Dylan Edwards: Tackling the Comic World as a Queer, Trans Artist

Dylan Edwards has been an artist for as long as he can remember.

As a comic artist today, he recounts looking at newspaper comics as a child, copying Peanuts and Garfield illustrations and hoping one day it would be his name next to the daily panel of illustrations. 

“It was not until I found out that being a newspaper comic strip artist meant producing 365 comics a year, I was like, ‘Perhaps that is not the path for me,’” Edwards says, though he moved forward in his creative pursuit, eventually majoring in art in college and embracing traditional drawing and painting.

Edwards says he didn’t start producing comic work on a regular basis until after he came out as queer, which has since acted as a prevailing theme throughout his work.

“That was when I got inspired by the idea of doing comics that focused on queer themes,” Edwards says. “Before that, I just kind of spit out a few different ideas, but nothing had really solidified into a project that could maintain my attention, so I started doing comics, kind of on a semi-regular basis.”

Soonafter, Edwards also came out as trans and began to explore that in his comics.

This was in the early 2000s, when the comic industry’s queer representation was nearly non-existent. At the time, Edwards began searching for queer newspapers and publications to publish his work, eventually starting a regular queer sports comic for howstuffworks.com, which led to consistent work creating editorial cartoons for a queer newspaper in Texas for several years.

Edwards says one of his main aims was to tell stories that have yet to be told. He says the comic space in the 2000s was predominantly cis, white men talking about their experiences and writing from their lenses, and while queer comics existed, they were not plentiful or accessible.

“When I started doing comics, there were almost no trans cartoonists with any visibility to speak of,” Edwards says. “I know that there were one or two other people out there who are working on comics with trans themes, but there was just, you know—it was kind of this like vast wasteland of nothingness if you wanted comics that had, you know, positive portrayals of trans characters written by trans people.”

Edwards created the representation he didn’t have for himself, moving forward to create comics specifically from his lens as a queer, asexual, transmasuline person, leading to his autobiographical series QAT (Queer, Ace, Trans) Person.

Edwards says that the landscape for queer and trans comic artists has change pretty drastically since he first began more than 20 years ago. He believes this is, in part, because over time publishers found there was a market for queer and trans material as society’s attitudes toward LGBTQ continued to progress. He also says that there has been a major shift of queer and trans comics being seen solely as adult material.

“You know, if you have a story with straight people, where a husband and wife kiss each other, or a kid has a crush on another kid, that isn’t automatically considered to be adult material, and the same standard should apply to queer stuff. So, that conversation has happened a lot over the past 20 years, to the point where now, there are a lot of mainstream publishers who are like, ‘We totally want to publish stuff for queer kids.’”

He says that he’s noticed the shift in demand for queer, young adult content as well, with more parents and enthusiasts at conventions approaching him for stories for the queer and trans children in their lives over the years.

Currently, Edwards is dipping his toes into this new realm, with his web comic Valley of the Silk Sky, a young adult series heavily focused on trans and queer characters in a sci-fi setting. Edwards says that diving into fiction that allows for world building also allows him to create a universe for LGBTQ people where queerphobia and transphobia don’t exist.

“What happens when you build a culture from the ground up, where they are not transphobic? Like, (the characters aren’t) going through a period of transphobia; they’re not going through a period of homophobia, and then getting over that—they never had that in the first place. So how does that change how the culture perceives gender in the first place?”

Edwards hopes the comic world will continue grow in the future, specifically that queer comic artists are able to write queer stories, and stories featuring queer characters, without being typecast or pigeon-holed as that being their exclusive niche.

“For the most part, when I’m doing a panel at a convention, they’re like, ‘We’ll put you on the trans panel; we’ll put you on the queer panel,’ but it’s like, ‘No, put me on the fantasy world-building panel,” Edwards says. “I mean, there’s definitely been ways in which opportunities have expanded, but there’s still a lot of gatekeeping going on in ways that people might not even quite appreciate that they’re gatekeeping.”

Edwards says he currently has “a bunch of irons in the fire right now” as far as current projects. In addition to Valley of the Silk Sky, Edwards also produces OFM’s monthly comic. He still produces QAT Person and other anthology comics, which he typically publishes online until there are enough to publish in a collection.

To keep up with Dylan Edwards’ work, check out his website studiondr.com. For more on Valley of the Silk Sky, visit valleyofthesilksky.com.