Thirty Days of CCS #23: Sasha Steinberg

Sasha Steinberg, during his time at CCS, was one of the most ambitious, talented and cerebral of its students. His Stonewall series, taking on the famous riot that launched the gay rights movement in the USA from a variety of different points of view. During his time at CCS, he also began experimenting with drag performance as Sasha Velour. An early showcase came at the Ignatz awards at SPX, when she presented an award, along with her partner Johnny. (Steinberg tends to flip between pronouns, and for the purposes of the article, I will refer to Steinberg as she when in the Velour persona and he otherwise). Of course, Sasha Velour has become a worldwide star thanks to her winning Season 9 of the television show RuPaul’s Drag Race. She won it using the same persona she presents as a cartoonist: a playful intellectual whose work is deeply informed by and a tribute to a number of historical influences.

Even before her success on the show, Velour was self-publishing a full-color, the first issue of which was titled Vym, but has since been simply retitled Velour. The third issue is fairly light on comics and heavy on both photography and especially collage. It’s also light on the thoughtful, philosophical essays from the first issue, or at least, they manifested in the form of interviews and photo commentary. The emphasis on both collage and performance reminds me of the sort of the thing that was produced in Weimar Germany, also harkening back to collage artists like Hannah Hoch.

The result is a colorful, beautiful comic that emphasizes the sense of community and kindness in drag culture rather than the shade that’s thrown on TV. Indeed, the theme of the issue was “Sisters”. There was a photo/collage piece where a pair of drag queens used similar materials to decorate photos of the other, and this turned out to be the most striking photo essay in the magazine. A tight-knit Brooklyn drag group (The House of Aja) receives a similar kind of photo-collage treatment, with each member getting a page of their own glory. Velour’s conception of drag has always emphasized inclusivity, especially with regard to people of size, people of color, people of different faiths and trans women, and the “That’s My Sister” article speaks to the incredibly wide array of manifestations of what drag means to people. (I thought Patti Spliff was an especially clever persona.)

Circling back to CCS contributors, Jose-Luis Olivares contributed drawings of five of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, along with commentary. This is a group that Olivares is listed as a “novice” of, and Olivares’ painterly qualities are on full display. April Malig collaborated with Untitled Queen on what could have been a fantastic risographed zine as well as an article in this magazine. Titled “the spectacularly sad surreptitious spinster snake sister survival spellbook”, it’s a clever, funny and deeply emotional blueprint for establishing and nourishing friendships with one’s sisters. Their mutual Filipino background contributed to the dessert portion of the piece, a layered concoction called Halo-Halo.

Velour herself contributed a collage of photos of her fellow stars from Drag Race, putting them in fantastical settings befitting their personae. Velour was the subject (along with her Drag Race collaborator, Shea Coulee’) of a photo essay emphasizing their “Naughty Nightie” piece on the show and taking it to another level. Finally, in a comic by Laurel Lynn Leake titled “Afters”, she depicts some moments of rest after a drag show, with each of the performers doing their own post-mortem. When Yessica Mente wonders why one of her tributes went down so poorly, her friends note that her tribute to an African-American artist (recently departed), including use of a racial slur. Yessica, not being African-American, is unsure and defensive about this, and tensions rise.

Leake takes a long look at the kind of simmering tensions that can arise and nods toward the fact that it was women of color (and trans women of color of that) who were the key figures of Stonewall. Leake is another artist who is sensitive and aware of the complexities that surround drag while being enormously sympathetic toward them. The end, which includes apologies but also a sense of realizing that certain issues couldn’t be resolved instantly, speaks to the sisterhood that’s the theme of the issue and the story itself. It speaks to drag’s power and possibilities while gently examining the human imperfections that are a part of it, so that it can be celebrated authentically.

Comics-as-Poetry #10: Inkbrick #4

The comics-as-poetry anthology Inkbrick's fourth issue was the best to date, thanks to powerhouse bookend entries from Keren Katz and Sasha Steinberg. The former's "Marks On The Attendance Sheet" is a tense, sexually charged story about a teacher and a student told from the student's perspective. Katz's use of impossible angles on an open-page layout creates the illusion of there being panels on the page, only it looks like they're caving in and/or putting the characters into these extreme, oblique angles. There's a lack of neat order on each of the pages, which is further exacerbated by Katz's intense and textural use of color, to the point where it looks like she's exploring the aesthetic of textiles. Arms and legs bend at strange angles, boot-tips droop, colors and patterns surround line and a number of other visual signifiers are at work to express the sense of feeling upside down that the narrator is experiencing. She's feeling unbalanced and dizzy in this relationship, feeling thrills and doubts and disappointment all at once. It's a brilliant short piece, probably the best in Inkbrick to date.

This issue was printed in 2015, a couple of years before Sasha Steinberg achieved international fame as Sasha Velour, the drag artist. However, this piece should be easily accessible to fans of Steinberg's drag work, given that it works with Velour's trademark bald head. The piece, "What Now?" is about Steinberg grieving his recently-deceased mother, and it makes extensive use of negative white space. Alternating between huge swaths of red, black and green, we see Sasha going from room to room (in his mother's house presumably), dizzyingly processing (one word per panel) the new reality of her absence. Later, a series of panels alternate between Steinberg spreading her ashes in the snow and melting away in the house. The last two panels are killers: another silhouette of a dress, this time with a hat, with the next panel being a photo of his mother in precisely the same position. It's a beautiful, touching exploration of what it means to exist in one moment and to disappear the next, and what those ideas mean when you leave a loved one behind you. This was the first comics-as-poetry piece I had seen from Steinberg, and it was powerful and sincere.

Another welcome presence in the issue was that of David Lasky, a pioneer of comics-as-poetry. This issue featured an experiment in juxtaposing a textual memory against unrelated images; in this case, it was several images he redrew from London's National Gallery. The best poetry, in my opinion, is that which has concrete images. That's why Lasky's later piece, which provides simple descriptions of activities "Streetlight walks, Electric fan in the hall, Shadows and breeze" is so powerful, particularly since the images take off from those concrete descriptions and becomes plays of light and shadow, focusing on small, singular images that almost look concrete out of context.

Many of the cartoonists make good use of the fact that Inkbrick is in full color. Laurel Lynn Leake's juxtaposition of color as representative of environment is abstracted in part because of the way she compares it to depression and that "thoughts can trap you". There's the implication that staying mindful is crucial even when being presented with the pure beauty of one's environment. Isuri Merenchi Hewage & Deshan Tennekoon are more direct in their piece "August In Pasikuda", as a single color, displayed on each page in different patterns but all in a grid, represent a different time of day and different activity in the same locale. The use of light, texture and an especially rich mix of colors, along with the concrete descriptions, powerfully evoke a sense of time and place in an almost visceral manner. It's interesting that they concretize color to create a sense of time and place, whereas Leake abstracts the same color patterns we see in nature to reflect inward.

Kate Schneider's "May" takes familiar, comforting images as a kind of bulwark against the stress she felt regarding an upcoming surgical procedure. It starts with lightly-drawn pictures of her cat, then the trees outside, and finally simply the night sky. It's not as sophisticated, visually or otherwise, as the other pieces in the book, but there's a sincerity to it that makes it work. Not every use of color is effective. Hayley Fiddler's "Waves" uses light blue as the sole tone in her poem about infidelity that switches from an undersea oyster to a couple getting ready. The use of color is obvious here and doesn't add anything when she switches from under the water to a bedroom, and the idea for the poem is not especially remarkable. The same is true about Paul Tunis' otherwise clever piece about pomegranates; it would have conveyed precisely the same information if it was in black and white.

A lot of the pieces involve melting, shifting and otherwise transforming into something new. William Cardini's piece takes his garish, computer-generated imagery and creates something quite beautiful with it, as his creature talks about being thrown into the river and their mud mind compressing. That's followed up with an image of the creature's mind turning into layers of sedimentary rock, each one constructed of the words they describe them: "to chalk, to coal, to marl, to shale". Louise Aleksiejew's piece, other than resembling Michael DeForge a bit, is all about a transformation from losing all her drawings and pictures into seeing a witch who gave her a magic item as a kind of replacement. There's a sense of whimsy, not fear, at work here, which fits with the melting art style. Gary Jackson & David Willet's "The Midnight Marauder Contemplates Retirement" is a naturalist image of a crimefighter having beaten up some criminals, but the action in the piece takes place in the graffiti in the background, reflecting a change of emotional states. It's a clever device that leads the reader across the page expertly.

Alexander Rothman's own "Honey Locust" speaks to the increasing complexity and beauty in his pieces, as his use of colored pencil combined with a strong sense of negative space makes for an eye-catching piece, as he combines the particular scent of the honey locust tree and imagines mastodons ages ago trying to get at its buttery scent. Michel Losier's strip is text-heavy and doesn't let its images breathe, while Aurelien Leif's piece is an excerpt from a longer work that's hard to approach because of the swirling chaos on each page. The experimental piece from Alexey Sokolin and Angel Chen was clever, using sentence mapping to create alternative versions of ideas, all leading into different, separate, images. All told, there was very little filler in this issue. Most of the cartoonists made some powerful statements and the editorial team of Rothman & Tunis kept the issue flowing with a variety of different visual approaches, being careful not to arrange pieces that were too similar to each other too close to each other in the anthology. This was really the first issue I felt like I could hand to someone and say that it was a pretty thorough survey of comics-as-poetry at this moment in time.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 22: Sasha Steinberg

Sasha Steinberg is one of the smartest cartoonists to emerge from CCS and certainly one of its most ambitious. Combining literary aspirations, a keen political and historical consciousness and a wicked sense of humor, Steinberg's projects have ranged from exploring the history of the Stonewall riot of 1969 to a thoughtful, edgy and personal exploration of drag. Sasha Velour collects a number of stories about his drag alter-ego; what's interesting about his comics is that Steinberg closely associates the act of drawing with the act of transformation that marks drag. That is, creating one's drag persona is both a personal and political act, a transgressive action against gender and cultural conformity and "microaggressions". It's a statement of freedom, an act of self-liberation as well as a kind of aesthetic Molotov cocktail.

Sasha Velour is mostly comprised of short stories Steinberg did about his drag self in various anthologies. The melting lips on the cover are an homage to that early trans-inspired film, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. There's a similar sense of camp, wild freedom and a hint of danger to be found in Steinberg's comics. Sasha Velour is an alien made of crystal with a magical ring capable of transforming the mundane to the fabulous; in the first story, he transforms a homophobe into a unicorn during a segment where the story shifts from black & white to full color as Sasha turns a "Wal-Mark" into a crystalline paradise. This is actually one of Steinberg's rougher, less accomplished stories in terms of the drawing and overall concept, but it still gets its point across. Much more complex is a Phantom-inspired piece done for Suspect Device that speaks to a historical continuum of queer ancestors and the brutal struggles they faced, framed by a clever series of tattoos and body-circumscribed drawings.Another strips where Sasha transforms into his human self is more interesting still, as Steinberg is less interested in manipulating line as he is color. Yet another strip mixes slice-of-life discussions about sex between a Hispanic mother and her gay son and three young Orthodox Jewish women, only to be interrupted by the absurdity of a dinosaur run rampant in the park. It's no coincidence that Sasha herself is sitting on a park bench.

In contrast, the comic/zine Vym has a much different aesthetic and political mission. Steinberg has noted that he's dedicated to a critique of white, affluent cis gay men and the ways in which they've allowed themselves to be mainstreamed and at the same time frequently reduced to being little more than comic relief in the wider culture, a sort of burlesque act. Billed as "The Drag Magazine", Vym explores through comics, essays and photos the ways in which drag may be defined, once again matching up the personal and DIY nature of drag to that of alternative comics: "a self-published magazine that celebrates self-published identities". The editor of Vym is actually Steinberg's partner John Jacob "Johnny Velour" Lee, another whip-smart writer with personal experience as a dancer/performer. While the comics and illustrations in the book (by Jon Chad, Laurel Lynn Leake, Romey Bensen and especially Eric Kostiuk Williams) are good, it's the photo essays that really strike a chord.

The first-person essay of drag performer Donald C. Shorter Jr is especially eloquent, as the photos highlight the transformative part of drag as part of the stage performance--the actual process of putting on makeup, adding layers of clothing, etc. It's meant to humanize instead of minstrelize, which drag is currently in danger of becoming as it becomes part of mainstream culture. That's why each of the photo essays keys in on humanizing each of the participants, from Shorter to another photo essay that features Steinberg's own transformation into Sasha Velour to K.James completing a drag transformation into male form. An interview and photo essay with Veronica Bleaus further recontextualizes images of the self-professed "worst drag queen in the Midwest" with funny and odd elements of collage. It all works, adding a touch of absurd humor to a drag queen whose stock in trade is self-deprecation with total self-respect and self-possession. The centerpiece of the issue was Leake's excellent teasing out of what drag means in its many forms. Leake notes that it's not just a matter of transformation, but of confronting the very notion of binary gender definitions. To engage in such gender-fuckery is a personal and political act of defiance. It's not being something you're not; rather, it's being yourself in the most authentic way possible. Vym promises to spotlight that authenticity using any number of styles and voices, and the first issue is a promising start.

Thirty Days of CCS #24: Queerotica

Queerotica is the aptly-titled anthology containing "queer erotica". What I found interesting about it is that the editorial team of Allie Kleber, Joyana McDiarmid, Laurel Lynn Leake and Sasha Steinberg specifically asked each contributor to come up with their own definitions of both "queer" and "erotica". That bit of editorial direction proved crucial in forcing each artist to think deeply about their choices in coming up with pieces (stories or illustrations) that fully expressed their own understanding of the term. Reclaiming pornography/erotica is something that every generation of cartoonists seems to do every few years, from the earliest underground comics (both gay and straight) to anthologies like Smut Peddler, True Porn, Dirty Stories and Thickness. Each one of those books had a strong editorial hand that both selected and directed their contributors to think about identity and sex in particular ways, and Queerotica's finely-honed editorial edict led to a surprisingly coherent and fluid read.

The anthology itself is beautifully designed. Leake's front cover is sensitive and evocative, with hands belonging to various genders and identities interlocking with each other, evincing both desire and tenderness. The back cover's parade of different shoes amusingly both recapitulates the front cover's theme of diversity and gives it a slightly dirtier take, suggesting what happens when shoes come off. The book's purple ink was an interesting choice, working well for the large variety of storytelling choices and line weights in the book. The pin-ups all contained striking images, some sillier than others. One person's erotic image is of course completely ridiculous to another person, so the pinup by "A.B. Fiddlestyx" featuring a furry reflection in a mirror just made me laugh. Laura Terry's monster orgy was deliberately funny but also had a strange erotic charge. Rio Aubry Taylor's beautiful drawing of two figures in an intimate embrace was the perfect complement to Terry's over-the-top image, once again recapitulating the kinds of pieces a reader would find throughout the anthology. That was repeated with Miz Moody's feather tickling illustration and Rachel Dukes' frank but tender image of a woman in front of her partner wearing a strap-on dildo.

The opening piece, Alexis Cornell's "Arbiter and the Bird", features two women in bed, as one is nervous about having sex. It's a funny, sensitive piece that explores the very idea of sex as a key component of relationships and how this can be difficult for many people. Cornell nails the characters' body language and relationship to each other in space, which is absolutely crucial for a story about this level of intimacy. Morgan Boecher's "To Share" is about how difficult it can be to find a sexual partner, someone to share his body with, after he made the transition from female to male. Boecher makes the most of his somewhat crude line to tell a story that's in turns sad, funny and hopeful. "Headspace", by Ivy Weine and Kleber, is a mild BD/SM tale, the sort that uses it as a healing force. Parts of it felt pretty rote and cliched, and at ten pages the story started to verge into self-indulgence. Kleber's illustrations for it were quite good, especially the weird, freckled character design for one of the protagonists.

Kimball Anderson and Leake's piece, "Are You Sure" is not unlike Cornell's piece, but this time it features two (physically gendered) men. Leake's choice to use a fuzzy, distorted line and a thin line weight was interesting and appropriate, given the difficult feelings discussed in this story. That fuzziness made the intensity of their actual sexual contact all the more intense as one partner engages the other in his reticence and gender ambiguity (the partner identifies as the non-gender specific "neutrois"), while the other has to confront his partner's differing sex drive. By contrast, Lena Chandhok's line in "Oral Sex" is smooth and even cartoony, as she relates an argument between two women experimenting with talking dirty to each other, the awkwardness and upset that this causes, and their eventual make-up sex. Chandhok's approach here is direct, both in terms of the humor and emotional content and the explicitly detailed manner in which she drew the sex scenes.

Joyana McDiarmid's "Nothing In this World" explores polyamory and one woman's struggle with the concept, as well as her (soon to be ex-) boyfriend's being OK with her having sex with women but not men. For this character, she views any sexual encounter outside of their relationship as cheating and is distressed to find out that he doesn't. This leads her to an encounter with a woman who talks about polyamory and her relationships with other women, bringing her into a moment concentrating totally on the present and what they bring to each other. McDiarmid certainly doesn't skimp on the sex scenes either, but they're completely integrated with the story's emotional content, down to the very end. Her rendering style, with angular faces that have a minimal level of detail combined with her fleshy way of drawing bodies, makes this one of the most effective stories in the book.

Fydor Pavlov's "Gentleman's Gentleman" is more traditional gay porn drawn in a thin, delicate line; there's not much more to the story than just the sex scene. Lawrence Gullo's "The Fisherman" and Laura Hughes' "The Outlaw" are two example of using fantasy tropes to explore sex and identity. Gullo's story about an alienated fisherman neatly ties in issues related to otherness as the title character winds up having a silent sexual relationship with a gender-ambiguous mermaid/man. Hughes' story doesn't escape its fantasy tropes, mostly goes for laughs and winds up as the only juvenile story in the anthology. The book ends on a strong note with Melanie Gillman's "Wrappers" is a different kind of fantasy story, one in which both gender and genitalia are totally different constructs. Her character design here is especially excellent, as she quickly deflects reader expectations while still being able to relate both the embarrassment and powerful sense of discovery when two people explore each other's bodies. The way Gillman also subtly explores concepts like gender pronouns is also quite clever. Steinberg's "Somnata" is a beautiful and later hilarious way to celebrate this anthology, as it starts with three figures dancing an erotic and delicate ballet (Steinberg's line is beautiful and thin here) and ends with Steinberg himself crashing the party. All told, Queerotica has a high batting average of quality stories for the initial volume of such an anthology, and its impeccable design and careful sequencing by its editors make it a feast for the eyes.

Thirty Days of CCS #3: Sasha Steinberg

Sasha Steinberg's CCS thesis was quite ambitious: the first chapter of a projected nine-part serial about the Stonewall riots of 1969, the event that sparked the gay rights movement worldwide. Steinberg combines ambition, technique, research and passion in this project, as he's set out to create a work of historical fiction that examines the event from the point of view of a number of different characters. We were introduced to Miss Venus in the first chapter, a young trans woman who represents the youthful culture not yet jaded by New York's drag scene. The first and second chapters of Stonewall are drawn in the style of Miss Fury cartoonist Tarpe Mills, who herself kept the identity of her gender vague during the 1930s and 1940s as she drew her very popular super hero strip. Miss Fury combined action and glamor, so it makes perfect sense that Steinberg would use it as a template.

If the first issue was all set-up and background for some of the most famous trans women of the era, then the second throws a match into that powderkeg of pent-up anger and stress. Indeed, one of Steinberg's missions in this comic is to restore the key role trans folk played in the Stonewall riot back into the historical mythology of the event, a fact that faded over time. It was common for the police to randomly raid gay bars at the time, out of boredom if nothing else. That night, the queer patrons of Stonewall had had enough, fighting back against humiliating body searches and assuming that the cops would be only too happy to rough them up. When a cop drew a weapon, that galvanized the crowd into fighting back. In an era when the word "revolution" was on the lips of many, the riot was seen as a chance to finally draw a line and unite against a common oppressor. Venus herself concludes this part of her story by saying "I'm not missing a minute of this...it's the revolution!" Steinberg traced Mills' figures from Miss Fury as templates for his own character design, as well as photo reference of the real people included in the story. The result is a true reimagining of a particular artist's style that fits seamlessly into the aesthetics Steinberg is interested in portraying. It's fashion, it's beauty, it's violence, it's self-liberation all in one, just taken to a logical extreme in depicting true events.

The next character followed, Mark, is done in the style of Belgian cartoonist Guy Peelleart, whose Adventures of Jodelle was just published in English. Peellaert was sort of the ultimate 60s psychedelic cartoonist, and this story follows a young, heterosexual taxi driver in Manhattan named Mark. (Steinberg told me that some of the stories are based on his father, who drove a cab in New York in the early 70s.) Mark is a Viet Nam vet and aspiring photographer who's trying to make a living, navigating the crazies of New York. He is inspired early on by having Allen Ginsburg as a fare, though Mark despairs that most of the gays he's met in New York aren't political and are downright annoying. The psychedelic color scheme cleverly gets across the strangeness of this urban environment; a group of young toughs are colored green, for example. Background details about the raid emerge here, as it's theorized that the mob members who owned the Stonewall didn't pay off the cops that month, so it wasn't off-limits to raid. Mark winds up on the scene, taking photographs (he likely took the photo of Miss Venus that appears toward the end of Stonewall #2), because he's fascinated by the concept of revolution finally beginning. Steinberg's characters are far from one-dimensional, as he carefully considers how the actions of each character play against each other. The queer characters here aren't saints--just people, tired of being treated like shit. But they're also frequently junkies, thieves and homeless, just trying to survive. The approach Steinberg is using is not unlike the writer Raymond Carver, as he loosely ties together a number of personal narratives to create a larger tapestry. It's an approach that's fitting for an event that meant something different for the different people who experienced it, in addition to accruing a different historical meaning. This is a smart, beautiful and artful take on a significant and difficult historical event.