Introducing Then Come Kiss Me, my serial webcomic!
Cesario is gay, trans, and in love with Duke Orsino--who is deep in the closet and, to avoid marriage, pretending to woo a countess. Queer Shakespearean subtext becomes text in THEN COME KISS ME, a historical romance reworking of Twelfth Night.
Episodes will be posted on my website and Tapas on the second Thursday of the month! Subscribe to the comic on Tapas or on my website, sign up for my newsletter, or follow me on Tumblr for notifications.
Full description and cover without text below the cut!
Shipwrecked far from home, her twin brother lost to the waves, Viola faces a choice. She could seek passage home to Messaline, where the executors of her estate will demand proper womanhood from her in exchange for her inheritance; or she could stay in Illyria and make her own freedom.
Thus Viola becomes Cesario, a young male musician to the Duke Orsino. The longer Cesario spends in Orsino's court, however, the clearer it is that "Cesario” is no mere disguise: Cesario is who Viola was always meant to be. But Cesario soon learns that manhood is not as simple as he might have thought; indeed, it is killing Orsino, who, to avoid being pressured by his courtiers into marriage, has chosen to woo the one woman who swears she cannot love him.
When Orsino reveals this to Cesario, and asks for his help, Cesario finds he cannot resist any action that might ease the handsome duke's suffering—it is clear to him that Orsino is avoiding marriage to protect himself from the weight of expectation…something Cesario understands intimately.
As this understanding between them begins to bloom into something sweet and unexpected, Cesario and Orsino must decide whether it is worth overcoming all their fears: of each other, of society, and of themselves.
I've been doing this for sixteen years. I've seen with my eyes that giving people art, letting art move, letting stories breathe, allowing them to travel: it changes people. Those stories go places and lodge in people's hearts in ways you can't predict. That can't happen if you keep it all close to the chest, behind a paywall, locked in bureaucracy. It can't happen if you're afraid. If you operate from a place of ownership and grasping and the fear that there might be money left on the table. We want a piece of this, they say. We want to make sure we get our share. You wouldn't have made this without us. True. Of course. But who will move the story? Who will connect with the audience? Is it you? I don't think so. That's why you hired me. If you give someone something freely with intention, it carries gratitude in it like a seed. It's nonlinear. I've been saying this for years.
The "money left on the table" isn't thousands, or even hundreds. Often it's a loss! I pay to print comics to put out into the world because they will go places I can't. People will find their way back to me. If my life changed because of one college student's weird photocopied tall ship-themed zine I found in a bookstore in 2005, who knows where my work will go and what it will do.
It infuriates me to run up against this mentality because it is so hard to share anything in the world today. It is so hard to get stories into the hands of people who need them. You have to give everything a fighting chance—print it out, leave it in the library, share it on social media, post it on your blog. Yes, publish it. Put it in a book. Put that book up for sale. Of course. Of course. I want to eat. I'm not a fool. But if people don't find the story, they won't want to buy the book. That's how it works.
I'm tired of working in a system that operates on that fear. It feels juvenile. "What if someone steals my idea?" "What if someone reads my work and doesn't pay me for the privilege?" GREAT. SOMEONE HAS READ MY WORK.
I don't know how to sit in the seat of this power while also championing the fact that artists must be paid. Our work has value, but much of that value is slantwise. It doesn't come in linear channels. So yes, pay me, but also trust me. Trust that I know what I'm doing. Trust that art moves in mysterious ways. Trust in the story. If it is good and true, people will value it. They will bring that value back to you.
it’s really easy to become obsessed with a shakespeare play you just have to watch one version of it and then read the play and then go mad trying to watch every possible version of it you can find and then study several centuries worth of performance history and controversy
Imagine a fluffy unicorn that’s bred for its wool like a sheep- once or twice a year it has to get shorn and the shearer just has to awkwardly flop and position the unicorn around without getting stabbed. Perhaps they cover the horn with a protective pool noodle
So I've got this friend whose nervous because she's trans and dating this guy who she hasn't told yet because they've only been on a two dates. For this story let's call the friend Jane and the guy she was dating Jason. Happy ending don't worry.
So I tell Jane to bring her boy over to a bbq I'm having and she can tell him she's trans at my place surrounded by queer and trans people who love her and will support her if he ends up being awful.
She waits till the end of the bbq to tell him the news, by which point the rest of us have learned that Jason is a kind, friendly, empathetic, hard working, dummy. So we sit down, all of us a little worried about this gym bro's reaction when she tells him she's trans, and that she understands if he doesn't want to keep dating her it's no big deal.
He's baffled, so we explain what trans is, and after the disclosure that she hasn't had bottom surgery yet...
"Oh you have a dick?"
"... yeah."
He look's around at the room full of people with baited breath, his clearly a little afraid girl friend says
"Oooohhhh! I get it! You think- don't worry Babe! Watch this!"
And ya'll this man jumps up, runs into the kitchen and returns with one of the bratwurst we had for grilling and proceeds to tilt his head back, put it down his throat, hold it in his mouth for a moment, and spit it up without even a whisper of a gag and then looks around at the group absolutely beaming with pride.
My mans saw his worried girlfriend and her support network and thought to him self "Oh they don't think I can't please my girl, but I'll show them!"
I do feel the need to add that later he excitedly tell the group that as a straight guy, he never thought that skill would be useful outside hotdog eating contests.
As the Ides of March approaches, let us all remember it not as the day Caesar was stabbed a whole bunch, but for what it truly was: the day a group of organized elected representatives killed a sitting unelected dictator.
