Maia's art journal

comics, sketches, & feelings | she/her | queer ace genderqueer | sparklemaia.com

[sparklemaia]

made this to help a friend who just started subQ stabbies, thought the rest of y'all trans nerds might want copies too. It's free to download here, so you can print and fold it yrself! And here's all the individual pages.

kiss kiss stab stab love u 😘

[sparklemaia]

fresh new zine coming soon 😘

[sparklemaia]

Yoooo, I saw that you had a lot of Ursula k le guin on your shelf in the snake post. Do you have any other author/book recommendations? She's one of my faves and I'm building my tbr rn

That's my housemate's bookshelf, almost everything I read is from the library! But if you like Ursula K. Le Guin's sci-fi, I'd recommend Octavia Butler, China Mieville, Martha Wells, and Becky Chambers ❤️

[sparklemaia]

Hey, first up I love your work and getting your newsletter in my inbox brightens my day! Just popping by to ask if you had a pattern for Levar the book snake? I want to knit myself a snake friend, but can't work out how to shape the head :/

Hi, I didn't follow a pattern and as a result his head is actually kind of lopsided 😂 I did take inspiration from this instructables tutorial and the snake designed by this knitter (who has since released an actual pattern). Hope these help!

[sparklemaia]

Here are some links and resources I’ve compiled that cover in more detail Substack’s unsavory history.

Substack is Creating a Walled Garden You Have to Share With White Supremacists: my friend Maia Kobabe’s (@redgoldsparks) essay on this topic (with lots of links!)

https://leavesubstack.com/

this is your one-stop-shop for all things “uh-oh substack,” includes chronology and citations

The most salient links if you don’t have time for a deep dive:

The Atlantic: Substack has a Nazi Problem (2023)

Open Letter to Substack: Substackers Against Nazis (2023)

New York Times: Substack Says It Will Not Ban Nazis or Extremist Speech (2023)

Ars Technica: Substack’s Nazi Problem Won’t Go Away After Push Notification Apology (2025)

(image descriptions are in the alt text!)

Oh and if you want to subscribe to my buttondown here is the link!

sparklemaia's buttondown

comics newsletter by Maia Foster O’Neal about about identity, curiosity, mental health, queerness, and joy. also soup, probably

[sparklemaia]

my friend Liam and I just released a mini-zine to celebrate being two years post-op from top surgery! This little zine is free to download here or you can dm me and I'll mail you a physical copy for free (free shipping within the US!).

[Image Descriptions: sequence of 5 images, with a hand holding a printed zine in front of green plants, progressively turning pages for each image. Art is inked in a simple style, and shaded in greyscale.

Image 1: Zine cover. Title text reads: "two friends, two years since top surgery!" Metallic scissors snip through a curling ribbon decorated with the words "two friends, two years," the word "since" is a script font centered below, and "top surgery" is inside a speech bubble coming from illustrations of the artists in the bottom corners. Maia, on the left, has one hand up and is wearing a t-shirt with a bicycle graphic; Maia has short hair that's slightly longer on top, earrings, and glasses. Liam, on the right, is wearing a plain t-shirt and has buzzed hair with a long topknot.

Image 2: Pages 1 and 2 of the zine.

Left page: Text at the top surrounds an illustration of Maia as a bust, with twisting smoke covering her chest. Top text: "I didn't hate my chest, exactly. It just never felt like it belonged." A rounded black rectangular section with white text reads: "Dysphoria manifested as a disconnect between my brain and body." Chains break on both sides of the word "disconnect." Below, Maia walks down stairs, holding books tightly to her chest. Text reads: "Repeatedly encountering the reality was an unpleasant, jarring surprise--like missing a step."

Right page: Maia, wearing a striped t-shirt and smiling with one hand on her chest, holds up her phone to take a photo. The rounded black rectangle behind frames the white words: "Top surgery has given me a peace that's hard to articulate." Grey steam spirals from beneath this text into the bottom of the page, coming from a mug that a seated Maia contentedly holds with two hands. Text to the left: "It's like taking a hot shower and then putting on the softest, coziest pajamas that fit just right. It's a quiet 'yes'-ness, a joyful resonance."

Image 3: Pages 3 and 4 of the zine.

Left page: Three illustrations of Liam as a young kid with long curly hair, implying the passing of time from left (youngest) to right (oldest). The first two look down with discomfort, while the third is typing at a laptop, frowning. Text on the page splits across the illustrations and reads: "I wanted the weight off my chest long before I knew that the word for the knot of feelings living there was dysphoria." A black squiggle covers the chest of each iteration, scrawling down the page beside the text and becoming the word "dysphoria" at the end of the sentence. An older Liam with short curly hair holds the end of the unraveled line, eyebrows raised.

Right page: At the top is an illustration of Liam in a side profile view, hunched forward with their fist curled towards their chest, over a dark background made of zigzag lines. Text at the top reads: "I hadn't truly realized how loud that dysphoria was--until it wasn't." The last part of the text breaks into the light section of the panel, alongside a zigzag shape that leaves the large mass above and slowly disappears as it reaches another Liam, standing upright and holding a hand to their chest. They smile in relief. Text beside them reads: "Now it is quiet, every breath a connection with my body."

Image 4: Pages 5 and 6 of the zine.

Left page: Maia holds a pair of scissors and a set of four cutout hearts. She says, "Top surgery for me was less about my gender identity and more about my body feeling like mine." The word "mine" is written across the hearts. Maia continues: "Even though my experience doesn't align with a 'typical' f to m transition, top surgery was 100% the right choice for me." Beside this text is a Sharpie marker and a name tag. The name tag reads: "Maia she/her" with a smiley face. Below is Liam as a floating head, above five cutout people in different skin tones holding hands. The middle person has lines across their chest and is surrounded by tiny cutout hearts. Liam says, "For me, it was both about my identity and about crafting a more comfortable space to exist in."

Right page: Top text reads: "We believe access to top surgery is fundamentally about the right to bodily autonomy." Maia and Liam hold either side of a large pair of scissors, cutting through a ribbon with the text "bodily autonomy" on it. Below, more text reads: "Though we each have different relationships to gender, we both chose top surgery to feel at peace in our bodies."

Image 5: Back cover of the zine. Text at top: "While we recognize our privilege in being able to access top surgery, it's not fair that it requires privilege!" Beneath this, Maia and Liam defiantly hold bricks in their hands while standing behind a crumbling brick wall, saying, "We will fight for your right to do whatever you want with your own body!" Under the wall is the text "Everyone deserves access to medical care that helps their body feel like home" with a heart symbol to the right of the last word. At the bottom are the artists' links, with cartoon heads beside their respective info. For Maia: "linktr.ee/sparklemaia" and instagram account "sparklemaia.art". For Liam: "linktr.ee/LMPerttula_design" and instagram account "LMPerttula_design". Beneath is a creative commons license symbol, dated June 2025.

End image description]

[sparklemaia]

my favorite gays-on-a-spaceship audiodrama podcast is back for the third and final season and I accidentally... made more fan art... this time based on an off-hand comment someone in the fan-run discord said 🫣 thanks @iriscasefiles for letting my brain fixate on a fictional fascist regime instead of the real one I'm floundering under you're the best 😘😘

[sparklemaia]

[sparklemaia]

hourly comics 2025

[sparklemaia]

it's been quiet 'round here for all the usual reasons ((side-eyes societal collapse)) but also because I'm making a graphic novel and attending school full-time and making enough soup every Monday to feed 20 hungry art school students and also doing a lot of this🧶

[sparklemaia]

I'm working on a graphic novel and it's hard!!! But now I have Maia Kobabe (redgoldsparks) mentoring me (which is so? cool???) ahhhh

it's maia x maia! maia²!

with our powers combined, etc.

[sparklemaia]

Heyyy!!

So I've recently read a lot of your comics about top surgery, and I really resonate with your experience (I haven't had it myself but I'd like to). I've recently been exploring my own gender and realising I might be non binary, but I guess I feel sort of an imposter in that I want to keep my name and pronouns (afab), despite feeling like I never got the memo about what a "woman" is, which I know is fine, but I guess I was wondering how the shift from your agab into realising you were nb felt?

Like, you seem to describe your gender as sort of unknowable and indefinable, and I guess that's sort of how I feel? I just want to be... More me. I guess what I'm really asking is, how would you define/feel about that shift into realising you were nonbinary, do you still feel connected to your agab, how do you reconcile the two?

Sorry for the long ask!

Hi, this is such a good question! I actually DO still feel pretty connected to my agab. I feel like I am a girl but also more than a girl but also not enough of a girl, simultaneously. (Weirdly, I never ever feel like a woman, and definitely not a man, but I do feel like an adult at least some of the time.) Top surgery was 100% the right decision for me; my body feels so much more correct and I am grateful every single day this procedure was accessible to me. (I was on a low dose of T for a year and a half too, and I basically just got biceps and a sliiiightly lower voice out of it. We stan.) I simply don't have strong feelings about how these things do or do not map onto gender identity or other people's perceptions of my gender. I am generally perceived as female, and that's fine! Like, close enough! I often feel somewhere BETWEEN cis and trans, or even between cis and nonbinary, and sometimes I joke that I'm just "nonbinary for insurance purposes." I mostly use she/her pronouns, although won't object to they/them. I like my "feminine" name -- I chose it myself years ago for reasons unrelated to gender and I have no plans to change it again. In terms of gender presentation I'm usually somewhere in the "tomboy femme" zone. Basically, I've been through a medical transition but not a social transition. Which is not very common, or at least I haven't seen much representation of it! (Be the bad trans representation you want to see in the world, i guess??)

Even though the words are often used interchangeably, I feel more alliance to genderqueer as a label than nonbinary, because nonbinary feels too clinical and "third checkbox"y to me, whereas genderqueer feels more expansive and undefinable and dynamic, with space for the ways in which I both am and am not performing girlhood correctly. When pressed to pick a gender word for myself, that one feels the closest. But if I'm filling out a government form or whatever? Yeah sure F is fine.

A lot of where I land with this stuff, though, is just kind of relaxing my grip on language. Top surgery was a relief, it helped me feel present in and connected to my body. Ultimately it doesn't matter much to me how much of that was *gender* dysphoria and how much of it was just... something I wanted, a way to make my body feel more like mine, to align my mental image of myself with the thing I had to stuff into clothes and walk around the city every day. I believe very strongly in bodily autonomy, and in making our lives as easy and comfortable and joyful as we can for ourselves, without needing to have a clean and tidy explanation for our choices. It is very possible to know with reasonable certainty that you want something, that it will be a net positive for your life, without being able to articulate, even to yourself, WHY you want it. It doesn't need to have a bigger meaning than ahh yes, this feels right. At this point in my life, I'm more invested in marveling at the sheer improbability of my own existence than in wedging myself into the taxonomy of known and acceptable gender narratives. I'm just a person, here for the merest twinkle of a moment in cosmic history, making soup and knitting baby hats and admiring bugs and singing off-key and cutting my own hair and doing my gosh darn best to light my tiny patch of night sky with stories so that you (and you, and you) feel less alone on your own journey through the unfurling dark. Gender is just such an inconsequential detail in the narrative of my life, and pretty open to reader interpretation anyway.

Not having to wear bras is pretty great though ngl

[sparklemaia]

in this household we support the noise-cancelling headphones lifestyle 😤

[sparklemaia]

I mean yes I've been resting but I also worked 160 hours this month🫠

[sparklemaia]

might have cried a little bit while reading your comics, they’re so good!

😭😭😭 I love crying about comics, tysm ❤️

[sparklemaia]

Haven’t seen anything from you in a while. Just making sure you’re okay.

Yes! I am alive! I'm in the last push to get my End of Year Final Projects done for comic book school which is omg so much work. My body is held together with k tape and prayers lol but here are some Upset Children from my current (undisclosed) project for your viewing pleasure

[sparklemaia]

kids need safe places to play. kids need safe places. ceasefire. ceasefire. ceasefire.