my activities are so poorly conveyed

PREVIOUS

A nonbinary love letter, NYQZF 2018 debut. 12pp, bright red and bright gold risograph on mint paper. Thanks to Cameron Toy, Wo Chan, Taylor Johnson, Victory Matsui, and Caroline Faustine. Printed at the EFA RBPMW, October 2018.

Download free PDF here [1.9MB]

NEXT

A nonbinary love letter, NYQZF 2018 debut. 12pp, bright red and bright gold risograph on mint paper. Thanks to Cameron Toy, Wo Chan, Taylor Johnson, Victory Matsui, and Caroline Faustine. Printed at the EFA RBPMW, October 2018.

Download free PDF here [1.9MB]

PREVIOUS

A few months after we started dating, my girlfriend’s mother suddenly passed away. A short autobio comic, 16pg risograph. Thanks to Kelsey Short for printing, and to Caroline Kittredge Faustine for the eulogy, voicemail, and much else. A few physical copies are still available for free or pay what you want, so let me know if you want one.

Download a PDF [20.5 MB]

NEXT

A few months after we started dating, my girlfriend’s mother suddenly passed away. A short autobio comic, 16pg risograph. Thanks to Kelsey Short for printing, and to Caroline Kittredge Faustine for the eulogy, voicemail, and much else. A few physical copies are still available for free or pay what you want, so let me know if you want one.

Download a PDF [20.5 MB]

The captain waited in a cold rain by a mound of fresh-looking trash. The pile had very little plant growth on it, otherwise it was ­indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape. But between the coordinates her contact had sent her, and an eye trained by long experience, she knew this would be the spot. Here was the entrance to the revolutionary Moonies’ underground base.

There was a quiet rustling, then an awful sound like a broken foghorn, and some hissing. A hatch opened in the rubble and out stepped a young person, cursing. Their clothes were stained with — grease? or ink? The captain couldn’t be sure.

“I told her to get that fixed! How are we supposed to have a secret base if it calls like that?”

The captain watched with a small, indulgent smile. Her crew and she dealt with the Moonies for fuel distribution, but she’d seen enough small hiccoughs like this to doubt their ability to execute larger projects.

“I’m sorry about that, Captain, we’re normally a bit more together. My name’s Luisa...um...the path’s a little rough, Captain…I don’t think I can get your chair down it…”

The captain grimaced.

“It’s real twisty — makes it harder for unprepared people to get there...”

“Makes it harder for some folks who could really use your ­revolution too.”

Luisa winced.

“Find someplace to hide my chair.” The captain released her wings, rising from the chair with a gust that staggered the Moonie and blew trash down the hatch. Luisa piled some trash on the chair to hide it, and then gestured to the Captain.

“Watch your head…and your wings, I guess? It’s really rough there’s like stalagmites or stalactites or whatevers. Um…it’s really cool that you’re here? Like I remember my mom telling me about what you did to the mozzies and…. like I thought of you when I went out to find my friends here! Like you really — we just, we’re not part of them, you know? Like earth and shit that’s not us, you know they’re just like, using our natural resources for their own gain and leaving us—my abuelo was a prisoner here you know and like we’re still kinda prisoners! And — and we just, we oughta be free! And you did a lot of that and I can’t wait for you to see what we cooked up, like when I first saw it? I thought of some of the stories I heard about you n your partner and all the pirates…”

The Captain stopped listening and lost herself in memories. The kid’s excitement and zeal reminded her of some of her crew when they were young – of her old partner, too – Luisa had stopped walking. The Captain made herself listen again.

“The drop is right up ahead. It’s about fifty feet down. Um...give me a bit of space, if you’re flying down there?” The captain nodded, and Luisa jumped, cannonballed, and wahooed down the pit. The captain waited a moment, and then dove down after, wings tucked in tight like a peregrine. Just as she dove, she heard a sproing. They had a spring at the bottom? The old pirate laughed at the crazy kids.

She landed next to Luisa at the bottom, and the Moonie showed the captain through a door and into a ragged lab, haggard people working on assorted computer terminals and dirty mugs everywhere. As the wind from the captain’s wingbeats disturbed loose papers, some of the Moonies scrambled to put everything in a safe place, and others gaped at this terrifying woman who frightened the earth below. No one had ever thought they’d meet her.

A squeaky door opened, and a familiar voice called out. “C’mon everyone, get the presentation together. Let’s not keep our guest waiting. Khayrat, you ready to go?”

The Captain stuttered in her rhythm a moment, forcing a couple extra beats to keep hovering. She hadn’t expected to see her old partner’s lover Seahorse here - nor that they would be running this cell of the revolutionaries. She knew that they had frequent contacts with these folks to distribute and test her old partner’s plants - but this was a real surprise.

Seahorse turned to the Captain as a young woman with hair spiked up on her head gathered up charts and diagrams. “I’m really happy you reached out to us. We’ll keep this meeting short, and we can talk more about it somewhere more comfortable for you. But I think our pitch is quite compelling. Are your ready, Khayrat?”

“Yes! Here’s the big one!”

Seahorse took the chart from Khayrat and unrolled it. “Captain, we’re going to steal the moon. We’ve turned the whole place into a rocket. And with my partner’s plants, and the fuel in the core, we’ll be self-sustainable.”

“We’re gonna be free! We’re gonna be free!” Luisa and Khayrat giggled together, and watched the hovering Captain with hopeful eyes.

“Captain, there’s a lot still to be done,” Seahorse said. “And all of it’s gonna go faster with your help. You have a lot of clout, and a lot of connections, and a lot of people owe you a favor. If we can get everyone up here on board, we could launch in two weeks, when the other trashmoon’s gravity will give us a boost. But we’ll have to be quick and ready – even one informant could send the whole of the mozzie fleet up to stop us, maybe even turn us back into a penal colony again.”

“We basically are one!” one of the Moonies chirped.

“We’re not,” the captain said. Her wingbeats had slown now, an undertone of feathers rustling reverberated through the lab. “But the other moon still is.  I want to hear more about this plan, Seahorse. And then there’s someone we need to talk to. I think we can do something even bigger,” she pointed to the blueprint, “than this.”

The kids started singing something. The Captain remembered it, but couldn’t place it – oh dear. It was that hoary prerevolutionary classic, “Fight the Power.” The Captain sighed. These people were exhausting.

[next: coming in November]

This and the next will be a bit different -- instead of different media, I want to write a little about some less visible themes I tried to write into The Goddess of Drought. (Whether I succeeded is up to you, the reader.)

The comic is set in 2010 because at that time, I (and fictional Emily Lu) did not yet have a framework about racism in America. I would develop one over the next few years by reading Black authors, witnessing segregation in Chicagoand Israel, and being present for the rise of Black Lives Matter. Just a few thinkers who were important to me:

- Cathy Cohen: Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens - Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Case for Reparations - The platform of The Movement for Black Lives

I also had do work understanding the place of Asian-Americans in American racism, the way that we suffer from whiteness while also participating in antiblackness. A lot of this work was catalyzed by Serve The People, a 2013 exhibit at The Interference Archive that was organized by Ryan Wong, who somehow later became my friend. Much of my thinking has been informed by you, Victory, Wo, and Lara & Adrien who brought us all together. I've been talking about race since college with Andrew Fan and Abhinav Shrestha -- thank you so much for your dear, dear friendship. Especially Andrew, who walked all over Chicago with me, introduced me to many of the works cited above, and is currently doing The Work with the Invisible Institute(!!)

I tried to depict racism in The Goddess of Drought not only in the ways Emily is hurt by her white girlfriend, but also in the ways that Natty, her Afro-Latina classmate and the only other poc in their class, is mistreated by everyone. Natty, not Emily, is the target of all their classmates' overt racism. Meanwhile Emily repeatedly fails to stand up for Natty, staying silent and pushing Natty away. In a better world, maybe they could have become friends -- alas.

I've always thought that comics as a medium had a ton in common with film. Here are two movies in particular that had an impact on The Goddess of Drought:

The way that Perfect Blue (1997) depicts a descent into madness is chilling and beautiful, especially its use of reflections. The scene transitions are deeply inspirational and reminded me a lot of the best comic panel transitions, sharp but always clear.

Get Out (2017), of course -- a perfect movie that deserves all its accolades. I can only hope to show casual racism, predatory white femininity, and deer imagery half as well as this movie does.

Last, I want to give a short shout-out to the Ghost in the Shell PSA by Chewy May and Jes Tom. It was a good reminder while I was making my comic (ft. the fat butch Chinese-American protag of my dreams) about the importance of representation, and the implicit transition between the child and the adult in the short made me think more critically about Emily Lu's gender. Thanks, and hope you two are working on more projects!

Playlist for The Goddess of Drought:

01. Destroyer -- Goddess of Drought 02. Sunset Rubdown -- Jason Believes Me, You Can't Believe Your Dreams 03. Lady Gaga -- Born This Way 04. Tegan and Sara -- So Jealous 05. Kanye West -- FML 06. Gandor Chorale -- Gloria 07. Mitski -- I Will (which supplies the epigraph) Google Play link if you're into that

Also thanks for the new Frank Ocean singles (Chanel, Biking, Lens) for getting me through the last two weeks.

Biggest comics inspiration for The Goddess of Drought is Annie Mok, whose comics are incredible at illustrating trauma and its echoes. I come back to Body Language, Shadow Manifesto, and especially Swim Thru Fire (illustrated by Sophia Foster-Dimino) again and again. She depicts characters with kindness even as they go through unkind times in a way that I aspire to. I'm really looking forward to her memoirs, to be illustrated by Carta Monir. Other snippets: Noelle Stevenson's diary comic, about how society can reward traumatic weight loss and forced femininity. G. E. Gogarty's "Times I Made My Ex-Bf Cry" (pts 1 & 2) covers similar topics to The Goddess of Drought in a nearly opposite (= super funny) tone. I think about the careful vignettes and twisty narrative of Whit Taylor's Ghost a lot. Along with Annie Mok, Wendy Xu, Yumi Sakugawa, Aatmaja Pandya, and MariNaomi are inspirational Asian-American women in comics. I wouldn't have found many of these cartoonists without the We Should Be Friends podcast, so thank you. I also would not have known how to layout or print my comic without the sage advice in the Dirty Old Ladies podcast -- C. Spike Trotman's writing and Amanda Lafrenais's gorgeous screentones were a constant inspiration. Lastly, Scott Pilgrim by Bryan O'Malley and Octopus Pie by Meredith Gran (which just ended after a decade!) have been storytelling touchstones for me since I started making comics. Thank you.

I have so many people to thank for The Goddess of Drought, so I’ll be doing some “extended acknowledgments” over the next couple of days. First off, some key steps in coming up with this comic:

I came up with the first four pages in 2012, taking my one and only class in comics with Paul Hornschemeier. For many years this was a beginning in search of a story.

Until I read this interview with Leah Horlick in 2015, and I knew immediately that the story of the Goddess of Drought needed to be a story about abuse in a lesbian relationship. For Your Own Good is an incredible and heartbreaking book of poetry, and I recommend it to anyone.

Emily Lu is a poet partly as tribute to Leah Horlick, and partly because I wanted to explore racist dynamics in the supposedly creative and productive environment of an MFA workshop. Many, many people have written about this; the two essays which were most important to me are Junot Diaz’s “MFA vs. POC” and Jenny Zhang’s “They Pretend to Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist.” I haven’t been able to get Wo Chan’s [i reserve the right to feel] out of my head since I read it, so I’m hugely honored that they let me put it in my comic.

And of course, I never would have been able to make the comic if I hadn’t been accepted to the Undiscovered Countries Blast Off! Development Lab. Thanks so much for taking an inaugural chance on me.

Emily Lu is should be living her dream, attending the prestigious Idaho Writers’ Workshop and living with her girlfriend after escaping their homophobic families. Instead, she wakes from a nightmare every morning, stalked by the monolithic Goddess of Drought. A comic about love, abuse, terrible white writers, and what it means to “go crazy.” Buy a print here, $5.

>> DOWNLOAD THE PDF << [48 pages, 10.2MB]

pay what you want: Venmo / PayPal / Square Cash

The Goddess of Drought by Molly Liu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

First four (out of forty) pages of my new comic book, The Goddess of Drought, presented by Undiscovered Countries and officially launching JUNE 10!

If you're in NYC, come to Bizarre Bushwick at 7pm to see a STAGED READING starring Hye Yun Park, Jessica G. Smith, and Nicole Shanté, directed by Caroline Kittredge Faustine -- plus amazing work by all the Blast Off folks: Brianne Rowe, Hollis Beck, TJ Burleson, and Rebecca Vineyard.

Minneapolis woke up on the rough hotel bed when her alarm went off, sitting up and getting out of the covers before she shushed it. Elytra moaned on the couch and shook hir wingfeathers. Sie slept here three or four times a week, slept heavy as a teenager should, and waking hir up in the morning bothered Minneapolis in an affectionate way.

Minneapolis got herself ready, checked to see if any new students were coming or any others had cancelled. She got dressed, got clean, took her hormones, grabbed Elytra’s ankle, and started towards the door.

They stopped at a small farmstand on the way to class. Elytra needed a vegetable to wake up in the morning. A scraggled flyer on the wall caught Minneapolis’ eye. It was a sketch of the solar system, but the trashmoon was at the center. There was a pattern of horizontal and vertical lines underneath the drawing, and Minneapolis slipped into memories of research back on earth, of greasing palms in spaceports for any information about the pirates, and about those who supported them. Elytra pulled on Minneapolis’s suit, mouth full of tomoonto. Hir eyes were concerned but Minneapolis smiled, glad to be back in the present. She pocketed the flyer as they both walked towards the square.

Even from blocks away, Minneapolis could see the group assembling. She had realized her class was one of the larger gatherings for flykids around, and probably the only one folks with night jobs could make. Tamal’s dog Goodboyyo was there, a weird pup with a botanical ear, bounding around and sniffing everyone’s wings.

Goodboyyo loved these mornings, getting pet by all these different people then getting to bound and bark as they all took off before sitting and watching the sky attentively, howling at first sight, trying to leap twenty or thirty feet into Tamal’s arms.

When Minneapolis and Elytra reached the square, Elytra fell to rolling around with Goodboyyo and Minneapolis waved and smiled before taking off. This was a special class - Bartender Willy had connected her with a flygirl botanist whose observations suggested a great wave of plant flatulence would create intense and unpredictable turbulence. It would be a test for her advanced students. But Minneapolis didn’t feel anything strange in the wind currents, besides some warm breezes. She flew back down to the ground, much more herself now her wings were stretched. She let Goodboyyo sniff them as she looked for Malinalxochitl, the botanist.

Ten minutes passed and all the regular stragglers had shown up. There were more of the warm drafts blowing by, and Minneapolis could see the excitement and anxiety in her student’s quivering feathers and necks craning to the sky. Finally, Malinalxochitl appeared a few blocks down, rushing towards the square with two bags around her arm and something shiny in her hand.

“I brought! Buns!” Malinalxochitl gasped out, having reached the square at last.

“Oh waow! What kind?!” Elytra said, her wingtips twitching.

Tamal was rescuing the bags from the inquisitive Goodboyyo. “Looks like Sweet Veggie and Spiced Jam from the good place!” There was a collective hum of approval.

Minneapolis commanded, “All right, flykids, let’s get into launch order. We’ll have the buns for a reward. Malinalxochitl, the air was clear about 15 minutes ago but the warm blasts have sped up since.”

“Yes! That’s right! That’s what it should be. There’s probably a strong current twenty feet up? And another really rough one like forty feet above that?,” she replied.

“Elytra!” Minneapolis called. “I want you to take first flight, see how you do up there.”

“Ha-hey!” sie cried, leaping into the sky with a powerful burst of hir’s beetle-like wings. A gust struck hir, but sie flipped around and beat hard, angling hirself with the wind and up, until sie cleared the first batch of turbulence. Sie let out a triumphant “Hi-yo!” and clapped hir hands.

“Next up!” Minneapolis watched as her class took off one by one, smiling to herself as she watched them deal with the unpredictable current. Minneapolis kept a close on eye on what each struggled with.

Soon, everyone was flying. One dozen flykids over Rockpile early in the morning, with the earth behind them. Malinalxochitl and Elytra were laughing, flying circles around each other and rolling in the strong current underneath them. Two of the older flykids, Reggie and Jamelle, were spotting each other as they practiced hovering in the turbulence. Reggie was an incredible painter, and their wings looked like massive camoflaouged moths, false eyes and all.

Minneapolis was shocked from her quiet admiration when Tamal let out a shout and flew up, towards the roughest part of the air. Those who noticed clapped and cheered, and he let out a reckless laugh. It was easy to see when he hit the current, half his body straining against the wind. Minneapolis grimaced. Tamal was a strong flyer, but it took him a while to correct technique - and then he was out of control.

He was tumbling wildly, as each panicked beat of his wings made his descent more erratic. Minneapolis ran in his direction, her wings glowing blue as she leapt into the air and twirled through the turbulence. She couldn’t catch him directly, but maybe she could slow his fall and help him get back some control, if she could just reach him before he hit the rough lower current. But he was falling too fast.

Reggie and Jamelle had had their eyes open though, and were already in position. There was no way to safely catch him, but they hovered just above the turbulence and then, at the last possible moment, flapped their wings at him as hard as they could.

They fell into the current below but were prepared and controlled themselves, and they had slowed Tamal enough that Minneapolis could reach him. She flew above him and then dove down, spearing him with her shoulder through the turbulence then curving up to land softly in the square. Tamal was shaking and gasping, tears streaming down his face. Minneapolis bit her lip as her students landed and gathered round.

Goodboyyo came right over and started licking Tamal’s face, and he burst out in a roar of laughter. He and Goodboyyo rolled around on the ground for a good minute before he sat up.

“I know what I did wrong!” he said and everyone laughed, relieved. He was still chuckling. “That was such a blast I’m so sorry I’m so so sorry thank you so much oh my god you have to try it” he said before burying himself in his dog.

Minneapolis stood up straight, and looked at her students. They were all happy now that Tamal was okay, and they sat or lay on the ground breathing heavy and feeling their wing muscles burn.

“Hey Minneapolis!” Elytra called from where sie was stretching. “Can we watch you try?”

“Yeah!” Malinalxochitl said. “There’s not gonna be one like this for another month at least!”

There were general murmurings of approval, and Minneapolis smiled. Her wings turned a piercing electric blue as she leapt into the sky, blasting through the first current and soaring to the second. She tensed her body as she reached the second layer of turbulence. She knew she could handle the wind - but she wanted to show her students what it was like to dance with it.

[next]

The captain stared at her open desk drawer. She couldn’t remember why she’d opened it. She pushed away the new schematics from Seahorse, turned to the window behind her, and stared out into space. Her stomach ached with hunger but she had no appetite for the dinner on her desk.

This was the same route her old partner and she had flown after taking their first mozzie. The two of them, a few friends from the jailbreak, a hired wing or two. The tankers were scarcely defended back then since the other pirates focused more on supplies than the liquid gold blood of the moon. It was here, looking at these stars, that she and her old partner had sat on the floor, a knife between them. She remembered her hand shaking and her eyes welling up as she carved a scar into her old partner’s cheek. The captain reached up to touch her own scar, the bright ridge from her eyebrow through her eye and to the edge of her mouth. Somehow her old partner’s hand had stayed steady. That woman was the bravest person in orbit, and the captain felt like a fraud again, nervous as that breathless flykid making herself a pirate, dreaming of a free moon.

Forty years of piracy felt futile now.

She left the window but realized she didn’t know where to go or what to do. She chucked bitterly and went to the middle of the room. Her partner and she had thought it would be a few years until the Utopian Socialists of the North decided to treat the trashmoon as a sovereign nation and pay for the fuel they sucked from the core. Instead, trashmoon-Earth relations were in tatters, and the pirates had become essential to the lunar economy’s stability. It was stability built on the bodies of the pirates, living and dead: because the mozzies were militarizing. According to Seahorse’s informants, public fervor in the USN was being whipped by vicious government propaganda into tankloads of new missiles and anti-personnel defenses. How many more flykids she would have to bury in Rockpile’s styrofoam graveyards?

It made her sick. All the captain had done with her glorious dreams was to shackle the moonfolk to an unsustainable drip of fuel, turning them into parasites on the back of parasites, sucking blood from bloodsuckers.

And it would make her flykids sick if they knew. She wanted to quit but she couldn’t and it made her want to die and she couldn’t. There were no natural leaders among her crew to take her mantle. Except maybe – but even if Minnie hadn’t been a Socialist pawn the captain couldn’t bear the thought of sustaining the moon with decreasingly effective piracy for another generation, or worse, the moon collapsing as the piracy failed. It had to end soon but she didn’t know how. She felt so hopeless.

But her old partner wasn’t. She grew her hopes in a greenhouse to protect the moon from famine. The captain went back to the desk and threw her untouched dinner in the trash and snatched a tomoonto off the shrub she’d bought. She bit into it and the earthy sweetness brought her to tears. She put her head down on the desk and breathed heavily as the juice dripped onto the maps.

They had made so many plans that night they cut each other’s faces. They sketched dream pirate fleets and figured out how to organize the first flykid squads. And swabbing their wounds, delirious with pain, they’d come up with the wildest plan they could. When they woke, the captain’s head was in her old partner’s lap, the two of them curled up by the porthole, eyes opening to the stars.

The captain smiled and turned to look out the window, the tomoonto in her lap. She saw both trashmoons and the earth behind them. Maybe it was time for that wild plan. It would take the largest crew she’d ever assembled, the cooperation of thousands of moonfolk, and at least one massive prisonbreak. But she could do it. Now, with her reputation, her experience, and her desperation – it was time.

She chuckled and raised the tomoonto to her mouth. She was going to hijack the moon.

Juice sprayed across the window.

[next]