Denise Riley contemplates the same mytheme in its Greek form, through the river Lethe in her essay ‘The Wounded Fall in the Direction of their Wound’. It seemed like fertile territory for exploring ontological and phenomenological questions around queer and trans experience, as well as general existential angst. I learned about a river in Chinese Hell which erases one’s memories, as the final destination all souls must pass through on the path towards reincarnation. The idea coalesced after visiting a Chinese temple during tremendous personal grief. I’ve been working on the manuscript for about year. The whole thing is really a psycho-romance in my own mind: Red is the most pitiable, pathetic version of myself, while Wolf gets to act out my monstrous anger at the wretchedness of the world. Red loves and loathes Wolf, while he commits increasingly grotesque acts of violence in her name. On the other hand, Wolf has no interiority apart from an obsessive desire to protect Red, having had his memories wiped as part of Hell’s punishments. Red’s narration carries the story’s tone she has this comically tortured interiority. They’re on the run from Hell’s authorities after escaping karmic punishment. The plot is centred around Red, a trans girl who reads too much, and Wolf, her monstrous boyfriend/bodyguard. It’s kind of a Thelma and Louise-style couples’ road trip through Buddhist Hell. Tell us a bit more about the graphic novel you’re working on under the Next Chapter scheme. My first comic was a zine called Little Magic #1, a domestic drama about two millennial lesbian witches talking about F inal Fantasy for twenty-six pages. My friend Marlo Mogensen had been making indie comics for a few years by this point as well, and I really admired his work (and still do, endlessly). By this point, I’d become more familiar with indie comics through the zine scene, and ‘becoming’ a poet gave me the confidence to try ‘becoming’ a comic artist. I started making comics in the aftermath of another breakup in 2016 (yes, I’m a lesbian cliché). As critical as I am of bad art, I appreciate the confidence that comes with being able to make something and putting it out there. You can be a crap poet, but no one can deny that you are a poet nonetheless. By 2014 I’d stopped making creative work altogether, but what was really valuable about making poetry zines was coming to understand that you can just ‘become’ a poet. I was about as bad as you would expect a 19-year-old poet to be, although I did write one poem projecting onto Shakespeare’s Ophelia that was nominated for a Rhysling award-which is why I like to joke about being an award-nominated ex-poet. When I entered university I became an amateur zine poet, a practice I started in the aftermath of a high school breakup. I was just an ex-deviantART kid with a pocketful of OCs and a head full of dreams. I contemplated webcomics too, but it felt outside the scope of my ambition because I didn’t know the first thing about maintaining a website or building an audience. I wanted to make serialised epics, but I didn’t have the skill set or any idea about publication. I was really into Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series when I was a teenager and his whole ‘literary rock star’ image that was popular throughout the ‘00s. I loved comics and manga growing up and I had this prestige fantasy of being a comic artist.
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