Interview about my old journal comic (Patreon)

Long before Oh Joy Sex Toy was a twinkle in my eye, I used to draw a little diary comic called DAR! A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary.  I kept it up from the ages of 20-26, around 2003-2009.  A couple months ago I answered this interview from a university student writing their thesis on journal comics and I thought, hey, maybe some'a you Old Skoolers from back in the day might be interested in my responses too. SO HERE YA GO.

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What were the reasons for you to start an autobiographical comic? What is the title? What platform was it published on?

I was always scribbling down little autobiographical comics to capture real life moments and jokes, so when girlamatic.com asked if I had a series to pitch to them, well, it was just the obvious choice. All my friends had webcomics and I wanted to feel like a cool kid too. The title was DAR! A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary  and it originally ran on girlamatic.com (the female-focussed off-shoot of modertales.com), then switched to webcomicsnation.com and then moved to my own domain at darcomic.com which is powered by WordPress.

How frequent were the updates?

Weekly.

What made you choose the situations you depicted?

Whatever stuck out to me, whatever situation rung a little bell in my mind. I’d feel that way about many different types of events, from Super Important Meaningful Interactions to the completely mundane. I would experience something and I think “somebody else could relate to this”, so I’d turn it into a comic.

Have you ever not mentioned difficult things that were happening at the time? Or was it the opposite, did you try to make it as open and personal as possible?

In the beginning it was suuuuper personal, I would talk about whatever was pressing on my mind in that moment, including the uncomfortable and unpleasant things like depression and heartbreak. As time went on, I progressively shared less and less of the unhappy things, because I wound up hurting my friends if they didn’t like how I’d depicted them or disagreed with my interpretation of what happened. By the end I was only drawing comics about completely benign subjects, I was saying nothing of value.

How did your friends and family relate to that? Did you ask for consent first? Have you ever had anyone fall out with you because of the comic?

At first I didn’t ask for consent because it just didn’t occur to me to do so. I thought “This was my experience, so I’m sharing it.” without realizing that it’s also another person’s equally valid experience as well and I may not be representing them accurately to their view. I talk a bit about it in this comic http://www.darcomic.com/2007/08/06/autobio01/ As the comic progressed, I would run the concept by the person first and get their consent. I did have a falling out with a friend in a very small part because of the comic, but our friendship was deteriorating anyway. The super dumb thing was: the comic she was upset over wasn’t even about her in any way. It was the earwax comic: http://www.darcomic.com/2009/01/20/earwax/ The part where I said I was afraid of bursting my eardrum with a Q-tip, she thought I was making fun of a time when she did that. But… I had no memory of her telling me that had happened to her? I was specifically thinking of my (future) husband’s mom!!!

Has running this kind of comic ever affected your life? In a negative or a positive way.

Making DAR! completely shaped the direction my life took. The majority of my most important relationships were formed with people who were readers of my comic first. I met my husband because of this comic. I was able to transition from a traditional job to full time self-employed cartoonist because of this comic. I have a comfortable career in comics because of this comic. That’s the positives. The negatives are: people who have never met me fucking hate (their image of) me because of this comic. I am harassed, I have had strangers attempt to have events un-invite me as a guest, I am lied about, I have blogs dedicated to recording every wrong-doing I have ever done (both real and imagined), I have vicious things written about me, I am paranoid about my safety, I am regularly afraid to leave my house, and I have violence and death threats because of this comic. So, y’win some, y’lose some!

What kind of feedback did you get from followers, especially the ones you didn’t know?

Mostly positive! For the most part people enjoyed my sense of humor and willingness to open up, they appreciated being able to relate to a real person with similarities to them. That doesn’t sound so revolutionary now, but back when my comic was running that was still pretty novel. Especially to have a journal comic talking about sexuality and especially a sexuality that was fluctuating, that was especially novel back then. On the more negative end of feedback, some people felt I was a bad example of a queer woman and that my existence was just generally causing harm to queer people simply by talking about my own experiences. 

Have you always tried to stay as truthful to the events as possible?

Sometimes I would truncate events to make them fit a narrative and punchline better, but yes, I feel like the comics were always truthful to the feeling of the event if not the exact chronology and every single detail.

How long was it going on for? What made you decide to stop drawing it?

DAR! ran for six years, from 2003-2009. I stopped drawing it because I was paralyzed with fear over the hate I was getting. The comics I felt “safe” enough to post were just… fluff. It wasn’t fun, it was scary and stifling in the end.

Is it still available online? If not, what reasons made you take it down? Was it published in a book format?

Still up! www.darcomic.com And yes, I self-published it in two printed volumes. The first book is long sold out and the second is aaaaalmost all gone now. I still have PDFs of them though: http://www.ohjoysextoy.com/ebooks-shop/ I drew a bunch of extra comics just for the books, ones that aren’t online.

(You $5 patrons all get downloads of these books automatically! Download links to Volume 1 and Volume 2 here :)