic allows him to do expand the way his gender arrives on his body: our dad goes to get water from Craig’s fridge, and discovers a be-lemoned pitcher of it on a shelf. “I can’t believe Kegstand Craig puts lemons in his water now,” he says. And in the next frame, he stares at his glass in awe. “Wow. The ratio of citrus to water is perfect. This is so refreshing!” So many things are present in these two frames, things I don’t often experience when reading about masculinity in any sort of fictional context. First, Kegstand Craig has been allowed to evolve, and there isn’t a moral judgment about how he has evolved. He hasn’t gotten better or worse; he has simply gotten older and changed. And that is an okay thing to have happened. Second, he keeps a house and takes care in details that make his life more comfortable — the lemons in the water. Later, Craig confides in Our Dad how nervous he is about the reunion, that some things about the reunion might cause him social stress. He communicates these fears really cogently and calmly and allows himself to feel the feelings without passing judgment on them. He is then reassured by another Dad, Our Dad, that the reunion will be fine and fun. And Our Dad will be with him every step of the way. Plus there is some very sexy kissing. We get to watch Craig and Our Dad do everything from adventure at the pier to interact with Craig’s mom.
The first two Dream Daddy Comics, as they look laid out in an attractive manner on my dining room table
In the second issue, entitled Let the Right Dad In, we follow Robert (dad to a pupper, not a human child) and Damien, canonically trans goth (vampire?) dad and explore their relationship with each other as Damien first moves into the neighborhood. Robert thinks of himself as a classic movie hero; Damien thinks of himself as a vampire, basically, or at least an enthusiast of Victorian Jelly, as evidenced by the scene in which Damien and Robert interact at a neighborhood cookout. “Looks like you’ve got a thing for the macabre,” says Robert. “I prefer to see it as a comfortable relationship with death’s inevitability.” Robert sees himself as a badass, but runs during his first encounter with Damien; Damien allows his earnest love of his aesthetic to flourish (“For my aesthetic sense to convince you of the supernatural can only be described as a testament to the years of hard work I’ve spent refining my personal style and sense of self.”) while also, again earnestly, volunteering at an animal shelter for the love of cute puppers.
In short, not only do we have a pantheon of masculinities in the characters as individual archetypes, each dad transcends his archetype and experiences a multitude of masculinities within himself. I find both of these things underrepresented and also comforting, an affirmation that I am not doomed to something so narrow. Furthermore, each sort of masculinity we see never relies on a diametric opposite, which is often the flaw of masculinity portrayals. They simply are, and it makes me breathe easier.
The other thing the comic does that the game doesn’t do is encourage a quietness, a low-stakes-ness for which gaming as a medium doesn’t often allow. In a game, there are usually high enough stakes to make a player feel like something has been attained. The Dream Daddy game has both a choose-your-own-adventure conversational system that the genre of “dating sim” relies on, and also dad-ly mini-games that often require dexterity. For whatever reason, I am very good at the Brian mini-games (yes, even the mini golf that everyone else I know complains about), but very bad at the Mat ones. I have not had one single good date with Mat, and so he remains someone unexplored.
One cannot, however, rage quit reading comics because no part of the experience of a book relies on physical dexterity or frustrating repetition. There is a sweetness to the medium that I crave; a sensitivity to the art, the act of putting my feet up on the couch and slowly sipping coffee, taking in a story that doesn’t require my involvement (save for actively reading it) to unfold. I am not usually a person to advocate for passivity, and yet that is what I want right now. Something that’s less about trying things on and more about observation. Something gentle and nurturing, where the number one conflict is a bird accidentally stealing someone’s watch. There’s no goal for the reader, nothing they must attain, no action necessary. I can simply rest in this strange and beautiful world of homosexual daddies with expansive definitions of what it means to be masculine; given how raw and terrible I feel as I continue to come out as trans, continue to lift up the rocks within myself and peer under them, this is what I need. I have cried so much about this. Sometimes I just want a comic book where not every attempt to narrativize masculinity looks like a deep pit into which I can tumble.
All this, plus the fifth one of these, slated for a December release, is entitled Dungeons and Daddies and might be a perfect confluence of my interests. You can join me in reading the next three issues (one of which came out last week) by ordering them online directly from Oni Press.
Monday Roundtable: The Board Games We Never Lose
There are just some things some people are good at: spelling, thinking of synonyms, remembering numbers, dark magic, imaginary capitalism. And some times those things translate into being very good at board games. This week we asked our team what board game they always win, and here are our answers. Let us know if you think you could beat us — or what game you always win — in the comments!
Heather Hogan, Senior Editor: Monopoly
I hate to say this because it makes me sound like a monster but I am truly unbeatable at Monopoly. Part of why I always win is because I’m shockingly ruthless at it. I made a grown man cry on Christmas Eve a few years ago because I humiliated him so thoroughly, making him mortgage all his properties one-by-one and count out his money to me, slowly and deliberately. (Shouldn’t have been rude to my girlfriend, motherfucker.) Part of it is my ability to see three to five moves ahead for every player: Where you’re probably going to land, what you’re gonna get from it, who’s gonna want it, what you’re gonna want from them. It is an evil way to use my intuition, I know. I think the biggest part of my success, though, is my uncle gave me a Monopoly probabilities booklet when I was just a kid and I studied that thing more than I ever studied for school. Seven is the most common number rolled with two dice. Jail is the most likely space people will land on. The orange properties — New York Ave., Tennessee Ave., St. James Place — are, therefore, the most likely properties people will land on, and repeatedly. The reds are the next best, specifically Illinois Ave. due to dice probability and the fact that a Chance card exists advancing players there. Magenta properties are a little less probable but also cheaper to build on, which means a quicker return on your investment. Greens and dark blues are a waste of your life. I like Monopoly because I am good at it and very competitive and I like to win, and unlike a lot of other board games, it relies on your skills as much as it does on chance.
Rachel Kincaid, Managing Editor: Boggle
I am amazing at Boggle. Other seemingly word-related games are deceptive in that what they measure is not actually verbal — Scrabble is really more about the ability to maximize points strategically, crosswords are kind of more about knowing trivia, etc. Boggle, though, is just about seeing words and writing them down, and I guess maybe sort of pattern recognition if we’re getting technical! And I know a lot of words, and am good at writing them down. And that’s it, that’s the entire game. I haven’t played Boggle for years; it was really only played with my family when growing up, and for a short period of time when I used to babysit this one particular child who insisted on playing it every single time even though I did not let her win, and was in retrospect a little too competitive. It’s fine I’m sure she’s fine.
Carrie Wade, Staff Writer: Password
Password, a la the ‘60s game show. My family did Game Night at dinner for a while when I was a kid and my dad and I were basically a superteam at tabletop Password. We haven’t played in well over two decades but I am confident we would remain unstoppable to this day.
(Related: We had to retire Game Night because I got too competitive.)
Erin Sullivan, Staff Writer: Bananagrams
I have a pretty solid track record with Bananagrams and Connect Four lmao, and I love me for chosing two games that for sure don’t have boards. General area though! Connect Four always seems to be at bars, which is why I know this about myself, not because I own Connect Four and encourage other adults to play with me. And then everyone seems to own Bananagrams, yeah? Currently, there are two sets in our two-person apartment, and I wouldn’t rule out a third mysteriously appearing in the near future.
I have a very fast and loose approach to Connect Four and very chaotic energy while playing. People hate that I just willy-nilly drop in chips as if I’ve not one thought in my head (I don’t), and I think this is key because it can even rattle people who are great at strategizing. With Bananagrams, it’s about one big word to start and breaking off into smalls. Definitely not trying to impress with interesting words, and I’m gonna hit you with that “has” and “none” and “can” until I win. Ultimately, though, no one really wins, because to have won you’ve had to scream “peel” on repeat until everyone hates you.
Creatrix Tiara, Staff Writer: Monopoly
I feel like I always win Monopoly? Though I don’t normally go in with any sort of strategy. I’m mostly sharing this though because I wanted to talk about this one time my friends and I were at some guy’s house & we were playing Monopoly & my other 3 friends were making out with some guy each and meanwhile here I am drunk on tequila being THE STRICTEST BANKER EVER. Like “STOP KISSING YOU OWE THE BANK $200”. Tequila, me, and Monopoly don’t mix.
Alexis Smithers, Staff Writer: Scrabble
SCRABBLE I actually haven’t played scrabble in years because my family won’t play with me anymore (because I was like seven or eight playing with my aunt and cousin and I put down “way” and they were like “Good job, Lex!” and I was like, “I’m not finished.” it turns to “away”, “Good job, Lex!” / “I’m still not finished.” turns to motherfucking RUNAWAY ON TRIPLE LETTER SCORE THE GAME NEVER OFFICIALLY ENDED THEY JUST LEFT ME THERE TO THIS DAY I AM STILL PROUD) and after listening to Back to Back where Cameron Esposito talks about lesbians and board games, I’m thinking it’s for the best that I don’t try it with anyone not blood related.
Al(aina) Monts, Staff Writer: Chess
I always win at chess because I only play chess alone because I’m a really bad chess player.
Riese Bernard, Editor in Chief: Scattergories
I am really really really serious about Scattergories. Nobody appreciates my adherence to the rules. Honestly I don’t see why the rules are so confusing to people, but maybe it’s just sad for them that I always win.
Valerie Anne, Staff Writer: Scattergories
My family and I used to get in really heated games of Scattergories. It was great because anyone who was old enough to write words could play, and it was fun for everyone because even when you were bad at the game, it was pretty hilarious. There would always be fighting about semantics and my mother would always accuse me of being more lenient with others than with her, but I almost always won. To the point where now my family refuses to play with me because I’m a “writer” and have such a “big vocabulary” that I have an “unfair advantage” but really they’re all just sore losers.
Carolyn Yates, Staff Writer: Settlers of Catan
I win often – but not always! – at Settlers of Catan, because in high school instead of branching out socially or really going outside I played it almost every single Sunday afternoon with my then-best-friend and her family. They had expansion packs. They had expansion tiles someone had bought on ebay. They had extra leaves to put in the kitchen table. We regularly played to obscenely high point counts in brutal, tea-fuelled six-hour games and I lost constantly, with the side effect that now when I play in casual settings on a regular-sized board with friends I sometimes get to win.
Yvonne Marquez, Senior Editor: Dixit
Have y’all ever played Dixit? It’s a strange little board game that’s super fun! The simplest way I can describe is that it’s similar to Apples to Apples but with pictures. You have a card and you say a word or phrase that reminds you of the card. Then your opponents have to pick a card from their own hand that matches what you described and then you shuffle up the cards and then everyone has to guess which one is actually your card. It’s a game that tests how well you know the people you’re playing with, their quirks and how their mind works. I seem to win most of the time and I think it’s because my Scorpio moon is really good at reading people and their intuitive feelings.
KaeLyn Rich, Staff Writer: Ouija
I honestly can’t think of one board game that I always win, unless you count the Ouija Board which is sold as a board game and also maybe is not a board game, but anyway… I grew up in a rural area with the local cemetery right behind my childhood home. I believe in ghosts partially because of growing up in an old farmhouse near a graveyard. I had some weird experiences in my childhood home. I believe in science, too, though, so I’m not sure whether my successful Ouija board sessions came from my own subconscious via the ideomotor effect or something more…spirited. I had a very close connection with my board as a tween and was convinced I could sense spirits in my house, so I definitely believed. This is going to make some of ya’ll yell at me, but I slept with the board under my bad at the peak of my obsession and played every day by myself. My friends marveled at how my board “worked” possibly because I really, really, really believed and made sure no one was intentionally pushing the planchette. I don’t know how one “wins” the Ouija Board game, but it was originally sold as a board game and Hasbro’s sticking to that category, so…I’m saying it counts! Also, I’m not particularly consistently good at any board games otherwise. I’m more invested in having fun and being silly than winning at a game, which actually makes the Ouija Board thing make sense, I guess.
Sarah Sarwar, Business and Design Director: First Time Everything
The first time I ever play a board game, I win. It doesn’t matter what game or where I’m at or who the president is — I AM WINNING THE GAME AND YOU CANNOT STOP ME. Train Dominoes, Monopoly, The Game of Life (oh ha ha!), and more — beware of challenging me to a board game that is new to me, for you will lose.
“Donut County” Is a Perfect Game For People Who Need a Break From Their Rage
I have been watching people play a lot of hard video games this month. Dark Souls, Bloodborne, PUBG. A cool thing about these games is that they make some people very mad when they play them. Not everybody, but some people. It takes a real go-getter to see a couple hours of downtime stretching out ahead of themself and think, “Man oh man, I cannot wait to get angry!” I admire that kind of fire. Me though, I just can’t do it. I can’t handle those games. I don’t need another anger hobby, I have Twitter. Give me easy games, bud. That’s what I want.
If you also like easy games, I am about to make your day! Donut County is the easiest game I have ever played, and it’s also a real nice time! Look at these neat colorful graphics. Look at these cute animal people. Look at this hole!
Look at it!
Speaking of holes, this is a game in which you play as a hole. As a hole, your job is to make things fall into you. It’s like eating, but with a plot. The plot is that a raccoon summoned a hole and now things are falling into it. It doesn’t ever make much sense but it makes the exact amount of sense that was intended, I think. The raccoon sucks things into a hole to fulfill a hole filling quota, then his friend gets very upset about how he has sucked so many townsfolk into a hole that she steals his hole and sucks him into it. Then, from within the hole, they concoct a plan to use the hole to suck some other things down into the hole with them, so that they can get out of the hole. But if your entire town has been sucked into a hole, what is really even the point of getting out of the hole? That is a moral dilemma you’ll need to solve for yourself.
That’s it. That’s the plot.
The way the game works is that everybody who has fallen into the hole has a story to tell about how they wound up in the hole in the first place. You act out that story by being a hole, and dropping down small things like grass and soda cans and then bigger things like cinder blocks and beach balls and then the main characters of this game and then every single object in the immediate vicinity. The more you eat, the bigger, and therefore better, you get. A big hole is inarguably better at being a hole than a small hole is. I think we can all agree on that.
It feels like a very simple, not quite as satisfying Katamari Damacy. As you progress to later levels, there are new mechanics introduced organically that you have to figure out on your own, but nothing ever gets too complicated. Figuring out what you have to do to maximize your hole potential in a particular level always feels like “Ah. Neat.” (In another Katamari-like nod, you also get to check out what kind of trash you’ve collected after each level.) That’s really all there is to it, and it might honestly not be enough for a lot of people. The gameplay is consistently fun, but definitely not super deep. The only way to lose is if you run into a bug where an object flies just out of the playable space so you can’t suck it down into your self-hole. Then you just restart the level and all is well. (I ran into this bug exactly once.)
An Important PSA.
It’s a game that could very comfortably be for kids. Maybe it even is for kids. But the writing feels like it’s for me, and for other people in this exact age of the internet. It speaks a very specific language that felt right on time when I played it on Tuesday, August 28th 2018, but might already be out of date by the time this review is posted, because what even is time anymore. It’s definitely meme-ish. I liked that. I like to be in a joke. But if you think that, like, “Puppers are so last year” or something along those lines, you might still like this game because you’ll get to feel superior and more with-it than the writers. Or you might hate it.
Progress, but at what cost?
I really liked this game. It doesn’t shoot for the moon. It’s a fun little story built around a handful of solid and satisfying mechanics. It doesn’t run on too long. For $15, the two-hour playtime is maybe a little on the short side, but it ended when it should have ended. There’s no padding. The story bits are short and charming, the levels are short and charming, the boss fight is not a massive annoyance. Everything is intuitive and nice to look at.I would recommend this game for people who do not want to get angry, people who want to feel nice with very little effort, and people who would love to be a hole. I would also recommend it for actual children.
Donut County is currently available for Windows and Mac, Playstation 4, and the iOS app store.
Do you have what it takes to win?
The Gayest Comic Books from 2018 NYCC
The world is on fire and I am at New York Comic Con asking every person I meet how gay their shit is.
I have always done this. Every NYCC or, really, any con, the sheer amount of new things to interface with is, frankly, overwhelming. It doesn’t matter if you’re a professional nerd or how many years you’ve spent as such — when faced with an entire Javits Center full of content, there’s absolutely no way any one single human has heard of everything. And I have a memory like a whiffle ball, so sometimes I don’t remember that I know something because that memory has fallen out. I spend the first day of every con just getting my bearings. And my shining North Star, the thing I use to narrow down where my eyes need to land, has always been how gay something is. I have always walked up to booths and brazenly asked to be pointed toward their most homosexual of books.
Given that Noelle Stevenson is the show-runner of this, pretty sure this is gonna be at least A LITTLE BIT gay
This past year has been a long decade for me. I came out as trans about a year ago, now, and it has not always been a pleasant experience. Plus, you know, the everything. The everything in the whole world is really bumming me out. I need to be really honest with myself about where I am in my reading for pleasure right now and, given the everything, I need to fully embrace the idea that I simply do not have time for any fun-reading that isn’t queer. So, given that I’m laser-focused and, frankly, very filled with rage, this question has gone from sort of my compass to Very Aggressive.
Here are the responses I have received to this question in this, the year of our Lord 2018. They ran the gamut.
I actually had a photo of Tee Franklin, whose blue eyeshadow was absolutely stunning on this day! But my camera threw an error and it seems like it ate two photos I am kicking myself over — one was Franklin, the other was the McElroys. I’m SO PISSED. I switched memory cards after that.
Jook Joint — Tee Franklin
First up is Tee Franklin, who I found in Artist’s Alley. You might remember her as the writer behind Bingo Love, which we talked about last year. I am happy to report that, in the year since we last spoke, Franklin’s Bingo Love has gotten picked up by Image Comics. She’s now doing a five-part horror series called Jook Joint, also with Image. When I asked her how gay it was, she opened the comic to the first page to show me the story begins with a graphic lesbian sex scene. “We’ve got all sorts of scissoring up in here,” she said. Alas, there is a lot of blood and gore in this comic, so it’s not for me. But given how much the everything sucks right now, it might be for you! Because Jook Joint appears to be about killing people who deserve it. Enjoy this rich fantasy that has absolutely nothing to do with how the world currently works.
The Adventure Zone — Travis McElroy, Clint McElroy and Carey Pietsch
Then I stopped by the First Second booth to talk to Travis McElroy, Clint McElroy and Carey Pietsch about The Adventure Zone graphic novel. For those who don’t know, The Adventure Zone is a part of one my favorite media zeitgeists: recorded Dungeons and Dragons games. The comic is an adaption of that D&D game, and it’s artfully and whimsically done. It acknowledges the game by inserting Griffin, the Dungeon Master, speaking directly to the player characters. While getting a copy of the first arc, Here There be Gerblins, signed, I asked a slightly different question but one that got at the spirit of the thing.
Since I was already aware of how gay their content was (and how gay the comic will become), I asked Travis how often people ask the group about trans player characters, since the introduction of their first trans non-player character (a character played by the DM) went so very well. I’m trans, so. This question was relevant to my interests. Travis McElroy said they get the question of if any of the existing player characters are trans all the time, and said that the most popular request is a non-binary PC. Because I have run out of fucks, I stood in the middle of the aisle listening to this answer while snapping my finger in the air in praise, because I am non-binary. Then I talked to a person on their PR team whose name I didn’t write down because I’m an asshole about how good Tom Hanks looks as Mr. Rodgers and also about how the McElroys were announcing the second graphic novel, Murder on the Rockport Limited, the following day.
Critical Role is Hella Gay and also a large part of my fave media zeitgeist (see above, recorded D&D games). Here’s the cast getting interviewed on the left. Marisha (center, red hair) plays Beau, who’s in love with another party member, Yasha. On the right, two cosplayers tackle Cadeuces and Molly, who was very very queer.
Safe Sex — Tina Horn
On to the DC Vertigo panel, where I chatted up Zoë Quinn and Tina Horn, both extremely talented and extremely gay, about their new books. Horn’s book, Safe Sex, “couldn’t be gayer,” says she. She asserts that even though the main characters are in what appears to be a heterosexual relationship, they’re both bi. Horn also had a lot to say about the themes in her book directly resisting the queer community’s impulse do “the work of the oppressors by fighting ourselves.” Given the released art, I can’t wait to see this serial come out in 2019.
Goddess Mode — Zoë Quinn
Quinn, who writes Goddess Mode, which will be out in December of this year, described the comic as “pretty gay,” with its genre being a cross between magical girl and cyberpunk. Quinn teased that one character, called Antimone, will be the character that “makes all the gay ladies say, ‘step on me,'” and another character has entirely opted out of consuming the misery of marginalized populations and has magical headphones that phase them out from reality so no one can speak to them. It’s a big mood, I’ll tell y’all. I even got myself a poster that I am very excited about. Immediately after the show, I pre-ordered both these books with my local comics shop.
I also popped by Boom’s table and talked to Jackie Ball, who assured me Goldie Vance AND her new book, Wanderland, were both Very Gay. Some lovely friends at boom also told me about Backstagers, so! Boom’s got plenty of new gay content as well!
While walking the floor, a lot of folks running booths see my press badge and try to tell me about their comics. Even as confrontational as I was when two dudes whose comics could not have looked straighter were stunned into temporary silence as I asked my question, I still seemed to get positive responses out of them as they admitted that their comics were not very gay at all. I waved at them and thanked them and walked away, and I heard one of them turn to the other and say, “I think that might have been my favorite question so far.”
Only at one of these booths that saw me and called me over did I get a “yes, this is very gay,” and that was at Ringling College of Art and Design. They were handing out a compilation of student work and the representative looked me right in the eye and said, yes, there’s a lesbian vampire story right in the middle. Being in higher education myself, I switched gears and asked how gay their program was, how they support their students and how easy it was for a student to transition and change their name while in the program. I’m happy to report that the representative had answers to all those questions, and that they have resources for LGBTQ students. This was the most unexpected answer I got from asking how gay shit was.
Oh hey look, it’s our very own media critic Valerie Anne! I ran into Valerie (left) and the Nics (center and right) several times throughout the weekend. Gay quotient: very gay.
Kim Reaper, Dream Daddy, Aquicorn Cove, Open Earth, Wet Moon — Oni Press
I happened upon the Oni Press booth — Oni published our very own Archie Bongiovanni‘s A Quick and Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns, which you should buy and hand out to all human people, especially if you’re cis. Given this, I asked to be steered toward their most homosexual content. Director of Operations Brad Rooks, beer in hand, lead me through all of the very queerest of his wares, including Kim Reaper, Dream Daddy (yes, like the game), Aquicorn Cove (which is going to have a board game associated with it!), Open Earth and Wet Moon which there is a lot of and somehow I have slept on something with that title and that fills me with shame. He loaded up an Oni Press tote bag so I could revel in the queer. So far I’ve gotten through the first trade of Kim Reaper and it’s nigh near perfect and I added it to my pulls when I was at my local comics shop after the show. I highly recommend you go purchase it right now!
IDW’s Femme Magnifique creators
Some women and queers got uncomfortable when I asked this question, mostly because I feel like they were responding as though I was some sort of gotcha journalist on the right. Jokes on them; I’m not even a journalist! I’m just a writer with a lot of opinions about nerd culture!
Love Letters to Jane’s World — Paige Braddock
Anyhow, I stopped by the IDW booth to talk to Shelly Bond and Paige Braddock about the anthology Femme Magnifique: 50 Magnificent Women Who Changed the World. They both reacted this way, preferring to talk about the structure of the book — but as I moved down the line to get copies signed and I talked to Alison Sampson, Megan Hutchison and Mags Visagio, all of whom worked on various stories in the book, they all crowed that the anthology was extremely gay. Sampson lead with, “I have detail shots of Beth Ditto’s bum!” It was very cute.
Braddock did circle around to tell me about her book, Love Letters to Jane’s World, which is the writer-artist’s favorite strips from Jane’s World. Beginning in 1995, this strip was the first mainstream comic to feature a queer protagonist. “It’s like the show Friends if half the cast were gay,” Braddock said.
Paige Braddock signing at the Lion Forge booth
What’s in these last two books? Well, my wife stole them from me immediately upon re-entry to my apartment, so I actually have no clue; I’ll have to wait my turn. All in all, a gay ole time at New York Comic Con 2018. Can’t wait to pester folks about their most homosexual content next year.
The Astro Boy of Asbury Park
Annie Mok reimagines the classic manga and anime character Astro Boy as a non-binary teen growing up in New Jersey. “The Astro Boy of Asbury Park” will appear in the upcoming Astro Boy zine, which you can preorder now.
Lesbians Who Tech 2018: Hillary Clinton, The Future of Disruption, a Path Toward Hope
I waited in line at 8:00 in the morning. It’s now 10:45 and I am in the front row. At 12:15 today, I will watch Hillary Clinton speak to a room full of queer people, and likely it will be about technology.
Technology is, in part, why Hillary Clinton is not president.
There are no press cameras allowed until after she leaves, so I can’t document how close I am to the stage. But it’s one of those seats where you have to slightly incline your head to see what’s going on. And there’s no one in front of me.
I was at the first Lesbians Who Tech Summit in San Francisco as well. It was an amazing conference even at its start, and the first of its kind. No one could have anticipated how it would grow, least of all founder and leader Leanne Pittsford, who seemed somehow both calm and shellshocked every time I ran into her over the course of the three-day event. In her kickoff speech, where she delivers her customary State of the Tech Lesbians and discusses where the organization has come from and where it’s going, she dropped the numbers and they were astounding: Lesbians Who Tech boasts a membership of 40,000 queer women, non-binary folks and allies (while they center lesbians and the lesbian experience in the technology workplace, their tagline is “Queer. Inclusive. Badass.,” which is why I still feel comfortable taking up space here after coming out as trans) and is the largest queer professional organization in the entire world. The largest, and it centers women. The largest and 50% of their speakers are folks of color. The largest and 10% of their speakers are trans.
Since that first conference, Lesbians Who Tech has always had rockstar presenters: Megan Smith, who was the country’s Chief Technology Officer during the Obama Administration (otherwise known as the last administration I personally recognize before we all fell into a pit); Kara Swisher, co-founder of Re/code and killer technology journalist; folks from Indiegogo and Twitter and Amazon. In the intervening years, we had the pleasure of welcoming to the stage and the squad Edie Windsor, who filed the lawsuit that struck down DOMA and paved the way for legal gay marriage in the United States—and was also an engineer at IBM and the first person to have a personal computer at that company. This year was the first anniversary of Windsor’s passing, but she’s remembered in part by the Edie Windsor Coding Scholarship, a program named for her that helps queers go to coding schools. Lesbians Who Tech has had rockstars all the way down.
But the experience of Lesbians Who Tech’s New York Summit in 2018 was a whole new level. Aside from one person from Goldman Sachs who basically only told us how great it was to work for Goldman Sachs, all the presenters I experienced were not only rockstars, but were compelling speakers. And they were speaking on a loose theme of leadership. Each Summit has a focus, and this time around there was a heavy emphasis on what it means to be a boss. This, I think, resulted in a more curated attendance and a more intimate group.
Dom DeGuzman, DevOps and Technical Program Manager at Twilio, scrapped her presentation at the last minute to talk about what leaders really need to do to lead a team (answer: you need to bring the passion, and not every project will be your baby — so make that passion about the people and the process; find the things in your team members that they do not yet know they can do themselves and use every project to foster those things). And she did it flawlessly; she made it look easy to scrap a talk and wing it.
Lanaya Irvin, Director at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, spoke about how she has, for the past decade, had two closets: her normal closet and her “Condoleezza-Rice-Wear.” That being a black lesbian who is “unapologetically black and gay” in a leadership role in finance has, often, forced her to hyper-feminize. She has recently decided not to continue doing that — she was wearing a Jenna Lyons-esque black suit. Everyone cheered.
Andra Keay, Managing Director at Silicon Valley Robotics, outlined in very clear detail how we as a society can avoid the Robot Apocalypse — spoilers, the first rule is “don’t build killer robots,” a rule that the United States actually refuses to explicitly agree with at the UN. I feel like this is a good rule; I wish my country also desired to not build killer robots. I began to realize that leadership, in the context of this conference, also occasionally meant stewardship: the idea that we will leave this planet in some sort of state for the folks who come after us. That, as the engineers, designers, thinkers on the bleeding edge, we need to not only lead within our organizations, but we need to be thinking about leading the world. In what sort of world do we want to live our lives?
Jane Lynch—well I’m not sure what she was doing there, but dang I enjoyed hearing her speak. Apparently the costumes on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are as luxurious and wonderful as they look. If you want to really hear about how technology has impacted the entertainment industry, I’d suggest looking up Mara Wilson’s and Gabby Dunn’s views on the subject. If you want to hear Jane Lynch scream “fuck you” at her Apple Watch for telling her to stand up, then brill, this was the right fireside chat for that. And, I think, a nice breath out in the midst of all the very hard stuff we talked about for three days.
I begin to realize that because this conference is largely about leadership, perhaps Hillary Clinton won’t be speaking about technology. I am immediately a little sad at the thought, but I try to wipe that sadness away, because a) who doesn’t want to hear about leadership from Hillary Clinton and b) she’s already given us a book about What Happened, do we really all need her to relive every shitty moment? That’s just… mean.
I try to concentrate on the speaker at hand, try to be present (though that’s hard for me—my Ravenclaw-brain is always whirring). It gets easier, though, because the person on the stage is Madam Gandhi. Former drummer for M.I.A. and electronic music performer, she came on stage and valiantly performed using audio equipment that was not set up for music (her mic went out at one point and she elegantly tapped it and looked at the sound people while continuing to rap). But music isn’t all Kiran Gandhi does: she spent time at Universal Music analyzing performance for the label’s artists on YouTube and Spotify, determining whether one million views in a weekend was a triumph or a disaster. She also got her MBA at Harvard while touring with M.I.A., which prompts me to turn to the person sitting next to me, Leah Fessler from Quartz, and say “holy shit.”
Madame Ghandi at Lesbians Who Tech NYC 2018
The point of Madame Gandhi’s presentation isn’t, I think, what she actually intends for the point to be (though at one point she says “optimize for your own joy” and I scribble it down in large letters). I actually think the point of her presentation is that one must unapologetically advocate for the things they want and step ahead into those big plans with a fierceness. She talks about her boss, how she watched her former boss walk into these male-dominated industry spaces and change things, bring other women up. It’s why she went to business school.
The consensus from the Summit seems obvious: leaders have to bring other queer folks up once we get to the top. In the past, it was called an “80’s mindset” a couple of times by a few different speakers, the idea that there can only be one. But when it comes to a diverse workforce, the technology industry at it’s most cis-hetero-normative seems to think both that diversity is required and desired, and also a risk.
I am used to this.
I am used to this outside the technology industry and in it. It’s just subtler in other fields; the assumption as my body walks into a space and it is inherently unprofessional. I am used to cis-men, colleagues who have known me for years, assuming I am less intellectually rigorous than they are. It is a risk to employ any of us, common wisdom says. And I look back at the room full of queers at my backs — all employed, all at a summit focusing on leadership, all in an industry that is, at times, overtly hostile.
“If I’m going to stand out anyway, I might as well have fun with it,” said Andra Keay at an AMA about robots. She was in possession of the most spectacular undercut, the long hair on the top dyed beautiful galaxy colors. This was during a supplemental stage session titled “Leadership Lessons & Pro-Tips for Being a Boss,” moderated by LaFawn Davis, Global Head of Culture and Inclusion at Twilio. Our very own Raquel and I had seen her on the main stage earlier. When she walked out, I gasped at how badass she looked: leather pants, the most gorgeous pink top with fashioned-fabric rose epaulets, purple hair. And every word out of her mouth was as badass as her presentation. “We lied,” she said, assertively and badassly, regarding the Silicon Valley attitude of bringing one’s whole self to work. Her point was that no one was equipped for that — that’s why the millions spent on recruiting folks with intersectional identities had barely moved the needle. “It’s not just who’s coming in the door; it’s who’s walking out, too.” When the industry was ill-equipped to support these hires, they left. It’s not a pipeline issue; the talent is there. The Silicon Valley just punishes people for bringing their entire selves to work at the same time as telling them that they should. People like Davis are trying to fix it.
One of the most brilliant, hope-giving parts about being the writer who’s covered Lesbians Who Tech fairly consistently since the first Summit is watching the evolution of discourse at the bleeding edge with forward-pushers like Davis. I remember when we were talking about a pipeline problem; I watched it morph into the inkling of a support problem; I was watching when the organization announced the Edie Windsor Coding Scholarship in response to the idea of pipeline and support both being issues. And at this Summit, they’re talking almost entirely differently about the ways the industry has failed. It isn’t a problem of education, or of children, or of marginalized communities’ failure to stick with it; the industry, according to this discourse, actively punishes people for being who they are after asking them to be who they are. As Rumman Chowdhury, Global Responsible AI Lead at Accenture, said of algorithms, they push everyone toward normalizing, toward a center. The algorithms cut out the outliers. The Silicon Valley has been pushing their workforce toward homogenous; technology folks even write it into their programs.
“It isn’t about making sure everyone has a seat at the table; we need to redistribute those chairs.” Everyone claps and cheers and hoots and I do too. I look over at the journalists covering the event and they do not seem to display emotion like this. They are professional and smart and buttoned up and I am, once again, a human cartoon. I wonder if I appear unprofessional. Then I remember I am in a sea of professional people who are often seen as unprofessional, who push back against their environments daily, and I tuck that feeling back in my pocket to interrogate later. I also remember I am not a journalist; I am a writer who occasionally does some reporting for their stories. The rules are different; I laugh big and cheer loud and participate, because I don’t ever think I can or should be objective. I don’t ever think I can or should distance myself from my community.
We are listening to Kimberly Bryant, the Founder of Black Girls Code. She is being interviewed by Tiffany Dockery, Senior Product Manager at Amazon. And what’s more, Bryant’s daughter is also on stage; Kai Morton was instrumental in the founding of Black Girls Code as well, and has recently started university. She’s also gay. Watching these two be a family on stage is amazing and endearing.
“We only have we,” says Bryant, of lifting up Black women, of making community with Black women. It’s a statement that applies to this room in all sorts of intersecting ways. I don’t identify as a woman anymore, but we are a room of risky people. People whose bodies arrive in a space and the assumption made is of our incompetence. And yet here it is, the largest queer professional organization on the planet, full of powerful people taking care of each other. These are the people who buck the algorithmic trend toward center, toward normal (and what normal means is, often, cis-hetero-patriarchal).
Is this real life? @HillaryClinton @lepitts @lesbiantech #lwtsummit #hillaryclinton pic.twitter.com/iiJdIg3CQT
— Lisa French (@lisafrench) September 14, 2018
And then it is time. Kara Swisher comes on the stage wearing a cashmere flannel and carrying a bottle of Rodham Rye to introduce the fireside chat between Leanne Pittsford and (Rightful President) Hillary Clinton. Later I will see Pittsford outside the venue and I will ask her “how do you feel?” and she will look back at me and say “I have no words.” But it is not later. It is now. And Clinton is walking on stage. She waves and I take a few cellphone camera photos, as I’m not allowed to take out my nice one. I send one to Carmen Rios, who texts back “OMG.” I send one to my family. I send one to my best friend. I am very excited to be in the front row watching Hillary Clinton high-five Leanne Pittsford.
Hillary Clinton high-fiving Leanne Pittsford, via Lesbians Who Tech’s Twitter
Leanne asks her first question and Clinton puts the microphone up to her mouth to speak; the mic is dead. The entire audience reacts. It wouldn’t be a tech conference without some technical difficulties. But I am close enough to the stage to hear Clinton turn to Pittsford and crack a joke: “Oh no, the Russians are here.” I am not the only one; the front four rows roar with laughter. Pittsford hands over her mic and we are off to the races. The interview is fairly soft in tone; there’s not much that’s hard-hitting to ask in front of this room, where I have not met a single person who self-identified as a conservative to me (and I talk to everyone).
Pittsford asks about October 7th, 2016 — a lot happened that day, it was a never-ending hit-parade for the press. President Obama announced that Russia had been tampering with the election; the Hollywood Access tapes came out, in which Donald Trump brags about assaulting women; Wikileaks dumped the DNC emails. Pittsford lists everything that was happening on that day and then asks Clinton: “So how was that day for you?” The audience laughs. I laugh.
Clinton regrets not being able to make the media stick to “Russia has been interfering with our election” for at least 48 hours. And then she says, “Wikileaks is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Russian intelligence now. It wasn’t always that way, but it is now.” I grab for my phone to Tweet it, because I love hearing this woman speak truth unapologetically and I am a millennial who performs excitement on social media. I have strong feelings on how to leak; feelings that have grown and changed a lot. The technology sector often has quite the boner for “total transparency” as though that, alone or at all, will solve the world’s ills. What they neglect to account for is the bad faith actors with zero investigative training that make up a large portion of the populace. Something Clinton has experienced firsthand. Of the false facts and fake news and specifically of “Pizzagate,” in which the DNC is accused of running a child prostitution ring out of a pizzeria basement, she says, “Look, the pizzeria doesn’t have a basement.”
I look over at Fessler, who’s posting a photo of Clinton to Twitter. I write in huge letters in my notebook, ARE YOU POSTING PHOTOS? And she nods. I feel emboldened, even after the Lesbians Who Tech staff made a huge deal out of my camera. I post a fairly terrible photo, but I don’t care that it’s not great photography. On this day I listen to Hillary Clinton say that the Russians are still at it; they’re still all up in our electoral system and we don’t even really know what’s coming. I want to remember that. I want to remember that I am aghast as she says that Republicans spend 40% of their advertising budget on digital media and Democrats spend 0-15%. I scribble down “tech for campaigns” and later I will look it up. Later, as I write down my experiences, I will encourage any queer with technology skills to get matched with a Democratic Campaign they can help. I will also encourage queers to get into hobby robots because Andra Keay told me to. I will do it in the same paragraph.
Pittsford is now asking a question befitting of a leadership summit that focuses on women. “The more powerful women are, the more they are disliked,” she says. “You’ve experienced that, probably more than anyone in the world.” Clinton answers this gracefully — women need to support women who challenge the double standard, she says, and women are often treated poorly when they pose a threat to the established order. It’s one thing if you have a problem with the quality of a woman’s work, I hear her say, but the instinct is to insult her personally. To call into question her likability. “The knee-jerk reaction is ‘Oh, she’s just not that likable.’ But I have a list of about 10 million men who aren’t particularly likable. We need to get over that.” The room erupts.
But inevitably, we will all discuss how likable we found her. We will talk about how funny, how it’s nice to see her loosen up, like it is important when it certainly is not. We will talk about how Pittsford asked her what technology questions she calls up Chelsea to ask her, and Clinton will sigh heavily, the word “yeah” escaping her lips and we will all laugh. She will make a joke about how, if it looks like her messages are disappearing, she gets a little paranoid. She is grace personified. And I know we will talk about this because my original idea for coverage was to interview attendees and in the moment I did not yet know that everyone would be too busy figuring out how to save the world to talk to me, so I am making a point to ask everyone what they thought. Likable, personable, loose. And later, when I will write it all down, I will ask myself if we were all also falling into the trap (myself included), or if we hoped that, in that room with us, with people who had her back, everything was just a little bit more special because that’s the way it felt, it felt special?
But it is not later, yet, it is now and Clinton is categorizing Donald Trump’s behavior. “I wouldn’t say disruptive, because disruptive can be positive… he’s more than that.” She is talking, of course, to a whole room who has a particular notion of the term “disruption.” It strikes me. I honestly expected Clinton to be a lot more bitter about the term “disruption.” I know I am. I think the technology sector has taken disruption a bridge or thirty too far, with no concept of what should be disrupted and why, rather disrupting only what it collectively sees it can. The idea that everything is a thought experiment. The idea that because most of the folks who make up the technology sector won’t feel the consequences, that the consequences don’t exist. That is what I hear when I hear disruption.
Once again I consider the room I am in, and how many of these speakers have explicitly talked about their own forms of disruption. How many have risen in the ranks and then decided to blow up the mold into which they used to contort themselves to fit. Pittsford is asking rapid-fire questions now, meant to be fun. “Pantsuit or tracksuit?”
“Pantsuit, obviously.” Clinton looks at the audience because we are all in on the joke. We cheer and I think about the data feedback that we have found ourselves dealing with. President equals men’s suit, men’s suit, men’s suit, men’s suit. Woman equals likable, likable, likable. And here, in this room, we have the outlier. We have so many outliers. The data that breaks the algorithm. And maybe we aren’t there yet, but as this room grows internationally, we will get there. We will pull ourselves away from being normalized.
The only politician’s answer I really hear is to the question “is Facebook a utility?” Clinton sidesteps answering a pretty hairy policy question by stating that, if she remembers correctly from her interview with Kara Swisher, Mark Zuckerberg thought at one point that it was. It’s an elegant way to point the audience in a direction without committing. But I tuck all that away, too, because it is understandable that skilled politicians might give this kind of answer every now and again and Hillary Clinton is very, very good at her job. I choose, instead, to hold onto the feeling that I have seen the future of disruption, and it is not the tacky, gold-gilded Trump brand. It is here. This is where disruption is headed. And that gives me hope.
The Batwoman Comics You Need to Read Before Her New TV Show
As you know, Batwoman is coming to the CW in this year’s Arrowverse crossover, and will very likely fly out of there to headline her own show. As you also know, Ruby Rose will play Kate Kane and don that famous cape and cowl. What you might not know, however, is how in the world to dive into Batwoman’s illustrious comic book canon to prepare yourself to see her on teevee.
Comic books are complicated! Every superhero in every Marvel or DC universe has been killed or destroyed and then rebirthed repeatedly. There are multiple character continuities, some of which are being published at the exact same time. There are alternate realities. Characters exist in their own solo titles and are sometimes getting up to shenanigans in other characters’ titles or in team titles. Most confusing is the fact that each hero’s solo books start over at #1 every few years. Where do you even begin, and once you’ve done that where do you go? Don’t fret, friend; I’m here to help.
The lesbian Batwoman that we know and love today was reborn into our world in 2006, a mere 50 years after she was introduced into Detective Comics as Batman’s love interest to thwart rumors that he was gay! We’ll start with her lesbianism, but please do enjoy her original arrival in Gotham city.
52 #7-11 and #28-36 (2006)
DC’s 52 is where Batwoman reappears as a lesbian, under the seasoned queer-writing pen of Greg Rucka, who’d made Renee Montoya a lesbian in Gotham Central just one year earlier. Batwoman is a minor character in this series, but she and Renee do get to know each other and trust each other and start feeling some feelings about each other in side-stories and the background. (Issue #33 is their most prominent one.) The other main thing this series establishes is that Kate’s an outsider in the Bat-family. It’s not essential Batwoman reading, but Renee Montoya remains one of the best-written queer comic book characters, and it’s important to note that when 52 was published, Kate and Renee’s relationship was revolutionary. They were the only queer women in comics. There weren’t even any leading lesbian characters on broadcast TV during during this series run. Glee was still years away.
Countdown to Infinite Crisis #41, #39, #38 (2007) and Crime Bible: The Five Lessons Of Blood #1-5 (2007)
If you’re casually into Renee Montoya — and you absolutely should be! — these are both her series and Batwoman is featured as a side character in them. (If you’re really into Renee Montoya — and, again, you should absolutely be! — back up and read Gotham Central before you read, well, any of these recommendations.) Like 52, this isn’t essential Batwoman reading but it’s good gay stuff.
Detective Comics #854 – #863 / Batwoman: Elegy (2009-2010)
Here’s where Batwoman’s career begins! These issues of Detective Comics are collected in the award-winning graphic novel Batwoman: Elegy, which features a foreword by Rachel Maddow and remains one of the most celebrated collections of queer comic books. Batwoman’s backstory (getting kicked out of West Point because of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) is explored, and her blossoming relationship with Gotham City PD Detective Maggie Sawyer (not the Maggie Sawyer you know from Supergirl the TV show), and her supremely fucked-up family dynamics, and her relationship to fighting crime in Gotham City. This is a must-read.
Batwoman #0 – #24 (2011-2014)
J.H. Williams of Elegy continues his celebrated Batwoman art in her first solo title. These first 25 issues are artistically stunning; to this day they contain some of the most celebrated art and layouts in the industry. Writer W. Haden Blackman goes deeper into Kate’s past and works to create her own cabal of supervillains from Gotahm’s C-list. He begins pitting her against some of Gotham’s more mythological foes. It’s uneven, but it does feature a three-issue team-up with Wonder Woman that ends with her caressing Batwoman’s hair — and Kate and Maggie’s engagement.
Batwoman #25 – #40
Skip it. I’ll just tell you right up front: Skip it. Kate comes out to Maggie as Batwoman and proposes at the end of Issue #24, but DC forbade their wedding, which caused the entire creative team to quit. Marc Andreyko picked up the writing in Issue #25 and tanked the series. Kate and Maggie break up, Batwoman gets in a rape-y situation with a vampire, and it’s overall just bad, bad, bad.
Detective Comics #934-940 / Vol. 1: Rise of the Batmen (2016)
This is a much-needed Batwoman do-over. It resets her story and alters some key elements of it, as well as finally folding her into the larger Bat-family in the way she’s always deserved. This is actually a really good jumping-off point for the most modern version of Batwoman, and an excellent precursor to her current solo title (which you can read more about below).
Batwoman: Rebirth #1 – Ongoing (2017)
11 years after she came out, Batwoman finally got a queer woman writer in her main-universe book! Marguerite Bennett is joined by James Tynion IV in the beginning of this series but she’s writing it solo now. Bennett wowed everyone with her take on all of DC’s famous women superheroes in Bombshells, and all the care and affection she gave to Kate and Batwoman in that alternate universe is on display here, with more grit and trauma-conquering. Most recently, Renee Montoya is back(!!!!) and Hayley Kiyoko’s music makes a guest appearance. Another must-read!
Bombshells (2015-2017)
If you like A League of Their Own and also women superheroes, this is for you. It’s not part of DC’s main universe continuity by any means, but it’s hands-down the best characterization of their most beloved superheroines. The series is set during World War II and while there’s plenty of action and villains to fight (including, hey, punching Nazis!), there’s also plenty of character growth and exploration of these women’s relationships with each other. Kate’s lesbianism is on full display here, even though it’s the 1940s. This is also the series that made Marguerite Bennett a star!
This is not an exhaustive list of Batwoman single-issue comics; she shows up repeatedly in Batman’s books and pokes her head in from time-to-time in other Bat-family titles. Do you have any favorite Batwoman issues that I missed? Share them in the comments!
For Your Consideration: Openly Scrolling Through Someone’s Entire Instagram Feed
Welcome to For Your Consideration, a new series about things we love and love to do — and we’d like to give you permission to embrace your authentic self and love them too.
A few weeks ago, my friend was in the midst of an Instagram deep-scroll. She had found the Instagram account of someone she met once, a friend of a friend, and she simply needed to consume her entire Instagram history. Mid-creep, she committed a classic error. She accidentally liked a very old photo of this person with their family on Christmas.
Then the panic set in.
This friend of mine is prone to… extreme measures. The first time we ever spoke to each other, she stormed up to me in the college newsroom we both worked in and announced that we were in a fight because I had hung out with her best friend and she hadn’t been included. So, when she accidentally liked a stranger’s very old family Christmas photo, instead of just hastily unliking, this particular friend took extreme measures. She assumed a new Instagram identity. She changed the name in her bio to Frank B. Jones and removed her profile pic. In theory, the person whose life she scrolled through would get a notification for a very old photo, click through, and find a locked account for some mysterious and fictional deep-scroller named… Frank B. Jones. (I asked my friend and she said the B stands for Baptiste.)
My friend was mortified to the point of GOING UNDERCOVER. And when I used her mortification to fire off a tweet, droves of people weighed in with their own stories of accidentally liking during a deep-scroll. Some just quickly unliked. Some took more drastic Frank B. Jonesy levels. Some even fully deleted their accounts. Frank B. Jones was seen by Twitter as some kind of hero.
my friend accidentally liked someone's very old photo on instagram when she was doing a deep scroll, panicked, n immediately CHANGED HER NAME AND PHOTO ON INSTAGRAM LIKE ASSUMED AN ENTIRELY NEW IDENTITY N GAVE HERSELF A NAME LIKE FRANK B. JONES JUST SO THE PERSON WOULDN'T NOTICE
— kayla kumari upadhyaya (@KaylaKumari) July 17, 2018
Now, I definitely have to give my friend props for innovation, but I’m sorry to say… she is no hero. The real heroes are the ones who fully embrace deep-scrolling, who not only aren’t fazed by accidentally liking someone’s old photo but do it on purpose.
Shamelessly delve into the selfie archives of your crushes! Let them know you’re looking! Who cares?! If they didn’t want that content to be looked at, they would delete it. Nothing is more flattering to me than when someone likes a tweet of mine from like four years ago. It shows commitment and investment and a thoroughness that I respect! And if you think about it, it’s actually less creepy than doing it in secret.
It doesn’t always need to be a crush either. I’ve done a full scroll-through on everyone from someone I hooked up with one time to a straight girl I met at a bar in my hometown who cried to me, a complete stranger, about her boyfriend for thirty minutes to my former high school tennis rival… which is probably not the healthiest version of a deep-scroll, but hey, at least it wasn’t an ex!
Sometimes deep-scrolling on a potential new friend is a great way to learn more about them. Sometimes you just gotta keep scrolling way back until you find the evidence that that one girl from your church youth group who you thought was always maybe flirting with you a little bit is indeed queer and out and living her best life now. Sometimes it’s just nice to observe the evolution of one’s caption game or to see someone in a different light — and by that I mean see them in a Toaster filter.
Erin once instructed us to shamelessly and publicly flirt with each other because the world is ending anyway. Well, folks, she’s correct. And deep-scrolling on Instagram doesn’t have to be a shameful, secretive activity. It can be flirty! It can be informative! It can be a great conversation starter! Like hello, yes, I see that you went through a nautical jewelry phase in 2014, and you know what, I’m going to support you and your past self.
For the Frank B. Joneses of the world, embrace your inner social media sleuth. Embrace your ability to scroll so deep into the archives that suddenly you’re enmeshed in the Old Instagram aesthetic of borders and filters that washed people out to oblivion. Like that photo of the day they got their cat four years ago! It’s not weird. We’re literally all doing it.
Don’t Let the Stick Figures Fool You, “West of Loathing” Is One of the Best RPGs I’ve Ever Played
Do you know how much time I spend thinking about the next great RPG that doesn’t exist yet? How disappointed I am every year at E3 that a new Dragon Age or Elder Scrolls isn’t announced? All I ever want is a big map to wander around on, running errands for strangers and getting into fights with strangers and taking treasure from the dead bodies of strangers. Well I feel very dumb, because West of Loathing has been out for almost an entire year and I have been stumbling around the internet complaining that there are no good new RPGs for that entire time, and it turns out to be one of the best RPGs I have ever played.
The game randomly generated this name for me, for the record.
The thing that made me keep delaying picking this game up is the same as the thing that made it look interesting to me in the first place — the art style. It’s stick figures. It looked cool enough to catch my eye but too silly to be a Serious Video game. And it’s not a serious video game exactly, it’s a very silly video game, but the mechanics are serious and intuitive and the game works so smoothly that it honestly puts most serious games to shame.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What is the game about? That’s a good place to start. The plot is very simply to go west and explore. You’re a bored farm-person looking to broaden your horizons, so you set out on that dusty trail to make your name or your fortune or just get out of your parents’ house. And then you meet people and you talk to them and, in classic RPG fashion, they all need errands and favors done, so they send you to retrieve a bracelet from a mine or a rifle from a ranch overrun by demon cows or a bowl of jelly beans from a forgetful hippie. And along the way you run into more people, and more locations show up on your map, and you fight and loot and pick locks and crack safes and hornswaggle goblins. It’s a game of near-endless sidequests. But unlike most RPGs, the main quest (Clear a path for the westward railroad) is just an excuse you get you into the map. The sidequests are where the lore of the game is revealed, and they also serve to paint a world filled with likeable enough weirdos. Nothing feels generic in this game, despite the simple art design. All of the NPCs have big personalities. Every location has its own special something going on to set it apart from the rest. The world is just fun to explore. Flush every toilet, dig around in every spittoon. Adventure!
Cut. It. Out.
The writing is very silly. On purpose, I mean. I’m kind of a curmudgeon who usually doesn’t like things that are trying to be funny. I acknowledge that as a Me Problem. But I really liked the tone of this game. It’s jokey without being a joke, and it’s never mean. I unlocked a thing called “Stupid Walking” in the first scene and spent the whole game rolling and crawling and sliding around instead of walking, and never considering turning it off, because it was fun. On a macro level, the silliness is a send up of serious RPGs that are already pretty silly. People often complain about fetch quests in RPGs like “I’m the hero of the realm, why would I take the time to go find a bottle of wine you left in a cave ten years ago?” But in this game, you’re only really a hero (if you even are a hero) BECAUSE you do a lot of nice things for people. This guy needs glasses, this lady needs a bar of soap so she can take a bath before starting up her bakery business, these bandits died in a haunted pickle factory and need their souls put to rest by having all of their pickle-making work completed. I dig that. In real life I would find it very heroic if somebody would bring me an iced coffee and a breakfast sandwich when I really need one, for instance right now and also always, whereas I don’t really need anybody to sword fight for my honor or whatever. Maybe it’s my depression talking, but I think running errands is heroic.
Just gals being pickle pals.
Mechanically, the game just works really well. The fights are a simple old school turn based RPG format. I relied on the same attack for most of the game, plus my pardner Susie’s lasso skill to stun enemies. Most fights are pretty easy, but something you’ll run into something that needs a little more thinking and a few consumables (poison bullets and dynamite, for instance), and maybe you need to put on a different hat to counter the enemy’s strengths. Fights go quickly, so they never feel like a chore no matter how many you have to do. Moving across the map is also quick and easy. Random encounter pop up almost every time you try to go somewhere, but those are usually funny or unlock new map locations, and they only take a couple seconds, so they add to rather than subtract from exploration. Everything feels good. The movement and the clicking and the dialogue and the fighting. I started playing this game before dinner just meaning to get a feel for it, and wound up forgetting dinner entirely and almost finishing the game in one sitting because the play loop is so satisfying.
I never did find a cactus for her to marry. Love is a lie.
I finished my playthrough in about seven hours, but I think I left a decent amount of exploration on the table in the final map section (I did the final bit of the main quest without realizing it was the final bit.) But I definitely want to do another playthrough. I chose the Snake Oiler class, which is a shooty class, but I’d like to try out the melee and especially the magic class. I gave up on being a Necromancer because it hurt my shooting skill, but if I’m playing full mage why NOT raise the dead, right? I also didn’t finish a couple of the larger subquest arcs, and I want to see how those play out. There is a lot going on in this game world, and not all of it is silly! But I want to see all the rest of the silliness as well. It’s really good silliness.
All’s well that ends well.
West of Loathing is available on Windows and Mac, as well as on the Nintendo Switch. I played it on my Windows laptop and it ran perfectly just using keyboard and trackpad. It’s $10.99 on Steam, and absolutely worth the money. I could not stop playing it. It is one of the most purely enjoyable game experiences I have had in years and I really cannot recommend it enough.
“Detroit: Become Human” Mines Familiar Social Justice Stories for Empathy and Fails Miserably
So how bout that E3, huh? Ellie is still kissing girls in the apocalypse in The Last of Us 2. You can be a lesbian in Assassin’s Creed now. Lara Croft seems more murdery than usual, which in my opinion is a good thing. Skyrim will finally get a sequel, if probably not until the next round of consoles. And Norman Reedus for some reason goes on a hiking adventure with backpacks full of babies, I think? Nobody knows what that game is about, and everybody is going to buy it anyway, and who am I if not everybody? I don’t need to know what something is to want it, as long as it is pretty.
What I’m trying to say is that this month I played Detroit: Become Human, which happens to be a nonsense game I knew very little about besides that it is beautiful and features a lot of Jesse Williams’ face, which is also beautiful. I’ll tell you what, this game doesn’t seem to know what it’s about any better than I do. It is a mess. And I am probably going to play it again.
Very Beautiful.
The game takes place in the fantastical setting of Detroit, Michigan, United States of America, where there is no racism, xenophobia, sexism etc. because apparently humanity agreed unanimously to transfer all of their bad feelings to androids. And therein lies the first enormous problem of the game, is that it’s hard to feel super empathetic towards androids when apparently their invention somehow cured all of the bad things we do to fellow human beings? But obviously we are meant to be on the androids’ side, and of course I am because I am not a monster and also I feel what stories tell me to feel even when I know better.
There are three protagonists. Markus, who is played by Jesse Williams, starts out learning to paint but winds up leading what is literally Black Lives Matter, but for androids. Connor is a police android whose entire storyline is “Can cops learn to be human?” And then there is Kara, a maid/nanny android who’s story begins in “Robots took our jobs!” and domestic violence and I don’t actually know where it goes from there because believe it or not I got her killed in pretty much her first scene and was stuck playing as only the (mostly) invincible dude characters for the whole rest of the game. My fault, obviously, but why can the one woman character die at the beginning while the men can’t truly die until the very end of the game? That’s not just a thing that happened, that’s a thing was designed.
How very Post-Racial.
Robot/Artificial Intelligence stories are always a playground for “What if?” situations and questions about humanity and empathy. But by setting this in a very familiar place and surrounding the action with the same breed of awful people that exist right now, there’s no fantasy. It feels like the “Magic Is Drugs” plotline from Buffy season six. It’s so on the nose it misses whatever the point ever was. Why is the maid who is yelled at for stealing peoples’ jobs white? Why are many of the cops who shoot at the Android Lives Matter protesters black? Why is the only policeman who we expect to consider the consequences of his actions not a human at all? This game goes so far out of its way to not tell the stories it is blatantly mining for empathy that it becomes completely meaningless at best and pretty fucking insulting also at best. Add to that a lot of “Well, that escalated quickly” moments, and what you get is a plot that is really best ignored altogether. Not really a great look for a game that is 90% plot.
Another annoyance is the controls. For the most part, Detroit plays like a point and click walking sim adventure a la Life Is Strange or L.A. Noire. But it makes you use every button on the control plus motion controls in ways that sometimes feel clever but more often feel like “Oh, we haven’t made them press that button in a while.” It’s always a tightrope walk in this kind of game, to force enough button pressing to make people feel like they are playing a game without them noticing that you are just making them press buttons to make them feel like they are playing a game. I noticed it here. There were a whole bunch of slow actions that required three entire buttons held down for multiple seconds to complete them but you couldn’t actually fail, so what is the point? And the pointlessness of the controls most of the time made the actual rare quicktime sequences super jarring (and also hard to follow because the icons moved around the screen and everything was hectic but I acknowledge this might just be symptomatic of me being bad at stuff).
Swipe Down to “Look”!
But anyway. It really is very pretty! The lighting is great. The face capture is excellent. The game is so beautiful that when it is occasionally not that beautiful it’s kind of hilarious. Examples of this include: Clancy Brown’s hair, Clancy Brown’s dog, and the scene in which Jesse Williams’ head for some reason got very pointy for a minute. I think, for instance, that this game features the best pores I have ever seen in a video game. Also, the teeth are much better than usual, except when mouth shadows get a little weird and it looks like Minka Kelly has been chewing on a pen between takes. The dog cracks me right up though. Obviously I fucking loved it and it was my favorite character in the game, but I have no idea where it came from or who decided to put it in this world and most importantly even though it was a monstrosity why was I not allowed to pet it?
You really have to see this dog in motion to truly understand its majesty.
Besides the visual beauty of the game, my favorite thing was how thoroughly it let me fuck everything up? I screwed up so bad! I already told you I killed one of the main characters at the very beginning of the game. Well, I killed everybody. If a character could die, they are dead in my universe. There was a point where I realized “Wowee, this is not going very well,” and I started leaning into chaos. But mostly it was my fault. Some of it was I just wanted to see what would happen if I did what seemed like an unexpected thing (RIP Kara), sometimes I just screwed up quicktime events. But in the end, I managed to wipe pretty much every android in America out of existence by being very bad at video games. And that’s actually pretty impressive?
So yeah, I think I’ll play it again, only because I fucked it up so bad the first time I wound up missing out on huge chunks of the story. (But the end credits will still show you scenes from pathways you didn’t unlock so you can get spoiled by beating the game for the parts of the game you didn’t get to play, which seems to actively discourage replaying it but clearly not enough to stop me.)
I would have appreciated this warning before I bought the game, Minka Kelly.
Detroit: Become Human is a Ps4 exclusive, and it costs a whopping $60 because it is pretty and features actors whose names and faces you will recognize. For $60 I think they could have done a better job drawing the dog, but what do I know. I liked playing it, and also it was very bad, so your mileage may vary. If you have already played it, please let me know if you accidentally murdered the entire android race like I did or if you salvaged a better world for humans and androids and inexplicably poorly animated dogs.
No way this is an XL soda.
Before I Go, Here’s My Top Ten Favorite “Drawn to Comics” Comics of All Time
by rory midhani
Writing this column has been one of the best experiences of my life, not just because I get to write about something that I’m passionate about, but also for the relationships it has enabled me to build. I’ve made great friends by finding out that we’re both fans of the same comic, and I’ve been lucky enough to even make friends with some of the people making my favorite comics. I write so that I can connect with people and never have I felt that more than when someone talks to me about how they read “Drawn to Comics.” All of you have made my life wonderful. So, it is with that in mind that I present to you my last-ever “Drawn to Comics” before I move on from AS to other opportunities.
In this column I’ve gotten to recommend my favorite webcomics and graphic novels. I’ve been honored to highlight dozens of LGBTQ cartoonists and comic creators. I’ve been able to have a relevant voice in the comics world that I believe has made a difference in the way comics work. But that hasn’t been because of me, it’s been because of you. The reason DC Comics changed the transphobic parts of a Batgirl issue is because you readers shared and spread the articles about it. Queer creators made enough money to do comics for a living because you bought their comics and supported their patreons. Kids got to see themselves represented for the first time because you bought your cousins and neighbors and children Lumberjanes and Jonesy and The Witch Boy.
I’ll continue to tweet about the comics and artists that I love. I’ll boost kickstarters and pre-orders. I’ll also be putting up weekly comic recommendations on my patreon for everyone who supports with a dollar a month starting in July. I hope all of you, my family, will interact with me on twitter and other places on the internet. I’d like to leave with one final list of recommendations: my ten favorite comics I’ve covered here in Drawn to Comics.
1. Witchy, January 13, 2015
From Witchy by Ariel Ries.
Since I wrote about Ariel Ries’ wonderful and breath-takingly beautiful comic it’s only gotten better and more beautiful. Nyneve, the young witch of color who stars in this comic, cut off the hair that gives her her magic and is now on the run from essentially the whole world. You need to check it out right now because my girl Prill just came back into the picture and it is GREAT.
2. Strong Female Protagonist, January 15, 2014
This is still the best superhero comic in the world. Since I first wrote about it, Molly Ostertag has become one of my favorite artists, and my favorite people. It’s been amazing not only seeing how far this comic has come in the four and half years since I first wrote about it, but it’s been even more amazing to follow Molly over that same time.
3. SuperMutant Magic Academy, April 28, 2015
Art by Jillian Tamaki
I first talked about this comic all the way back in 2013, but when Jillian Tamaki remade this into a book with added color and comics, I truly fell in love. I still have yet to read a book of any kind better than this one.
4. My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, July 18, 2017
This book has come the closest to unseating SuperMutant Magic Academy as the best book I’ve ever read. I don’t think I’ve ever read a comic that has dealt so frankly and painfully with the way mental illness and trauma effect queer sexuality. This is one of the best books about queerness ever.
5. O, Human Star, November 20, 2013
This is the piece of media that convinced me to like robots. I had a genuine and deep-seated hatred for robots that was existential in nature. But this comic changed that with a young robot girl named Sulla. I love her so much and I will do anything to protect her, even if that means I’m now a robot rights activist.
6. Patsy Walker, AKA, Hellcat, June 28, 2016
art by Brittney Williams and Megan Wilson.
This is my favorite DC or Marvel comic book of all time. This is what I wish more comics were like. Kate Leth wrote the characters so endearingly and so realistically that they reminded me of my friends and I wanted nothing more than to hang out with Patsy, Ian, Tom and Jen each month. With Brittney Williams putting in always fun and exciting art, Hellcat made me fall in love with the idea of superhero comics again.
7. The Prince and the Dressmaker, February 13, 2018
This is the most recent comic on this list, but wow it’s made a huge impression on me since I read it less than half a year ago. Jen Wang made a book I had never seen before and is opening doors for all sorts of new kinds of stories and representation and art in comic books.
From Agents of the Realm by Mildred Louis.
When I think about how to build a team of characters I love, I think about what Mildred Louis did with Agents of the Realm. These girls are so amazing and they have the perfect dynamic where they definitely seem real, but they also are aspirational the way they love and support one another. Aside from all of that, Mildred Louis is the best color artist on the entire internet.
9. Miranda Harmon, March 21, 2017
For my money, Miranda Harmon is the cartoonist with the biggest potential of anyone I’ve written about. I can’t believe how good her comics are. Her colors and writing are deep like the deepest part of the ocean, but without the scary parts. There is so much in just her four-panel comics that you can spend a week with each one.
Jo, a trans girl, talking to Barney, a non-binary kid. Art by Brooklyn Allen, colors by Maarta Laiho.
How could it be anything else? This is one of the most important and influential comics to come out in the last five years. It paved the way for dozens of unabashedly queer all-ages comics that I’ve had the pleasure of reading and writing about. This comic is why I did this column. This is what my hope for the future of all-ages media is. Thank you Lumberjanes, thank you Noelle Stevenson, Shannon Watters, Grace Ellis and Brooklyn Allen. But most of all, thank you everyone reading this.
New Releases (June 27)
Raven: Daughter of Darkness #6
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #32
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur TP Vol 5 Fantastic Three
Vampirella Dynamite Years Omnibus Vol 3 TP
Vampirella Roses for the Dead #1
Adventure Time: Beginning of the End #3
Welcome to Drawn to Comics! From diary comics to superheroes, from webcomics to graphic novels – this is where we’ll be taking a look at comics by, featuring and for queer ladies. So whether you love to look at detailed personal accounts of other people’s lives, explore new and creative worlds, or you just love to see hot ladies in spandex, we’ve got something for you.
If you have a comic that you’d like to see me review, you can email me at mey [at] autostraddle [dot] com.
Drawn to Comics: Rosemary Valero-O’Connell’s “What Is Left” Dreams Through Space and Memories
by rory midhani
I’ve known Rosemary Valero-O’Connell and her work for a few years now, and I’m really excited that I get to talk about her to you before I leave Autostraddle. Her illustration style is immediately recognizable, with lines and shadows that create some of the deepest and most vivid worlds that you could imagine. All of her art seems immersive, like you’re going to get lost in it, like there’s no way it’s on a flat screen or piece of paper. Her concepts for her work combine perfectly with the depth and layers she draws to drop you into a different universe of her creation. I’m pretty sure she knows more about using different shades of color together than anyone else on earth. She’s one of the young masters of illustration in America today.
Valero-O’Connell has many illustrations and comics to her name, and is currently working on illustrating Mariko Tamaki’s upcoming graphic novel Laura Dean Keeps Breaking up With Me. Her comic that’s making the biggest splash, though, is “What Is Left,” from the Shortbox anthology. This comic was recently nominated for two well-deserved Eisner Awards, for Best Single Issue/One-Shot and Best Coloring. “What Is Left” is 36 pages of full-color beauty and science fiction mastery about what happens to the lone survivor when an interstellar ship that runs on the memories of a “donor” overheats and explodes in space.
There’s something about Valero-O’Connell’s art that gives it a museum-level-art feeling. Every inch of the page is purposefully and maximized to its full artistic potential. She succeeds in telling the story, but in doing so, she also has created a comic where each page works as a the coolest poster you’ve ever owned. Still in her early twenties, Valero-O’Connell has one of the most distinctive art styles you’ll come across. Few can express lines and living things the way she does and even fewer can then use their coloring skills to make the illustration so much more expressive and evocative.
The story in “What is Left” is just as atmospheric as the art. The whole thing definitely feels like a dream, but the most amazing dream you’ve ever had. The colors are muted, and she mostly works with just a few different shades on each page, but these colors work in a way that you didn’t know colors could work. When you’re looking at these images and reading what it’s like for this biomechanic named Isla, it’s a full sensory experience. It feels like you’re swimming through air as thick as water and as beautiful as a a Giverny garden. This comic is able to whip up a thick and rich fog of memories for our protagonist, and us readers, to explore and enjoy.
New Releases (June 20)
Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 12 The Reckoning #1
Ghostbusters: Answer the Call TP
Ant-Man and The Wasp #2
Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol 8 My Best Friends Squirrel TP
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers #28
Welcome to Drawn to Comics! From diary comics to superheroes, from webcomics to graphic novels – this is where we’ll be taking a look at comics by, featuring and for queer ladies. So whether you love to look at detailed personal accounts of other people’s lives, explore new and creative worlds, or you just love to see hot ladies in spandex, we’ve got something for you.
If you have a comic that you’d like to see me review, you can email me at mey [at] autostraddle [dot] com.
Drawn to Comics Exclusive: “Lumberjanes: The Infernal Compass” Is the Mal and Molly Graphic Novel We Want!
by rory midhani
One of the titles I built this column on is Lumberjanes, the funny, fun and heartwarming series created by Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis, Shannon Watters and Brooklyn Allen. Together we’ve seen the series announced, read its first issue, and talked about the first dozen or so issues as they came out. We’ve seen the creative team change and each new writer and artist put their own lovely stamp on the series. We’ve seen YA novels come out and a movie be announced. And through it all, we’ve seen Jo, April, Mal and Molly and Ripley go on countless adventures, building their friendship with each other at every turn. We’ve seen a little book about five queer girls at a summer camp for Hardcore Lady-Types win countless awards and prove that not only can a book by, about and for queer people and women and girls be extremely good, but it can be extremely popular too. Now it’s time to announce the first ever Lumberjanes original graphic novel, Lumberjanes: The Infernal Compass.
This new ogn will be written by Eisner Award-nominated writer Lilah Sturges and illustrated by exciting new artist polterink. This is an all new story about our favorite campers and the story starts “when Mal, Ripley, Molly, April & Jo become separated during an orienteering outing thanks to a mysterious compass. While Molly begins to feel more and more insecure about the effect of her relationship with Mal on the other girls, a lonely woman explorer is trying to steal the compass… with the help of some weirdly polite automaton butlers, of course.” Wow, ok, first of all, I love that such a big focus of this new book is going to be on Mal and Molly’s relationship and how that affects the whole group. Their relationship is one of the sweetest in all of comics and I can’t wait to see it explored more. Plus, who doesn’t love automaton butlers?
Dafna Pleban, Senior Editor at BOOM! fully agrees, and thinks new and old fans alike will love this book.
My favorite stories are love stories — and I can’t imagine one sweeter than what Lilah and polterink have created for Mal and Molly. Whether you’re one of the millions of Lumberjanes fans worldwide or new to this incredible world, everyone will find themselves with goofy grins on their faces as they turn each page of LUMBERJANES: THE INFERNAL COMPASS.
Lumberjanes: The Infernal Compass comes out in bookstores in October, and boy howdy are you lucky, because I have a special 15-page preview here just for you!
New Releases (June 13)
My Little Pony Cutie Re-Mark TP
Welcome to Drawn to Comics! From diary comics to superheroes, from webcomics to graphic novels – this is where we’ll be taking a look at comics by, featuring and for queer ladies. So whether you love to look at detailed personal accounts of other people’s lives, explore new and creative worlds, or you just love to see hot ladies in spandex, we’ve got something for you.
If you have a comic that you’d like to see me review, you can email me at mey [at] autostraddle [dot] com.
“Gorogoa” is a Gorgeous, Dreamy Puzzle Experience That’ll Let You Put Your Stress on Hold
In less than one month my wife and I will become parents (which excites and terrifies me in equal parts to see written out like that). As we’ve been counting down the weeks until her due date, our lives have become a blur of baby-related activity. Some of it’s been physical, like painting the nursery and putting together furniture; some of it’s been mental, like trying to decide on a name or worrying about the baby’s wellbeing — but all of it is exhausting. I usually find puzzles to be soothing when I’m stressed so I decided to check out Gorogoa, which was recently released on PS4.
Gorogoa caught my eye mainly for two reasons: 1) the illustration style looked very pretty and I am a sucker for pretty things and 2) it was put out by Annapurna Interactive, the same publisher that previously released What Remains of Edith Finch. That game ended up being one of my favorites of 2017, so I was willing to pick up Gorogoa without doing any additional digging and I’m so glad I did.
So many of the screens are intricate and soft and lovely.
This game was exactly what I needed: a couple of hours where my busy brain could focus on tangible puzzles with achievable solutions. Gorogoa’s interface is deceptively simple; it’s just a 2×2 grid of square spaces that can be filled with up to four illustrations at one time. Within those four illustrations, however, there are tons of possibilities for ways the pieces can fit together. Sometimes you need to match up the edges (the closest thing to a traditional jigsaw-style puzzle in the game), but other times you might need to zoom in, pan around or even layer pieces on top of one another to complete the scene.
In this case, I had to figure out how to get the lantern from one side of the shelf to the other.
The puzzles range from quick and obvious to challenging, but even on the more difficult parts I never got stuck to the point of frustration. Just like with a physical jigsaw puzzle, Gorogoa sometimes requires you to check every configuration before you see the right one. There were definitely a few puzzles where I looked at the same pieces four or five times before realizing that the solution was in front of my face.
And do you know that feeling when you finally find a fit for a jigsaw puzzle piece that’s been driving you bonkers for a while? Like maybe you’re already half-convinced that your cat lost the corresponding piece(s) and you will spend the rest of eternity trying to finish a puzzle that’s impossible to complete? But then! Then you find that puzzle piece’s perfect little home, and it’s such a good feeling! Do you know that one?
Well, in Gorogoa that feeling is even more satisfying, because when you fit things together they animate and change and open up whole new puzzles you didn’t even know were there! Pure delight is the only way I can describe it.
Rube Goldberg eat your heart out.
Unlike Edith Finch, which is all about a single family and the stories that shape them, Gorogoa focuses way less on the narrative. I guess if I had to try to sum it up, I would say Gorogoa is a non-linear story about a kid trying to collect fruit for an offering to a dragon-esque creature that may or may not be evil.
The thing about it was – and maybe I only felt this way because of how stressed out I’ve been – I didn’t care about the specifics of the story one bit. Even after finishing the game, I don’t know whether some of the secondary characters are just older versions of the main kid or are totally different people. I’m still not sure if the dragon monster is a destroyer or a savior.
Usually I focus on a game’s story, but something about the dreamlike quality of Gorogoa and, specifically, the art, made the lack of concrete narrative completely work for me. It’s melancholy and beautiful and ominous and sad in ways I can’t fully put my finger on. I just know I loved floating through it, being delighted by all the details.
iOS was one of the first platforms Gorogoa was released on, and I imagine it might be even better as a mobile experience. You’ll be able to get closer to all the gorgeous illustrations, and the mechanics of swiping or pinching to zoom make sense for a game like this. It’s also a little more cost-effective at $5 versus the $15 I paid for PS4, which is maybe slightly on the higher end considering the game only takes a couple of hours to finish. But, to be honest, I would’ve gladly paid a few more dollars to get lost in Gorogoa’s dreamy puzzles for just a little longer.
Gorogoa is available on PS4, Xbox One, Steam, Nintendo Switch, and iOS.