Hello! I was reminded of your webcomic Goodbye To Halos recently and wanted to let you know it had a pretty big impact on me. I read it during my teenage years and I think it really helped me to contextualize and make sense of some feelings I was going through about - well, teenage stuff. Change, I guess, mostly. Changing bodies, changing genders, changing role in society, changing relationships with others - your comic helped me process a lot of my fears about those things.
Your comic was probably my first exposure to nudity that was neither sexual nor comedic. It really stuck with me how your comic has characters in states of undress fairly casually. Not like "walking down the street" casual, they're always in a safe place like a bedroom or a bathroom or something, but still. As someone who was raised Catholic it was really powerful to see nudity portrayed as so... not-shameful. Nudity is just a state the characters pass in and out of; they're nude after taking off their clothes like they would be wet after taking a shower. There's no shame in it. And that's really the way it ought to be, right? We were all born nude, it shouldn't be such a Thing as society makes it out to be.
That's just my little input on what impact your art has had on me. It was a good thing that I read it when I did. I wish you luck on all your future endeavors.
that's extremely kind of you, and very well-said, and thank you, and also that's absolutely wild for me to read.
i actually had to remind myself just now that there was in fact a sequence of (counting) eight pages where enae had her tits out. i didn't think a ton about it at the time. i do remember debating mentally whether to slap a "warning this page has boobs in it" label on the social media posts: i chafed at the idea, and i think i didn't do it? or only did it for some of them? i didn't want to because to even put such a warning immediately prompts the reader to think "oh something Sexualle is going on here," putting them on high alert and making it into a whole Thing. and it was not a Thing.
i always thought that some day, if ever i found the right moment, i wanted to have a page where fenic was fully nude. my idea of the "right moment" for that was that it would have to be at a juncture in the story where it made sense for her to be nude, and also where it would feel to the reader like there was absolutely no "point" to her nudity. the one page in the comic where fenic is topless was sort of a prelude to that idea: that might have been the moment, if there had been any reason at all to include her lower body in those panels, which there wasn't, so i didn't.
it's a fine line to walk. i think it's fairly obvious that there were many panels in that comic where the reader absolutely was meant to think "wow this character's attractive" (if they could get past my art back then lmao). i peppered those in liberally, sometimes because it was personally fun for me to draw, but always because it just seemed, i don't know, honest? for this story about young queer adults who are sort of omnidirectionally horny for one another to have a gaze reflecting that--for the reader to feel like they're "in on it" too, not in a leering sort of way, but as if they're just, like, sharing in it with the characters themselves. but then to have that, and then to also have full-on nudity, and for that nudity to feel at home with that sensation, but also purely incidental, and not in and of itself sexual, is a lot of objects to juggle, especially if one indeed (like me) wants it to not feel like there is a "Point" being made. so, it's cool to hear that it worked for at least one person. sorry for writing 999 words about this
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