Original Art Sundays (Wednesday) No. 261: Tranny Towers Complete cover!

Hi folks;
A week off my game, but never mind. I've had this piece stewing on the back burner for a couple months now. After numerous false starts, here we go. Now it can be told.
I am compiling all the Tranny Towers material. I am planning a Kickstarter. The Complete Tranny Towers. The Tranny Towers Omnibus. Or maybe, as it says on the mockup for the Kickstarter campaign page, just Tranny Towers Complete. I will post notice here when the Kickstarter goes live.
While preparing for this, I realized there were problems with the previous cover. It was drawn for a comic collection in black & white, and while the color added later was successful for the most part, the textures I added were awful. Also, the idea of Athena imagining herself and her trans family as sophisticates while they all have pizza and watch movies on TV was too clever by half. It just didn't translate from the image.
I played with ideas for a new cover for some time. Nothing gelled. In frustration, I thought, "how hard can it be to get the band back together?"
There it was.
I began playing with ideas. Since the strip was from the 90s, I went to girl bands I was listening to at that time. Our ladies as The Runaways. Our ladies as Bonnie Raitt and her backing band. Our ladies as the Bangles. That one was pretty close. I toyed with images based on the All Over the Place (still my favorite Bangles album- so raw!) era shots of the Bangles lounging on a couch. Still not quite right.
Once again, Archie saved the day. I found an alternative cover for The Archies no. 1. It was perfect. I lifted the poses and the setting. I haven't added color yet, but when I do, it will be faithful to the original cover, but with the right skin tones for my girls. I had reservations about using Archie comics as reference again. However, in my search for inspiration, I looked at The Art of Jaime Hernandez. Hey, if Love and Rockets pays homage to, and swipes from, Archie, why the heck shouldn't I?
Here it is.

In case people have forgotten who's who, here's a rundown. Relaxing on the floor, writing sheet music: Athena Hunter, MtF post-op trans woman, bi. Behind the couch, drumsticks in hand: Trina, cis lesbian, and partner of Sonia Kertzer, seated on couch with sheet music in hand. Next to her: Dena Statsin, lead guitar, pre-op MtF trans woman, straight. Seated at the end on bass: Dijan LaSalle, cis drag performer, gay male.
No, they're not a band in the original strip. I am going to do a short story in which they become a band for a brief shining moment, both to rationalize the cover and because it sounds like a fun story.
The collection should be about 100 -120 pages, when all is said and done. It will also include related stories from my other work, including the original Ink Tantrums book, attempts at a graphic novels using the characters, and editorial cartoons I did for TransSisters and TNT News magazines.
I'll also be doing paper dolls of each of the five protagonists, and a new story to give a sense of how everyone ended up. It is a soap opera, after all, and my readers never really got closure.
In case you've forgotten, this is the old cover, which was used in black & white as part of a Xeric Grant proposal so many years ago.

There are practical considerations to the new cover. The proportions of the cover may be a tad off. This is intended to serve as a wraparound cover. Ideally, the spine will fall near the edge of the couch. It will be easy enough to extend the right edge with large flat blocks of color to make this happen, if need be. Also, the large black area on the floor can easily be cropped or extended if necessary. Bear in mind that at this stage, we don't know how thick the spine will be! There's also ample air for copy placement on the back cover, and on the front cover near those windows and in the aforementioned black area of the floor.
In short, the piece is designed so I can play with it until it's technically right, if it's not already so.
Materials used:
Canson Recycled Bristol board
Straightedge, triangle and T-square
No. 2B and no. 4B solid graphite sticks
Lead holder and No. 4 lead
Magic Rub eraser
Dr. Martin's Black Star High Carbon Walnut Ink, which I continue to love
3/4" Princeton synthetic brush, flat
No. 4 Escoda Reserva Kolinksy Tamyr brush, flat
No. 4 Princeton Synthetic brush, round
Faber Castell brush tip marker, 80% gray
Crow quill and nib
Tight Spot angled correction brush
FW Acrylic White
I am enjoying the No. 4 brushes a lot. 
I have some reservations about starting a  new project before completing Sharp Invitations. But as I've confided privately to several friends, I relive my pains and stupidities (along with the joys) when doing that work, and it's emotionally draining. It's vital, and I'll keep doing it, but sometimes I need a hiatus. This is a project I can complete in fairly quick order (though I suspect fulfillment will be a nightmare). Also, it's pure joy. I had forgotten how much fun I have drawing the Tranny Towers characters!
Next: back to Sharp Invitations, either the Curt story or a long-promised single page story.

Original Art Sundays No. 179: An Unexamined Life

Wow, more than a month away. This new job really kicks my butt -working overnights as a caregiver for AIDS patients.
I have completed the aforementioned Surrealist Cowgirls short, but it turned out to be two pages, not four. I will be able to scan later this week.
As a placeholder, here's an editorial page I did for TransSisters Magazine, just under 20 years ago!
The emotions are a bit raw in this one. I was still mending from that abusive relationship I've mentioned in the past.
In general, I rather like this page. It was done oversize and was a bit of an experiment. The editor asked me stick to humorous material after this one, but as a direct result of this page, I also became staff cartoonist for the other major political transgender zine of the 90s, TNT News.

The craft on this one is all over the place. I particularly like the last image of the second tier, but the one before it is aesthetically painful. The lettering is wildly uneven. At this point, it was still more about getting the work - any work - out there than about any measure of craft, though I was too stubborn to accept that at the time.
I'll post some catch-up images later this week!

Original Art Sundays No. 146: TNT news

Back after a week off for no reason other than the holidays!
Here are some older editorial pieces.
But first, a brief explanation.
In the early 1990s, there were two magazines on transgender politics that took a slightly more "street level" approach than the academic journal Chrysalis.
One was Davina Anne Gabriel's TransSisters, which we've discussed briefly in the past. Ran ten issues from September 1993 to Summer 1995.
The other was Gail Sondegaard's TNT NEWS. This ran from 1994 to 1997, running eight issues.
If memory serves, that is. I don't have all my files copies of the latter at hand.
At any rate, I did editorial cartoons for both.
One of the TNT cartoons, Pinkette and LaBrainne, has been published here before. I'd like to offer a couple others this week. These are two of my favorites. The art is serviceable, the writing is sharp and on point, if a bit dated for at least one of them, and they come together fairly well.
These will be included in The Complete Tranny Towers, if and when it's done. The first one uses a Tranny Towers character!

Actually these stand up better than I thought they would.
I do have to note that there are a couple others with alarmingly bad art. I will not post those, but will include them in the aforementioned book, with a healthy dash of mea culpa.
The "change for a dollar" gag is adapted/stolen from a Bernie Wrightson poster. See the end of this post.
And the Mr. Haney vibrator line is a classic among us devotees of Green Acres!
The issue of stealth remains significant, but has lost some of its explosively divisive properties over the years.
Still.... a story comes to mind.
My last girlfriend suddenly moved to Texas to care for her mom about a month after her final surgery.
A little odd, but then we all have choices to make and I respected her for caring for her mother, even though we were getting rather close and her handling of the matter hurt me a great deal.
We talked a year or so later, and she was dating a guy. She was quite happy.
Well, good. We all get to be happy.
But he didn't know about her past, and she wasn't going to tell him, and isn't that wonderful?
Well.... no, it's not.
I mean, yeah, it's wonderful that you succeed in the world so well that you have that option. But there's more to it than that.
Deciding when and where you're out about your gender history is a complex issue. It touches on matters of integrity, mental health and physical safety, not to mention just plain wanting to be accepted on your own terms. And every decision around it has to be weighed VERY carefully.
This stuff can drive you up a tree. I used to worry obsessively about who knew, who could tell by looking, who was and wasn't laughing, on and on and on.
That will put a real crimp in your day.
Then after the end of my abusive relationship, about which I've kvetched in the past, I started assuming everyone knew and stopped worrying about it.
The paradox was that many less people knew after I took that tack!
However, in the midst of all that, it must be said that there are some people who have a right to know if you respect them. Close friends, family and partners/lovers/spouses fall into this category. It's their business if you value them in your life. If they can't handle it, that's on them, but those are the people you should trust.
Tuesday is January 1, 2013. and I'll begin my Best Comics of 2012 countdown then.
New art resumes January 6.
Now, here's that Wrightson piece!

See you all next year!

Original Art Sundays no. 135: Tranny Towers, Final Chapter

When my editor told me the strip had been cancelled (on the deadline, when I came in to submit the next strip), I informed him that I was unsure of the paper's intent and had prepared one more just in case.
They agreed to run it, which was actually rather gracious.
I'm glad. I think it's one of the better strips of the run.

The banner is made from scratch, no overt swipes (at least none I can remember). I took my enthusiasm for pinup art, especially the work of Gil Elvgren, and did some work I think was rather inspired.
The title is an obvious Streisand reference.
Simple layout, a bit more background than in some of the past strips, and a closing "in-joke."
For the last few months of the strip's run, Lavender decided to also run a new strip called "Fabulous Fabio". It was the worst of gay comic strips- bad art, cliches, sloppy lettering and lazy writing. Though it died shortly after this strip, I was quite annoyed at its presence, and wanted to take a little shot at its creator's seeming lack of training and effort. I mean really, not so much that this was running next to my work, but running such a mediocrity near Dykes to Watch Out For or Jennifer Camper's Sub Grrlz? Sad. I was relieved when "Fabulous Fabio" faded into oblivion a few strips later.
I had set this up for one of the next storylines, involving Dan coming to terms with just how deep his drag persona did or didn't go. Trying to leave the door open and all that.
The Dolly Parton reference brings the strip full circle to the original Tranny Towers, a Section 8 building where 6 of the 14 units were occupied by MtF transfolk. Several of my neighbors were huge country fans, and I'd hear drunken singalongs of this song well into the wee hours. Once in a while I joined in. Ah, memories.
I still have a bunch of strips I did as editorial cartoons for TransSisters and TNT News Magazines. I'll run those as a unit after taking a break from this work to get back to the Surrealist Cowgirls. MY work on that for the faculty art show is due on or by Friday, and is about 2/3 done.
For right now, I'm going to do as the song says, and try to look better than a body has a right to.

Original Art Sundays No. 126: Tranny Towers, Ch. 28

One more from a tearsheet. As always, click on the strip to see it larger.

This cleaned up fairly well, but will still need a rescan once I dig the originals out of the vault, as it were.
Notes on this chapter: decent action, adequate backgrounds, straight-up 2 x 3 classic panel layout, useful for action and humor pages (though for some reason, a 2 x 4 layout works better with most comedy stories). I seldom write action-heavy stories, and I wanted to push myself a bit in that area, as you'll see next week.
I think the Art Deco typeface in the banner is from a public domain book of Deco faces. I do love hand rendering mastheads!
The title "Let's You and Him Fight" is my favorite Wimpy line from Popeye. I also like, "I would gladly have you over for a duck dinner. You bring the ducks."
The line about "all glitter and no go" in the last panel is from Mike Baron's Badger no. 1.
There are 35 strips in the series, plus a few appearances in political strips from TransSisters and TNT News magazines in the early 90s. So we have about 7 weeks until the basic strip is completely posted. I'll save the editorial strips for the book, and I have an undrawn script somewhere that was intended as a collaboration with Katherine Collins (creator of Neil the Horse) before she fell off the radar. So there will be some bonus material in the book. More on that later. I have this habit of planning a lot and doing a fraction of it. I know, I'm the only creative person to have that problem...
Next week: the street fight.

Original Art Sundays No. 111: Tranny Towers Support materials

You find the strangest things in a move.

As a case in point, these are pages of character notes for my attempt to expand Tranny Towers into a graphic novel. This attempt was still in the funny animal subgenre, which I let slide away when I created a dozen or so pages of the same story under the title TranScending, some of which I've published here in the past.
Many of the notes are simply extensions of the established characters in the then-current strip. Actually, a few of these characters,
Dena, Athena, Trina and Sonia had lives that predated the strip.
Trina and Sonia appeared in my first strip in TransSisters magazine, and Sonia was in a strip in TNT News a bit later, offering editorial commentary on the MN State anti-welfare legislation that included elimination of state-funded surgeries.
Athena was in my strips in GAY Comics issues 18 and 25.
Dena joined her in issue 25, and both appeared in my first self-published comic, Ink Tantrums No. 1. Drop me a line if you'd like a copy. Out of the 250 print run, I still have about 50.
In addition to the aforementioned appearances and truncated attempts at a larger work, I tried a trans related strip with a lighter touch circa 2003. I submitted the following sample strip to Queue Press around 2003.
One issue came out after the strip's rejection, then the paper folded. So it goes.
This has never been in print.

I rather like this one, but nobody else seemed to. I think it could have been a lot of fun, playing with light hearted gags.
One of the reasons I backed away from doing a long-form story about trans issues is that most of them are  the same story. Outing, bashing, suicide attempt and self-acceptance. It's an important story, but I'd like to think we have more than the one. Rachel Pollack's character Kate in her Doom Patrol run (pictured below) is an example of the possibilities of trans narratives, possibilities that are seldom realized. 

Next week: well, it's Christmas next Sunday and I don't know if I'll be around to blog. I might post early (or set up a timed post or some such).
We'll find out when we get there.
In case I don't see you, may your holidays be kind to you.

Original Art Sundays #80: Tranny Towers, p. 13

Well, the next page of A Private Myth is done, but my scanner access is limited till tomorrow or Tuesday, so please enjoy another Tranny Towers page until then.

A few notes on this page:
First, I really liked the title banner device.
Second, the whole drag show thing that Dan and Dena are dishing about... that's a world I was never much part of. I danced on the periphery of it for a while, but never really got into it. Now, thanks to Ru Paul's Drag Race, the runway show become a default association with trans folks for a great many people, gay and straight. Well and good, but it doesn't really speak to the whole range of our experience. Truth is, living day to day life is not a constant catfight, and I don't put on a ton of makeup, mile-high hair and CFMs to play with the kitty.
I do really like the line "she learned the art of makeup form a paving contractor", however.To me, that dry wit is the best of that world!
I'm not sure if the bottle device works as well as I hoped it might. I wanted to leave the reader with an image of Ricky standing on the roof holding out the bottle with a funnel in it, which struck me as an odd and giving thing to do.  Problem with the page is that the reading path is interrupted so strongly by the bottle. It works, but then again, there may have been a more effective approach, in retrospect.
 There are approximately 24 more pages of Tranny Towers to post. Nine remain from the anthology, and there were 10 or 12 pages that were not collected. The characters also appeared in two strips in GAY Comics, a couple truncated attempts at The Great Transgender Graphic Novel (first as Athena, which predated all other attempts, and then as TranScending, some pages of which have been posted here previously), and some scattered appearances in editorial strips in the late lamented TransSisters magazine. All told, there's somewhere around 50 or 60 pages of these characters. After I've posted them all here, I'll anthologize them. It would be nice to have a comprehensive edition with a spiffy new cover!
I'll post the next page of A Private Myth later this week, right after I scan.

Original Art Sundays #72 : Tranny Towers p. 11

On time for a change this week. How'd that happen?
In cleaning up a huge pile of work, I found a few dozen comic pages I'd forgotten I'd done! I will post these on an as-needs basis.
The stack included the Tranny Towers strips from book II.
We're about halfway through Book I now. But I'm so glad I found the originals of these. I have ONE copy left of the comic-size mockup I did in preparation for the Xeric grant lo, these many years ago, and I've been pulling scans from that. Problematic, as the book is on 20# Xerox paper and there's a LOT of bleed through to compensate for, which can be a challenge if the art has fine lines that can drop out when pushing the white point. This has been an issue in many of these pages.
Anyway, here's the next page.

Again, some fun layout play and some on-the-nose wordplay.
I was so enthusiastic when this work went to press for the first time. I timed the work so Dena's surgery would hit at Pride, in the following strip.
I'm toying with the idea of doing a collection of these on a POD site, possibly LULU.
The collection would have to include some editorial comment and the editorial strips I did for TransSisters (note: link to an article on another contributor) and TNT News magazines, one of which was not printed because the editor felt it "too depressing". In truth, the strip was about tragedy balanced with optimism, but hey, she was the editor.
At any rate, my vision for this book is becoming more coherent, even if its content is in part dated.
Next week: I don't know yet!