Yuri's Tracery
Helen Chazan on erotic comics,
tracing zines, and Catherine Jones
interview by Tony Wei Ling
Tony Wei Ling: Helen, thanks for doing this. I've been reading your comics criticism for years now, and it’s been exciting to see you making zines. Can you tell me a bit about how you started out?
Helen Chazan: It's weird to think of myself as someone established. I have to remind myself that I've been doing this for eight years now! I was plugging away at The Comics Journal for a year or two before I came out. The beautiful thing about comics criticism is that everyone else is worse at keeping deadlines than you are. When I do sit down to write, I tend to write quickly, but I had all these ambitious ideas for longer essays, only one of which got done. I look back on some of that writing now and think, “Wow, I sure was listening to Chapo Traphouse.”
TWL: What’s changed since then?
Helen Chazan: Well, I'm a pandemic transsexual. I very narrowly figured out I was trans in January of 2020, had a giant breakdown. I was already on a health leave from grad school at that point. I wasn't out to very many people. I wasn't on hormones. At that point, it was like, well, I better come out to my editor! I emailed Tucker about it, and he was of course very supportive.
I'd reviewed the first volume of The Drifting Classroom under my old name, and then my review of the second volume was under my new name. Both of those reviews have moments where I ended up talking about my childhood and the impact that reading this comic had on me. From there, I started doing more ambitious writing because there was nothing else to do.
Honestly, I was just really fucking crazy at that point. I was really writing very long pieces very fast. My Twitter following blew up. I started talking a lot of shit on the internet, which somehow didn't backfire on me much in the long run, though it definitely did not do good things for my mental health. At some point I started writing for SOLRAD. More recently, I did writing for Comics Blogger and an essay for the second volume of Katie Skelly's Viscere anthology. In those first couple months out of the closet, I wanted to use comics criticism as a sneaky little backdoor to write about everything I was going through—helping girls like me, or whatever. Life was coming at me fast, though, and I slowly started realizing that maybe I needed some time to understand myself as a trans woman.
I started to become worried about the way that we write trans readings of things. I don't want to write ad copy for Viz Media about my fucking gender. I don't want to give them that, and I don't think that I'm going to understand myself better that way. I think you can pick up in the last article I published from that era that I'm starting to rankle at the idea of doing this thing that’s also compulsively important to me.
I tried to strike a balance eventually, where instead of writing “what this means this to me as a trans woman,” I started with, “I’m feeling this. Why am I feeling this?” More recently, I've stopped trying to reverse engineer it. I'm pushing back on my rejection of that.
TWL: Have your own zines been part of this shift in attitude?
Helen Chazan: Yes, I had a girlfriend who pushed me to think about putting transness at the forefront of my writing again—and my attitude, frankly. She got me to be less fussy about it, less apologetic. It got me thinking about the format of “this thing secretly is transgender.” Maybe Kurt Cobain is a trans woman, and we don't need to make jokes about that tweet anymore! Maybe this isn't a thing to deride.
When I was starting to work on the Catherine Jones zine, I spoke to my ex about how Catherine had a complicated relationship to transness, how things were different for her, and it was a different time. She was like, “What’s the difference between how she’s talking about this and how your typical older trans woman in 2004 would?”
And it hit me that older guys who love Catherine Jones’s work don’t fucking bother with her middle name—the name that she chose for herself, that she went by in her day-to-day life. They’ll focus on the times when she’d step back from being totally a woman in every way. But her feelings are perfectly clear.
I don't want to make something about this woman the way that she's factually remembered. I want to remember her the way that she deserves to be remembered. That has been a major turning point for my creativity, for my writing, how I approach emotions and being a trans woman.
I am this thing that I think I've sometimes been afraid of being, even though I'll be it anyway.
TWL: I appreciate you walking me through that progression. It’s very recognizable—that early transition compulsion to speak and write a lot about it, and then a period of regret or mixed feelings about it. But what strikes me is that your encounters with other women seem to pull you into a new moment—with Catherine Jones, for example.
Helen Chazan: In early transition, I was deep in the mindset of “T4T will save you!” Like, T4T is nice, but I'm increasingly focused on what develops from close friendships. I just bought a Risograph—an incredible dumb-luck find on Facebook Marketplace—and I had to get it from this guy's apartment. A friend helped me do the heavy lifting, and they’ve come over to support me while I’ve been troubleshooting it. I’m learning to ask for help, accept help, and at the same time to hold boundaries. It’s hard to maintain this sense that a person who's kind to you isn't the person who's going to save your life. But even with zines, you really can't do it alone. At some point, you have to give it to someone else.
Then you start to see yourself become a person in the world—to see friendships become mutual aid, the people you hang out with become creative partners. I've gone from seeing T4T in the image of two girls locked together, holding hands, to this network of people who are nice to me and I'm nice to them, who have my back when things are bad. I'm beginning to articulate a transgender ethos of friendship, which doesn’t mean all my friends have to be trans.
Even with this publishing project, I'm not running a T4T press like Diskette Press. But whatever and whoever I’m publishing, I'm going to be publishing it as a trans woman.
TWL: I think I hear you saying that these changes in how you conceive of relationships have come with the change from just writing criticism to making and publishing zines. You've recently been putting together zine anthologies with other people, right?
Helen Chazan: One that's coming together right now is called Afternoon Affair. The idea is to make something like Eros Comix for today. I had the idea for it more than a year ago, but stalled out for a while. Then, it just so happened that I started going to Toutoune Gallery, and I got to be friends with Ginette Lapalme, who’s become one of my biggest supporters. She encouraged me to make this idea happen and offered to let me use her partner’s Risograph printer, which meant that I had an inexpensive way to print a lot of copies. Then I heard from Molly Kiely, an incredible artist in Arizona who made some great comics for Eros in the 90s, that she wanted to participate. I’d be working with one of my heroes! That got me moving.
Then Sam W reached back out to me to let me know she was still down—she draws really awesome pictures of naked ladies—and once she agreed, I reached out to Lina Wu, who's a local cartoonist in Toronto, and she agreed to do a 6-page story for it. And then finally, I’d just interviewed Sunmi, and they’d promised to do a free commission for me. So I just asked them, “Hey, do you want to do the cover of this?” I was able to get in touch with Inés Estrada through Ginette, to run some old spot illustrations in the anthology as well. Basically, all these pieces fell into place by circumstance.
I've got another, very different anthology that I'm trying to put together now, titled Sleepy Time Gals.
I put out a call on Instagram for trans women to send me art or poetry about their bedrooms. I want to do this for t-girls who haven’t been published a lot, or who have been having trouble getting their work out there. That's it. It's very low stakes. But it gets complicated because I have a lot of people to follow up with, and since I’m not paying anyone, I’m not going to tell any of them to rush what they’re doing.
I'm already thinking about doing another issue of Afternoon Affair, because it's almost done, and there's a lot of excitement, and I have an expectation that I will make my money back on it. I still don't know if I'm going to be able to pay artists, but I know that I can provide copies to all of them and I'm going to be able to afford to do another print run. The goal is to not lose money and keep moving.
I want to start building something up that doesn't feel like Smut Peddler or Oh Joy Sex Toy, both of which have this glossy quality of not being unconscious enough. Maybe I feel a bit too much nostalgia for stuff like Eros Comix, but there’s something very material about the best comics from Eros.
The connection I have to that stuff made its way into one of my tracing zines, Finders Keepers, which is based on Hot Tails. There's a lot that I want to say in writing that's either really complicated or goes against my instincts as a critic. And I can just go and do that if I'm making a zine.
TWL: I'm interested in this phrase you used—“not unconscious enough”—because that does feel like a missing element sometimes. And that is part of the different risk you take on when you’re doing art, compared to trying to nail down an articulation of something in criticism.
Helen Chazan: With anything erotic, you can write about it in essay form, but it's not easy. Did you ever encounter a book called Manga, The Complete Guide by Jason Thompson?
TWL: Maybe in some aisle of Barnes and Noble many years ago.
Helen Chazan: I found it in a used bookstore when I was like 11 or 12. It's got these weird-ass capsule reviews of almost everything that was in print in English at that point, which makes it still a really useful resource for that reason. Just by picking up that book, you can get a snapshot of the North American manga scene in the mid 2000s. A lot of the opinions are really weird, but it's so comprehensive that there's two sections at the back—a yaoi / boys love section, and then a porn section. I think it's telling that the yaoi gets lumped together, whether or not it's smut, and then there's a porn section, and there's not a distinct yuri section.
The porn section had a couple inset images, which weren’t themselves explicit, but might be from the page before a sex scene. As a kid, I would look at that section a lot; it was a fixation as I was going through my first puberty. A lot of the time, I wouldn't be reading to get off, at least not directly, but because I found it so interesting. I got increasingly fascinated—for one thing, because the translations were just so different. There’s all these memorable jokes, really good lettering, and some of them were just really strange and funny and peculiar.
As I thought back on it, I thought a lot about all the dick girls in Toshiki Yui’s work. I named Finders Keepers after this one Yui comic where a guy’s dick falls off, and these girls find it on the ground, and they mistake it for a really realistic dildo. I had initially been thinking about just redrawing the entirety of that, but it kind of became less interesting to me—just the way sex looks in those comics. In the end, I didn't use very much of it at all, even though it was the jumping off point. Even though it is a porn zine, there ended up being no sex in it at all!
As I’ve gotten older, I look at some sex comics and feel as though they hold this secret underlying grammar to the whole medium—a secret, truer form of comic books, because they happily display everything that you're not allowed to see. And the transgression you get in smut feels so different from transgression you get in the underground, or in most alternative comics. Ironically, some of the only comics that give me the same feeling are feminist comics like Roberta Gregory's Naughty Bits, even though I believe that comic actually began from a place of irritation with Eros Comix and all the work she was doing for Fantagraphics.
TWL: It sounds like there’s something coming up for you about gender, or womanhood specifically, in those comics. And of course this is something transmascs talk about a lot.
Helen Chazan: During TCAF [Toronto Comic Arts Festival], I went to a panel of trans cartoonists shooting the shit. It was mostly made up of transmasc and non-binary people, and only one trans woman was on the panel—a friend of mine. There was this one moment where everyone was talking about how influential yaoi had been as a space for them to explore gender or whatever. That's great and all, but while everyone was bonding over this, I noticed the only woman there conspicuously having nothing to say.
Just before that, I’d been talking to Sunmi about how artistic responses to yuri as a space for genderfucked play being oddly neglected in comparison to yaoi. Listening to this panel, I suddenly felt this frustration that went even further: what the fuck—this is what I was feeling when I was looking at straight porn that fetishized lesbians and dick girls! When I knew nothing about myself, straight porn was where I got to have my gender play.
It's not like trans women don't talk about this—we do, of course, if you go on the internet—but there’s a strange way that it’s relatively safe to talk about how yaoi informed your queer identity, at least among other queer and trans people. Obviously, I don't think anything's safe for queer people right now. Whereas if you start saying, “porn for straight men really meant a lot to me,” people are going to look at you funny. You have to couch it under layers of irony, and you have to mention autogynephilia as a bit at least three or four times. I have nothing against joking about AGP, but for this, I’ve wanted to take it really seriously.
When I started working on Finder’s Keepers, I had just gotten done with the Catherine Jones zine, and it had immediately hit me—the next thing I'm doing is porn, though it ended up not being porn. At some point maybe I’ll do a follow up that's only sex scenes, because part of me does feel a little bad that this is a zine that I could almost certainly publish on Instagram and not have it get taken down. That's a little fucked up. But of course the thing is, I didn't want to focus on that. I wanted to cut out all of the stuff that’s for men to beat off to and focus on the weird intimacy and hopefulness and playfulness that I find in these scenes where women are talking to each other. I changed one word of dialogue in the entire thing—the word “hermaphrodite” to “transsexual.”
Across the board, I want all of my tracing zines to be simultaneously something that you read and something that makes you think about the process of making it.
TWL: How are you approaching the tracing zines in terms of literal, physical materials?
Helen Chazan: I'm doing this as manually as possible, using a tracing pad and some old art supplies that were lying around my room from when I was a teenager. If it's not dried out, I'll use it. I'm stocking up on new art supplies now, mind you, because I'm taking my work a lot more seriously, but I used these Faber Castell grayscale brushes for both Finders Keepers and the Lum zine. They were already starting to dry out at that point. I challenged myself to recreate as much of the screen tone effects by hand as possible. I wanted to do all of this methodical work to remake something that, originally, someone probably just used a strip of screen tone for, or went over to their assistant and said, “Hey, fill in this block.” I wanted to do it, you know? I also wanted to make mistakes. I wanted to get lazy. I wanted to get things wrong.
TWL: There’s something about tracing manga that feels like such a strong callback to childhood—the way we copy things that we love.
Helen Chazan: It was very helpful for Finders Keepers that my physical copies of Hot Tails were already falling apart, with pages falling out. If the spine is broken, I don't have to worry about damaging the book. I did my initial trace in blue pencil, then inked it after. I did the lettering directly in ink once I was sure it wouldn't seep through the paper, but everything else I would do in blue pencil first.
When I was inking Idyl Traces, I tried very hard to look as little as possible at the original page after penciling it, so that it would be kind of transforming and changing into something different. I didn't do that with Finders Keepers or Lum because I got to be a bit more of a perfectionist. The Lum zine was a real pain in the ass because the illustrations that I was copying were full color, and some of those colors were pretty dark. Sometimes I couldn't see the lines through the tracing paper, so I would actually be tracing only bits of it, and then I would be copying the rest by sight—that itself was really fun.
TWL: One thing that you're making me think about is just the greater risk of trans women talking about porn and sex. Tracing these comics in particular is a very interesting thing—it's not quite like talking about it. You’re tracing over these things that have already been made, but the copying also becomes its own speech act. I would love to hear about how you got started with the tracing.
Helen Chazan: I wasn't doing any art after high school for a long time, except just kind of for myself. During lockdown, I did a bit of art therapy stuff. I was starting to do some single page comics under a really dopey pseudonym that I posted on a very private Instagram account.
I remember this one night very distinctly. I don't remember why I was so stressed out, but I was having a really bad night, and I ended up tracing this page from The Drifting Classroom, and I wrote this text to go with it—just something I had written about in my review way back when, about my feelings about this scene. I posted it on my private Instagram story. Tom Campbell, who does Comics Blogger, messaged me like, “Hey, this is great. I'll run it on the back cover of the next issue of Comics Blogger.” And I was like, “Huh? People actually like this stuff I do when I'm like, freaked the fuck out. That's cool.”
It just so happened that I’ve been trying to write an essay about Catherine Jones for fucking ever, and it's just too hard. I encountered her work during that lockdown period. It was some of the first art that I'd seen by a trans woman that felt very much about being trans, but that wasn't like, some internet music from two years ago. There isn't really a ton of writing about her that talks about her in this way, and not a ton by trans women—although I’m sure I’ve seen a Sarah Horrocks thread about her at some point. Even the stuff that's embracing her as a queer trans icon is a little hands off with her identity.
So I thought, I want to attack this. But my first attempts at writing about her kept falling apart.
At the time, I was taking a class taught by SA Smythe called "Trans Techne," about the idea of a trans archive. We were allowed to do creative projects for our final project, so I decided to do a Catherine Jones zine developed out of these questions of what it means to preserve someone. I actually added a bibliography to the second printing of Idyl Traces to document all the reading and thinking that went into it.
Screenshot of the late artist Catherine Jones's personal website circa 2009, archived here.
TWL: Can you tell me about some of those reference points that were on your mind?
Helen Chazan: I was thinking a lot about the artist Elizabeth Mía Chorubczyk. She did this photograph of herself half-nude, entering a bathroom, where she has the names of famous women artists—Marina Abrahamovic, Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono—written on her back. So she’s incorporating herself into this history of feminist art while performing this very dangerous action that materially includes her in womanhood: entering the women's bathroom.
Another big thing for this project was a series of photos by Jordan King that I first saw in an exhibit curated by my friend Dallas Fellini at the University of Toronto—Mnemonic Silences, Disappearing Acts. Jordan King, who’s a trans woman and also a drag performer, had been staying in this apartment in New York that turned out to belong to this very famous drag queen in the 70s or 80s, who had an amazing stage name: International Crisis. When she found some old Polaroids of her in this apartment, she began taking Polaroids of herself recreating them with her own body. This idea of embodying a trans woman from the past—it helped crystallize the concept for the Catherine Jones zine.
So many of my attempts to write about her had me struggling to describe every little thing that I'm feeling—all of which would be so apparent to every trans woman reader that it's almost boring to write. Like writing a ledger for cis people. I hit this point of thinking—if people are going to talk about Catherine Jones’s art as if she’s not a trans woman drawing it, then if I trace and redraw it, it has to be a trans woman's art. At the time, I was struggling with wanting to make artistic expressions but not trusting my ability as an artist. But if my intention is to make a worse version of great art, then it just becomes about the act of making it with my own hands.
TWL: I love that you placed a photo of her on the cover of Idyl Traces.
Helen Chazan: Yeah, I designed the front cover so that Catherine Jones’s face is burning away at one of her images, framed within the burn. That picture is actually from a reference photo taken of her in women's clothes, where she just looks so beautiful. Her website is thankfully still on the Internet Archive; it’s also where I found the long quotation on the back cover, this passage where she talks about her gender and her transition journey. It’s really powerful. I tried to have my work be enclosed by that.
I didn't copy any of the dialog in my tracings, which I'm thinking back on now with mixed feelings. But I really wanted to focus on the way that she drew women inhabiting fantastical places. I let myself struggle with recreating some parts and do really well at other parts. I let some of the faces look a bit bad. I let some of the shadows look wrong. I'm very obviously using pens and markers, and not nibs and brushes.
I think the page that I'm the happiest with is one taken from a scene in the original comic of these girls fighting—each saying, “it isn't,” “it is,” “it isn't,” “it is,” over and over again. I really love how my tracing of that turned out, because while inking, I sometimes lost track of which parts are the bodies and which are the landscapes. And because the text isn't there, it's just kind of lesbian sex. It’s this erotic thing where I'm trying to capture Catherine Jones’s yearning for womanhood, and my own kind of yearning for what I was starting to access for the first time by looking at her art. It's a romantic emotion, I think. Because when I look at her work, there she is, you know?
I get this overwhelming sadness when I think about how so many of her comics are about not being allowed to be a woman—not feeling like she can be a woman. That's a big thing in her underground comic, Spasm, parts of which are still reprinted in some places. I would encourage anyone who likes what I'm doing in this zine to track down Spasm. I didn't want to touch it for my zine because it means too much to me, almost.
That emotion of wanting to be a girl that I had when I was dysphoric—it was almost an erotic feeling. My erotic feelings still have this sort of desire in them. When you're a young, closeted trans woman—and this is true for a lot of lesbians in general—you don't know the difference between wanting to be like someone, wanting to be someone, wanting to be someone's friend, and wanting to date someone. You don't have a vocabulary to distinguish that.
TWL: Could you say a bit more about this kind of desire—how you see it or read it in her drawings?
Helen Chazan: For me, the desire to connect with a really rich past that I feel in her work is not the same thing I feel when I look at Rachel Pollack’s comics, for example.
When I read Pollack, I think, “hell yeah, we've always been here.” Or when I’m reading an old trans newsletter, I think, “Hell, yeah, we've been having the same arguments for a hundred years.”
But I look at Catherine Jones, and I think, “Oh my god, there have always been women who were this fucking dysphoric, who have wanted this so badly, who visibly wanted this. who found ways to talk about wanting it over and over again, just barely avoiding saying it.”
You know, Catherine Jones was a disciple of Frank fucking Frazetta. If you look at how Frank Frazetta draws women—I do sometimes like it, and it is very similar to Catherine Jones in some ways. But Frank Frazetta, he draws the legs, and then he draws the boobs, and then he's done, you know? It's not quite the R. Crumb thing, where it's like these weird fucking birds on stilts or whatever, but he's drawing what he likes. It's a burger and fries.
But with Catherine Jones, it's not just that the figures are more alive. She’s looking at this beauty in how people stand, how people move. There's so much observation and thought in the way that hair looks, how it falls. Even when it's very idealized women, there's always just little details like a little bit of belly fat. And when she draws men, she draws these very interesting androgynous figures. They can be very Prince Valiant, but it’s like she’s looking for a bit of the feminine inside of the masculine.
There’s something there that makes me really emotional, and that isn't so far off from what I’m trying to do with eroticism in Finders Keepers and with this anthology that I'm planning right now.
TWL: What’s different with Finders Keepers?
Helen Chazan: Instead of having a long introduction where I state my intent, I have just five words on the back cover: “transsexual lesbian tracing heterosexual pornography.” I tried really hard to make it read like a continuous story, even though it's just random pages. There's disjunctions with that, but I tried to set them up in a way that you might think, “Oh, I missed something,” and page around until you convince yourself that you understood what's going on. I'd say it kind of disintegrates midway through. The first couple Hot Tails stories are just like, “what if there's a dick girl?”
TWL: Right, the adventures of being a dick girl.
Helen Chazan: In one story, this girl is out shopping, and she meets this other woman. They look at each other, and there’s something electric about it. Then it cuts to a planet with a penguin—for the surrealism, I guess? When they have dinner, it turns out that they have this psychic connection because they’re both hermaphrodites.
Then they fuck. That's the comic.
For the zine, I took the scene of them meeting, talking, connecting—and being mutually seduced by this feeling that there's something special about the both of them. That’s the heart of it.
It’s surrounded by these other little moments of women connecting with each other, women being excited about something, women having anxieties that have an erotic charge, but the centerpiece of this one is this moment.
It’s amazing to me because it’s trying to be like, “maybe being a dick girl means you have psychic powers!” Toshiki Yui seems like someone who doesn’t hate dick girls, but is thinking of them in the same way as “Dracula with two penises.” This is a fantastical thing to him, but he likes fantastical things, so there’s a certain sweetness and generosity to the way that he depicts them that has honestly stuck with me my whole life.
When you meet someone special as a trans person, meeting other trans people, there’s this unconscious electricity that's very erotic and romantic. It doesn't matter if you're friends, lovers, coworkers—there’s a feeling of something’s really right here. The same way that you don't want cis people to clock you in public, you do really want trans people to clock you in public. I'm always thinking, “what dog-whistles could I put on today?”
A bright fanny pack usually does the trick.
Helen Chazan is an archivist, comics critic, and zine-maker based in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in The Comics Journal, Solrad, Comics Blogger, and Cleaver Magazine. Her zines are available through her micropress Gynoid Distribution.
Tony Wei Ling is a comics researcher at UCLA and an editor at Nat.Brut.