Rooster Tails

This isn’t the actual comic for the week, that’ll be up tomorrow, but I want to put this one up too. It didn’t really turn out the way I wanted it to, but it feels like an important idea nonetheless – perhaps in time I’ll be able to articulate it better.

The concept isn’t meant to imply my boyness (or any trans identity) as a facade, it’s something about the silliness of how we all perform our gender in our own ways (trans or not), and that that’s what’s read initially by other people, though obviously not the whole story. I guess I wanted to express something about gender as performance and gender as ingrained and real and more than simply what we present. And something about the way we express ourselves in multiple ways, and the multiple identities we have of ourselves in different contexts. But in four panels that’s kinda hard to do, and I’m not clever enough to express it anyway.

Or maybe I just like that cute red scarf.

TRANSCRIPT:

Panel 1:

Sam: (A person wearing a shirt with horizontal navy blue and a lighter blue stripes, and a red neckerchief. Looking directly at the viewer. Eyebrows lowered a little, mouth closed, one side a little upturned, the other a little downturned.) URBAN HIPSTER.

 

Panel 2:

Sam: (A person wearing a blue and white polo shirt. Looking directly at the viewer, mouth closed, one side a little upturned.) JOCK.

 

Panel 3:

Sam: (A person wearing a pink, collared shirt, with a purple tie and black suspenders. Looking up, mouth closed, one side upturned.) DANDY.

 

Panel 4:

So many boys to be…