Lesbian Comedy Shorts

Azumanga Daioh (Kiyohiko Azuma, 2000)

Azuma’s mastery of the yonkama (lit. “four cell”) form allows him to create fully realized characters, relationships and narratives, while maintaining really strong humor throughout.

Azumanga Daioh is a comic about a group of female friends throughout their high school years. It captures the dynamics and relationships between high school girls incredibly well, and it’s a series I return to year after year since my middle-school years for it’s humor, characters, and female friendships.

Grandma Ashes #19, “Here, Wolf!! Sigrid Makes Her Move!!”

Grandma Ashes #18, “Enter Snake Queen”

“Hell” (Yoshihiro Tatsumi, c. 1970; Translated by Yuji Oniki)

Tatsumi’s work, produced over nearly five decades, pushed the manga medium both formally, and in the content it could represent. His short stories concisely showcase anxiety, love, and death in post-WWII Japan. “Hell,” included in the anthology of his work Good-Bye (Drawn & Quarterly, 2008), tells the story of a photographer ravaged by guilt after gaining fame and success from a photograph of a mother and son’s silhouette burned into concrete. Written four decades later, Dan O’Brien’s poetry collection War Reporter deals with a similar story–its opening poem reads:

And I hear a voice both in my head and out. If you do this, I will own you forever. I’m sorry but I have to. If you do this, I will own you. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to desecrate your memory. If you do this I will own you forever. I took his picture. While they were beating his body and cheering.

“Flu Drawings” (Michael Deforge, 2013)

“I wanted to write about a specific type of… I don’t know if I’d ever feel like approaching the subject of male sexuality and repression, just ‘cause it feels exhausting to write about at this point [laughs]. But that was definitely my concern when writing the first of those stories. And then the second one, I wanted to write about sharing in a sexual relationship, generally. But when I depict a relationship with two men, it tends to just make sense in the moment. I myself am bisexual, and when I make those choices, it’s all for a myriad of reasons that seem unrelated to representation. And that’s a happy byproduct, but the choices I make in the moment like that… It’s hard to talk about all those stories all at once, ‘cause I do think of them as all very different.” - Michael Deforge in conversation with Annie Mok

Jack Staff (Paul Grist, c. 2000)

Another super-hero re-imagined by an artist with a deep knowledge of the tradition, Paul Grist’s Jack Staff not only makes innovative adjustments to the public domain characters it re-invents, but to the form and structure of the comic as well. Grist’s layouts are dynamic and evolve to fit his content without becoming cluttered or too flashy–if we can compare comic layouts to poetic meter, Grist’s free verse is more H.D. and less Walt Whitman. Initially begun after the story was rejected as a Union Jack script by Marvel, Jack Staff is structured as an anthology, telling inter-connecting stories about a wide cast of characters throughout different times. The comic’s non-linear nature is often brought up, and Grist’s formal craftsmanship allows him to manipulate time and space in incredibly intricate ways.

Madman Comics #2 (Mike Allred, 1994)

When I was 13 and trying to get my friends into comics I gave a more literary minded pal a copy of the first volume of collected Madman comics Image had just put out. He read (a bit of) it and handed it back to me telling me he was looking for something “smarter.” Pffft.

Allred’s vibrant art, humor, creative storytelling synthesize perfectly with his Madman character. Plus, Allred has an expansive knowledge of the tradition of superhero comics, and re-works silver age sci-fi fun with biting 90′s irony. 

Dr. Flem’s robots in this arc of the comic have a great range of designs and personalities, and I’m far more interested in two robots falling in love with each other than the same schlocky story about a boy-mechanic who falls in love with his gynoid creation.

Well, you guys asked, so here it is. An actual shirt for when you just can’t be bothered with life.