evan-bo-bevin

[evan-bo-bevin]

Laying out the pages for the bonus chapter at the end of Kill Crush (our in-house nickname for the comic bc its name is too long to type over and over) and I forgot I drew Nate's little face like this. Look at him. He's so proud of his Great Idea.

You can pre-order a copy of My Assassination Target is My Childhood Crush? over on Backerkit starting in September. It's over 80 pages of off-beat romantic comedy featuring a trans hitman & his estranged unrequited crush -- it's a trans!man/cic!woman pairing, for those who are interested ;)

We're going to be part of the Printopia funding campaign that month, so be sure to check out the other cool authors that are gonna be part of it when it goes live!

[evan-bo-bevin]

Hey Look At This Comic: Smut Peddler Presents Pitch Black

I can't remember how we got on the subject of the comics that my friends Iris Jay and Nero Villagallos O'Reilly did for an old Iron Circus april fools bit. maybe we were chatting about Megan Delyani's blank frame comic Spaces, which I wrote a whole review of last year, but it might just as easily have been talking about comic structure generally. cause we're huge nerds. being a huge nerd, I was all over the premise of the joke: a fake kickstarter for a Filthy Figments volume full of comics with all blacked out panels.

it's a great gag, a full webpage duping the Kickstarter layout, with a fun tongue in cheek explanation: comics don't leave enough up to the imagination, there aren't enough interpretive gaps for the reader, so to fix that Filthy Figments will publish a bunch of Pitch Black comics where YOU have to provide the visuals. Joke, maybe, but it lends credence to frame-focused models of comics reading: it's not the images that make something a comic, but the breakdown of page space into discrete units. So goes one theory, anyway. How do these pages fare without their images?

Lin Visel deploys a regular grid of long, thin columns, with a kind of horizontal capital at the top. The speech bubbles drive a lot of the action here and there's a sense of simultaneous movement across the bottom, with the bubbles breaking the panel borders at the top and the sound effects flowing into each other below. So, there's an interesting division between the upper strip, which is relatively subdued, a moment of reassurance that exists almost in its own zone before the rush of the bottom. And, as we'll see with a bunch of the others, in the absence of images the style of the text, the shape of the word balloons, and the font colors all become more crucial to conveying what's happening (sex, to be clear). That's already a lot going on with a series of black panels.

I love how Iris's comic bakes an explanation for the blacked out panels into its narrative. The apparently dominant character gloats that her streaming site won't let her actually display the brutal force-fem pegging she's giving to some shitty gamer bro. Sure enough, at the bottom of that panel there's a black and white video control interface and LIVE signal. Text alone and the design of the speech bubbles transforms the whole diegesis of that second panel, from the floating omniscient "camera" of the other panels to a webcam. Which is crazy because don't forget, there is no diegesis at all. It's all black!

There's so many great touches in this. I love the fact that the tongue in cheek panel containing the "guy's" internal monologue ("I can feel my epic skills draining away with every thrust... along with my masculinity!") is not just a second panel on the upper strip but an inset, separating out this moment of more intimate first person experience from the more remote view of implied fucking. And look at the flowers in the final orgasmic speech bubble! This is a total tangent but I feel like a lot of older attempts at structuralist comics decomposition wanted a firm line between the panel, the image, the characters, the speech bubbles, and so on. But comic elements can constantly interpenetrate, with the apparent domain of text becoming more complex graphical elements. Also, what a cute way to depict orgasming so hard you get turned into a girl. Head full of flowers. :)

It's incredible what you can achieve without breaking Tumblr's draconian terms of service at all.

Robin Tess offers a more straightfoward humorous panel, which lets me catch my breath after Iris's hot and heavy speech bubbles. Yet, this could have been a straightfoward 2 x 3 grid, couldn't it? 6 panels? Instead, this joke about over-engineered jargon names for what could just as easily have been called a "fuckmachine" (left delightfully up to the imagination) gets its core pacing from an irregular panel format. The premise is introduced in a big splashy full-strip panel at the top, the elaboration takes up the middle row, and then the bottom, in two equal panels, displays the two part punchline. I like the subtle way the middle row panels get progressively smaller. It increases the tension as we move toward the release of the punchlines, in a way that could be easily obscured by the panel contents if the page wasn't all blacked out in this way. Like Delyani's work, it makes me want to see notable comics blacked out. It could offer a whole new perspective on the medium's language.

Speaking of which, Nero uses a series of tall regular panels that suddenly POP into one that seems to squirt across the page, the other panels moved to allow for the white negative space to show off the irregular splash of the panel edge. This could be the silhouette of literal fluid, but I also like the idea of a frame that just has this kind of irregular energy. The comic structure itself becoming unruly and fluid to highlight a climax is a staple of many comic genres, but I'd say that I see it deployed most consistently by adult creators, who seem more willing to throw page literalism to the wind in order to achieve heightened expressivity. And once again we've got this escalation to a climactic panel. Typing this up I actually realized I don't have a specific idea of what I think the visual for these panels is or should be. Part of the excitement comes from filling in the blanks, to be sure, but that's true of any comic, which requires us to engage in closure to make sense of the transition from panel to panel. No, it's the drama of the reveal of the vibe plug one character apparently has been hiding, the invitation to intimacy, and finally the release, all achieved through dialogue physically arranged on the page. I don't think this would really make sense at all without the visuals that ARE there--the buzzing sound effect that moves across panel borders and is simultaneous to rather than sequentially arranged between lines of dialogue, and the incredibly suggestive final panel shape. Even without apparent visuals, this is visual storytelling.

Abby Howard wraps things up with the most abstract of the pieces, one that doesn't use frames at all but implies panel contents simply through the convention of word balloon tails. The result is a disorienting dark mass. It's hard to know what exactly is happening here and actually I'm having a hard time imagining what the last visual is "supposed" to be. It sort of is what it is: groping claw marks raking a black void. It's part of the april fool's joke, but it's a creepy one, and it feeds into the final joke of the page: that all this overthinking, all this trying to make sense of black panels, has worn you out, made you vulnerable to the Dark. Well, looking at everything I typed up here, I can't deny the inevitability of this end. Time to get in the maw!

Actually I think this end uncovers the close relationship that comics and hypertext narratives or more experimentally formatted texts have to one another: the space on the page becomes, itself, a signifying element and a way to direct the flow of the story. It's a shame that this is, I think, still considered a bit gimmicky in the realm of professional publishing and criticism. We have all these tools we've barely employed for storytelling, made far more accessible than in the days of having to manually set type!

Well, maybe it'll all have its day in the sun, or I suppose night in its new moon, soon enough. With an increasingly puritanical treatment of sexuality in society and on the internet, maybe we'll ALL have to black the action out of our comics and leave the frames to imply what we socially no longer want to see.

Pitch Black: Comics Code Authority approved!

you can read more reviews in the Hey Look At This Comic tag and support me on Patreon at least until they get my ass for being an adult writing about comics for other adults.

[evan-bo-bevin]

"Oysna is a 'winnower,' tasked with coaxing the reluctant dead from their bodies. He meets Ifris, a young barmaid, whose guardian has recently died..."

WHISTLE AND I WILL COME HOME is a WIP visual novel i'm working on with my husband.

I post process for this project (among others) on my patreon. Patrons can play a ~20 minute test/demo of the game’s first chapter.

[evan-bo-bevin]

The Cartoonist Cooperative's Oops All Comics! zine is out now, and I have a Canada goose comic in it!!

The theme was "colorful," and I decided to write a tragic love story.

Oops All Comics! includes over 50 minicomics and is sold as part of Nib & Ink Fest, a free online comics fair that starts TODAY! 100% of proceeds from the zine support the co-op, and you can also check out the marketplace and buy additional comics from individual creators!

Cover art by Robyn Victa

Get the Oops All Comics! zine (and my goose comic) here!!

Check out the rest of NIF here!

[evan-bo-bevin]

Pre-order "My Assassination Target is My Childhood Crush?" on Backerkit!

[ID: Sketch animatic of Nate transitioning from his high school self (fem) to his adult self (masc), with the caption "POV when transitioning didn't help you get over your crush from 10 years ago"]

[evan-bo-bevin]

We've wrapped up our first comic and it's off to the printers! We should be shipping rewards out to backers within the next few weeks, once we have the last of the rewards in hand. In the meantime, we have a couple new projects coming up, the first of which is...

My Assassination Target is my Childhood Crush?

10 years (and a pronoun change) after his failed confession to Izzy, Nate is hired to take the life of the woman who broke his heart. Will he carry out the hit, or will he take a shot at love one more time?

My Assassination Target is My Childhood Crush? is a 30+ page romantic comedy where unrequited love threatens to resolve itself in the most inconvenient way.

We are launching a new crowdfunding campaign on Backerkit at the end of March to help fund the printing costs of our new comic! The teaser page is live NOW so please check it out and follow it so you can be notified when the campaign goes live!

Also, we'll be updating our Patreon with some behind-the-scenes peeks at the process. These will be posted to the $7 Drizzle tier (and above!), so make sure to join us over on Patreon if that's something that interests you!

[evan-bo-bevin]

do y'all remember when they found all that tf art in Osamu Tezuka's drawer post-mortem because I think about it often

anyway keep chasing your bliss and draw weird shit, god knows we need that right now

[evan-bo-bevin]

Mad about politics again

[evan-bo-bevin]

[evan-bo-bevin]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

I just finished reading @ohcorny 's graphic novel, Hunger's Bite, and I fucking loved it. I cannot stress how incredibly My Jam that whole fucking book was, honest to god I don't think there's was a single thing I disliked in that book, the colors were fantastic, the pacing was excellent, the composition was delicious, like literally no notes, fucking stellar, i can't fucking wait for the sequel, everyone go read it

[evan-bo-bevin]

And last, but DEFINITELY not least..... we're officially announcing the premiere of our long-form webcomic, Bite Your Tongue, an LGBTQ+ vampire meets vampire hunter action-thriller romance.

Aisha Beaumont is keen to eliminate any supernatural threat that crosses her path to prove herself as the youngest in a family of renowned vampire hunters.

Marko Tzavaras is a young vampire enjoying independence for the first time who stumbles into a romantic relationship with Aisha despite the clear danger she poses to him.

Will Marko successfully keep his identity hidden and keep the girl, or will Aisha uncover his secret and finally live up to her family’s expectations?

Bite Your Tongue will be released as free-to-read on our website at bytcomic.com, THIS NOVEMBER!! 2025!!! We're so excited to finally announce this project, as it's something we've been building since 2022 (though, the idea was conceived many years before that...).

Like with My Assassination Target is my Childhood Crush?, we'll be posting behind-the-scenes content and other sneak peeks over on our Patreon for the $7 Drizzle tier and above.

[evan-bo-bevin]

For those who missed it, our Forever Home comic is available for digital download on itch.io!

When the residents of a historic townhouse go missing, spirit investigators Ross and Jesse are called to eliminate the threat. Will they successfully drive out what’s haunting the home, or will they get sucked into its trap? Forever Home is the debut comic of Lee Evans that explores what happens when devotion becomes obsession. 40 pages of story + bonus sketches

We're also working on getting our online store open too for anyone who wants a physical copy -- stay tuned :D

[evan-bo-bevin]

Literally sobbing. A judge, a US judge defended us. A judge brought up intersex people, uaing the term intersex, to *defend* us by not allowing our erasure. I'm having a lot of feelings right now

[evan-bo-bevin]

The next couple of (smaller) things we're working on are a couple short stories/zines that we'll have available for sale at future conventions, too! Here's a sneak peak at the first one, titled Whale Fall...

The green lines represents text placement, but we don't wanna give away the story just yet!

[evan-bo-bevin]

We've wrapped up our first comic and it's off to the printers! We should be shipping rewards out to backers within the next few weeks, once we have the last of the rewards in hand. In the meantime, we have a couple new projects coming up, the first of which is...

My Assassination Target is my Childhood Crush?

10 years (and a pronoun change) after his failed confession to Izzy, Nate is hired to take the life of the woman who broke his heart. Will he carry out the hit, or will he take a shot at love one more time?

My Assassination Target is My Childhood Crush? is a 30+ page romantic comedy where unrequited love threatens to resolve itself in the most inconvenient way.

We are launching a new crowdfunding campaign on Backerkit at the end of March to help fund the printing costs of our new comic! The teaser page is live NOW so please check it out and follow it so you can be notified when the campaign goes live!

Also, we'll be updating our Patreon with some behind-the-scenes peeks at the process. These will be posted to the $7 Drizzle tier (and above!), so make sure to join us over on Patreon if that's something that interests you!

[evan-bo-bevin]

[evan-bo-bevin]

I’m so excited to show you my 5 of cups that I made for Star Crossed a Queer Tarot. There are so many incredible artists and just a few days left!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/novaandmali/star-crossed-a-queer-tarot