"Between the Lines" follows two trans kids and their gender variant group of misfits. The characters include Savvas who is in a category all his own, Razly who is all kinds of gender fucked, and Mike who just does not give much of a shit, but the two that the comic follows most closely are Shay and Dani, two friends with opposite personalities going through transition in more ways than one. BtL follows them through 5 years, the crap they go through, triumphs, and how things change with themselves and between each other.
I started this project a little over 10 years ago almost a year before I started hormones and back then it was a different beast all together. I originally started it after the anger of my first time reading exactly how the TDoR list of trans murders happened, my anger and sadness over this created the character Shay, a fun loving, outgoing 25 year old that other characters tended to gravitate towards. I also put myself in the comic as the main character, if you found any of the old pages you would see exactly how little self-esteem I had and the major self-loathing I had going on. I had these two angel and demon like characters for Mek which linked to how torn I was between making myself happy or being a boy like my parents wanted me to be plus my insecurities that back then I thought I could not possibly be passible, trust me, if you see my old pictures compared to now you'll be like "Holy fucking shit!" I also had another character in there who played a kind of "straight man" and then a mean spirited TS Nikki who was only talked about within the 15 pages. I quickly became much more interested in Shay's character cause I gave an unseen reason why she's friends with Mek and that is because Shay had a friend named Dani and Mek reminded her of Dani to a very large degree. I cannot exactly remember why I let go with this version but something just did not feel right.
On a side note when I first started talking to the person who would later be known as Sarina Valentina it was in a Livejournal group called "Transgender Goths" The first message I sent her was about how she looked and acted exactly like my character Shay, she agreed. Sarina will come into play later.
I started the next one within my first year of hormones. It was pretty much the same but it looked better and introduced the character Rachel who had a very typical secret of the TS kind, I also had a "kinder" version of myself which means that I had a better outlook on moi. Another change was that I had planed on playing up on the fact that Shay never got over Dani and how that affects her mentally and throughout the comic Shay was supposed to come unraveled. Something still did not feel right with this one so I started again.
This time Shay ended up being the center of the story, she had been living out in the country with her sister for a year and she comes back mainly for a special anniversary reminiscing on Dani. The Rachel character changed alot, everyone knew her T, she escorted, very sweet and soft-spoken and had been friends with Shay for a long time. My character had change since I had a very positive view of myself and deep into the Goth scene, I looked like a Siouxsie Sioux nightmare, I also introduced a mentor type of character basically I took that "Straight man" character, made him bi who spit out words to the wise. The mean spirited TS Nikki has a breakdown due to her past . I showed alot of flashbacks and it as I was drawing the comic and coming up with Shay and Dani's history I was finding that the flashbacks interested me much more than the rest of the story.
So for the 4th one I focused almost exclusively on Dani and Shay transitioning together and it's fallout. Shay convinces Dani to take the chance of going out in public as a girl and they go out and do what teenagers do. I got rid of the Mek character completely of course and I pretty much replaced the anger with fear so for all intents and purposes Dani is Mek in this version. When thinking about that mentor character I thought what better mentor is there than the one I had in real life Savvas. Nikki was there hating on both the main characters. Razly was new but was only seen at the very end of the first chapter. The second chapter was about when Shay started transitioning and was pretty much the Sarina Valentina right before she started transition with some changes like a supportive older sister and Sarina's mother did not have alot in common with Shay's. I got, I think to the middle of chapter 2 before deciding that the art was too atrocious and started over.
The 5th and most popular version lasted until about 3/4ths of way through chapter 4. Same story, just told and presented a bit better. In this we see Rachel again, this time she is a transsexual and a drag queen who has been in this game for a very long time, she provides Shay with a way to transition. She ended up being based on numerous transsexual drag queens that i've known. Then there is Rio who represented a kind of crossdresser, he was the lead singer of a very popular local band called "Burning Embers" that Dani loves. In this version Dani came out more as an individual character. In the end the entire story was a bit too.. ragged... built on creaky stilts....an overabundance of fat? Plus my art had gotten so much better, coupled with the fact that I really wanted it to be worthy of publishing I decided to redo it for those purposes.
Trim the fat and refocused it I certainly did. A very close friend of mine died a few years ago, Bryce, who drew the first 10 pages of chapter 3 and his personality informs Dani this time around. I realized in context that previous versions of Dani had absolutely zero real rebeliousness she had no back-bone unless Shay put it there, she seemed to be constantly either afraid, happy, or suicidal she had no purpose other than to serve the story, someone that others can easily project onto but that is not my intent and that does not feel right for a well rounded character. I also got rid of Nikki since her character was only there for people to dislike. I took away Rio because he was only there to represent a type of trans person. I added the character Mike, who is based on my friends Matt and Mike who is a complete lune, both are fantastic guitarists which goes well with the whole "music" feel and he is a character that plays very well talking between Dani and Shay's personalities.
I plan for this to be about 6 or 7 chapters unlike the 11 I had planned before, and if I can get through it i'd love to do a sequel with Shay in her 20s, hopefully, hopefully. I suppose looking over this it's obvious that the comic has become more about just wanting to tell the story of these characters, beyond the influence of a few personalities from friends I know melding with a few of the characters there is no influence from trans politics and societal ideals, something that I am happy about, I would rather have the nitty gritty.
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