Saturday Morning Cartoons: Visibility Matters

Welcome to Saturday Morning Cartoons, a segment where four artists take turns delighting you with their whimsy, facts and punchlines on Saturday mornings! Our esteemed cartoon critters are Cameron Glavin, Anna Bongiovanni, Megan Praz and Yao Xiao. Today’s cartoon is by Megan!

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Megan Praz

Megan Prazenica is an animator/artist from Pittsburgh, PA. She now lives LA and life has been interesting ever since. When Megan isn't making art comics, or video games, she can be found wrecking havoc on the ultimate frisbee field as her alter-ego, "Bacon." Catch up with her on her website, her tumblr or tweet @MeganPraz.

Megan has written 42 articles for us.

29 Comments

  2. Thanks, AE, for being there in all those years I needed you. Thanks, writers, for creating my community before I could create one in the real world. Miss you. ❤️????

  5. This hits so close to home. Pretty sure this is a depiction of what my life looked like between spring 2010 and fall 2011.

    Thanks AE. And thank you Autostraddle. And thank you Megan.

  7. Oh AfterEllen what a horrible end of life you’re having. You didn’t deserve this. We didn’t deserve this.

    • But Carmen,
      what we see with the site isn’t what afterellen has become at all!
      It’s this:
      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g2wZdJ0KKyk
      and this:
      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yYUl7wOdp84
      and it’s you and me,
      and that girl from Great Britain, whom I never met, who I chatted endlessly about what ice cream flavors we were before I ever dared to talk to a girl in real life,
      it’s my very, very colorful DVD collection and it’s everything in this comic.
      The site itself was like a horcrux, the meaning of the thing itself secondary, but the life and soul poured into it is maybe not entirely immortal, but it multiplied and it lives on in literally a million ways!

      Ok, so maybe the website is not a horcrux at all.
      It’s..it’s…an artefact?
      Help me out here,people.

  8. Yeah, sometimes you don’t understand the impact you have on people. I don’t mean this mean, but as a bi woman, reading AE often made me feel awful about being bisexual and less likely to come out, especially to lesbian women. The anti-bi sentiments expressed on there lots (which seemed to be cool with some of the site’s writers =/ ), well, that was my first exposure to other queer women. And it really hurt.

    I’m sorry, I just really wanted to get that off my chest. I know AE was hugely important to many women, just, that’s the impact it had on me and maybe some others, but I can only speak for me.

    • Thank you for bringing this up!

      It was helpful and important to me, and I do miss it as I said above, but I definitely agree that AE was not always the friendliest place for people who were not, well, white cis lesbians. Like AE was my first community, but the comments section on AE played a part in how long I stayed closeted, too – I thought lesbians I met in real life would be angry that I had slept with men, would ask me to prove myself, etc. Eventually, when Heather Hogan moved to Autostraddle, I moved to, and learned that queer people could be pretty accepting after all.

      AfterEllen taught me that it was ok to be gay. But Autostraddle taught me that it was ok to be myself.

      • AfterEllen taught me that it was ok to be gay. But Autostraddle taught me that it was ok to be myself.

        Same. Absolutely same.

    • Allison, that was my experience with AfterEllen, too. This is probably not the space to expand on that, but thank you for saying it.

    • I never saw any “anti-bi sentiments” on AfterEllen beyond the occasional troll comment that Harpy, the site’s moderator, quickly removed; she was great about that. The site’s rules explicitly said that bi-bashing wasn’t allowed. I also seriously doubt that the writers there were “cool with” such comments. Heather Hogan, one of AfterEllen’s longtime editors, has commented here, and she’s always been supportive of bisexual women.

      You know, there’s a time and place for everything. Look at the responses here, about how much AfterEllen meant to people. You even acknowledge that. So, perhaps this wasn’t an appropriate article on which to air your grievances with the site and hurl unfounded accusations at the women who ran it.

      • I think there’s space for both critique and nostalgia, Katie. Allison wasn’t extra caustic in her comment, and she expressed something that some other people here identified with as well. I think it speaks to the AS comment community that we can have these dialogues respectfully and make space for different peoples’ truths.

  10. ALL THE FEELS. AE was so important to me when I was younger and scared and confused and embarrassed it holds a place for me having grown up and found my answers on the internet. I love this comic!

  15. This is very lovely. I’ve had lots of issues with AE in the past few years but it was so, so important to me when I was younger.

    Thank you for this comic.

  19. It’s sad how true this comics are. Like, it was literally my life and it still it. I wish my someday would come soon.
    :(

  20. The fact that Brunch with Bridget and South of Nowhere were included gave me that “Killing Me Softly” did-someone-read-my-soul feels. Thank you for this. <3

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