Today we’d like to introduce you to Megan Rose Gedris.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I started making comics in ’96 when I was ten, mostly to entertain my classmates. As I got older and started coming to terms with my queer sexuality, I started making stories about gay romance, but I wasn’t ready to share those with my classmates or anybody I knew, so I started putting them online for strangers to read. My first web comics went up in 2002, ancient times in internet years, when web comics were a newfangled thing and queer stories had to be searched for with a hard-focused purpose.
The web comics got gradually popular, and I started self-publishing them into printed collections. This was long before Kickstarter and IndieGogo made it easy to crowdfund the up-front costs of a big run of books, so I’d print on demand a dozen books at a time and had myself a nice side hustle while I worked in television to pay the bills. In 2010, a friend asked if I’d like to contribute to her new erotic comics website, Filthy Figments, and I started drawing dirty comics, which was the first steady paying art gig I ever had. It led to more opportunities with other publications, like Smut Peddler and SlipShine.
I took my love of dirty storytelling to the stage and started doing burlesque as Florence of a’Labia, the comic stripper. Making comics can be such a solitary affair, doing a lot of work in secret for people to read two years later. Performing was collaborative, with immediate feedback from the audience, and a very different energy. It also took me traveling across the country, letting me form connections with other artists and fans I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to meet. And I kept finding myself drawn to Chicago. This city has such a variety of artists and an audience of people excited to consume it.
Right around the time I moved here, back in ’15, Ari Yarwood, an editor at Oni Press, contacted me to say that she’d liked my work for years, and if I had anything to pitch she’d love to take a look. I had just finished putting together the pitch for Spectacle, and they accepted it a few months later. Combined with a steady flow of income from Patreon, Filthy Figments, and merch sales, I realized it was more economical to quit my day job as a cheesemonger (though I loved it) because comics were paying the bills better than any day job I’d ever had.
Immediately after quitting the day job, I injured my wrist pretty badly and couldn’t draw for months. I was only able to draw one short story, Trans Plant, which is nominated for an Eisner this year, so it was worth the pain and struggle it took me to draw it. I’m still not fully healed, and I’ve had to start looking into transitioning my career to focus more on writing than drawing. Writing has always been my favorite part anyway. I used to work on three or four different stories at once, but these days I’m only able to work on one, which is Spectacle. Volume 1 came out in stores everywhere a few weeks ago, and it’s already getting a second printing, so again it’s nice to see that the hard work and pain has been worth it.
Chicago is a great place for me to be a comics writer. I’ve befriended so many talented artists here that I’ve been able to collaborate with, and it’s nice to make comics in a way that isn’t so solitary. I do miss how cheap everything was in Michigan, though.
Please tell us about your art.
Everything I make is queer. I make queer art because I’m queer, because my friends are queer, because there isn’t enough queer art for us. And I wanted to take it further than boy meets boy or girl meets girl. Being queer is a big part of who I am, a big part of any queer person’s life, but we’re more than just that. I wanted adventure, horror, comedy, fantasy, sci fi, but with queer people in all the lead roles. I make the kinds of stories I wanted when I was growing up, the kinds of stories I needed that didn’t exist.
I’m known for bright colors and thick lines in my drawings, rendered in various degrees of cartoonish deformation. I draw soft bodies and long flowing hair and fashionable clothes. It’s all very femme. My audience is primarily femmes. I spent a long time feeling like I had to butch it up to be taken seriously, but now I’m unapologetically painting my entire house pink.
I want my art to be affirming for people of any body type or race or gender presentation. Especially with my erotica, a genre that has often been sexist, racist, and body shaming. But none of those flaws are inherent to erotica. It’s all in what decisions you make when you create something. I get asked a lot why I choose to do this, but I think it’s just as much a choice to not include any queer characters or fat characters or black characters in a story and those decisions rarely get questioned.
It’s a psychological fact that seeing oneself reflected positively in media boosts self-esteem. One demographic has a lot of self-esteem after being overrepresented in media, to the detriment of all other demographics. I try to make my work both escapist and relatable. I want all the people who never see people like them in stories to pick up my books and get to have an hour where they get to be heroes.
Choosing a creative or artistic path comes with many financial challenges. Any advice for those struggling to focus on their artwork due to financial concerns?
A lot of artists don’t have much money because we’ve been told over and over and over that our work isn’t worth money. After a while, you start to internalize it. You price your work too low, you feel ashamed to ask someone to pay you, you feel too shy to chase down paying gigs. You worry that you’re selling out by getting money involved, and that worry is backed up by a lot of people telling you that you’re selling out by getting money involved.
There’s also a pervasive idea that art THRIVES in misery, that the depressed starving artists produce the most “authentic” art, and that romanticized idea is so dominant in our culture that a lot of artists will self-sabotage in the name of their art.
After a while, I just… got sick of not having money. Or rather, I ran out of money, I ran into health problems, and I was now living in a city that was twice as expensive as the one I’d left. I started getting older and I started needing money in a way that I hadn’t needed it when I was younger and able to live on ramen and never went to the doctor. I reached a point where I couldn’t afford to be shy or modest about looking someone in the eye and telling them that I made something great and they should absolutely read it. And I think more artists can do that before they get to a life or death moment.
You don’t need to quit your day job to be an artist. You will have less time to create your art, sure, but it’s hard to create when 95% of your brain is preoccupied with how you’re late on your rent and can’t afford groceries and that infection isn’t going away. Artists SHOULD be able to make a better living from their work, but until we live in that world, just stop letting people make you feel guilty for doing what you got to do to take care of yourself.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
All of my online projects can be found through my website rosalarian.com. Spectacle can be found in bookstores and comic shops everywhere. I’m partial to Challengers, where we had the book release party.
Contact Info:
- Website: rosalarian.com
- Email: megan@rosalarian.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/rosalarian
- Facebook: facebook.com/rosalariancomics
- Twitter: twitter.com/rosalarian
Image Credit:
For the photo of me, photo credit goes to Miranda Sharp
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