Wally Wood’s 22 panels That Always Work have been passed around like cartoonist samizdat for decades now, and this is a good thing. But keep in mind, they aren’t a lesson in how to make good comics, they’re something to keep handy in case of emergency. The emergency in question is when a writer has handed you a non-visual script. (Read this letter from David Mamet to his writing staff for more about such things.)
Comics are a visual medium, and work best when they use pictures to advance and enrich the narrative. Sometimes a script doesn’t do that, but an artist still needs to communicate the impression that there is something dramatic taking place. Tv and film have sound and movement to help accomplish this goal. In comics, we’ve got variations in gesture, lighting, and composition.
At six or seven panels a page, you can run through a lot of clever shots very quickly trying to keep the reader’s eye engaged. When you’re all out of good ideas, that’s when you need to break the glass and deploy some of Wood’s 22.
The Annotated Edition of Gender Queer is almost here!
It will be out in stores on May 19. Many people, including myself, added notes, comments, thoughts, drawings, and in a few cases extra comics to this edition! I also included many of the early black and white inked comics and penciled pages I created when developing the book. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed:
⭐ Jadzia Azelrod (author of Galaxy: The Prettiest Star)
⭐ Andrea Colvin (original editor of Gender Queer)
⭐ Alex L Combs (author of Trans History From Ancient Times to Present Day: A graphic novel)
⭐ Dr Sandra Cox (English Professor, Southeast Missouri State University)
⭐ Eli Erlick (author of Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950)
⭐ Mel Gillman (author of Other Ever Afters, Stage Dreams, As the Crow Flies)
⭐ Ashley R Guillory (contributor to Queers at the Table)
⭐ Justin Hall (editor of No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics)
⭐ Kori Michele Handwerker (author of Tiny Book Science)
⭐ Phoebe Kobabe (my sibling and colorist of Gender Queer)
⭐ Tara Madison Avery (publisher, Stacked Deck Press)
⭐ Ajuan Mance (author of Gender Studies: True Confessions of an Accidental Outlaw)
⭐ Hazel Hewlevant (author of Queer and How We Got Here)
⭐ Matthew Noe (Librarian at Harvard Medical School)
⭐ Hal Schrieve (author of Out of Salem, Vivian's Ghost, Fawn's Blood)
⭐ Matt Silady (Comics professor at California College of The Arts)
⭐ Rani Som (author of Spellbound, Apsara Engine)
⭐ Shannon Watters (co-creator of Lumberjanes)
They all have impressive credits but more relevantly, all of them are friends 🧡💛💚💙
In stores May 19 2026, and available for preorder here. (It is heavy enough to be difficult to hold up in one hand!)
insta / patreon / portfolio / etsy / my books / print store / bluesky
I had the honor of doing some of the annotations for this book, alongside a TON of absolutely incredible queer artists and scholars! I’ve seen the whole book and it’s lovely. Get a copy for yourself, and ask your public library to get one for all your neighbors.
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.
Fantastic explainer comic from my colleague @ripleylacross. Ripley has always been a solid cartoonist with plenty of interesting things to talk about and the ability to keep it entertaining, but over the past year or so, they have gone stratospheric.
I look forward to every new comic from Ripley- even the ones that aren’t about my kind of stuff- just because their cartooning is always so good. See for yourself! https://www.ohjoysextoy.com/agender-being-more-with-less-ripley-lacross/
Exploring your gender is fine and all, but what if you don't have any attachment to any of them? Let me introduce you to the world of being
Superman/Spider-Man [one-shot] - Jimmy Olsen & Carnage: Jimmy Con Carnage (March 25, 2026)
Written by: Matt Fraction
Artist [pencils & inks] by: Steve Lieber
Colorist by: Nathan Fairbairn
Lettered by: Clayton Cowles
Edited by: Marie Javins (editor)
Published by: DC Comics and Marvel
One of the good things about a character like Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen is that he doesn't lend himself to traditional hero pose sketches, so any time I draw a commission I get to just come up with an untold Jimmy story and then illustrate it!
Been sick in bed for the past week, but Taskmaster Season 19 is really pulling me through. It’s been SO LONG since I wanted to just draw people for fun?? Is nature healing???
I was scanning some art today, and I realized that I never shared this piece! This one wasn't for a project, it was just for fun - and so of course I had to fill it with lots of stars and clouds
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
Yesterday I learned that the deluxe edition of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen is up for an Eisner! We're all so proud of this book. And my studio's etsy shop has several signed and sketched copies available. Free USA shipping. Expensive international shipping. (sorry) https://helioscopepdx.etsy.com/listing/4311530238
Also DC's legal department had to get 141 separate likeness release contracts signed and processed for this cover to happen, which, depending on the final number of billable hours, might make it the most expensive cover they've ever published. I am stupidly pleased about this.
I'll be at Austin Books and Comics in Austin, TX on May 23rd, at your service signing anything and everything folks bring (as long as I worked on it). We extended the signing hours and there will be a one hour Q&A break. Hope to see some folks out there. in a week and a half.
