Lately I feel like I say “when I was…” a lot. Am I just more nostalgic now than usual, or is it the stuff that I’m consuming now making me remember so much? I’m not sure. But when I was a teen I used to have this daydream about opening a store - sometimes it’s a bookstore or a cafe or a music store, and the truth is, I don’t think it mattered all that much what kind of store it was supposed to be. What I was looking for was a safe space, a place for the misfits and weirdos to hang out.

Back then I thought I wanted to write, and I wrote these series of short stories. Each one was about a different person who worked at the same place, run by this mysterious person - mysterious to me because I still hadn’t figured out their story at the time - and the stories sometimes connect, and sometimes don’t, but these people were like family. Some of them were a little fucked up and problematic because it was the nineties and I still had a lot to learn, and most of them didn’t have the words for what made them feel like aliens in this world, because I myself didn’t have the vocabulary needed to help them out, yet.

Years went by and I slowly let these characters go, one by one. I forgot about most of them, especially the ones that I hadn’t yet fleshed out by the time I realised that I didn’t have the thickness of skin or the ability to live with uncertainty, to be able to keep writing. I needed repetitiveness and routine and stability to help keep my anxiety to a manageable level. I needed my boring office job to stay physically alive, even if it makes me feel dead sometimes, which is really funny but also makes sense to me. But anyway. Even as I forgot these characters, and lost nearly all of those stories I was slowly changing, learning more about myself and the queer community and how all of these forgotten characters fit within that.

This morning I finished reading this manga series Shimanami Tasogari (Our Dreams At Dusk) and it made me think about those lost characters. Because this manga is about community and found family, and the characters are queer folks from various backgrounds and ages and orientations and they all have complicated feelings about their own queerness and I love them all so much. The mangaka is X-gender and Asexual (I think they are also Aro as they wrote about Aromanticism as part of Asexuality in the manga, which is a little iffy but an attitude I’m used to from AroAce people I’ve met.) I think the fact that this group of characters found a safe space for themselves and each other made me remember yearning for that as a teen, and it made me a little mad at myself for giving up on finding one as an adult.

new issue out!

There's a new issue of superfairyanimal, for the first time since 2016. Because of the long gap, a lot of the content are from the years in between. I've decided that I won't be releasing pdfs online via the newsletter after all. Maybe if I do, it might be via something like Carousell? Or I might not release pdfs. I don't know yet.

Anyway, there are two covers for #17, and the variant (with Ms. Marvel and Marvel Girl) is nearly finished. I won't be reprinting either cover, I think, unless there's a zine fest or something like that in the future (in which case only the text cover will be reprinted.)

Stay safe!

/ Papir Tost #4, May 2021