Quote For The Week: Erika Moen

Erika Moen, in a marvelously revealing interview over at Comics Bulletin:

I've had many, many people tell me that my comics helped them come to terms with their sexuality or gender identity or made them feel less alone. That gives me goosebumps just writing it out! It is surprising to me how many queer people there are out there who have gone through almost the exact same experiences as me and received the same backlash and rejection from the "queer community," so while my comics help them feel less alone, their letters back to me make me feel less alone too! 

And, oh god, there has been a hilarious amount of ridiculous and painful criticism of my work. That it is bi-phobic, trans-phobic, privileged, sexist, racist, anti-feminist, advocates rape (yes, really), that I'm not allowed to call myself queer, that I'm trying to force queers to get married to oppositely-sexed partners like I did... Oh my god, the list could go on and on, only increasing in absurdity. It's fine though. People are allowed to project their interpretations onto my work; we're all entitled to do that! Doesn't mean that's the message I ever had in mind when I was making my comics, though. 

When I get hate mail or people confronting me at conventions, I process the experience in the same way that I do when a drunk, crazy, homeless man comes up and yells at me on the street: they're experiencing their own reality and expressing it outwardly, but that has absolutely no bearing on my life or who I am. If anything, I hope my supposedly offensive comics help inspire people to create the kind of comics they do want to read and that do"correctly" portray their views! People can write me angry emails that I'm not going to finish reading before I delete, but wouldn't they feel so much more empowered if they took that same time it would take to yell at me and funneled their anger into something productive, like creating their own comics.

I'm a big fan of not wasting energy on futility (such as screaming into the abyss of the internet) and instead making the content you want to exist, whether it's in the form of a comic, a story, or whatever medium you prefer. 

But then again, some people just like to scream, and that's enough for them.