The Process of Making Comics with b hayward

THE BELIEVER: How did this comic start?

B HAYWARD: This comic actually started while I was working on my first comic, “Comfort Levels: The Story of My Medical Transition,” for Rewire.News. It had been a couple of months since I’d quit my job in order to come out and illustrate full-time, and I was struggling—struggling with my hormones and my appearance and feeling like a fraud. I was plagued by the desire to stop doing everything I was doing, because I felt like it wasn’t working—like it couldn’t work—for me. Acknowledging that urge to detransition, to hide or abandon who I am, made me feel like I was lying to myself and everyone I’d told that I was trans. I really freaked out. In an attempt to sort through those feelings, I took a really long shower. In the shower, I started thinking about how I was as a little kid, as a tween, an adolescent, a young adult. I thought about all the ways I’d felt, so alone, so strange, begging to be accepted. And it came together so succinctly. My past selves all united. And I didn’t hate them for who they were. Then I was able to read backwards again, from coming out, to finding out I had cancer, to finding out what being trans was. I felt a new kind of gender euphoria I hadn’t felt before. Almost like a sense of destiny.

BLVR: What’s your process like?

BH: I’m self-taught, so everything is very scattered and messy. Which is ironic, given that everything I do now is digital. It’s hand drawn, but it’s all rubber on glass and electricity. I think my process often begins with me in the bath, typically having eaten a tiny pot cookie, like, half an hour prior. Then I try to visualize my story. Usually what crystallizes first are key phrases from conversations I’d had with my partner, Christina, or with myself. Then out of that come the images.

BLVR: Was any aspect of making this work particularly challenging?

BH: Since I’m so green, I made some oversights with framing, spacing, text, etc. My biggest issue is always organization. The work flows and then stops. And in between those states, I become very distracted and lost. And even though I had that epiphany, I struggled to not feel like an impostor, because I was still wrestling...