 Hello everyone. We are here for sickening to talk about queer horror comics. I guess we can just start. Yeah, thanks everyone for coming. We're really excited to discuss queer horror comics with you. My name is William O. Tyler. I am a comic creator and a editor as well as a film critic. I've worked on the theater of terror, Revenge of the Queers, anthology along with Justin Hawak co-editing. A few of our panelists were actually in that book as well. In addition to that, I am half of Tannis Comics, which is a queer horror publishing company that I do along with Dave Davenport, who's on the end. That's a little of who I am. I will let the panelists introduce themselves. I'm moderating, by the way. Yes. And we do have slides of the work of our panelists. Let's just go down the line and let the panelists introduce themselves. Hello. My name is Diego. I was part of the theater of terror anthology as well as some other anthologies. Oh, that's one of my pieces right there that I did for a friend. I have my horror comics called Hell Babes. It's kind of like Ravel's Drag Race in Hell and I'm the queen of that drag hell. Here's some of the images from it. Yeah, I also teach in the fashion department at City College. If you're a resident, classes are really cheap. Come on down. Yeah. Hi, I'm Robin. Robin Adams, and I'm a huge fan of your work. I'm here primarily because I was involved with the Theater of Terror project as well. I feel a little out of place sometimes because that was really only the second comic story that I had done in like 30 years. I have some history doing comics in the 90s. I did a trans superhero comic called Homazon 5 that had about three issues. There it is. And I was very much a sort of a 90s superhero take on queer activism. And currently I am working on a comic book adaptation of the drag queen film Vegas in Space. But I did a couple of studies. This is my story for Theater of Terror. And I had a great time doing it. It was a real honor to be on the book with all these amazing artists. Hello. Hi. My name is Malcolm Johnson. I am a comic book illustrator. My stuff is New Leak Queer. This is kind of like a comic book kind of finding my voice in the medium and in the work recently. But some of my characters Bermuda Jones in there, this is my third book and it represents a non-binary character who fights demons and monsters after the apocalypse drops and happens. So they kind of go around and solve mysteries and sleuths. The pitch is it's Tin Tin meets Clive Barker's Night Breed. If any of you are familiar with Night Breed. Yeah. I also work on a comic called Tales of Hodu Horror, which is an anthology of short stories based around Hodu, African-American conjure, root work, which is like a blend. It's kind of like the gumbo of magic. You have a bunch of combinations of different magical practices coming together. So this is a page from the book with the beautiful Josephine Baker. And yeah, they're all horror based. They're all spooky and scary. And there's a lot of education too on the lore of Hodu and Hodu Horror. So I kind of teach about like the background of where Hodu came from and certain practices and magical rituals that are associated and based around that. So yeah, that's my work. I'm Dave Davenport. Hello. I've been doing queer erotic horror comics for 20 years about, I would say. And I've just, my character's feral and the ghosted skater I've been doing about all that time. I was in the Theater of Terror anthology with these guys. It was an honor to be in there. I illustrated one of William's scripts, which was one of the best things I think we both worked on. Mostly I've done, like I said, erotic horror fiction, but I'm just debuting a zine here at this little pride and panels convention that's more of analysis about why I love Sadako, the Japanese horror character, and just what's queer about her and what I love about her queerness and it's my venture into non erotic horror, I would say. Thank you. So I guess to get things started, I have notes, so don't mind me. I'm not reading text or anything like that. I wanted to ask what about the horror genre interests all of you? What is it that brings you to horror as opposed to other genres, like telling queer stories and romance or something like that? What is it about horror that really calls to you? Just in the co-editor of Theater of Terror asked me if I had a horror story, so I said yes. I had thought of this idea of dead celebrities in hell, and then I thought, what if they were celebrity impersonators instead so they wouldn't necessarily be a copyright issue. So I gave them all pun versions of their name, like instead of earth a kid it's girth a kid and stuff like that. So I'm into campy horror, like I'm wearing a Frankenhooker shirt, has anyone seen that? Not many people. There's problematic things in it, but I think it's pretty funny. And yeah, I'm really kind of into the L-virus side of horror as opposed to like I'm not really into like slash or hostile kind of things. Well, let's see. I was just raised on horror movies and monsters and all that stuff, of course. I've never considered myself a horror fan per se, but I certainly find that telling stories, like it seems like I express a lot of my own fears through my stories. And so basically it's like sometimes that gets scary and sometimes that gets violent. And I think also like from a trans point of view, there's just so much opportunity for kind of a more mystical, magical, transformative kind of theme that I really enjoy. So yeah. I think for me why, I mean kind of like what Robin said with growing up in horror, my siblings would lock me in a room and have me watch horror movies and just traumatize me, but in the best ways, right? Educating me, let's just say that, educating me on the genre. And I just, maybe I'm just weird, but I like to scare people. In the consensual picking up a book and reading it way. But yeah, there's a shorthand to the medium and the types of stories that we tell through horror. I think that connects us as a community. Just like the tropes that I enjoy, slasher from slasher to haunted house to young adult horror stuff. There are certain conventions that I just, I think are playful and fun and scary at the same time that I like, I kind of like playing with those tropes. Yeah. Like you guys, I grew up watching horror. It was a staple in my family growing up. And I just love monsters. I think they're fun. I love drawing them. I love world building and the mythology that comes with monsters and horror. I love the dualities that's in some of them, like the Wolfman, obviously. And yeah, I don't know. It's just a fun medium to work with or a fun genre to work in. Well, I want to piggyback on something. A couple of you talked a little bit about like you said you, Malcolm, you said you were traumatized watching movies as a kid. And Robin, you said you kind of, it's kind of like a catharsis where you're working through your own feelings. But horror can be very triggering and traumatic quite often. I mean, that's kind of a part of the genre. So how do you navigate for yourself as a creator and also for your audience? How do you navigate content that could be triggering for people but still stay true to what you're trying to say or trying to do? I don't know. I just worry about it a lot. Yeah. Yeah. You know, well, so again, you know, the story that I did in the theater of terror was the first, I was given the assignment to do a horror story. And I got really behind on the deadline because I was sort of like, what the hell am I going to do? And I felt like a lot of, some of the ideas that I came up with or that were occurring to me were, I was like, God, is that just like unintentionally transphobic or, you know, it's just like, where's that line of making it queer but not making it homophobic, you know? What I ended up doing, I ended up doing a ghost story, which I feel is like a little bit of a cop out because there's no sex or gore in it. But it's fun and kind of glamorous. And for me, it was an expression of what the ghost character dies without ever having to come out as trans and is basically throwing the supernatural fit because she's being misgendered throughout history. And so that she's expressing herself and her true identity. And I cast myself as a ghost hunter who went and spoke with her. So, you know, for me, that was like, well, what's the scariest thing that I could think of right then and there, which was like, I was two or three years into transition at that point. It was like, yeah, if somebody tried to take this away from me, or if I had to die, not being my authentic self, that would fucking suck. Excuse me. And so, so anyway, that's what motivated the story. And, yeah, I was just going to say, it's round robin. So anyone can answer any of these questions. No, I kind of think about what it's like to be black and queer with my art, especially with the Bermuda Jones. Even though they're a non-binary character, I kind of identified with a lot of their, within the story, again, they're surrounded by monsters and demons and the new world is taken over by them. So they're kind of isolated in that sense. And I think a lot of my, through a lot of my own personal queerness, I felt a little a lot isolated. So I was like, how do I remedy this? Like, you know, finding community and finding friends and finding attachment through horror in that community. There's a lot of crossover. You know, you have punk and goth and queer and you have all these intersections. So you have a, to answer your question, maybe, to get it back to round the answer to the question. Yeah, I think for me, how do you handle it to not be triggering? And I think through my work, I try to use humor. I try to be a little bit more levity in it. You know, there's scariness and there's violence. But there's kind of a tongue-in-cheekness to it. So it's not explicitly there to scare you. It can, even though that's kind of the job of the work. Yeah. Anyone else? Well, I'm queer and I often think what isn't queer horror, just kind of like looking at your phone, things are fucking wild. I often also think just like how I'm a mess, but like somehow people are even messier. And I'm like, fuck, did you do that? Yeah. Well, okay, so let's talk about that. What is it like creating horror creatively when the world is the way it is right now? When there's so much horror in the world, do you find creating horror as content a way to escape the real world or is it drawing attention to things that need to be seen in the real world? Well, I think horror has always been kind of political. You trace it back to James Wales with Frankenstein and his message about queerness. You can even take that back even further to Nosferatu or telling campfires that are the story by the campfire. I'm sorry, what's the question again? Like creating horror versus the horror of the real world. Right. How do you coincide that? Right, so politically we've always kind of had horror as a way to express or cathartically move through troubling times. It's exercise and catharsis and having to explore and get into hard topics that are tough to talk about and how do you transcribe them without, kind of like the previous question, how do you do this without offending or being kind and gentle to your audience? For me personally, again, I'm trying to explore a lot of my queerness is by reaching out and getting other people's opinions and getting feedback and oh, is this offensive? Does this work? Does this not work? You have to workshop your ideas a lot for horror, I think. But I personally think it's important to have some sort of voice in horror, especially for nowadays. I mean, look at this audience. Everybody here is for horror, so it's like a huge, you know, you have a lot of people who are into this genre. So we have all different points of views, all different backgrounds. But yeah, I think horror is just, it should be political. It should be angry and scary and because, yeah, we do face these things in the real world and, you know, escape. It can also be used again, like horror is multifaceted. It's not just about scaring people. There's comedy. There's romance and horror. You know, there's adventure. There's so many other genres or types of horror that you can explore that don't necessarily have to be political. But I think it somehow creeps its way out, no matter what. It's always kind of kind of be under the surface, you know. I think a lot of the energy behind queer expression that I've experienced in my life is about, like, scaring the hell out of people. Like drag queens used to scare people and weren't on TVA. They scared people, you know, and they enjoyed that, you know. Putting yourself out there as, you know, being an outsider, putting it in their face, freaking people out, you know. Peach is Christ, of course, right now. It's like this huge, has made an industry out of queer horror that the lineage of that is coming from the T-Shack nightclub in the mid-90s, which was kind of a horror show. You know, it was not glamorous drag. It was fright drag. And it was very powerful. It was a real powerful expression of, you know, what was going on in San Francisco in the 90s, which was kind of intense and horrifying. It was a way to have fun and scream at the same time. One of the creators of T-Shack was the Strat Queen Hiklina who passed recently. And they had this term for their drag, which was like art damage. And I think they maybe, I think they used, were damaged a lot, like maybe like Catholic damage and stuff like that. So they did all these like really fun, artistic, like sometimes like kind of recreating music videos, but like on a dime budget. So I went to the kind of like tail end of the years of T-Shack and it was really inspiring. And that's when I started doing drag. And then my version of drag tends to be really campy. So my like kind of these zombies are like all snatched and just looking like besides maybe being decapitated. They still look fantastic. And my like second issue that I'm working on now of Hell Babes is the zombies are supposed to come to Earth and kind of fix everyone's problems in a kind of a campy way. I feel like specifically billionaires maybe needed to be like punched in the face. And who's going to do it other than like a zombie, right? Because no one's really punching them in their face right now. So we need some help. I mean if they're zombies, I hope they're also eating the rich. Totally. I was going to bring up how horror is seen as kind of low-brow to some people. But how that also is a way to have horror represent a kind of counter-culture and revolutionary work. And I was going to ask you all about that but I think you all already just answered that. So I also want to ask because you talked about being a drag queen many of you on the panel do work outside of horror and outside of creating horror comics. And I wanted to ask how creatively when you're working in genres other than horror do you have to have a different mindset to work in that content as opposed to horror or is it very similar still? I just do horror as hard as I can. That's kind of my bag. I kind of limited in that way. We're not limited but like just my narrow focus it's just always been on like just the cob stuff and everything but I guess for Bermuda Jones they... What do you call it? I'm trying to morph it more into like a young adult book so it's going to be more for like you know it's not going to be explicitly gory or out there like who do horror it's going to be a little bit more just teen friendly. So with that I just kind of scale back on like the violence I guess and just the X-rated features of telling a story while still keeping it like scary and spooky and kind of weird. What about Robin for you working on Venus? Is that a different process than creating horror work? Because it's more of a... Can't be sci-fi. Vegas, I'm sorry. Well sure that's kind of a... That's really just about how do I make it beautiful and glamorous and true to the source and so I mean in that way any project is the same. You know I mean that's what I try to do anytime I do something is just try to make it beautiful but again I'm just like I'm a little bit conservative I don't like go out I'm not trying to scare people right? I would not have functioned well at T-Shack. You know it's not my style I'm just a little less... And in a way I'm also very literal you know like Homazon 5 was a very sort of literal like reaction to political things that were happening in the world. I feel like I'm getting off track but... No not at all we want to hear this. Whatever you want to say. I mean I love hearing about how politics and real world things come into our work. I mean you know like... I don't know I really wanted to save the world I was so worried about it you know and here we are 35 years later and it's like oh great worse thanks. So I don't know how art can save the world you know I'm not sure I necessarily care about that but I do think that it's like very important on a... you know that idea of like you can touch people on a personal level right and like queer comics you know throughout the history of queer comics you know I mean you've got visibility you've got you know putting a name to something that people don't even know how to talk about you know telling those stories and making people feel you know whatever so I don't know if we can save the world with comics but there was a question about that in the previous panel and yeah I don't know I'm not as familiar with what's going on in queer comics right now as far as like is there a lot of political stuff going on you know I mean it seems like the world is on fire right now and I would like to use my talent to do something about it if possible. Dave you've been making comics for as you said 20 years have you noticed a difference in making horror comics back then compared to now are there more people doing horror comics now? there's more people doing queer horror comics for sure there's more people doing queer comics it's it's mushroomed there's so many people doing it now it's great keep it up did you say mushrooms? yes it's mushroomed oh got it so your comic Feral and the Ghost Skater your characters have been around for a while and you said you were like world building so what is for transparency Dave is my partner so I know his answers to questions already but I would love for I would love for him to talk about your Feral and the Ghost Skater comics and how they've evolved over the years with your world building and where you are now with those characters that wasn't on the list of questions I think we've kind of covered the list of questions that I came up with how has it evolved it started out as just like a lark I did an illustration of a werewolf that had dug up a coffin in a graveyard and was in the process of eating and fucking the corpse at the same time and it was just an illustration I was a tattoo artist at the time too I had kind of drawn it up as a back piece too I didn't, nobody ever got it and it's still available if anybody wants it but good friends Jackie who we're staying with saw it and started asking me questions and that got me thinking well how did this get to this point and that's how the first story came about which did tell how that scene came about and then I just moved on from there and it evolved mostly from just doing short stories that were self-contained that were coming out in issues of hard to swallow that we were out I was putting out with Justin Hall two after that I started doing more of a long form story with the characters that I'm really wishing I had stuck with the short one and dunce because I'm in the middle of a graphic novel that's taken ten years so far chipping away at it and hopefully I'll get it done soon because I want to move on to other stuff but that's mostly how it's evolved but I do try to with this longer form story I am trying to do something deeper my stuff is usually just kind of fun I think fun sexy scary romps but I'm trying to talk a bit about just like what we lost in the age crisis a little bit and how I don't know trying to turn that into something positive but I'm still working out to find details of that do you have a question for me? yeah I didn't actually go through my work because my work was at the end of the slide and I'd already introduced myself but this is a comic anxious axe that I'm currently working on that's all about a character who has very strong anxiety to the point where a monster manifests out of his shoulder and follows him hanging off of his shoulder all the time and just whispers negative things in his ear and it's just you know anxiety building in a way that you can't control and it comes from a very real place where I feel that way like I'm usually very calm and collected on the outside but my mind is almost always flowing with anxieties so it's kind of a like some of you were saying earlier it's kind of a cathartic way for me to deal with those things and those ideas that I have and then this other slide is actually these are two stories that Dave and I have collaborated on one was the first one in color is called The Vulture and was for Theater of Terror and I wrote it and Dave illustrated it and it's basically about a black guy who dates a white guy who ends up appropriating his culture so he's a culture vulture and then the black and white story is actually in Dave's Sadako's zine that he was talking about we pitted two of our favorite girls Sadako and Carrie against each other to see what would happen if they were in some sort of telekinetic psychosis type of fight so that was a lot of fun to do that collaboration was Dave drawing everything that had to do with Sadako and me drawing everything that had to do with Carrie so it was the first time that we've seen our art styles on the page together so that was fun I guess I'd like to open up questions to the audience if there's anyone in the audience that'd like to ask something you are here Thank you so much how have you like not exactly promoted your art but how have you kind of talked about your art to people who might not have experience in either or both of those categories I'm usually just very upfront about it and if they're interested they'll listen and if they're not they'll just walk away and that's that I would say it is a hard thing to navigate sometimes when you want your work to get out there more and it seems like the general public is not interested but that's why we have things like this convention and this fest and prism comics and other resources that we can have our own community and share these things so I'm very appreciative of things like this I have a comic that isn't necessarily horror it's about a horrible relationship that I had it's called piss in the city and it's about piss and it does not sell well but people will read it at my table real fast or at a bookstore that I sell at and laugh and say they love it but no one's really buying it it was in an anthology that what's funny is that story did come out of an anthology that we did together called yellow is the warmest color which it's available digitally but we actually tried to print it and we couldn't work out the logistics of actually printing a book like that and even trying to raise money for that book was hard we tried to do a crowdfunding thing and lots of people were interested but not a lot of people wanted to be I guess associated with it on paper maybe I don't know so yeah that kind of thing is always hard any other questions? I wanted to ask since everybody's a fan of horror here do you still see the value in having queer villains the creature or monster that doesn't conform to society either showcasing that in your work or do you gravitate that as a fan, a horror fan looking for that content but I know William's going to agree with this that the queer villains are always going to be needed and they're kind of our heroes so it's like Talented Mr. Ripley was my first kind of hero I don't know if anyone's seeing it came out in 1999 he was supposed to be a hero but there wasn't a lot of movies with gay people in them so it's Matt Damon as a gay murderer in the like Italy 1950s so everyone looked really fantastic like what they were wearing the cinematography, what? you know he's planning after Jude Law so we all can understand yeah exactly, relatable so he's kind of my I don't know my gateway horror hero, who knows? I think for me it was gay talking about gateway horror was again back to when I was raised on horror Friday, not Friday, I'm sorry I remember on Elm Street 3 and 2 were my introduction into Freddie's world so having his extreme campiness and just like hilarity and just like he's just proud to be himself and all its wretchedness and all its depravity and everything and there's something to be said I think about not art we can be ourselves now we can just express ourselves and be ourselves through our work and representing horror villains that represent us well yeah as long as we've got the right people in the rooms telling the stories that is Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs has done a lot of damage to a lot of people that was an irresponsible representation of queer and transness and so yeah I'm a little bit I mean at the same time I love a big fabulous villain I mean Tim Curry and Rocky Horror bring me that kind of fabulous sexy, messy energy I love it but the flip side of it is kind of gross First I want to say Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is one of the queerest horror movies ever so I absolutely love it but I always find heroes to be rather boring because heroes have to work within the rules of the society to get things done like my growing up my favorite character was Catwoman because she wrote that line and she would do what she needed to do based on what needed to be done legally and now I would say my favorite comic character is Poison Ivy because she takes it a step further and she's just like, nope I'm done with all of you humans the earth needs to rebuild and that's where I am now but I have always been a fan of villains and I kind of detest when we want to make villains redeemable now Angelina Jolie as Maleficent is amazing she's flawless the redemption of that character is like no, we just need a character who's a bad girl there's nothing wrong with that there was another question down here I know you were saying a little bit about that where would you say like the line draws what was the question again, I'm sorry how do you depict heart in your comics while still keeping it for younger audiences while still keeping it queer for my audience or for your younger audience sorry how do I keep it for a younger audience I mean again it's just I think so who do horror compared to Jones, Jones definitely the style is a lot more friendlier there's a lot more levity in it who do horror is just people getting torn apart there's a lot of body horror in there did they answer your question, sorry yeah a little bit are there any more questions my question was hold on let me find it again what piece of horror media either a movie or book has inspired you the most and this is to everyone it can also just be your favorite Knightbreed, Clyde Barker the director's cut for that, that's just I just love the monsters and the idea of somebody finding that community in the creatures and the weirdness and that vibe again relating it to queer horror finding your community and finding your tribe and your pack in a way I'm also just as far as comic books are related I'm a huge Hellblazer fan John Constantine is like my hero in maybe not too many good ways since he is a bit of a scoundrel but yeah having found a bisexual pansexual character in comics was really like inspiring for me and just kind of opened my eyes to different range of characters Dave you can talk about Sotico I would say the first group of Sotico books by Koji Suzuki I just love everything that's done on those books and I've put an unfortunate amount of those details into my other stories using it for influence and inspiration with larger ideas that happen in the books and I would have to go back to say like the Hulk from the 70s that sort of dynamic between Banner and the Hulk is really influences the way my main werewolf character was developed too because he doesn't he's the only werewolf in my book who doesn't like being a werewolf and it's very much you know like don't make me angry you wouldn't like me when I'm angry only it's horny instead of angry yeah the Hulk hasn't exactly been like that for a long time so I maybe would even just say like the TV show from the 70s but I could go on but please I was just went out of my head well so first off I was just going to say my biggest influences comic wise were the Bilson Kovach work in the 80s that sort of which isn't necessarily all horror but I just really love that the energy that he put into it and the way that those characters were developed with Chris Claremont so that was really really important to me Electra Assassin was a real big influence on my work on what I did and I can't remember what I was going to tell you it was a great one though was that, that's new class right with the Bilson Kovach right or New Mutants 1984 showing my age yeah I love this too I'm more focused on the aesthetics of horror and also what's like kind of draggy I love I forget which one it was in Nightmare on Elm Street when they were talking about his faggy Christmas sweater and I always wanted to do Gaga's manicure as Freddie Cougar but instead I did it to Taylor Swift's song about being in a nightmare dress like a daydream like impale someone on stage and of course the Hollywood Monsters I've done a lot of Brighter Frankenstein drag anything with like visible stitches I super love so like Michelle Pfeiffer is Catwoman the idea that she made that outfit right like I don't think so they like in part had to sew her into it it's just ridiculous and I love that I was just that Anne Rice's Vampires huge huge yeah that was a huge one for me too I mean that I first started reading Interview with a Vampire when I was coming out and their relationship was was hidden it was like wow as far as movies because I'm a big movie fan I probably carry I mean I mentioned her already in the comic that we put together but that movie symbolizes something for me that's so important where this character who is marginalized at school as well as at home so she's really like in the margins ends up having power and ends up having this realization about herself and not taking shit from anyone in the end that kind of is like a personal inspiration for myself so yeah so actually I think we're at time apologies to folks that had another question but thank you to our panel and if you guys are interested we'll have panel three in here out in the world publishing queer comics I mean up in 10 minutes thank you