Do you love comics? Or are you curious about comics and want to know more about them? Or are you irresistibly drawn to comics? Or are you and comics arch-nemeses? Then this is the blog tour for you! It is full of comics every day.
Follow along throughout the week for all-comics, all-the-time interviews and book recommendations from a selection of authors with books full of video games and space aliens and dimensional portals and murder and magic like Nick Abadzis, Landis Blair, Box Brown, Nidhi Chanani, Shannon Hale, Mike Lawrence, Molly Ostertag, MK Reed, Tillie Walden, Scott Westerfeld, and Alison Wilgus.
Tillie Walden is a cartoonist and illustrator whose earnest and dreamy comics have inspired many, and led to her publishing three books before she graduated school! Now a graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies, she is living in Berlin and working on comics full time.
“So much of my work is autobiography and even my fiction is full of layers of myself, and it feels like I already give a lot to my audience, to the world in general. And that can lead to this very warped thing, which I’m guilty of doing myself, where when you read a person’s body of work you really feel like you know them. When in reality you know their work, not the person.”
My graphic novel Spinning has been out now for over a month. I think. It’s actually a little hard to remember. Other authors may relate to this feeling - before your book is published, it feels like it’s never going to come out and the world is acting against you. And then when it finally comes out, it feels like its been there forever.
I’ve been traveling around with Spinning, talking to classes full of fidgeting kids, signing books with lines of people who are eager to discover what I actually look like, and getting late night dinners with bookstore owners after a whirlwind evening of talking about myself. Spinning is a graphic novel about growing up as a competitive figure skater. I talk about the expectations and challenges of being a young girl in that sport, while also dealing with coming out of the closet in Texas.
This is my first real book tour. I’m only 21, which tends to lead to agonizing expressions and eye rolls from a lot of older authors. And being a young, gay woman on a book tour for my graphic memoir has been exactly what you might expect: bizarre and wonderful.
It’s bizarre because so many people are surprised by what I have to say. They think that because I’m so young I don’t have enough real experiences to share. And that’s the moment where I launch myself into stories and use every tactic I’ve ever learned about public speaking to show them I do know what I’m doing. I tell them about moments in Spinning, about how I knew I was gay when I was 5, about the grueling practices and competitions, about how art gave me a connection to myself and a career at the same time. And I talk about how publishing a memoir is so healing because it let’s others hold your memories with you.
After I’m done baring my soul to audiences, people come up to me. They talk to me, they ask me questions, and they tell me about themselves. There was a father who thanked me for being a young successful lesbian that his daughter could look up to. There was the young woman who was having a hard day and simply cried with me. There was a young boy who aspired to one day draw Lumberjanes and wanted to know how he could make that happen. And then there were all the queer teens who simply wanted to share a piece of themselves with me after I had with them.
I think a lot about these moments. And I think about how what really matters about Spinning is not necessarily that it has queerness in it, but that it was made by me, a real queer person. That’s what I see people tapping into. And so much of the conversation about diversity seems to revolve around the content of our books, when really in my mind the focus should be entirely on the creators. True diversity comes from diverse voices.
I think about the queer kids along the way who have shown me their own comics, or who have shared their aspirations to create one day. And they often ask me if they should do a memoir, of if they should try and write a hard, honest story about themselves. I can see that they want to be a part of something, that they want to have an impact. But I always tell them the same thing. If you’re queer and you’re making things, your only job is to make what you want. We benefit from it all. The happy fantasies and the crime novels and the memoirs and the fan fiction. Diversity doesn’t require some hardened, tragic, real life perspective. It only requires that diverse people have a platform to share stories in any form that they want. In Spinning, I wanted to talk about the world of competitive figure skating from my own perspective. I wanted to talk about bullies, my first love, the dangers and beauty of childhood, and finding your identity in a sport where individuality loses you medals. Spinning is a piece of me. I drew every page with care and honesty. At times it was scary to share such a personal story, but I’m so glad I did.
Tillie Walden is a two-time Ignatz Award–winning cartoonist from Austin, Texas. Born in 1996, she is a recent graduate from the Center for Cartoon Studies, a comics school in Vermont. Her comics include The End of Summer and I Love This Part, an Eisner Award nominee. tilliewalden.com
We’re super-excited to share online for the first time a comic we published for Free Comic Book Day this year – Scott Westerfeld and Alex Puvilland’s ‘Spill Night,’ a prequel to their fantastic YA science fiction action-adventure Spill Zone.
It’s got magical possibly-evil cats! Check it out at the link.
