“Her stories are a challenge and an invitation to break down your

own walls to become a braver, more real version of yourself.”

—YUMI SAKUGAWA, author of Your Illustrated Guide
to Becoming One with the Universe

WORST
B E H AV I O R

Essays and comics about

trauma, games, and art

Annie Mok
“Annie Mok is a dream-warrior comix babe.”
—MARÉ ODOMO, author of Internet Comics
 Praise for Annie Mok:

“I can’t get enough of comics artist and critic Annie

Mok’s writing since her comic-essays started appear-
ing in Rookie Magazine last year. Her writing does
everything great literary criticism should, interweaving
themes and topics from Tove Jansson to Guy Maddin”
—Laura Kenins, The Town Crier

“[The essay WORST BEHAVIOR is] a memoir in

which a multiplicity of approaches never devolves into
sprawl or sloppiness, but rather retains a
communicative clarity a more streamlined approach
likely couldn’t have come near, a clarity that only
increases with each turn of the page.”
—SEAN T. COLLINS, The Comics Journal

“Annie Mok is a... broadly inspiring artist”

—KATIE ALICE GREER, frontwoman of Priests

“Her stories are a challenge and an invitation to

break down your own walls to become a braver,
more real version of yourself.”
—YUMI SAKUGAWA, author of
Your Illustrated Guide
to Becoming One with the Universe

“Annie Mok is a dream-warrior comix babe.”

—MARÉ ODOMO, author of Internet Comics
INDICIA AND THANK YOU’s GO HERE
Hendere con remquiderum quae seque eiumquo te consed que con perrovid
et pliquatem laboribusam, num re, solupta tiunte sum hilibus que nesti-
um quid que quis ratus maximolor sim quis simodiosam comnime illab inis
volore perum etur andit re comnis corepudae cus, sumquisque vent, sint
doluptatem audanis dest, ide consed everibeaquo et verum cuptaturis as
autemqui si odi que liciisci sunt.
Aximinc totatur simenih ilitati stiate officil illuptatem re eatem que volori
aliquam ute volo officiis et ligenissit eum quodipsam quat modicia sit magni-
hic te mi, ut doluptatium cus aut faccuptatem aut electis doluptate conem.
Gitium etus voloremporum et exerfer iataerit, to ipsa amus, sit mil il modigni
quunt erum fuga. Mus ium es ereicil iquodis ut audiament fugia volessum as
recto cone et occus adit, quo odit ea nimo qui dent es accati que poriaerum,
corumquo to volores temqui dolesti vollaccusda sunt essenti oriaeculpa
cum sequasin cor sae perectota sit ommoditis et voles nonsecum, alis re,
sitatur?
Luptium cum rem. Itatus etur, que sim simagnim nesera alis aborept ionse-
 WORST
B E H AV I O R

Annie Mok
CONTENTS
Me as Kiki (with Liz Suburbia) 000
Thoughts Like Friends: On Cather’s The Song of the Lark 000
Earthlings: On James Dean & Queer Tenderness 000
Shadow Manifesto, part 1 000
Missing you, Bryn 000
Espejos y Monstruos: A Horror Story 000
Zelda in Simulacra 000
Shadow Manifesto, part 2 000
Drawing Vocabularies: Trauma and Play 000
“In My Kosmis”: A Love Letter to Krazy Kat 000
Hair decisions 000
Easter morning 000
No No No: A Guide to Girling Wrong 000
Worst Behavior 000
A Love Like in the Movies (with Casey Plett) 000
Turned Into Flowers: On Tove Jansson and the Moomins 000
Shenmue Through a Prism 000
Me as Ophelia 000
Caverns: The Art of Rewriting (with Darryl Ayo) 000
Turtles in Time 000
Umf! (with Lottie Pencheon) 000
Two-Player Co-Op (with Hazel Newlevant) 000
On Cheating
THOUGHTS LIKE FRIENDS
On Willa Cather’s THE SONG OF THE LARK

When Cather went by William. (Collaged image:

Willa Cather Memorial Collection, Nebraska State Historical Society.)
 My old housemate Alexis Stephens wrote a piece for Rookie, “Life in
Jeopardy” about being on Jeopordy!’s Teen Tournament, and about how
her whole neighborhood turned their eyes on her when she made it onto
the show:
On my walk home from school, scrawny elementary school kids came
up to me and politely asked how I got to be so smart. It was heartbreaking,
terrifying, and adorable, but it felt like such a cop-out to numbly give ad-
vice like “Remember to study” or “Do your homework,” when what I really
wanted to say was “Read when you feel lonely,” or “Don’t ever let anyone
tell you what hobbies or interests to have.”
Sometimes, this line goes through my mind like a prayer: “Read when you
feel lonely.”
In Willa Cather’s 1915 novel The Song of the Lark, the young Swed-
ish-American girl, Thea Kronborg grows up with a big family in the small

The downtown of Red

Cloud, Nebraska, Cather’s
childhood home, in the
early 1900s. (Nebraska
State Historical Society).
desert town of Moonstone, Colorado during the 1800s. Thea escapes the
chaos of her house—with all her brothers running around—in little drips and
drops: “The clamor about her drowned the voice within herself.” She stud-
ies piano with the old German professor Wunsch, and he and a few others
notice special qualities in Thea: “…she had both imagination and a stub-
born will, curiously balancing and interpenetrating each other…She had
the power to make a great effort, to lift a weight heavier than herself.”
(I should note that if the idea of Destiny feels heavy, that is equally chill
and valid—the writer Margaret Atwood, for example, said recently on the
Hazlitt podcast that her junior high English teacher said, in retrospect, that
Atwood “showed no particular ability in class.”)
One day, Thea claims a little upstairs room for herself, her first room
she wouldn’t have to share. Her brothers don’t want it, because the night
winds come in strong. She heats a brick in the oven each night to warm
her feet in bed: “In the end of the wing, separated from the other upstairs
sleeping-rooms by a long, cold, unfinished lumber room, her mind worked
better…She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which
were like older and wiser friends.” Cather wrote this over 10 years before
Virginia Woolf addressed a crowd and said that, “a woman must have mon-
ey and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
Cather teases out the threads of Thea’s sexuality in the narrative, but it’s a
quiet, suggested awakening, having more to do with the feeling of breath in
her lungs and hearing music than connecting one’s desires to a specific per-
son. Cather nudges the reader. Her descriptions exude a deliciousness. On
a walk with Dr. Archie, an older friend, they see “a little rabbit with a white
spot of a tail, crouching down on the sand, quite motionless. It seemed to be
lapping up the moonlight like cream.”
The space of the desert town rolls out before Thea, and its expanse sug-
gests a space to blossom. Cather writes:
When she went home, it was not to sleep. She used to drag her mattress
beside her long window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with ex-
citement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through
that window—or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within,
not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was
not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the
floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation.
Lewis Hynde writes in The Gift of how the poet Walt Whitman takes
in the world, inhales, considers himself a part of everything. In “Song of
Myself” from Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman writes: “Sea of the brine of
life and of unshovell’d yet always ready graves, / […] / I am integral with
you.” Whitman and Cather saw the creative process, and even the process
of living itself, as one that begins with drinking in before anything can come
pouring out. Whitman suggests that this fallow period marks a death that
we endure before the next stage of selfhood takes place. When
we get to the other side of that change, that’s when we find a voice, that’s
when we write poetry and sing and draw comics and make films. But it is
only listening that allows us to reach that place. D.C. Lau’s 1963 translation
of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching says: “The way is empty, yet use will not drain it.
/ Deep, it is like the ancestor of the myriad creatures. Emptiness in art car-
ries things for us—emotions and memories and questions and ambiguities.
Cather named her first prairie novel, O Pioneers!, after a line from Leaves
of Grass, and in her 1918 novel My Ántonia, the protagonist speaks this
 Photo by Edward Steichen.

Whitmanesque sentiment, “that is happiness, to be dissolved into some-

thing complete and great. When it comes, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
Cather would allow herself to write about a more channeled, directly-fo-
cused sexuality in 1918 with My Ántonia. Cather makes use of a male narra-
tor-protagonist, Jim Burden, to express intimate admiration for the tough
prairie women she grew up with in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Cather had close
relationships with women throughout her life, and during a period at the
University of Lincoln, she cropped her hair short and went by the name
William (pictured in the front).
Cather based Thea partially on her friend Olive Fremstad, a Swed-
ish-American opera singer. When I saw my little sister in New York last De-
cember, I gave her a copy of the book, since she studied opera in Chicago
just as Thea eventually does. Thea travels there to study piano, which leads
to singing. Also, Thea often sings in German, Wagnerian pieces, and my
sister is studying opera in Hamburg, Germany.
In part one of the book, titled “Friends of Childhood,” Thea takes in the
experiences she will later draw on as an artist. Because Thea grows up in a
small Midwestern town, as Cather did, it’s hard not to draw autobiographi-
cal connections. Several of Cather’s pieces, like the 1905 short story “The
Sculptor’s Funeral,” spit venom on hidebound, provincial mindsets about
art and artists. Thea recognizes how stuck she feels growing up in Moon-
stone, even while the desert and her friends there give her life.
Thea acts a little bit like the High Priestess in a Tarot deck. The trans
Tarot expert and comic book writer Rachel Pollack writes in her book Tarot
Wisdom that Pamela Colman-Smith’s drawing depicts the High Priestess as
her robes partially obscure the Torah, denoting mystery.
She sits between two columns, signifying duality and balance, with her
eyes forward in a meditative state. Colman-Smith, Cather, Pollack, and
Whitman all see that potential can sometimes only be seen and tapped into
by inaction. My friend Jess, who often reads my Tarot for me over Skype,
always reminds me that passivity can be an active choice.
I shed this snakeskin. Was the one I had on before, was that me? How
about the one I have on now? What about when I shed that skin, and be-
come whatever I will be next?
Every time I look for a book or a movie or an album or a comic to hold
something, I’m looking for it to say one thing: I see you.
I saw a quote printed up on the door of the bathroom at Giovanni’s Room,
a bookstore in Philly that is also the oldest queer bookstore in the country:
Top: my old neighborhood of West Rogers Park, Chicago, from memory in an Earthbound style.
Bottom: West Philly
Drawing by AM after an inscribed photo by Dean.
EARTHLINGS
On James Dean and queer tenderness
I watched the 1955 James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause for the first
time late one summer night. Every evening, I waited for everyone to go to
bed so I could watch movies on cable. The quiet night was my safe place.
No school in the morning, nothing to do all day but avoid everyone in the
house, read comics, and play Mario on Game Boy Advance. At night, I could
watch what I wanted to watch without fear of reproach. I saw the queer camp
classic But I’m a Cheerleader one of those nights, and in James Dean I rec-
ognized Clea DuVall’s bad girl butch look. Dean looked like a bad (girl)
butch, too—that parenthesis because I know I’m projecting trans stuff like
I’m running a movie reel.
In Rebel Without a Cause, Dean’s character Jim Stark gets picked up by
cops one night for being found drunk on the street. Warner Bros. com-
missioned the movie in response to the 1950s hysteria around “juvenile de-
linquency,” but director Nicholas Ray made it into something more than
a teensploitation picture. At the police station are two other “bad” teens:
Judy, a bad girl with father issues (Natalie Wood), and a quiet, nervous boy
(Sal Mineo as “Plato”). Jim’s parents have moved the family because Jim
got into a fight at the last high school he went to. Jim, Judy, and Plato soon
get tied up in tragic circumstances and they hole up together, making what
many film critics have called a queered makeshift family. Plato barely hides
his desire for Jim’s affections, and James Dean and Sal Mineo give really
tender performances. Those characters take care of each other. I’d never
seen something like this between men in a story, especially a movie with
actors who were so cute. Sal Mineo made me swoon, and the camera seemed
to follow every muscle flex of James Dean’s body.
The movie is melodramatic, sometimes to a fault, but when its larger-than-
life style works, it felt perfectly what being a conflicted teenager felt like to
me at the time. Jim, Judy, and Plato all hurt terribly for affection and care,
and when they look for it from their parents, they don’t get it. It can be a
little two-dimensional—those moments remind me of something my friend
said in high school about The Catcher in the Rye: “It’s good, but [the main
character] just uses the word ‘phony’ way too much.” Still, the care that
the actors put into their performances, and the director Nicholas Ray into
the scenes, felt like care to me, because whoever made this movie seemed
to understand me. And they considered those feelings worthy of making a
movie about, which to me felt like I was worthy of care and attention. This
is not a feeling I had a lot at the time, so when it came it came as a surprise.
I picked up explicit and implicit messages that my hard-to-understand,
some-kind-of-queer-or-whatever story didn’t deserve telling, and Rebel
showed me tenderness. The actor Martin Sheen said, “[Marlon] Brando
taught us how to act, and James Dean how to live.” I think of this as how
Dean created his audience by finding a nerve and exposing it. Dean let him-
self be pretty, vulnerable, and tough all at once. A need to be loved infused
Jim Stark and all of Dean’s performances. It seems a very generous act to
me.

Some time after seeing the movie, I sat in my room and drew Dean from
photo reference (below).

I see now this drawing of Dean as a self-portrait of my state at the time

more than anything—the figure is lost in their own world, incomplete.
I see now this drawing of Dean as a self-portrait of my state at the time more
than anything—the figure is lost in their own world, incomplete.
On the night I saw Rebel, I stayed up all night. I was buzzing with electric
energy. In the early blue morning, I walked across the townhouse court to
the grassy drainage ditch and watched the sun rise. I sang the Velvet Under-
ground’s “Sunday Morning”: “Watch out, the world’s behind you,” a lyric
I always interpreted as paranoid, my 24/7 state of mind at the time. When
you’re young and you’re queer, you’re always looking behind your back,
assessing every situation for its safety or lack thereof.
If we can follow the bouncy ball that takes us from the early 2000s to
the early 1950s, we’ll find something that struck me when I read William
Bast’s sadly out of print 2006 memoir of his friend and roommate, Surviv-
ing James Dean. Bast had written James Dean: A Biography in 1956 when
Dean’s death was still fresh, but stigma around queerness prevented him
from acknowledging several truths about Dean and himself. In Surviving
James Dean, Bast writes of one night on a bus, well before Dean’s film ca-
reer picked up, when Dean talked about manifestation—what I think of as
the (somewhat) non-corny version of The Secret.

“I figure there’s nothing you can’t do if you put everything you’ve got into
it. The only thing that stops people from getting what they want is them-
selves. They put too many barriers in their paths. It’s like they’re afraid to
succeed…I think, if you’re not afraid, if you take everything you are, every-
thing worthwhile in you, and direct at one goal, the ultimate mark, you’ve
got to get there…That’s why I’m going to stick with this thing. I don’t want
to be just a good actor. I don’t even want to be the best. I want to grow and
grow, grow so tall nobody can reach me. Not to prove anything, but just to
go where you ought to go when you devote your whole self and all you are
to one thing. Maybe this sounds crazy or egocentric or something, but I think
there’s only one true form of greatness…You’ve got to go on and on, never
stop at any point.”

I like Dean’s phrase “grow so tall nobody can reach me.” It connects to
what he became, culturally—a tall tale, a fairy tale.
The James Dean that was sold as a poster in Blockbuster Video next to a
sexy Marilyn clock is as close to the “real” Dean as Disney’s The Sword in
the Stone is to the historical King Arthur. So when I talk about Dean this way,
I have to remember that I’m creating him as much as an icon as I do when I
walk through the medieval wing in the art museum, and imagine knights in
armor. In the beginning of T.H. White’s Arthurian epic The Once and Fu-
ture King, White describes the young Arthur, in contrast to his older step-
brother Kay, as “a born follower. [Arthur] was a hero worshipper.”
Dean, too, had his moments. Like I believe T.H. White did, I consider
fandom an endearing trait of an artist or person. William Bast describes one
night when they happened to see an older Judy Garland perform at CBS,
just after MGM had fired her from her contract to devastating effect. Bast
writes that he wondered, “Would she perform? Could she perform?” Then
she began to sing. Bast writes, “Her delivery was transcendent and the emo-
tion overpowering. I got the feeling halfway through that everyone in that
audience was thinking, ‘My God, what have they done to Dorothy!’ […] All
the way home, incredulous, Jimmy kept repeating, ‘How did she do that? [
...] How the fuck did she do that?’” With no care for decorum or tradition,
Garland opened her guts for the audience in a way that Dean had never seen
before. We fans love our heroes because they, like Garland’s character in
The Wizard of Oz, opened up the world from dull sepia tones to vibrant
technicolor, full of possibilities.
In the role-playing game of my heart, as heroes go, Dean’s health is limited
since he was a white, cis, able-bodied dude. But when I was in high school,
I hadn’t even really heard the word “queer” used in the way that it is now
every day for me. Being trans was unthinkable. Dean provided freedom in
his posture and his eyes. He pouted. This was not allowed within the social
contract of all the straight-seeming boys I knew at my school. I would listen
to “Poses” by Rufus Wainwright—“All these poses, such beautiful poses /
Makes any boy feel as pretty as princes.” These lyrics sounded gently illicit,
and turned a key in me. Dean turned himself into a statue of poses, an image
locked in time. And that image has haunted me, pleasantly, since.
As an adult, I read in David Dalton’s biography James Dean: The Mu-
tant King of how Dean, as a kid, rode on the train that housed his mother’s
hearse after she died, carrying them to where the funeral would happen. I
thought of this when I saw Elia Kazan’s movie East of Eden, which is about
Dean’s character Cal Trask, and his hurt for a mom he never knew, and
longing for affection from his dad that he’ll never get. There are a couple
scenes with Dean sitting on top of a train, wearing a sweater and shoving his
arms inside it, writhing with angst, not knowing what to do. What captured
me about Dean then, I think, is the idea that queer longing and queer pain
could be beautiful and interesting. Dean chose to turn himself inside out for
the camera, and that included his tenderness, which I tend to read as a queer
tenderness. Dean’s raw, hurt, open heart changed his audience.
James Dean’s favorite book was The Little Prince, and this information
twists a little block on the Rubik’s Cube. When I was in high school, boys
my age scared me; they all seemed rough and cruel, even though I know now
they were likely as terrified of daily life as I was. Stories like Dean’s movies
and The Little Prince insisted that the world could be a little kinder, could
make space for my inner life.■
Missing you, Bryn.
BRYN KELLY was an artist and performer, an HIV-positive trans
woman living in Brookyln, and earlier this year, she killed herself. She
was in her early thirties. I can’t be tame about this: it fucking sucks. I
hate it.
Bryn was sweet, warm, and funny, and her personhood had a big effect
on me at a time when I felt isolated and low. We did a panel together that
my friend Morgan M Page organized at PTHC 2014, of trans lady artists,
and she talked about putting together a short late-night show sort of on
the fly, which inspired me to write a story on the drive to Baltimore that
night instead of the comics I had prepared. The piece I made up that
night became the basis for “Espejos y Monstruos.”
Bryn kept a semi-secret blog about living with HIV, and in one post,
she said that the HIV-related meds she took every day added up to
$45,000 a year. What does it say to poz people that our government
can’t be bothered to shell out the money to keep them alive?
After Bryn died, my friend merritt kopas pointed out on twitter that
suicide is not a begnign, isolated act. It spread suffering. Her death was
a wildfire, and as always, grief is a prism. Morgan M Page tweeted that
she’d been to three times as many funerals than weddings in her thirty
years.
Take care of yourselves, and let other people take care of you, please.
I know it’s hard to do.
—A.M., 2016
A tumblr text post from Bryn’s blog,
partybottom.tumblr.com, 5.29.14

your life is worth living even if you’re

“not doing anything”
your life is worth living even if you are
“letting life pass you by”
your life is worth living even if you stay in
bed all day every day watching netflix
you don’t have to be big, beloved, important,
beautiful, wealthy or famous
there is dignity in just being
it is ok to be
you merely have to be
ESPEYOS Y
MONSTRUOS
A HORROR STORY

(FOR EMILY CARROLL)

1.
You squat by the TV and sift through VHS tapes in their worn boxes. The
biggest rips and tears lie on The Lion King and The Little Mermaid, videos
that you and Maya sat watching, warmed as though by a fire, until the tapes
got fissures and a static wave washed over the screen and skipped parts.
Your boots bump your ass as you squat, and push your wallet against your
butt. An alien name sits in place of “Fawn Inés Estés” on your ID.
You sit on the floor against the coffee table, and notice the note your mom
left you. She left info about the security alarm, how to clean up the cat’s barf
if she pukes again, and the number of the hotel. Before you realize it, you
pull an old tin for loose leaf tea out of your backpack, tap the ash onto the
note, pack the bowl, and light up. You breathe deeply and the sting hits the
back of your throat. You cough and your eyes water. You crumple the note
and, getting panicky about leaving a smell trail, tie it in a plastic bag and put
it in your backpack instead of leaving it in the trash.

Your fingernail, with chipped-ass black nail polish, picks at the ratty card-
board of the tape boxes. On the Lion King box, the evil lion Scar is brown,
mincing, scrawny, and literally limp-wristed. He’s thrown in darkness, be-
low Simba and Mufasa, who are burly, strong-jawed, butch, and light. The
cover of The Little Mermaid shows a petite, white, femme Ariel looking in
horror at the wicked, fat, dark-skinned Ursula, who the animators based off
the drag queen Divine. Both villains smile, all bright eyes and sharp teeth.
They sit among their chosen family members, hyenas and eels.
The fan beats slower and slower. Your fingers vibrate against the stubble
of your chin, and your tiny breast buds are stifled against your shirt. The
weed helps sometimes, but sometimes it just accentuates that feeling of all
the cells in your body trying to escape.
You hook up the RCA cables of the dusty VCR to the TV. The tape clicks
and whirrs, and The Little Mermaid resumes right near the part where it al-
ways skipped. You saw the movie without this flaw, which started before the
Sea Witch cut’s Ariel’s tongue out (wait, you’re confused it with the Hans
Christian Andersen version?), and before she meets the prince on dry land.
You saw this skipped part so rarely that you don’t remember what happened
in between the jump. Snow-like static coats the screen, but the frames keep
running. You don’t want to see this. Your cells vibrate. You click the VCR
off.
You sit down on the toilet and try to slow down the rush of your breathing.
Disney animators held a plate of water over top of the images they filmed
for Pinocchio’s underwater scenes, making the animated drawings undu-
late. You feel that panel of water between you and your hands and body, and
the ceramic tiles on the floor and walls. A sense memory returns to you of all
the years you sat in the bathroom, reading Goosebumps, or Swamp Thing
comics. The bathroom door was the only boundary that was respected.
A wax candle sits on top of the toilet behind you. You take the lighter
out of your jeans and flick the button, letting the wick catch the flame. You
pick up the candle and place it on the edge of the sink. The automatic fan
sputters and dies, and the lights above the vanity mirror follow. You smile
and stand in front of the mirror. You drag your hands against the smooth
porcelain of the sink.
“Bloody M—,” you say. “Bloody Mary.”
Your breath sounds loud. You drag the syllables in your nasally voice,
daring her.
“Bloody Maaaaaaryyyyyyyyy.”
A flicker appears, an unholy shape. She cracks a side smile. Her teeth are
all fucked up.
Your image replaces hers. What did you see? Did she remind you of Miss
Havisham in Great Expectations, the image of her dangling from a beam,
as Pip saw her during his first terrified visit to her mansion, and then later
called a childish fancy? Did the woman’s image have the smooth grain of a
Daguerreotype, or the rough lines of an Emily Carroll horror comic, stark
red lips against charcoal grays? Was she in color? Was she wearing some
Victorian dress, really, or was it your cousin’s frilly quinceañera dress? You
stood to her side with her brothers, your chest caved in, covered in acne and
hiding your face behind bad Robert Smith hair, wanting that dress so bad.
All your aunts and uncles crowded her, calling her mija, mija. They called
you mijo, and the difference was the gulf between standing in sunshine and
being buried alive.
You don’t know what you saw. Darkness makes room for you to see what’s
in your mind. It also desaturates and makes your vision something like black
and white, closer to how wolves and dogs see.
 You blow out the candle and open the door. You pull out a baggy
cardigan and the standard issue “queer punk” jean jacket vest, and throw
on your backpack. You tromp down the stairs, pull the doorknob, and let
the cool air hit you. Boot soles sink into the frosted grass and you clomp
through the backyard and into the woods.

2.
Birds chirp and dry leaves crunch under your feet. You breathe from your
diaphragm like an infant, like they say you should when you sing or medi-
tate.
Branches snap and dry leaves brush somewhere in the distance. A tall—
really tall—gaunt figure with long, black hair hanging over their face walks
through the woods. Holy shit, you think, is that another trans girl?
You walk up to this person, wave, and give small “Hi.” Do you recognize
them? They’ve got graying skin, their flesh loose in spots. Stitches cover
this person’s body, barely holding their skin together. You remember a
passage from Mary Shelley: “His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of
muscles and arteries beneath.”
The figure sighs as they walk, sounding exhausted.
You realize that this person looks like Frankenstein’s creature. Not Boris
Karloff or Christopher Lee in a movie, but how you remember seeing the
character in your mind when you were 15 and read the book in study hall.
Their huge shoulders move from side to side, like a wolf’s, as they take
huge paces. You say hello again, ask their name. You find yourself with a
muddy ass and a sore chest, wheezing.
“What the fuck?!” you say.
The tall figure looks at you in horror. You recognize the expression as the
face that you saw in the mirror after you screamed and cursed at the neigh-
borhood kids, toddlers really, whom you caught scrawling “TRANNY” in
chalk on your driveway back in Uke Village in Chicago.
The person bolts, long black hair trailing in the wind, and you remember
that Victor Frankenstein gave the creature no name.
You catch your breath and look up at the latticework of tree branches
above you, the deep green needles of New Jersey pines.

3.
The river gargles in the distance. You open your eyes slowly, lazily, and a
huge shadow passes over your body. You look up and see back-bent bird-
like legs. You’ve seen herons around here, near the river, but this thing is
fucking huge, and its wings beating sounds like leather, not feathers.
Hooves? How the fuck can it have hooves?
Its red eyes remind you of a chittering pet rat’s, the bright eyes that your
bestie said looked like Red Hots candies. Its horse-head jerks around, the
bat wings arched up. You stand and slowly walk towards it, edging step by
step, like you did with so many white-tailed deer in these woods growing
up. The creature freezes.
“Shhh,” you say.
You recall the story from a 1909 Camden newspaper, reproduced in the
pulpy Weird NJ magazine. It goes like this: They say that in the 1600s, a
Quaker mother, Deborah Leeds, sweated, vomited, and writhed on a straw
mattress, cursed the pain of 12 childbirths endured, and said, “The Dev-
il take this child.” With these words, she forced a name on the creature
who exited her body. Are you still her child if she exiled you from your first
breath?
The creature called the Jersey Devil stands still, then bolts in the other
direction, cracking small branches off trees as it escapes through a clearing
in the forest.
“Do you have a name?” you wonder.

4.
You smack your lips, dry with cotton mouth. You continue walking, look-
ing up at the trees for another sign of the creature, and your foot slips in
the dirt. You slide down into a cave or a tunnel, roots dangling free from
the ceiling. Echoes of cars driving and little kids playing in the distance
sound muffled, as though from underwater. You flip your cell phone open
for light, but it’s dead. You take the lighter from your pocket, and click it.
The author E.L. Doctorow likened writing stories to making a long drive
through a foggy night—that you can see just a few feet ahead of you, but you
can get where you’re going that way. You drag your fingertips across the
rough surface of the curved walls, and the tingle in your fingers and your
lower legs answers your question: yes, you’re still a little high.
You hear a tinkle of water before the flickering light of your lighter shows
you an underground river, thin in diameter but maybe very deep. Fish
you’ve never seen before swim under the surface. You think you see long
trailing spines coming out from their scales, fine like hair and undulating in
the water.
A shuffle of dirt, and a feeling of hot breath breaks the quiet. A four-
legged animal with huge black eyes stumbles from the endless darkness.
Your eyes adjust to the light to make out the thin legs and sharp face of a
small deer, with sharp bottom incisors that curve around her lower jaw. A
thought riles you: She looks a lot like the fawn you found in the woods as a
middle schooler, with the ribcage exposed, her flesh in the process of being
eaten away by small, white maggots. She rears her head up and opens her
mouth. She cries, uncannily like a human child.

The piercing sound is identical to the baby’s cry-sound that startled you
on an Albuquerque farm, as you jerked to hide behind Papi’s bulk, him huge
against your tiny body. He patted your back and called you mijo, and you
felt weird about being called his son and not his daughter but you didn’t
have words for that. Papi said it’s just the goats whose milk he used to make
cajeta. You feel his warm solidness in dreams sometimes, where he’s alive
again until you wake up and tears well.
The young deer stumbles, kicking up little clouds of dust, and a small
burst of flame escapes her lips. The heat makes you sweat in the cold cave.
You wonder whether you should make yourself large, as if to scare a bear,
or whether you should run.
The deer cries again, darting her head around. She’s a baby, you think,
and she seems lost or confused. You walk slowly, close to her, and lay out
your hand, palm up for her to sniff it. You’re ready to let her go, or to run
at a hair’s breath, when the deer walks up and sniffs your hand. You kneel
down to her level and pet her rough, patchy fur behind her ears, down her
thick neck, and around her shoulder blades.
The deer’s cries soften and she shakes. You stroke her and tell it’s OK in
soft tones. Her fur and flesh burn you like impossibly cold ice. She sinks to
the ground and you sit with her. You draw your hand across her fiery hide
and her breathing slows.
Your gaze goes soft as your eyelids sink, and you let your shoulders droop.
The rhythm of your breath matches hers.
You open your eyes and the deer is gone. You sit on leaves, atop the spot
where you fell in. Moonlight slips through branches.
Small swatches of gray aluminum and tile roofing lay far behind the trees.
You need to make your way somewhere, the train station, catch something
back to Chicago, because you can’t walk back into that structure, the house
where you were raised with all your monstrousness burnt out, all your seeth-
ing and ugly humanity siphoned.
You know you can’t be the daughter of the woman who birthed and raised
you. You know you can’t be anything to her but a memory and a pile of re-
grets, because nothing’s going to change back there in that house, not soon
at least, and so as far as you can tell she’s never going to bring you anything
but hurt.
When you decide this, or realize that you’ve decided it a long time ago,
you figure that if you can decide who your mother is or isn’t, then you know
that you’re a daughter, and you can crack yourself open and let yourself be
called “mija” by women you choose to trust.
You turn away from the house. No moon lights your way. It’s hidden by
clouds, or it’s not out tonight. A small spurt of flame darts out from in-be-
tween your lips and lights a few feet ahead of you for a moment, and sug-
gests a direction. Your boots make prints in the damp dirt, and you might
be wrong about where you’re going. It doesn’t matter. You have all night. ■
ZELDA IN
SIMULACRA
Miyamoto, Guy Maddin’s MY WINNIPEG,
and my grandfather’s dollhouse
DOLLHOUSES
Koji Kondo’s familiar refrain from Zelda picks up quickly in the beginning
of the Nintendo 3DS game The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
(2013). The game uses the same overworld as the popular Super Nintendo
entry The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991), and the same top-
down oblique view. The view gives the effect of little figurines traversing a
landscape.
The Nintendo 3DS is the great-grandchild of the Game Boy
(I still call the 3DS a Game Boy), which produces a stereoscop-
ic 3D effect without special glasses. I felt high when I first tried it.
In A Link Between Worlds, Link soon encounters fissures in the world of
Hyrule, which lead to the Below world of Lorule, with its own shadow/in-
verted version of the series’s Triforce talisman. Link passes through thresh-
olds, cracks in the “Above” world of Hyrule, to enter the “Below” domain
of Lorule. To move from one to the other, Link becomes a flat drawing on
the wall. A fissure in a fashionable lady’s room in Hyrule leads to a demol-
ished version of that same structure in Lorule.
 I played The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, my first Zelda
game, early on in my switch to 3D gaming. I expected the 3D effect to pop
out beyond the screen, like in traditional 3D, but with this game and a cou-
ple of others, the screen created a window to a diorama that I looked down
into.

“Pop-out”-style 3D effect
 Fall-in” style of 3D

Gaming feels like playing with dolls to me, and the 3D effect shines bright-
er light on that idea. Switching to 3D, I noticed the roundness of the villag-
ers’ heads in Animal Crossing: New Leaf (2013), a peaceful life-sim where
your neighbors are bunnies and frogs and foxes.

Blathers the museum-keeper in Animal Crossing: New Leaf

 In drawing classes at art school, teachers advised you to “draw through”
things, to feel the volume of objects beyond the planes that you face. My
teacher John Gaunt said that over the years, he saw only a few students faith-
fully translate the shapes of heads, rather than making the common mistake
of rendering a skull with little area between the ears and the back of the
head. New mothers included that area of the head because they saw and felt
their babies’ heads from above. They cradled their kids’ fragile bodies in
their arms, and became intimately aware of their volume and shape.

Drawing after a photo of Michelangelo’s David (1504)

 I had always struggled with drawing through; with my triple fire sign chart,
I often raced to the outlines, without slowing down to take in the dimen-
sions of a box or a body.
The 3D effect heightens the feel of a little living dollhouse, coupling pow-
erfully with the oblique projection.The creator of Zelda, Shigeru Miyamo-
to, thought so too, when he was asked about designing the Nintendo 64
Zelda game The Ocarina of Time:
…When I was younger I used to enjoy creating puppets and doing puppet
shows, so [designing 3-D games was] like doing puppet shows in a 3-D vid-
eo game space.
A Link Between Worlds (2013) took the gameplay back from the more
“realistic” feel of games like Ocarina of Time, in which the camera circles
around the protagonist, to the fixed perspective of earlier games. In the
games, the young Arthurian-style hero, Link, pulls a sword from a stone.
He explores the overworld of Hyrule, and the underworlds of dungeons,
and he fights monsters and solves puzzles. The thrill lies in the games’ open
design, as the player gets to look around, talk to people, and wander.
After playing, I walked outside and visions formed; houses connected to
their backs, and their floors and foundations. Circles appeared that wrapped
around tree trunks.
The 3D Zelda game reminded me of the large red dollhouse my grandfa-
ther built for me and my little sister. Its cutaway wall in the back laid bare
the relationship between the interior floors and walls, the exterior, and how
they all fit together. It even rested on a brick foundation, indicated by a strip
of a sticker with a red brick pattern.
I remembered the Thorne Miniature Rooms in Chicago, where artificial
light spilled from open windows into meticulously-made period rooms the
size of shoeboxes, looking as though mice might don the Victorian dresses
and drink from Art Deco teacups.
The shift to simulacra helped me see the fullness and volume of my “real”
life. The limited perspective of Zelda’s visual style engages the senses. Re-
duction of information makes the player more actively participate in the
scenes. Like a John Porcellino King-Cat comic in which John’s drawn ver-
sion of himself walks out by his garage and the phrase “fall sounds” appear
to indicate whichever autumn noises you remember, the simplified puffy
shapes of Zelda indicate the memory of trees rather than attempting to
paint a picture of the “real” thing.
My grandpa’s dollhouse.

TINY GARDEN
Shigeru Miyamoto directed, designed, and produced the original Legend
of Zelda game for the NES in 1986, and acted at least as a producer for most
of the following Zelda games. A year before, he worked with the hyper-lin-
ear platforming of Super Mario Bros. (1985).
When you play the NES Zelda, you stand in an open field, where you can
wander into a cave near you. An old man inside gives you a sword.
Eventually, you weave through pathways between bushes and come across a
lake. Miyamoto explored the landscape around his Kyoto home as a kid, and
one day found a cave, eventually working up to exploring it with a lantern.
The dungeons and their puzzles, he said, came from his getting lost among
the sliding doors in his childhood home.
I spent a lot of my time playing in the rice paddies and exploring the hill-
sides and having fun outdoors. When I got into the upper elementary school
ages — that was when I really got into hiking and mountain climbing. There’s
a place near Kobe where there’s a mountain, and you climb the mountain,
and there’s a big lake near the top of it. We had gone on this hiking trip and
climbed up the mountain, and I was so amazed — it was the first time I had
ever experienced hiking up this mountain and seeing this big lake at the top.
And I drew on that inspiration when we were working on the Legend of
Zelda game and we were creating this grand outdoor adventure where you
go through these narrowed confined spaces and come upon this great lake.
And so it was around that time that I really began to start drawing on my
experiences as a child and bringing that into game development.
The idea for Zelda sparked when Miyamoto opened his desk drawer and
imagined a tiny garden inside. Of designing games, Miyamoto said, “I real-
ized the joy of doing something that hasn’t been done before, and working
in the unknown.”
There are imperialistic overtones to Zelda. It takes place in a medieval-fla-
vored world of lords and ladies, populated by monsters that disappear and
reward you with money or health when you kill them with a sword. But Zel-
da compels me because of its ability to mirror a literal or psychological walk
through the woods.
UNDER THE UNDER
Carl Jung wrote that stories reflect dreams, because both take emotional
and psychological material, and use fantastical imagery and allusive leaps in
logic to get at the truths we subconsciously hide from ourselves.
The prefix “sub-” of “subconscious” or “subterranean,” comes from the
Latin “sub,” meaning “under, close to.” Link goes underground to reach
dungeons below, as Orpheus descends to the underworld to face Hades,
and as Perseus explores the darkened Labyrinth to face to Minotaur.
The original NES Legend of Zelda game begins as the yet-unnamed Link
descends into a cave, and finds an old man who offers him a sword. Jung
called the archetype of the wise old man a “senex,” and for different dream-
ers, he takes different forms. For the writers of the Arthur myths, it was
Merlin, and for George Lucas, he was Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Bodies of water figure prominently in the underworld. The boatman
Charon guides souls across the river Styx. The fluidity of water reflects the
unconscious, and as Alison Bechdel’s therapist suggests in Are You My
Mother?, creativity as well. Humans are animals, and we can’t see well in the
dark. We project our visions into the void, into what’s underneath. “The
descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent.”—Jung

TIME FOR EXTREME MEASURES

Around when I started playing A Link Between Worlds, I got obsessed
with the Guy Maddin movie My Winnipeg (2007). The film comes as the last
part of a memoir trilogy, following Cowards Bend at the Knee (2003), and
Brand Upon the Brain! (2006). Each silent film-inflected piece shows an
oblique, magical take on Maddin’s autobiography, just as Miyamoto created
a dream-mirror to his own experience. My Winnipeg posits itself as a docu-
mentary. An actor plays Maddin, and a voiceover from the real Maddin res-
onates as the actor Maddin sits in a darkened train car that passes through
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The reduction of the perspective helps to
create the frame, in a small, manageable space, with which we move through
the narrative and the city.
The voiceover informs the audience that Winnipeg is a town full of sleep-
walkers. Guy looks out the window, looking for his childhood home of 800
Ellice Ave., a split-level home above a beauty salon run by his mother. Guy
intones in a trance-like voice, “White. Block. House.” as a brief overlaid
shot shows a pair of hands turning over a Lego version of 800 Ellice Ave.
Like Miyamoto’s little garden, the world becomes manageable as it shrinks
into diorama-size.
On the train, Guy says,
All a dream, all a dream. I need to wake up! Keep my eyes open somehow.
I need to get out of here! What if… What if I film my way out of here? It’s time
for extreme measures!
Guy then rents out the building to re-enact his childhood for a movie.
Let’s call My Winnipeg, the movie we’re watching, the “Above” film, and
the untitled filmed re-enactment the “Below” film. In the Above film, Guy
brings in his mother to play herself in the Below film, played in reality by
veteran noir actress Ann Savage, who reportedly terrified such tough gals
as Bette Davis with her intensity.
In Mario Vargas Llosa’s Letters to a Young Novelist, Llosa calls such sto-
ries, as they appear in Don Quixote or The Arabian Nights, Chinese box
stories or matryoshka stories. He also names them “mother” stories and
“daughter” stories, because the effects of one reverberate to the other.
 Some tales contain “granddaughter” stories, and in My Winnipeg, one
such tale is Ledge Man, an old Winnipeg-based TV show that Guy’s mother
starred in, in the universe of the Above film. In Ledge Man, her character
belittles her son, who stands on a ledge, threatening to kill himself. At the
end of each daily episode, the son comes back through the window. Mad-
din’s own brother, who he brings back to life through an actor’s portrayal
in the re-enactment of the Below film, killed himself in 1963, at seventeen.

“White. Block. House.”

In the Above film, Maddin hires actors to play his brothers and sister, and
they dress in period ‘fifties garb. In one of the movie’s great comic touches,
these actors play their lines either disinterestedly, or over-the-top. Histri-
onics break out in one scene where Guy’s mother harangues Guy’s teenage
sister and calls her a slut. During the filming of the Below film, the cur-
rent owner of 800 Ellice opts to stay in her house during the shooting, so
she sits in the living room, unfazed, breaking the dream that Maddin in the
Above film tries to create.
 Fissures reveal themselves. Maddin reveals layers in Winnipeg. He speaks
of a First Nations story of “the forks beneath the forks,” rivers beneath the
forked Red and Assiniboine Rivers. He also returns to a potent scene of his
childhood, of a three-story community pool, separated out by gender, with
pools under pools.
“Who’s alive?” Maddin asks at the end of the film. “Who’s alive? Some-
times I forget.” Like Orpheus, we often go deeper in grief.
Maddin plays with veracity. He called Brand Upon the Brain! “97 percent
true,” though he admits that he did not grow up in a lighthouse (“maybe
that accounts for one percent”), and his parents didn’t run a Grand Guig-
nol-style orphanage. But, he said, the films are “emotionally true, melodra-
matically true.” Like Miyamoto, Maddin transposed his memories into a
shape in which he could hold, but in order to do that, magic had to enter.
Alex Smith of the sci-fi collective Metropolarity said to me recently after we
talked about The Matrix (1999) for my podcast Lights Go Down,
At this point, I don’t care about a story unless it has some kind of magic in
it. Or, it doesn’t have to have magic, but it has to feel like something magical
could happen.

REVERBERATIONS
As Rachel Pollack says, the Magician’s gesture in his Tarot card—pointing
up and holding an instrument, and one hand pointing to the ground—sug-
gests the phrase by Hermes Trismegistus, “As above, so below, as within,
so without, as the universe, so the soul…”
The layering of the worlds made magical, melodramatic sense to me. It
affirmed my fears and feelings around confronting my own Shadow self, the
Jungian idea of the self who hides in dreams, who holds trauma and fissures
within the dark night of the soul.
Best of all, in order to move between Hyrule and Lorule, Link becomes a
drawing, just as he began, a series of marks upon a flat surface. Link’s form,
with its 3D shapes and bright colors, transforms to a 2D design with thick
outlines. The transfiguration grants power to that idea of Link, that drawing
of Link, to move over walls and in-between cracks to the other side. ■
SOURCES
1. 97 Percent True, dir. Guy Maddin, documentary produced for the Crite-
rion edition of Brand Upon the Brain!
2. Alex Smith of Metropolarity, conversation after Lights Go Down epi-
sode taping.
3. Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama. Houghton-Mif-
flin Harcourt, 2012.
4. Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Nintendo 3DS, 2013.
5. Gilles Néret, Michelangelo. Taschen, 2010.
6. Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols. Dell, 1968.
7. Eurogamer, Miyamoto on World 1–1: How Nintendo made Mario’s most
iconic level, 2015.
8. The Legend of Zelda. NES, 1991.
9. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX. Game Boy Color, 1998.
10. The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. Nintendo 3DS, 2013.
11. Jennifer DeWinter, Shigeru Miyamoto (Influential Games Designers
series), Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
12. Jill Schar, The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds Review: Por-
trait and Landscape Modes. Tom’s Guide, 2013.
13. John Gaunt, Drawing 1 class at the Minneapolis College of Art and De-
sign, 2005.
14. Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist, Picador, 2011.
15. My Winnipeg, dir. Guy Maddin, Buffalo Gal Pictures / Documentary
Pictures / Everyday Pictures, 2007, and an interview with Maddin con-
ducted by Robin Enright on Criterion edition Blu-ray.
16. Q&A: Shigeru Miyamoto On The Origins of Nintendo’s Famous Char-
acters, NPR, 2015.
17. Ruth Voights, Personality Theories class at the Minneapolis College of
Art and Design, 2008.

Thanks to ZEAL editors Rory, J Bearhat, and Aevee Bee.

DRAWING VOCABULARIES
ON TRAUMA AND PLAY

THE LANGUAGES OF DRAWING

Everybody codeswitches all the time, often without thinking about it.
How someone talks to their mom (if they talk to their mom) differs from how
they talk to friends, how they talk to their teacher or a boss. When I was first
getting laser hair removal, I told a couple of non-trans lady friends that I was
getting “laser stuff,” and they asked what that was. “I’m getting a Mega Man
arm cannon,” I said. “I’m transitioning to Mega Man.” Visual vocabularies,
like verbal vocabularies, change tone and effect in neat, unexpected ways
ways.
I use the term “drawing vocabularies” to describe how different artists
make marks in a 2D space, like a piece of paper or a drawing tablet screen.
I’ll mostly be talking about comics. I’m curious about how different ways of
drawing affect both the reader and the artist, and about artistic trajectories.
Everything we do as artists and people exists in context to our pasts, and
so the traumas we’ve lived through, and the traumas that have been passed
down to us, must affect the way we draw.
Let me give you an example of a drawing vocabulary. The Love and Rock-
ets co-creator Jaime Hernandez will draw, for the most part, illusionistical-
ly. I like to use “illusionistic” rather than “realistic” because I don’t believe
in “realism” — in referring to typical perceptions of the world as an objective
Real. So, I use “illusionistic” to describe a drawn version of the illusion of
the world as people typically see it, because it refers to the kind of illusions
that most people see as “reality.”
Jaime’s drawing vocabularies shift playfully: in one moment, he draws his
character Terry Downe illusionistically. Then in the next panel when Terry
gets mad, she suddenly has giant gnashing teeth that are bigger than her
head was in the panel before — a “cartoony” drawing vocabulary. If you grew
up reading certain kinds of comics like Jaime and his siblings did — Archie,
etc — this makes perfect visual sense, even though it’s totally bananas if you
think about it out of context. It makes an emotional, narrative sense. The
Hernandez siblings were blessed with a mom who loved comics as a girl
and kept all her old ones, giving them to her own kids when she had them.
A sense of safety, early on especially, fosters the ability in a kid to play, a
central instinct to artmaking.

RECOVERING SAFETY
I believe that like the cartoonist Lynda Barry suggests, moving our con-
ception of artmaking to a playful place can be healing and generative. In her
book What It Is, she talks about how just about how, typically, kids seem to
know how to draw instinctively, but when they reach a certain age, they get
self-conscious, and their drawing freezes up, and they usually stop.
It’s a little woo-woo (I’m a little woo-woo, too), but in Julia Cameron’s The
Artist’s Way, she begins her book with a chapter called “Recovering a Sense
of Safety.” “Parents seldom respond ‘Try it and see what happens’ to artistic
urges issuing from their offspring,” Cameron writes, “They offer caution-
ary advice where support might be more to the point.” Cameron mentions
“try it and see what happens” in the sense of following art in general as a
path, but “try it and see what happens” is a great mantra for anything that a
person might try when they’re in the studio or at their desk making things
in the moment.
But that can feel hard, since if we’ve internalized toxic ideas about art
and artists, we might feel afraid to try it and see what happens. But that’s
how one lands on fun ideas, like Jaime making Terry Downe turn from a
typically-drawn figure to a smoke-snorting, teeth-gnashing anger monster,
codeswitching from a literal reality to a dreamed one. I believe drawing and
artmaking is about our emotional realities, inner lives, dreams, and dream
languages. The comic strip Krazy Kat played with comics in wild ways: the
mesas in the background would change shape from panel to panel, limbs
were no more than sticks when they needed to be, the moon hovered over
a brightly-lit ground. Fear can hold us back, keep our drawings constrict-
ed. John Gaunt, a teacher of mine at MCAD, referred to the artist Andrew
Wyeth’s oil paintings as “constipated” while he admired his looser, more
gestural drawings and watercolors. As someone who gets constipated when
they get stressed out (when I graduated college, I pooped mountains, later
realizing that I hadn’t shat in three days), that metaphor makes a lot of sense
to me.
CONTROL
In high school in NJ and college in Minneapolis, I got obsessed with slick,
cartoony illusionistic comics by Dan Clowes and Chris Ware. While I’m
still interested in Ware’s work, both cartoonists lean heavily on technical
skills, sometimes to a fault. Looking at Ware’s Acme Novelty Datebook
sketchbook collections, I wonder why he holds back so much his observa-
tions from his comics work. His sketchbooks are full of tender pen and wa-
tercolor drawings from life, and often I miss the tremulous quality of those
drawings in his comics work, which he sacrifices for an almost unyielding
unity. Both cartoonists are beholden in their work to a high level of craft.
In comics, “craft” vs. “art” has been a debate from at least the time of a mid-
90s feud in the letters section of The Comics Journal between “cute brut”
artist James Kochalka and several cartoonists and writers. In retrospect,
Kochalka’s slick lines look as much as part of the comics establishment as
anything else. I don’t want to come down hard on craft, because I am not
interested in upholding binaries. As my old teacher, the sculptor Kinji Ak-
agawa pointed out, craft and design is essential to artwork, as long as inqui-
ry is there too. I used to get confused when I would go to art museums and
see furniture, coffee pots, and architecture. But the most striking of these
“crafted” things ask the same questions as much fine art does: how does one
exist in the world? What is our relationship to spaces, and what are those
spaces’ relationships to us? In these questions, and responses, one might
find as much playfulness and spontaneity as in a John Coltrane solo.
In Franz Kafka’s short story “Metamorphosis,” which begins, “When
Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found him-
self transformed into a monstrous cockroach on his bed” (trans. Michael
Hofmann). Kafka’s protagonist is haunted by work, seriousness, labor, and
a cultural antagonism towards play, hobbies, free time. “‘Whatever I do, I
musn’t loaf around in bed,’ Gregor said to himself,” even though he finds
himself afflicted with a nightmarish condition. (The loafing reminds me of
the uninhibited queer joy of Walt Whitman: “I loafe and invite my soul, / I
lean and loafe at my ease…. observing a spear of summer grass.”) Play comes
back to Samsa when he tries to get out of bed to get to work: “As Gregor
was already half-clear of the bed — this latest method felt more like play than
serious exertion, requiring him only to rock himself from side to side — he
thought how simple everything would be if he had some help.” Like much
enduring art, Gregor’s plea is one for care and support. Gregor’s mother
speaks to the Chief Clerk of his office, who’s come to chastise Gregor. Gre-
gor’s mother says that almost all Gregor does is work, and he is no loafer.
She says, “His only hobby is a little occasional woodwork. In the past two or
three evenings, he’s carved himself a little picture-frame, I think you’ll be
surprised by the workmanship…” I like the image of Kafka toiling away as
a lawyer, spending his evenings at play, thinking of a story in progress as “a
little picture-frame.” I’ve been intrigued by the idea of movie and play adap-
tations of Kafka, like Orson Welles’ version of The Trial with nervous cutie
Anthony Perkins, but I never want to replace the pictures in my head. The
playfulness of Kafka’s choices is a gift, one that belies his sad-sack image.
André Gregory, speaking as himself, from his and Wallace Shawn’s screen-
play in My Dinner with André, talks about directing an acting workshop in
a Polish forest with a language barrier between him and the women. He said
that it was a group of adults learning to play again. Gregory discusses a mo-
ment an hour and a half into the workshop in which he, on instinct, threw a
teddy bear into the group, and how the group responded in this rapturous,
beehive-like energy. “It was something like a kaleidoscope, like a human
kaleidoscope,” he says. I’ve felt moments like that, especially with music,
and I think of Pamela Colman Smith’s image for the Tarot card of Judge-
ment, the second to last card in the Fool’s journey of the Major Arcana. This
image is of literal rapture, gray corpses being awakened from their graves
and praising the heavens.

ZOMBIE BRAINS
In Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, Daniel G. Amen, MD shows
how trauma literally shrinks the front lobe of your brain, and severs neu-
ral connections, making one less flexible and more fearful. Art is all about
flexibility and making connections: “Try it and see what happens.” Howev-
er, the brain is as malleable going forward, and neural connections can be
repaired by changing neural habits. This, to me, is one of infinite proofs of
manifestation, the idea that our ideas about the world shape and reshape
physical reality, since there is no true separation between ourselves and the
world, since we’re made of energy and we don’t really exist. The malleabili-
ty of art can help illuminate the ever-shifting ground we stand on.
PLAY TRAJECTORIES
In Lynda Barry’s book Blabber Blabber Blabber: Everything Vol. 1, she
traces her artistic development through youth through her college and early
post-college years. “After I learned to read,” she writes, “I liked to copy
pictures and trace them and I still do. To me it’s like singing along with the
radio following all the notes because it takes you somewhere.” She talks
about how sweetness overwhelmed her style for a long time. “This seems
to be the trick with comics: bitterness and sweetness need something else;
some third thing. And it’s hard to say what that thing is, but it’s something
like what music is to lyrics. It’s the thing that brings the feeling-change.”
The sci-fi writer Samuel R. Delany wrote in About Writing that the most
important thing in work is begeisterung, a German word literally meaning
“be-spiritedness.” Less literal translations include buzz, zeal, or rapture. I
like rapture. I talked to my housemate, DJ Delish yesterday, about a song
that gave her that rapture on the dancefloor one night. I said that I love that
feeling, and that it feels religious to me — she said that when she’s in that it
was like being taken over by the spirit, and who is this preaching to me?
Jaime Hernandez, similarly, said in the monograph The Secrets of Life and
Death that he looks at old comics, not to draw like them, but “to get reli-
gion.” He said that when he looks at old superhero comics by Jack Kirby,
he’ll laugh, “out of joy.”
Barry says she ended her strip Two Sisters and began a wilder comic, Girls
and Boys, because the sweetness felt stifling. “I wanted to make comics
with trouble in them and I wanted to draw in a way that was not sweet be-
cause the stories weren’t sweet, and because something interesting hap-
pened when I stopped trying to control my drawing: I got that feeling back
from when I was a kid, that feeling of the line being alive again.” The first
page of the collection of Girls and Boys is a tiny, ratty, almost stick-figure
drawing of a man with sunglasses, and the text: “What is wrong wih [“wih”
crossed out] with this picture?”
As so many artists have pointed out, one’s style often develops naturally
out of their limitations. The Peanuts creator Charles Schulz developed a
shaky hand over the years that became, as Chris Ware has said, part of the
“handwriting” of the drawings of the comic. Lynda Barry writes, “People
who liked Two Sisters were very mad at me [for ending the strip abruptly
and harshly], but by then I was a punk-ass artist and it was a punk-ass time.”
Barry let her limitations, the constraints of her style, bring the stories to life
in new, weird ways.
There is no play without constraints, because if a piece of art is one thing,
that means it isn’t something else. I go through a lot of difficulties with my
body: gender junk, trauma, physical and mental illnesses. I find it comfort-
ing to say, this is what my body can do. This is what I can draw, right now. ■
“IN MY KOSMIS”
A LOVE LETTER TO
GEORGE HERRIMAN’S KRAZY KAT

A.M. after Herriman.

I was learning to drive when I found the Patrick McDonnell book on Krazy
Kat in the dingy basement of a library being renovated, housed in the re-
mains of a chain bookstore. I’d read the Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Wat-
terson, a hero of mine since I was a kid, talk on the strip. Here he explains
the “plot” of George Herriman’s 1913-1944 newspaper strip masterpiece,
from a 1990 introduction to a collection:
“...Krazy Kat gains its momentum less from the personalities of its char-
acters than from their obsessions. Ignatz Mouse demonstrates his contempt
for Krazy by throwing bricks at her; Krazy reinterprets the bricks as signs
of love; and Offissa Pupp is obliged by duty (and regard for Krazy) to thwart
and punish Ignatz’s ‘sin,’ thereby interfering with a process that’s satisfying
to everyone for all the wrong reasons.”
I had been making bleak comics with anthropomorphic bears (you can
put your own gay Zootopia joke here) at SVA’s high school program. I had
read what Scott McCloud said about Maus, blah blah blah. And I grew up on
Bugs Bunny & Daffy Duck cartoons, Daffy being the perfect stand-in for an
egocentric child. Everything primed me to follow cute cartoon animals into
weird emotional places.
George Herriman grew up in New Orleans, that polyglot city, and he
turned phrases over and over until they only barely resembled their origins.
Herriman created an often phonetically-spelled language for his characters
and narration, hurting my brain. As a kid, I sometimes gravitated towards
stories that seemed like puzzles. For my quote in my high school yearbook,
I put Herriman’s line: “In my Kosmis there will be no feeva of dischord; all
my immotions will function in hominy and kind feelings.”
Elisabeth Crocker’s essay “Some Say It With a Brick,” posted online with
the barest of HTML and presumably written for a class at the University of
Virginia, was among the first pieces of criticism I ever read, a form that was
to become one of the great loves of my life. She teased out threads from
the structure of the strip: she pointed out how Krazy became a figure to
playfully point out bullshit within racial, gender, and economic lines. For
Herriman, a mixed Black man who was ordered by his famous boss William
Randolph Hearst to always wear a hat when photographed to hide his curly
hair, I appreciate his ability to turn what must have been incredibly painful
realities (we can never know, as he was not allowed by racist circumstance
to speak on them) into kind, empathetic art.
The queerness of Krazy captivated me. Krazy went by variable pronouns
depending on the situation, and his abiding crush for Ignatz Mouse, a male,
went uncommented on in any moral sense. The newspaper mogul Hearst,
now most famous for being the inspiration for Citizen Kane, made his ed-
itors keep Krazy Kat running despite their and their readers’ complaints
that the strip was incomprehensible. For a nascent medium whose primary
influence was often the gag-a-minute format of vaudeville, the quiet radi-
calism of Herriman’s strip was, as the cliché goes, ahead of its time. It took
decades after his death, and the rise of reprinting old newspaper strips, to
find an audience wider than a small group of intellectual cognoscenti.
Krazy Kat was a puzzle I could never solve as a teen, and that both frus-
trated me and drew me in. Krazy’s relationship with gender and queerness
hit all these chords for me that I barely knew were there. I had loved Bugs
Bunny playing with drag and camp, but that particular trickster figure only
toyed with changing his gender. The trans woman artist Aiyanna Maracle
pointed out that many widely-accepted trans and gender-variant artists,
such as Ivan Coyote, were perceived as performing gender, and were thus
more palatable for a larger queer audience. Bugs did drag, and I loved that,
but Krazy’s conception of gender shifted as often as she wanted it to. Krazy
pointed towards a dream, a Kosmis where “there will be no feeva of dis-
chord; all my immotions will function in hominy and kind feelings.”
Herriman took his knife to scratch into the ink to make the detailing on
Krazy’s back. He shifted the backgrounds behind the characters, empha-
sizing the ever-malleable nature of the world we live in, a world crafted by
our perceptions. I’d watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show and they would
sing “Don’t dream it, be it.” I couldn’t’ve known I could if I didn’t see it.
Herriman showed me.

SOURCES
1. Aiyanna Maracle, keynote for Writing Trans Genres conference at
the University of Winnipeg, 2014.
2. Bill Watterson, foreword for The Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat, 1990.
3. Elisabeth Crocker, “Some Say It With a Brick,” 2008. http://
www2.iath.virginia.edu/crocker/
4. George Herriman, Krazy Kat, reprinted by Fantagraphics as Kra-
zy & Ignatz.
5. Inkstuds podcast episode, “Jeet Heer on Krazy Kat,” 2006.
6. Light Grey Art Lab podcast episode “Animism—A Conversation
with Ruth Voights,” 2014.

Thanks to my editor, Zainab Akhtar.

Easter morning 2011, the day Jesus rose to heaven~
I had done karaoke and drank the night before. I got
coffee (from the shop where the boy from Mirrors
of Egon Schiele worked—he’s the weed butt boy, if
you read that comic) and two blocks from my house, I
pooped myself.
Out loud I said to myself, “So we’re there now...”

(This is me cleaning up, drawn later that day)

NO NO NO
A GUIDE TO GIRLING WRONG
Your story’s due Monday. You spend an hour with
coffee, scratching into paper, and then you hold up
your hand to check if you’ve had too much caffeine:
If you have to check, you know already. You wonder if
you’re going to go by Wendy Xiao, or use a pen name.
Most people must have the safesearch off on Google,
and you can never take filthy slash fiction down from
old message boards (not that you want to).

You wonder whether to write about transmisogyny.

You decide there’s no way you can tell this story with-
out getting so specific that you’ll get the last 10 percent
of ostracization that you haven’t yet encountered in lit
scenes, and in queer scenes. You think about every
time you let someone know that they said something
fucked up and transmisogynist or racist or ableist, and
you read their lips, perfectly red Taylor Swift–type
lips, that asked you if you even wanted their support.
You weigh the pros and cons of never leaving your
house, like some trans girls you know.
Wonder why you live in Philly as you feel rock-hard
boulder boogers in your nose.
Pretend not to hear people talking about the ma-
chine in your ear. “Yes, it’s a hearing aid, and yes,
that means I can hear you. I’m a cyborg.” You don’t
say this.

The rain streaks against the window, silenced by the

bus motor.

You’re very, very tired. Don’t lean against the win-

dow, because you might fall asleep. If you fall asleep,
you might dream.
Don’t think about being five and playing in the Pa-
cific for the first time, when all you’d ever felt were
New Jersey waves. Don’t remember losing your grip
on the sand and your dad running out to grab you.
Don’t think about how he could save you from the
ocean, but not from your mom.

Don’t think about sharks, and how if you were ever

in the ocean, you’d be completely helpless.

You remember being at the aquarium with your

mom, and standing in front of the glass of the giant
tank, and having the the water fill your entire field of
vision? You remember how that little kid had no safe
place to run because the only person that was there
was your mom and she was never there, or she was
there, but she was a shark, too.
Look: A cat is not a family. Don’t you have a
family? Have you checked up on that group
of alcoholics? Don’t you wanna know what
they say about you when you’re not there? It’s
been a few years. They must have their act to-
gether. You know, it’s not really their slogan,
but “fun” in “dysfunctional”: You gotta love
a family that needs a slogan to explain itself to
itself.

The room rattles under you from the kava tea

that your doctor told you that you shouldn’t
drink because it can cause liver damage. So
can Estradiol. You tried deep breathing for
what felt like an hour and you don’t know what
the fuck you’re supposed to do.

The machine’s going to dispense Hazel’s

food, but she mewls anyway.
Are you looking into the mirror to find something
to berate yourself about? Too fat, too much stub-
ble: The mirror’s going to make it easy for you if you
come to it with that goal in mind. Don’t you wanna
be “body posi”? There isn’t any wiggle room here.
Love your body, end of story, no gray area. That’s
what the Tumblr cartoons order you to do.

Standing water is unsanitary.

Think hard enough and Devon’s in your arms again,
warm, breathing. So solid.
People say it, or the pity-looks on their faces tell
you: You’re grieving wrong, you should get over
it. Wonder what that means. Decide that grieving
wrong means grieving in public, in front of other
people. Don’t think about a yellow funeral home,
and a pastor saying the name his parents gave him
instead of his name, the pastor and his parents
“she”-ing all over his fucking dead body.

Wish that you were gay, again. Decide that being

trans turned the gay shame that you grew up with
into straight shame. Decide not to tweet this.
You’re fading.

Don’t think about the ocean.

WORST
BEHAVIOR
 “G.P.O.Y.” selfie, 2012.

2014.
A year ago, January ‘14:
I did a group comics reading that I organized as a debut event for my com-
ic book Screentests at Bergen Street Comics in Brooklyn. Someone who
worked at Babeland a few doors down gave me a free buttplug—for drawing
comics!!! Then I got so excited that I could finally go to a “real Brooklyn
queer dance night,” that I stayed up later than I knew I could handle. I grew
up in New Jersey, and New York still holds an allure for me that I’m embar-
rassed to admit. I knew how much losing sleep affects my mental health—es-
pecially then, when my bipolar disorder still raged full force.
When Sam, April, Sasha, Jeremy, and I got to the club, I realized that
as a trans woman, I was as much of a non-entity at this place as nearly any
“rad queer” space. Except for the wonderful Reina Gossett, who co-hosted,
I was practically the only one in the room. Trans boys swarmed the club.
These were the same kind of trans boys who I dated back when I identified
as a cis fag, and now they looked right through me.
I got home to my friend Bev’s apartment in Kensington, and her perfect
cat, Girlcat. I woke up, took the F train to Chinatown, got on the Chinatown
bus to Philly, and took the 34 trolley to my house.
I stood on a step stool in the kitchen and grabbed a gin bottle. Its glass
neck felt cool. My throat tightened up. I looked around. I knew no one in
the house, a punk house, cared if I drank, but I got the feeling that this swig
looked sad. I told myself that I was getting away with something, by drinking
to destroy myself when I knew that this was the worst possible time and way
to drink.
I pushed out the memory of being six, 10, 13, and going into the garage
to throw out a Diet Vanilla Coke can (I know), onto piles of empty beer and
wine bottles that filled two huge recycling bins.

2012.
My world ended. That year, I broke up with my boyfriend, went into ther-
apy, recovered memories of being sexually assaulted as a little kid, and start-
ed identifying as trans.
Between starting to contextualize the abuse, and starting to contextualize
my gender, I have trouble parsing out what happened first. I wrote about
how they converged in my comic “Body Talk” in Screentests.
 From “Body Talk”

On New Year’s Eve 2012, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats tweeted:
 This echoed the Mountain Goats’ song “This Year,” in which Darnielle
sings verses about being 17, when his stepfather beat him, and he tore him-
self down with booze. Then he gets to the chorus, where he yells that he’s
gonna get through the year:

2013.
On January 5, 2013, two years and one day ago as I write this, I sent out
the email that had been sitting in my drafts folder since Thanksgiving. My
therapist had looked over it, and I’d talked about it with friends.
It told my parents that I would have no further contact with either of them
because of what had happened to me as a kid. I’d stay in touch with my little
sister, the only member of my family that I could trust, and she’d inform
them that I was alive, basically. I told them that they should give me mon-
ey, because I suffered from extreme mental disabilities, and because once I
started transitioning, I knew it was going to get very difficult for me to find
work, even when I would be able to work.
My father emailed me back and, in a line that sounds so corny it now pains
me to type it, he said that I knew that if my “accusations” were true, it would
destroy both his and my mom’s lives.
Left to the wolves, but for my silver spoon.The money kept me under a
roof, and for that privilege, I am very grateful.
I thought a lot about God that day, and that January. I remembered when
I was five years old, how I sat in the crying room at the church, and thought,
“A man can’t walk on water.”
Everyone in the congregation repeated phrases in unison, robotically, and
it scared me.
My suspicion lay way under my skin. My experiences with my parents
taught me that the ground could crumble underneath me. Any fucked up
thing could happen at any time. I was dirty. I was stupid. I didn’t matter. I
was a toy.
When I got my Communion at age 13, I soothed myself by only mouthing
the words. I knew I’d get a cheap computer as a Communion gift from my
grandpa. I ended up using it to explore porn that confused and scared me,
but I felt a compulsion for, for reasons buried deep in my body.
The night of January 5, I walked home towards the sublet I lived in, and
looked down from the Walnut Street Bridge at the Schuylkill River. I saw an
image of my body hitting the surface of the water, made hard by the impact. I
turned away from the river, and thought of jumping in front of a passing car.
I cried and walked straight ahead, my feet hitting the sidewalk and nothing
else. I turned from thoughts about hurting others, to thoughts about hurt-
ing myself. I thought about “This Year.” Spoiler: I did not kill myself.

2014. (again)
In 2014, by then in that punk house that I still live in, I became obsessed
with Drake and the poet Walt Whitman.
I got into Morrissey and the Smiths in high school. Together, Drake,
Whitman, and Moz formed a trifecta of creative reactions to hurt, and ways
of building oneself in opposition to marginalization: Walt and Morrissey
against queerphobia, and Drake against anti-black racism.
 2014 threw me into projects. I made piles
of comics, and music with my bands See-
Through Girls and Wolf Thistle. I organized
a comics tour, and developed more and more
confidence in my work. As far as I figured, my
name was practically in Elvis lights.
Jane Smiley points out in her book Thirteen
Ways of Looking at the Novel that what she
calls the “literary persona” (that is, the public
persona) always has things figured out more
than the person who crafts that persona. The
“Annie Mok” onstage and on Twitter gets fi-
ery, but for the Annie Mok who burrows in her
blankets, goes to therapy, drinks too much
coffee, and spends too much money on CDs—
that fire can threaten to burn me out.
I need both people, but I believed that I was the person onstage. My in-
ventiveness, confidence, people sending me nice notes on ask.fm—I learned
that these things can’t fly me across the rivers of grief that I just have to swim
through.
On February 18, 2014, I attended my friend merritt kopas’s workshop
Queering Play at NYU Polytechnic. I drew a comic about it, “Shadow Man-
ifesto, Part 1.” The next night, I drew in my diary about all the torn-up ways
that I got when I started to get close to somebody.
All three parts of “Shadow Manifesto” ended up following the scope of
my romantic relationship with my friend merritt kopas, who I was dating at
the time. Dating merritt marked the first time I’d really dated another trans
woman, for more than a couple of dates. I hadn’t dated anyone for almost a
year at the time, following a fucked up experience I had in spring 2013.
Besides recent experiences, I’d always had a hard time relating to other
(trans) women sexually, because of bad, deep, under-the-skin memories
getting triggered. “Shadow Manifesto, Part 3” dealt with how the most dif-
ficult person to negotiate sexual consent with tended to be me, because I
wanted so badly to be immune to the anxiety that came up when I got inti-
mate with someone.
 merritt and I dated for only a short time, but it affected me deeply. I told
my friend, the artist Sab Meynert, about how freaked out I felt about my
feelings, and they said, “Time isn’t linear.” This jibed with all the ideas I
started exploring with “Shadow Manifesto,” about art that excited me that
dealt with personal modes of perception.
Relating to another trans girl, as a trans girl, helped me feel whole in my
body. As Whitman said in a context of closeting and queerphobia, “Divine
I am, inside and out.”
 All the features that I listed at the end of “Shadow Manifesto, Part 1” are
ones I felt body dysmorphia about. I knew that each could act as a “tell” of
my transness in public. I don’t need to learn to love my body, but I wanted
to at least not actively hate it. I am on some kind of path about that.
I started going through my Saturn return, a two-year period in a per-
son’s astrological chart that shakes up your world and makes you pick up
the pieces that work for you, on December 23, 2014.
I ended 2014 as a sober girl, healing in public. I ended 2014 with a ques-
tion.
(I also ended this year watching a library DVD of the 1942 René Clair com-
edy I Married a Witch starring Veronica Lake. It’s on Hulu and it’s perfect.)
 The question is:

I feel pulled from all directions to look and act in certain ways. Queer
scenes, comics scenes, the larger kyriarchical society, my birth family: Each
context force-fed me images of how I should be.
Rachel Pollack, a trans woman who’s a comics writer, sci-fi novelist, and
tarot expert wrote, “If images have trapped us, then images can free us.”
I like seeing artists make new images of themselves, images that integrate
multiplicity.

On Drake’s “All Me,” Big Sean runs through all the ways that he can’t
trust people, and he ends by saying that he’s no angel, but:
A LOVE LIKE STORY BY CASEY PLETT
ILLUSTRATION BY A.M.

IN THE MOVIES
 The first boy I slept with tried exactly one nice thing: When I ran down his
tiny hallway to the bathroom to throw up, he clambered after me, drunk as I
was, and said, “I’m going to hold back your hair!” He was excited about it,
suddenly animated and high-pitched, like a kid in class not used to knowing
the answer. Like, here was a move he could finally pull off. What a dolt. I
don’t want you around when I’m barfing.
You. I’m nervous about seeing you on Thursday. For one, I have just
graduated, and you are still in high school. For two, I am a transsexual, and
while you know this and never mention it, some people aren’t as bad as hair-
hold-boy at pretending to be nice (pro tip: If you really have to say, “I’m not
a fag,” don’t say it with your dick in my mouth). For three, you don’t drink,
and I am not used to seducing boys sober.
Yesterday at work, our shifts overlapped. I was unpacking a box in receiv-
ing. You were getting an order and eating a muffin.

You: I don’t want to go back out there.

Me: Give me a bite of your muffin, and I won’t tell anybody I saw you.
You: I could hide here.
Me: Forever.
You: At one with the shelves.
Me: A store poltergeist.
You: How would I eat?
Me: Ghosts don’t eat.
You (serious and considered): Hm. Right.

And then you left and I watched your perfect ass disappear through the
door, and then I leaned into the counter. I never think about having sex
with you right away. I don’t even register I’m attracted to you until we’ve
been talking for a few seconds—and then your eyes bounce where other
guys would laugh and you move a lock of hair from your face. And then your
shoulders are moving up and down with mine and our fingers slip out of
their basket-weaves from the sweat. It’s distracting.
I like that we work together. I get to see you without having to plan it.
You’re still in school so maybe that’s still normal to you. But I can’t count
on randomly seeing people anymore. I have to make an effort. It’s awkward.
It’s weird. It makes me nervous, and I don’t like it. It’s better when seeing
your friends is out of your hands. Some days I don’t see you at all. Some days
I see you four or five times. I like that.
You have an ex. Her name is Marni. Everyone at school thought she was a
bitch but I liked how she wasn’t afraid to talk shit. You’re both still friends.
Word gets around, I know you’re a virgin. I have no exes; I’m not a vir-
gin. I imagine us as balanced, and sometimes this comforts me, but it’s only
sometimes.
We might be watching a movie on Thursday? I know we’re hanging out
and I know your parents are never home.
A few days ago we were both eating lunch in the break room. I was having
a bad day. You were playing a game on your phone. You stayed playing a
game on your phone. You didn’t look up at me, not once, not when I said,
“Hey,” not when I said, “How are you,” and not when you said, “I’m good.”
I stayed there for 10 minutes, until we had to go back out, waiting for you
to say something, to notice that I was hunched in a corner, that I wasn’t
actually eating, that I was in the break room in the first place, which I never
am, to at least say something more than “I’m good.” But you stayed on your
phone, and then you left without saying a word. You didn’t look at me. You
didn’t look at me once. And now you’re texting me, inviting me to come
over and watch a movie?
I wonder what you know about me. I get paranoid about my reputation.
Maybe too paranoid. It’s like my sister says: Lots of people don’t actual-
ly care enough about you to gossip hard, one way or another. And I don’t
count as a girl to a lot of them, anyway. Here’s a fun story, maybe: A couple
weeks ago after I gave you a ride home (you didn’t ask, I love that you never
ask) I drank a bunch of vodka in my room then walked over to sneak into the
Alibi. But everyone there knew me from the last few times, so it didn’t work.
Which is OK. There are other bars. When I walked out, I saw my buddy
Tim, working the street for change. Older guy.

“Lorena!” he said. “Sweetie, I haven’t seen you for so long.” He

kissed me wetly on the forehead, then the cheek, but that was it. He knows
I’m young. We sat together and talked. Mostly he talked. He’s got a kid back
East trying to graduate. Said he was getting out of this town soon, before it
got cold again. It was busy outside the bar, and some other kids ended up
hanging out and drinking beside us. One guy gave me some beer. He was
pretty in a gentle and clumsy way: Long hands and big frizzy hair. He spilled
beer more than once or twice. And I liked his hoodie. It was the color of ash.
 “Hey, Lorena!” Tim said when he saw me leaning against him. “You
watch out for that one, he’s no good. He brags. You want me to give him a
boot in the head, it wouldn’t be the first time.”
You know how it seems like a person is kidding, but halfway through you
realize they’re serious?
“Shut up, Tim!” the boy said.
“You shut the fuck up!”
I like Tim. He reminds me of my dad. Merry and degenerate. In another
life, the two of them would get along.
This boy with the hoodie, he was probably older than he looked. I’d seen
him around here before, playing guitar sometimes. He popped open an-
other beer and told me to drink. I like having my fun, but I’m smarter these
days. I took a sip and handed the can back to him. “I’m gonna go home
now.” Tim walked me down the block and kissed me goodbye, once on the
forehead and then the cheek.
When I walked over the bridge back to my house, I felt fuzzed and manic
and at peace all at once. I waved and blew sloppy kisses at every car that
went by. I wouldn’t have actually gotten into one. That’s not what I want
anymore, but—I dunno. Some cars honked. One guy did stop—middle-aged
dude. I told him to go away or I’d call the cops; he turned pink as a rose and
sped off. Should I feel bad about that? It was funny. I wonder if you would
find something like that funny. I wonder if you’re one of those good boys
who has a wild side in waiting, or if you really are just a good boy and that’s
all. I’m not sure if I care either way. Maybe I do.

****
I mean, last night I just stayed in and watched Netflix. And the night before
that. And the night before that I did a puzzle with my mom. (Puzzles. She’s
basically 80.)
I can’t stand thinking about you and I together so much—not even just in the
gushy way, but as a possibility. Like—I keep you in mind when I think about
my future. I can’t stand it. Other girls say I’m lucky because I must know
how boys think. Whatever. I know just enough to be even more confused
about them. And what boys think about me—I’ll never figure that out. There
was a day, a year ago, you sat in front of me at an assembly. (Your hair was
down to your motherfucking ass back then. I like it now, shoulder-length.)
Marni wasn’t around. You had a white long-sleeved shirt on under a black
short-sleeved one. The assembly was about rape. You listened. I noticed.

****
My friends have all this advice for me. One of them is telling me to dress
up all sexy (“but not slutty,” she says definitively. “You know?” And then
she nods sagely. Whatever.) and kinda snuggle up to you and let you make
moves. But my guess is you would freeze like a booger in January. (I had one
try at kissing a girl in middle school, by the way, I get that manly pressure
thing—I mean, sort of.)
You’re the one who wants me to come over on Thursday. I like you so
much. I don’t understand anything. I don’t. I’m going to kiss you, I want
you to know that. I’m going to lean over and touch your shoulder at some
point, and if you look at me for more than a second, then I’m going to kiss
you. It will be awkward and you’ll want me to leave right after, and then
this thing with you will be over—it will be so wonderfully over. I like you so
much, and I will get one kiss. I know how these things go. One kiss, and
then I’ll see the shock and drop and fear in your eyes. I can’t wait to wake up
Friday and know for sure that you don’t see me like that, and I won’t think
of you as a possibility anymore. I know the joy in knowing it’s over. That
thought makes me happy. That thought is a happiness that’s possible, and
real. That thought will let me kiss you, and I couldn’t do it any other way. It’s
so hard to explain that there are things in my past I don’t feel good about,
but neither do I feel ashamed. I know how it works, don’t tell me I don’t. I
will see you Thursday. I wonder what movie you will pick. ■
TURNED INTO
FLOWERS

On Tove Jansson, the Moomins,

and making it through the winter
SECRET NAMES
I poured myself into drawings and stories, always, especially when my
body and speech felt too small to contain the galaxies inside me. When peo-
ple foisted narratives onto me, I locked onto fictions that held the possibili-
ties that seemed too scary to name, or that I lacked the language for to begin
with. When a feeling looked too painful or beautiful or both, a cipher, a
protagonist carried it for me. I didn’t even have to know what the story was
doing for it to work, not consciously.
In the second Moomintroll book by Swedish-speaking Finn author-il-
lustrator Tove Jansson, 1948’s Finn Family Moomintroll, Tove introduces
us to two small characters, Tofslan and Vifslan (Thingumy and Bob in the
English translation). The pair lug around a giant suitcase with some mys-
terious insides that they call the Contents. In the name Tofslan, we hear
“Tove,” and in Vifslan, “Vivicka.”
Tove met Vivicka Bandler, the first woman who she was intimate with, 3
1/2 weeks before Vivicka had to leave for Paris. Tove was also entwined at
the time with Atos Wirtanen (“her love affairs, both with men and women,
were many,” Westin says), but for Atos, romance came second after politics
and philosophy. Tove wrote to her friend Eva about being the romantic cen-
ter for once, with Vivicka, and said, “Now I’m the sun shining.”

The Hemulen (wearing a dress) meets Tofslan and Vifslan.

All images, besides the first, drawn after those by Tove Jansson.
 Little Tofslan and Vifslan speak in a strange language shared between
the two of them. The Groke, a great gray isolated creature who spreads
ice wherever she sits, wants the suitcase. She doesn’t care about it, she
just thinks that whatever’s inside must be expensive. The ownership of the
suitcase comes into dispute as Tofslan and Vifslan contradict each other
and themselves when asked who the Contents belong to. In response, the
Moominvalley inhabitants hold a trial.
The Snork says that Tofslan and Vifslan “can’t tell the difference between
right and wrong. They were born like that and can’t help it.” This was in
1946, and homosexuality was only legalized in Jansson’s native Finland in
1971. Tove and Vivicka kept their affair secret, for safety.
The Moomins live in a state of glorious apartness. They remain unaware, by
and large, of conventions around love and money. Their weirdness defines
them, their staunch desire to hold fast to their bohemian ways of living.
Joselle Vanderhooft wrote in “Tove Jansson: Out of the Closet” that “In
Moominvalley, everyone from Fillyjonk and Too-ticky to taciturn Snufkin
and mischievous Little My is not only part of the Moomin family, but Fami-
ly, in the truest sense of the queer term.”
Tove referred to her gay community as specters living on “the other side.”
I grew up without words for the weird nonsexual longing for the butch
Clea DuVall character in But I’m a Cheerleader. I smuggled that DVD out
of SunCoast Video when I was in middle school and into my house, as con-
traband.
Moominmamma satiates the Groke, who only wanted the Contents be-
cause she thought them expensive, by giving her the magical but trouble-
some Hobgoblin’s top hat.
The summer and the story draws to a close, and Moomintroll’s friend
Snufkin departs to travel for the winter. Moomintroll sits on the stoop and
cries for his friend, seemedsurrounded by blooming lilacs and tall grass.
Like Tove and Vivicka’s brief affair, Mooomintroll and Snufkin’s time to-
gether felt too short.
Tofslan and Vifslan try to comfort him, and offer to show him the Contents
to cheer him up. They lead Moomintroll to their secret hideaway, tucked
among the leaves, and open the suitcase. “A soft red light lit up the whole
place, and before him lay a ruby as big as a panther’s head, glowing in the
sunset, like living fire.” The ruby glows with Tofslan and Vifslan’s secret
love.
I remember the man who loudly said, “Hey ladies, how’s it hanging?”
to me and my date at the time, merritt on a Toronto bus, and the man in
black sunglasses who smiled like the Joker at us when we held hands walk-
ing down the street a few weeks later in Winnipeg. My date took her hand
from mine and apologized, and said she didn’t feel safe. I told her she didn’t
need to feel sorry. I mentioned this to a friend, who said they never got ha-
rassed in Toronto on their own, but when they were with someone and they
got read as a queer couple, it came on like wildfire. I remember feeling like
I had to shrink inside myself, though I wanted to open the suitcase and let
the light blaze. My time with her was brief since we lived far away from each
other, and I spent many hours sitting on Moomintroll’s stoop, crying for
ideas I held fast to, even more so than a real relationship.
There are songs that I believed in so deeply when I was a kid that I made
their doomed romanticism manifest in my life. As that Clea DuVall-loving
teen, I lied on my bed and heard Morrissey from the Smiths sing, “I know
it’s over, and it never really began, but in my heart it was so real.” These
ideas took such root within me that I integrated them into my stories of re-
lationships that did begin, that I moved through, and then naturally ended.
Tove’s ruby stayed locked away for many readers, for many years: wheth-
er consciously or unknowingly, both the FSG editions of the Moomintroll
chapter books, and the lovely reprints from Drawn & Quarterly of the com-
ic strip version of the Moomins, omit any mention of Tove’s relationships
with women, including her inspiration for Moominland Midwinter. Many
of her critics, to this day, downplay the influence of her sexuality upon her
work. “It’s not so significant,” comics critic Paul Gravett says on an episode
of the podcast Inkstuds, “It’s more a tolerance.”
IF I MAKE IT THROUGH THIS WINTER
In 2011, an internet friend who I did daddy/son roleplay with told me that
Tove based Little My and Too-Ticky off her girlfriends. In 2012, I recov-
ered memories of being raped as a kid, I started to transition, and I told my
parents to fuck off for a while while I figured things out — but, really, I just
used that to buy me time and space while I gathered the courage to tell them
to fuck off forever. I knew that when I made this necessary break to save my
heart and my life, I’d be leaving my whole extended family. I’d never get to
see my baby cousin grow up.

So, picture your girl, newly on estrogen and crying at any provocation. I
had broken my computer by leaving a waterproof bottle not quite closed in
my waterproof bag. I lived in a sublet in Fairmount, Philadelphia, a house
that was half-dimly-lit basement with a concrete floor. I saw Divine Fits play
that cold fall at Union Transfer down the way on Spring Garden. I stood in
the grand old hall, and remembered when it had been the chintzy restaurant
The Spaghetti Warehouse, and how my mom would take my sister and me
as kids. Dan Boeckner crooned weird words onstage to a beat, and I imag-
ined myself standing where he was.
Each night, Complex-PTSD and nightmares tore up any semblance of
restful sleep. Every book I tried to read before bed seemed to trigger me. I
wondered if a kids’ book might help. I walked down Fairmount Ave., full of
white Christmas lights. I walked past the looming Eastern State Penitentia-
ry, the ghastly model for the modern prison system, of which Charles Dick-
ens wrote after a visit to Philadelphia, “I hold this slow and daily tampering
with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture
of the body.”
I went into Book Haven, a used bookstore run by an elderly couple. The
store came complete with a puffy bookstore cat. I pulled a book off of the
shelf.
 Inside, strange little descriptive sentences marked the top margins of each
spread.

Blank, open space dominated the illustrations. Single objects, or one char-
acter floated, isolated, in a vast swath of snow. The old Firrar, Straus, and
Giraux edition, with a soft-edged painting by Tove on its cover, possessed a
quiet magic that I felt lacking in the brightly-colored, slick reissues.
That night, I sat on my my comforter on the floor that doubled for a bed,
and opened the book. Triggers found me here, too. Young Moomintroll
awakes in a cold, dark house while his family hibernates, and for the first
time, he can’t get back to sleep. Moomintroll tries to wake Moominmamma,
but she didn’t awake. She just curled up in an uninterested ball […] All at
once Moomintroll felt frightened and stopped short in the warm darkness by
the streak of moonlight.
Moomintroll decides that it’s no use, and he ventures outside on his own.
He encounters winter for the first time, since he always slept through it be-
fore. He sees a squirrel and calls after it, but it runs away.
“Wait!” he shouted. “Don’t leave me alone!” […]
Now he didn’t shout any more, because he thought how horrible it would
be if nobody answered him. He didn’t even dare to lift his nose from the
track, which was hardly visible in the dark. He just crawled and stumbled
along, and whispered softly to himself. And then he caught sight of the light.
 It was quite small, and yet it filled all the wood with a mild red glow.
Moomintroll calmed down. He forgot the track and continued slowly […]
On the other side of the lamp someone had dug herself a cozy hole, someone
who lay looking up at the serene winter sky and whistling very softly to
herself.
“What song is that?” asked Moomintroll.
“It’s a song of myself,” someone answered from the pit. “A song of Too-
ticky, who built a snow-lantern, but the refrain […] is about things that one
can’t understand. I’m thinking of the aurora borealis. You can’t tell if it real-
ly does exist or if it looks like existing. All things are so very uncertain, and
that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured.”
Tove’s biographer, Boel Westin, said that Tove wrote the book in 1957
after meeting the woman who became her longtime partner, the graphic art-
ist Tuulikki Pietila, who went by “Tooti.” “Too-ticky is the one who gives
Moomintroll guidance through the winter and the hard times,” Westin says.
“It’s Tooti’s book. It’s a book for her and about her.”
SHADOWS
After Midwinter came Tales from Moominvalley and the somber, yearning
Moominpappa at Sea. Tove’s mother died in 1970, and she began Moom-
invalley in November, her swan song to the series. If Moominmamma’s
“uninterested” slumber marks the beginning of Midwinter, her permanent
departure colors November.
Morrissey singing: “Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head. The
sea wants to take me, the knife wants to slit me, do you think you can help
me?”
A new character, a small young person named Toft (again, think “Tove”),
shows up in November and wonders where the Moomins went, along with
Snufkin, Mrs. Fillyjonk, and the Hemulen. Tove wrote, [Toft’s] dream
about meeting the family again had become so enormous that it made him
feel tired. Every time he thought about Moominmamma, he got a headache
[…] The whole of Moominvalley somehow become unreal, the house, the
garden, and the river were nothing but a play of shadows on a screen and
Toft no longer knew what was real and what was in his imagination.
Toft make his way through the thick forest, where inside there was perpet-
ual dusk […] Toft walked through the forest, stooping under the branches,
creeping and crawling, and thinking of nothing at all, and became as empty
as the crystal ball.
Toft — who we hardly ever see from the front, he’s always looking, search-
ing — confronts Moominpappa’s crystal ball. Toft, finally, gets through the
woods.
Toft looked behind him and the Valley was just an insignificant shadow
below him. Then he looked out at the sea.
On the last page of the last Moomin book, Tove wrote, Toft saw the hur-
ricane lantern Moominpappa had hung up at the top of the mast. It threw
a gentle, warm light and burned steadily. The boat was a very long way
away. Toft had plenty of time to go down through the forest and along the
beach to the jetty, and be just in time to catch the line and tie up the boat.
Tove penned these words in a simple summer home that Tove and Tooti
built together on the secluded Klovharu Island. Tove turned to mostly to
novels, short stories, and painting. Westin said “Self-portraiture was al-
most an obsession for Tove as an author and artist. She wrote no tradition-
al autobiography but one might say that she created a narrative of her self
throughout her work.”
My friend Coda read my astrological chart this bitter spring. I asked her
to because I’m going through my Saturn return, a two-year period that one
goes through every 28 years of her life, which marks huge upheavals and
self-reflection. I told Coda about the comics I’d done about Candy Darling
and Egon Schiele, and the journeys those stories took me on.
“It seems like you pick theses ciphers,” she said, “but they just end up
bringing you more pain.”
Coda’s words came back to me as I sat in a coffee shop in Center City Pila-
delphia and read about Toft stumbling through the woods, and I shook with
tears. I got up to blow my nose with a brown paper nakin, and I used another
one to cover my face. The Supremes sang “Ain’t no mountain high enough”
on the stereo, and glittering strings sounds surrounded me.
I find it easy to write myself as the protagonist in stories that work as “vic-
tim-to-victory jams,” as Sia said in a piece about songwriting for Rookie.

The protagonist learns some Hard Lessons, but then she Pumps Herself
Up and Takes the Crown and No One Can Ever Keep Her Down. It can be
hard for me to just let myself walk through the woods.
I’m going to do it again, anyway. If Toft can make it through the woods,
why can’t I…
In October 2013, I stood in PhilaMoCA, off Spring Garden, and ate too
much free vegan mac & cheese. Me, Al, Perry, and Zach readied ourselves
for our first set as See-Through Girls, the first band I ever played in. My
stomach churned. I went to the bathroom, but I get viciously constipated
when nervous. Back in the big room, I smiled and relaxed a little when I saw
the projection on the screen between bands: the venue showed the 1970s
Polish stop-motion version of the Moomins with the sound turned off as a
DJ played. I felt like Tove’s ghost had blessed us. Moominvalley glittered,
and Moomintroll wobbled around, all soft, friendly shapes.
We got onstage and Al plugged their guitar in, and their growling crunch
filled the big, open room full of friends. Zach’s drums pounded a perfectly
stupid beat, and I took a breath and got ready to sing.

P.S.
The other day, I finished drafting this story in longhand. I felt im-
bued with Tove’s freewheeling spirit and longing for sunshine, so I biked
across the Spring Garden Bridge that evening as the sun set over the
Schukyll River. I rode to my drummer Zach’s place for his birthday. Zach
loves the Moomins too, so I asked him if I could use some of his wife Ana’s
drawing paper. I sat on the floor by the coffee table near my friends Addie
and Ben, who sat on the futon, and I drew Zach the Groke from Moomin-
land Midwinter. A mom showed up with her two little girls, who Zach used
to teach. One, M., sat with us and I asked her if she wanted to play a drawing
game. She proposed that we do an Exquisite Corpse, though she didn’t use
that name. After M. drew a cat head for the first folded paper run, I kept
asking her if she wanted to draw the heads. M., Ben, Addie, and I drew Ex-
quisite Corpses and lined them up in a gallery on the windowsill. Ana came
home from work at the bakery, and grabbed markers for M. and her sister.
M. pored over big sheets of bristol, and said, “Finally, some color.” She
made drawings for everyone, and drew me a flower. Its vibrant scratches let
secondary tones rest within the primary colors. Its scratchy, intuitive smart
decisions reminded me of a Mickey Z. RAV comic book.
That night, as I have on many nights, I dreamt that I stood by a big Christ-
mas table where all my cousins, aunts, and uncles sat around it. In most of
these dreams, I cried in the next room, or screamed at my mom that I hated
her, only to break down and say that I loved her, too. In these dreams, I al-
ways planned to leave, but I scrambled to gather my stuff (always a big pile
of CDs, shit I was trying to hold onto but I knew I didn’t need), and I’d miss
my plane. But this time, I walked around the low-lit table where there was
no place set for me, and I walked around the table and touched my cousins’
shoulders as I softly said good-bye. ■

Too-ticky gives Moominpappa advice; I’m trying to listen, too!

SOURCES
I heavily quoted Tove’s official biographer Boel Westin as she was inter-
viewed for the following two articles, especially:
1. Sort of Books: Q&A with Boel Westin about working with Tove Jans-
son
2. Mark Bosworth “Tove Jansson: Love, war, and the Moomins” for BBC
Magazine
3. Inkstuds “Moomin chat” with Paul Gravett, Juhani Tolvanen, and host
Robin McConnell
4. Joselle Vanderhooft “Tove Jansson: Out of the Closet” for Tor.com
5. Juliet Rix “The Moomins — A family affair” for The Guardian
6. Young Talk episode 2 with me, Sophia Foster-Dimino, Ben Urkowitz,
and host Kris Mukai
7. Eastern State Penitentiary’s history website
8. Tove Jansson Finn Family Moomintroll, trans. Elizabeth Portch, from
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
9. Tove Jansson Moominland Midwinter, trans. Thomas Warburton, FSG.
10. Tove Jansson Moominvalley in November, trans. Kingsley Hart, FSG.
11. Tove Jansson Moomin: The Deluxe Anniversary Edition from Drawn
& Quarterly. This collects the complete run of Tove Jansson Moomin
comic strips.
12. W. Glyn Jones Tove Jansson for Twayne Publishers.
13. Sia “Ten Tips for Better Songwriting” from Rookie Yearbook Three.

Thanks to:
Aevee Bee, for believing in me and this story.
Sophia Foster-Dimino, Robin McConnell, Cathy G. Johnson, Book Haven,
and See-Through Girls. Tom Devin, for talking to me about the process of
putting together the Moomin books, for his essay in the Anniversary book,
and for everything he’s done to bring Tove’s work to a larger audience.Boel
Westin, for her work and words. And Tove.
Al San Valentin, from See-Through Girls.
SHENMUE
THROUGH A
PRISM
In fall 2013, after my grandfather died, I saw my sister in Chinatown in
Manhattan, and she said, “Don’t worry, you weren’t the only one who
wasn’t there,” there at the funeral. it turned out that one of our cousins had
disappeared, wouldn’t answer phone calls, and was doing a lot of pills. That
year, I’d taken back the surname that had been stolen from him and his sis-
ter, rendered fatherless during the Second Sino-Japanese War, by a white
immigration officer in San Francisco. My grandfather, his sister, and their
mother had gone from their home of China, to their mother’s native Colom-
bia, to seek solace in diaspora in the US. When they arrived on American
shores, the immigration officer replaced the ancestral surname “Mok” with
“Choy.” The aftermath of war tainted even my grandfather’s name.
The 1999 Sega Dreamcast game Shenmue opens with a young Japanese
man, Ryo Hazuki, reeling from the traumas of that same war, traumas that
run as deep as his blood.
In Summer 2016, creator Yu Suzuki made a splash on Kickstarter with
the long-awaited Shenmue III. I’d never played the games, so I watched
Youtube videos, skipping around walkthroughs of Shenmue and 2001’s
Shenmue II. Videos of games let me avoid the stress I sometimes feel when
I actually play them. Tense games give me nightmares far more easily than
comics, books, or movies. Boundaries blur. To this day, I still fly in dreams
by gliding as with the Wing Cap in Super Mario 64, sinking towards the
earth and back to danger. Watching games makes them out of reach and out
of time.
It felt like an appropriate game to watch, since the structure seems like
a beefed-up version of a Japanese visual novel. Shenmue was the most ex-
pensive game ever made back in 1999, boasting changing weather patterns
and NPCs who each have their own schedules. There are quick time event
fights that occur in short bursts among the wandering through run-down
cities in search of people who can help you find Lan Di. But its story, mostly
dialog-based, is not so different from a typical modern Twine game, games
that use a choose-your-own adventure format to talk about gender, trauma,
and sex.
The story begins on a snowy night in December 1986, two weeks after
I was born. Lan Di, a Chinese man, has come to a dojo to entrap Iwao
Hazuki, father of teenage protagonist Ryo. Ryo tries to defend his father,
but Lan Di chokes him and throws him to the ground. Ryo crawls on the
floor, coughing. The music glitters, recalling Danny Elfman’s soundtrack
for Batman. He’s dressed in a white t-shirt and jeans, looking like James
Dean crawling on all fours in the street in the beginning of Rebel Without a
Cause. The moody, string-heavy soundtrack swells as Ryo sputters on the
floor, struggling to catch his breath. When I think of other popular games
from the time—GoldenEye, Turok—I remember few, if any, that emphasized
the physical, palpable qualities of violence.
Lan Di accuses Iwao Hazuki of killing a man named Zhao Sun Ming in
Mengcun during the war—as far as I can figure, the Second Sino-Japanese
War. Lan Di asks Iwao about the location of a magic mirror; Iwao refuses,
and Lan Di threatens to kill Ryo if Iwao won’t speak up. Iwao says that it’s
buried under the cherry tree, and Lan Di kills Iwao in a fight.
All of this is delivered as a long, long cutscene, of course. The player
first takes control of Ryo when he awakes in his room with the sun shining.
You have him go through his drawers, his underwear, and finds some tapes.
He picks up a notebook, where he’s made a note about Lan Di and the un-
known connection between him and Zhao Sun Ming.
The notebook and mundane point-of-view shots, a quiet scene that
comes after trauma, remind me of Gone Home, another game where you sift
through objects looking for leads about your lost family. At IGN, Alex Kidd
wrote that Yu Suzuki “wanted to create a revenge epic in the tradition of
Chinese cinema, centered on the origins of [Yu Suzuki’s 1993 game] Virtua
Fighter. Eventually, the fighting game tie-in would vanish (outside of the
game’s battle mechanics). It would be re-titled Shenmue.” Suzuki took the
equivalent of an AAA game’s budget to tell a terse, personal story.
Ryo walks through Yokosuka, looking for Chinese people, to see if any-
one can point him towards Lan Di. In a Chinese restaurant, the owner says
to Ryo, “Not all Chinese people are bad,” and Ryo replies that yes, he knows
that, but all he has to go by about Lan Di is that he’s Chinese. The character
designs and writing sometimes tell a different story: many of the Chinese
characters come across as a murderous villains, or vaguely racist comedic
caricatures.
Ryo’s stony face never changes. Throughout the game, he looks through
his journal, which starts with the December 1986 note about Zhao Sun
Ming. The dates remind you: how long has it been since your father died?
How long have you been looking? What are you even looking for, really?
Hanui Liu, a monk in Shenmue II, tells Ryo in the Man Mo Temple that he
needs to stay for awhile. He says Ryo must breathe, “regain your calm.” The
master of the temple worries, Liu says, that Ryo’s “obsession with revenge”
will eat him alive.
When I’d first seen these clips of Shenmue, the spectre of violence seemed
very, very close. Throughout my life, my mother drank heavily, often to
blackouts. (In my early 20s, a family friend who had known my parents in
college pointed out that this was not normal; it had not really occurred to
me to put that into words). My mother twisted my role as her child into that
of a confidante, an uncomfortably intimate friend, a caretaker, a therapist,
and even a lover. Throughout my childhood, she repeated ghoulish stories
about her father: he had followed my uncle (then a young boy) around the
house with a video camera while my uncle sobbed; he waited for my moth-
er in a darkened house like a viper when she came home late during high
school, to scream at her. When my grandfather died, I wanted to stab his
ghost.
My great-grandfather worked as a courier during the Second Sino-Jap-
anese War, and a Japanese ship sank the boat he rode on in the Yangtze
River. My grandfather was about ten years old when it happened, and I can’t
help but think of Batman and Citizen Kane when I think of how young he
was. I don’t want to tell you the racist shit he told my uncles about Japanese
people.
When I was a kid, my grandfather used to invite me and my sister to bang
a small gong we had on a side table. Always three times. When I’d hit it the
third time, reminded of the Beetlejuice cartoon, he’d say, “Where did you
go??” He would wave his arms around, and me and my sister, now “invisi-
ble,” would crack up.
“Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy,” the
British essayist Angela Carter wrote, “and so do we all, whether we like it or
not, perhaps even if we have never known them.”
Some quiet games, like Animal Crossing, weigh down at times with forced
calmness, like a bad indie movie that confuses introspection with drama.
Shenmue moves from fistfights to buying batteries and helping to feed an
orphaned kitten in a box. The dynamics make the quiet parts resonate.
Ryo puts dollars in machines to get supermarket-style capsule toys, and I
wonder, how old is Ryo? He plays arcade games, including the Sega games
Hang-On and Space Carrier, developed by Yu Suzuki in the ‘80s. The fin-
gerprints of Suzuki’s unusual emphasis on his own authorship are every-
where in the game.
Ryo Hazuki walks under gray skies and through snow, in cities and for-
ests, in one of the earliest “open world” designs. The format became fa-
mous with games like Grand Theft Auto III a few years later, but unlike
Rockstar’s games, Shenmue assumes that you may want to talk to everyone
you meet. Ryo’s adventures take him through learning martial arts, moving
mystical cups, and moving from person to person for information. He learns
that Zhao Sun Ming, the man that Ryo’s father killed in the war, is Lan Di’s
father. It asks of Ryo: When you get ahold of Lan Di, if you kill him, what’s
it going to do? Are you going to feel better? I believe in violent retribution/
defense sometimes. But I don’t know when.
“Life being what it is, one dreams not of revenge,” Miriam Toews’ teenage
protagonist Nomi Nickel said in her novel A Complicated Kindness, “One
just dreams.” I want that to be true. Shenmue II ends on a cliffhanger as Ryo
takes to the mountains to meet a woman he saw in his dreams.
Even though Shenmue became the third biggest game of 1999, its co-
lossal $70 million budget for the first game and the concurrent 2001 re-
lease of Shenmue II meant it tanked. Some blamed its failure on the death of
the Dreamcast, the last console Sega made. The game became that strange
thing, a blockbuster underdog. When Sony announced the Kickstarter for
the game at E3 earlier this year, fans cheered and cried. I hope I get to play
Shenmue III the way I play current-gen games: sneaking little sips of it while
standing at a demo station in a Target. ■
 CAVERNS
The Art of Rewriting
Illustration by Darryl Ayo

For a long time, the process of editing a story mystified me.

I understood well enough that when you wrote a first draft, you followed a
thread into a dark forest and found out where you’d end up. You just did the
first thing you thought of. But what about when you needed to take those
threads and wrap them up?
I got scared when I thought of facing what I’d made, with all its inherent
flaws, and then refining it. I either refused to start editing, letting the story
wither, or I edited obsessively, and never let the story go.

GEMS
In the 1995 Studio Ghibli movie Whisper of the Heart, the young protago-
nist, Shizuku, writes a story to impress Seiji, the boy she likes—and to prove
to herself that she can do it.
 She shirks her chores, skimps on her homework, and stays up late, writing
for her life. At the end of all that work, she presents it to Seiji’s grandfather,
her friend Shiro Nishi, an old antiques shopkeeper whose German cat stat-
ue inspired Shizuku’s story. After reading it, Shiro Nishi thanks her and
says it’s great. She breaks down, saying it’s no good, “I couldn’t write what
I wanted!”
Shiro Nishi says, “You’ve shown me the rough stone you’ve just cut from
the rock. You’ve worked hard. You’re wonderful.” Shizuku’s lip trembles
as the bright lights of the city at night glow behind her. “There’s no need to
rush now,” he says. “Take your time and polish it.”

CAMPBELL’S SOUP
I understand everything through stories, even the process of storytell-
ing. In his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, the mythologist Joseph
Campbell theorizes “the hero’s journey.” He congeals the common themes
in stories from Buddhism, Christianity, and Ancient Greece into what he
calls “the monomyth.” He borrowed the term “archetypes” from his teach-
er, the psychotherapist Carl Jung, to describe character types who appeared
over and over in different forms in stories. The Wise Old Man archetype ap-
pears to the Hero to help them on their journey, just like Shiro Nishi acts as
a guide to Shizuku, or Obi-Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker. George Lucas
studied Campbell when he wrote Star Wars, which is why those movies feel
like old fairy tales—they are.

BAT’S CALL
So, let’s follow a hero along her path of initial spark, and editing. Let’s say
she’s a writer named Bat.
First, the hero hears a call to action. Bat’s inner voice says, “Make this
thing!!” and her inner voice sounds like a yelling Ian MacKaye from Fugazi,
because she’s been listening to them a lot lately, which is to say, it sounds
urgent. Inspiration acts as her inner Veruca Salt—inspiration always wants
it now. Maybe inspiration knows that if Bat doesn’t at least write down some
notes ASAP, yes even now while she’s on the 42 bus home from the comic
book shop near Penn’s Landing and she’s so tired she doesn’t even want to
lift her arms, she probably won’t remember her idea later, no matter how
great it was.
Bat resists, not just the notion of writing some notes right now, but the
whole enterprise. She tries to talk herself out of it. Many real-life factors
may impede her—job, family, time, school—and she may feel scared of the
unknown.
But maybe she’s talked herself out of following exciting ideas before, and
by now she knows that her options are limited. She can ignore it, and stay
where she is, but endure a little soul death. Her other choice is to enter a
dark cave with only a little lantern to light her way.

LIMINAL
When Bat finishes her first draft, she thinks she’s basically done.
She wants to believe that she just needs to check for spelling errors, send
it to McSweeney’s, and before she knows it, she’ll be sipping fancy lattes
and playing racquetball with Zadie Smith. (“Oh Zadie, you’re such a card!
When will we see your good friend Chris Ware on the court?”) But, as
Robert McKee says in Story, his book on screenwriting, stories hinge on
moments when characters meet a gap between what they expect, and what
really happens. The big reversals come up at the end of act breaks. And at
the end of Act One of our story, Bat finds that while she’s laid important
groundwork and created an impressive foundation, her house will fall down
if you look at it too hard.

“Looking back, search for the disharmonious image.”

—Lu Chi, Wen Fu / The Art of Writing

Bat enters Act Two, and she takes some time to rest or invest energy in
other projects, so that she can come back to it fresh in a month or two.
In Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley writes, “You have
made your commitment; now make the most of it. You will also try to decide
whether it is good. Let me answer that for you—it is, but it can be better, and
your job in rewriting is to make it better.”
When Bat cracks open the notebook, she hears nasty things being whis-
pered in her ear. This part of herself yells at her to stop, puts her down,
calls her dumb. It’s her lizard brain talking, the amygdala, the scarcity-driv-
en mind, which, in its view, wants to save Bat from the embarrassment of
potential failure. But Bat knows this lizard brain’s tricks, so she talks to it in
soothing tones, explaining logically why she should continue and why it’s
fine, until that part of the brain is lulled to sleep. Then, she can begin. She
comes to the manuscript as if her best friend wrote it. Bat looks at it with an
eye that is never coddling, but always kind, and cuttingly honest.
Annie Dillard says in The Writing Life that when you look over a draft,
“The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part, it is also, odd-
ly, the part which was to have been the very point.” And, “You can waste a
year worrying about it or you can get it over with now. (Are you a woman,
or a mouse?)”
Bat draws comfort from hearing other artists talk about their process, the
murky paths they walk. She hears the director Robert Rodriguez talk on
The Nerdist podcast about starting before she’s “ready,” and all of a sudden
she’s a Coke bottle that’s been shook up and is about to be opened.

A LITTLE HELP
Bat writes her second draft. She takes solace in interviews with her
favorite writers, who all reflect on how fucking hard it is to write a story.
McKee writes in Story, “Generally, a feature-length Archplot [a story with
a traditionally ‘big’ plot, as opposed to the Miniplots or Anti-plots of some
independent films] is designed around 40 to 60 scenes that conspire into 12
to 18 sequences that build into three or more acts that top each other con-
tinuously to the end of the line. To create 40 to 60 scenes and not repeat
yourself, you need to invent hundreds.”

By the end of her second draft, Bat has exhausted what she can do
on her own. So she draws on the resources of friends, mentors, and teach-
ers. She asks the people she trusts: What did you want to hear more about?
Which parts bored you, and where exactly did your interest wane? Did you
feel it was earned when Julie kissed Jane—was there enough buildup and
tension?
 Bat listens to what her inner circle says, and in particular she listens
for what TV writers call “the note behind the note.” When executives give
TV writers notes on scripts, the writers look for larger storytelling concerns
suggested by the often very specific feedback given.
Bat gives her story, “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night,” to her friend Bea
to look over. (Bat’s protagonist, Julie, is a big Snoopy fan.)
Bea comes back at lunchtime and in between bites of bad cafeteria
pizza, she tells Bat that she thinks Julie should end up with Jill, not
Jane. Julie and Jane seem mismatched, Bea says—they’re always on
each other about something or other.
Bat may ignore Bea’s note completely—she can if she wants. She
can decide that Bea’s totally right, and change the story to switch the
pairings. Or, maybe Bat believes that the note beneath the note is that
while she wrote Julie and Jane to be complementary with some inter-
esting tensions, the attraction between them gets lost.
So, Bat moves a scene around, trims a little bit of the clashing, be-
cause it had been established and become redundant. Fluff. A cute mo-
ment surfaces between the two: It had always been there, but the light
hit it in a new way as Bat cleared out the clutter around it.
Then Bat chips away at different chunks of the story. She does this for
what feels like a million, billion, billion times.

RUMPLED PILLOWCASE
The rivers fork in front of Bat, and sometimes she finds herself at
a loss for where to go. But even when she gets lost, that information
helps her to know where not to go next, which is important. Those
little, mundane bits of information add up. Some paths lead to under-
ground caves with glittering walls.
She reaches the river that spills out to the sea. “The feeling you are
looking for as you decide whether you are finished,” Jane Smiley says,
“is exhaustion. I do not mean literal physical fatigue as much as the
sense that you have used up your inventiveness, your intelligence, and
your ideas in regard to this story and these characters. While you are
still interested in them, you have thought every thought you are ca-
pable of about them. Chances are your novel is not perfect…but you
have come to the end of your relationship with it.”
Bat stands at the water’s edge, on the other end of a tunnel she didn’t
know was there, looking out at a view of the sea that she’d never
dreamed of. At the water’s edge, she hopes to find money and applause
greeting her, and neither are sure. But she can be sure, at least, that the
journey took her somewhere, and she will be changed. ■
P.S. This is a joke for a cross-section of people who are
(A) trans, and (B) played the 1991 Super Nintendo/arcade
game TMNT: Turtles in Time, so I’m sorry/not sorry
ON CHEATING

Growing up, constrictions around my gender, my sexuality, abuse I

was dealing with, and my self-expression felt tight. I looked for any
way to act out that I could. In late high school, having made the very
privileged decision to go to art school, and perceiving a low amount
of risk to my very privileged white person, I became obsessed with
getting away with stuff, especially cheating on reading assignments
and skipping class.

Cheating and skipping were my escape valve. After roll call in gym
class, I would dip out through the locker rooms, and back out into
the main halls. I changed back out of gym shorts in the bathroom.
My high school had been designed by what we assumed were 1970s
hippie architects, with big open spaces, and cubicle-style partitions
sectioning out classrooms instead of walls. The architecture made
it absurdly easy to skip class, as opposed to the neighboring school,
which we thought looked like a prison. Skipping gym came as a great
relief. I wanted to live outside my body. I went to the art room in-
stead.

Cheating, as I understood it, involved getting through school work or

the day in ways not laid out as options. My favorite method of cheat-
ing involved skipping reading the book in English class, listening to
the discussions, and then bullshitting my way through the essay test;
I got through Kate Chopin’s feminist novel The Awakening this way
(a book I now really wish I had read). “You need ideas to bullshit,”
a friend told me recently as we talked about our cheating histories.
So much of my high school experience revolved around rules and
restrictions that made no sense to me; coming from a home where
I lacked positive models for authority, I chafed at most adults’ ideas
of what I should do. That same friend told me they cheated by writ-
ing things on a li’l piece of paper and taping it to the bathroom trash
can. We both agreed that we sometimes took way more pride and put
more work into doing things the “wrong” way. This helped confirm
an idea for me: some students, including me, put vast amounts of
ingenuity, grit, and work toward cheating.

Before we go further, I must make an Official Announcement, or

as official as it gets from a freelance professional transsexual writer.
(I add the word “transsexual” because it’s so dated that it makes me
laugh.) The reason is, the consequences can be high, especially for
plagiarism, or on standardized tests like the SATs. Different teachers
and schools have different policies, and I honestly do not want to see
you get in trouble. I don’t think the cheating I did was necessarily a
good idea—at 29, I regretted reading Great Expectations so late in
life because I loved it and am making a comic about it—I just think
there’s a lot to break down and parse regarding cheating and why dif-
ferent people do it. In a system that overvalues strict attention to facts
and figures, cheating at times exercises different kinds of intelligence,
including thinking critically under pressure.

The videogame maker and games critic Jane McGonigal talks about
the value of games and the cultural bias against the idea of “gaming
the system.” She writes in her book Reality Is Broken that “Game
developers know better than anyone how to inspire extreme effort
and reward hard work.” I realize now that when I got into the zone
of cheating or skipping, I turned the event into a game that I played
with myself. While taking one vocabulary test, I realized that one of
the answers were printed on the cover of the book. During one “field
day,” my high school bestie Jesse and I delighted in walking through
the school hallways to dip out and play Playstation 2 at his house. At
a time when I felt out of control in my own life, when just one way
of doing things was provided, I felt a sense of agency and (perhaps
misplaced) rebellion in laziness.

I realize now that the teachers I cheated most with saw me as a gifted
student who didn’t need a lot of attention, and thus allowed me to
coast. A lot of times, I didn’t feel challenged. In some ways, I think
some of my teachers could have coaxed that effort out of me into
“legitimate” classwork. At the same time, I respect the unbelievable
difficulty of teaching, having taught in some capacities over the years.
It was what it was: I went through my youth without anyone realizing
anything was wrong, when actually I was constantly being trauma-
tized and I was extremely depressed. I believe these are extremely
common problems.

The overwhelming emotion that comes to me now is empathy for

my younger dirtbag self, who flailed her way through an untenable
living situation and issues with gender and queerness that she didn’t
understand. Now, my life as a freelancer resembles endless college to
me more than anything; I have assignments, and deadlines, and if I
get done early I can screw around and play ukulele and Nintendo. My
lack of a day job feels like I’m “cheating” by avoiding the prescribed
way of making a living. I try not to have it any other way.
 Annie Mok (b. 1986) is an
author-illustrator who makes comics both
solo and collaboratively, writes essays,
and draws illustrations. Her collaborative
projects include Swim Thru Fire with
Sophia Foster-Dimino for Hazlitt. She’s a
regular contributor to Rookie Magazine.
She fronted the pop group See-Through
Girls. Annie co-stars in the sci-fi feature
Phaesporia. The Leeway Foundation gave
her a 2014 Transformation Award.

Annie attended the

Minneapolis College of Art in Design,
lived in West Rogers Park, Chicago
from 2009—2011, and
lives in Philadelphia.

heyanniemok.com | @HeyAnnieMok | heyanniemok.tumblr.com

Photo of A.M. with Archie Bongiovanni from the Quimby’s photobooth, Chicago 2014.