Drawing on Experience: KC Councilor

By Alex Dueben

KC Councilor makes comics about a lot of subjects, from the legacy of Stonewall to access to hormones, to how transitioning has changed his experiences of the world to, more recently, parenting. He doesn’t make many comics that are explicitly about being trans, but a trans and queer lens is at the heart of so much of his work. Some of that is because transitioning forced him to see the world in new and different ways and to convey that experience in his comics.

Some of it is because making comics and transitioning are tied together for him because he only started drawing and making comics in his thirties. Now a professor at Southern Connecticut State University, Councilor was getting his PhD at the University of Wisconsin when he took a class with the artist Lynda Barry.

“She loves working with people who have not drawn since they were kids,” Councilor said. “The way that I describe it is like finding your fluent language. Discovering a way that I could express myself—especially at that particular moment of realizing I was trans and wanted to transition. That’s a really complex thing to do, practically and emotionally and socially. I had a hard time expressing a lot of those nuances in language, but I could draw comics about them to really convey what that experience was like.”

“It became a way to both deal with difficult stuff myself, but then to connect with others,” Councilor said. For him, drawing isn’t just about the work he creates, but it’s a process and a way to process information, which he tries to convey in different workshops and in different kinds of projects. “Basically, if I’m coming in to work with a group, I talk with the person who’s organizing it about what the group’s about, what the history has been, and then we sort of co-create it together,” Councilor said. “I always build in some warm-ups that get people comfortable with drawing because so many people are so uncomfortable drawing. I do things that I’ve learned from Lynda, like drawing with your eyes closed, drawing monsters, different things to just get people moving.”

“A friend of mine studies the rhetoric of homelessness, and how it impacts policy. We came up with something together, which was to have all the students in the class draw a picture of a homeless person. So, everybody does on a piece of paper with a marker. And then you can put them all up on the wall. And then you can visually see like, oh, we all have this idea in our head of what a ‘homeless person’ looks like. “That leads to a lot of interesting ways of unpacking where does that image come from? What’s the actual picture of homelessness? What’s the impact that we all had this image in our minds without even talking about it? So, there are a lot of different ways that you can use drawings to kind of get at collective unconsciousness or assumptions.”

This work is part of what he does in the Department of Communication, Media, & Screen Studies at Southern Connecticut State University. “I’ve had my students do the same thing. Draw images you associate with femininity or masculinity. What does a trans person look like? And many of them are drawing the same things,” Councilor continued. “It’s a way that they can discover something, where we can collectively discover something; where the point is not, ‘let’s make beautiful pictures,’ but ‘let’s learn something we didn’t already know.’”

Councilor has been a participant in Graphic Medicine, where people have been using comics to talk about medical issues and public health, something that has only gained momentum in the past decade. “I like to connect with people who are doing interesting health and public health research and to think about how we could use drawing either as part of a research process or to disseminate the research that they’re doing. So, I visit people’s classes and do little drawing workshops all the time to spread the good word of comics,” Councilor said with a laugh.

His current book project is centered around parenting. And like his earlier book, Between You and Me: Transitional Comics, the new book is about the experience of being a parent who happens to be trans. “We were navigating the fertility and pregnancy process,” Councilor said of the couple’s lengthy journey first at Yale and then at UConn. “Another thing, too, that I think is not talked about often enough is pregnancy difficulties. Unless you’re in a forum on the internet, the mainstream is like ‘yay, pregnancy and babies.’ Only now are we starting to talk about miscarriage and menopause and all this sort of taboo things.”

This is precisely the kind of work that graphic medicine has tried to promote and share. “And then of course what it’s like to have a baby and now a toddler. And wanting to do that for a couple of different reasons. I’m a cartoonist, and, my God, it’s very complicated to have children. There’s just a lot of material to work with,” Councilor said smiling. “But also, just wanting my daughter to have a really strong narrative about who she is and where she comes from. To make it for her—and also sharing that book with other people who may have similar or somehow intersecting journeys.”

Councilor was very introspective when we spoke, and it’s clear that his recent work has caused him to think differently about his work. “One thing I have found very interesting about b

ecoming a parent is that I have much more in common with straight people than I did before. There are some queer people who have kids, but the biggest thing in my life, we no longer have in common [with many other queer people]. Ironically, it’s been a way to connect with way more people as a shared human experience. And that’s a conflict for me when I also feel particularly vulnerable with some of those same people,” he said talking about the recent election.

“Truly, I am struggling with this at this very moment. I mean, I’m going to make the book,” Councilor said. “I believe in documenting life as an essayist. I’ve come to realize that more recently. I think about both my first book and even more so the one I’m working on now as a collection of essays—not how to parent, but observations from a parent—from a particular trans lens.”

“Parenting is really hard, and it brings up a lot of stuff. I think it’s helpful to read a lot of different ways that people deal with these common things,” Councilor said. “Comics that are about my family in this moment feel different after the election than before. I had a sense—maybe this is naïve—but I do believe stories are really important. I think we need more stories about families that are not the straight, nuclear family. Which most families are not! There are stepparents, divorces, single parents, adoptive families, all kinds of stuff going on. I want to contribute to a bigger narrative about fatherhood and what that can look like.”