Trefle wrote:Man, so many good questions. Just putting that up here.
And so many potentials. *sigh*
Retrospectively, if there's anything you could change before making (or at least putting) QUILTBAG, what do you think will make the strip better, from a creator's perspective?
Emotionally speaking, what I should've done was take an extra month to consider the pros and cons of doing this series and see if I could be as motivated to represent various sexual and gender identities as a single group as I was motivated to represent teenage girls. While I have friends or friendly acquaintances representing almost every part of the acronym, I certainly haven't been as close to most of them as I was to my extended family when
P&A started. I also don't feel like 2011 QUILTBAGs were as under-represented in online comics as 2004 teen girls were. (Intersexes and asexuals, yes: transsexuals and transgenders, arguably.)
But let's suppose I did get that fire in my belly, or that someone else who did inherited the series. Basically, there are two divergent paths to carve
QUILTBAG's concept into something Eisner-worthy. One is to make it much more centered and focused on Sara and Lisa, and to make Sara and Lisa a lot less passive about their world. In the
QUILTBAG we got, their principal goals were to blend in, do well in school and find fulfilling romantic and sexual companionship. None of that is implausible, none of that makes stories hard to tell. But it all does mean that the characters weren't naturally drawn into situations that addressed the series' alleged themes, and I wanted to push those themes, which led to somewhat contrived coincidences like Lisa's first partner being a transsexual and the pair just happening to stumble into a lesbian-exclusive sorority on their first try, and, oh yes, the fact that they just sort of found themselves in the "gayest" dorm I felt I could get away with.
If Sara had been more of an "Aggie" from the start, a fervent promoter of sexual identity whose heart and passion exceeded her wisdom, then she would've sought out LAZ deliberately and her and Lisa's social circle would've started accumulating QUILTBAGs organically, without the need for such coincidence. I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine Sara in that role, considering what she's been through and the activism she's observed in the past (and especially given the overall failure of Penny and Aggie's "Great Society" to really change things at their high school).
The second path is to make
QUILTBAG great is more "art-house," more like going for the Ignatz Award than the Eisner. Make it a true series of loosely interconnected vignettes, with only the barest connections to the
Penny and Aggie universe (but possibly including more of the old crowd than just Sara and Lisa, as the stories might well take place on multiple campuses). What would really tie the series together would be the themes of gender and sexual identity and how it's evolving, more than the plots. Frankly, stuff like this only sells on the basis of auteurish talent: see
Short Cuts or
Building Stories. I really wouldn't be able to rely on
P&A's fandom for it and I'd probably need to suspend most other creative activities just to promote it. That sort of effort's going into
Guilded Age right now, instead.