Lion Forge Comics to Release ‘Gender Queer: A Memoir’

Lion Forge Comics on Thursday announced during its “Diversity and Inclusivity” panel at San Diego Comic-Con that it will publish cartoonist Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir next year.

Kobabe, who uses the pronouns e/em/eir, is best known for short work in anthologies such as Mine!, Gothic Tales of Haunted Love and The Secret Loves of Geeks; e has also contributed to The Nib. Kobabe launched Gender Queer Comics as an online project to help explain eir gender identity and asexuality to family; the Lion Forge edition — Kobabe’s first full-length solo work — goes further to act as a guide to all about what genderqueer identity means, and how it can be thought about and discussed by allies, advocates and… well, everyone else.

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“I built the outline of this book by paging through 14 years of high school and college journals and pulling out everything I felt like I could never say,” said Kobabe. “I spent years confused by gender, feeling trapped between two poles, always longing for a third option.”

E went on, “When I finally came out as non-binary to my family their response was ‘We love you, we support you, but we don’t really understand what you are talking about.’ In many ways, this book is an extended letter to them about how my experience of gender has always been non-binary, long before I had words to explain it. I hope other non-binary people read it and see a reflection of their own experiences. Almost more so, I hope that the communities around non-binary people — co-workers, teachers, families, friends — read this book and are able to understand their loved ones better.”

“Maia’s touching and unflinching memoir is required reading for everyone who has ever discovered they are not quite the person everyone around them thinks they are, and for those of us who want to understand that experience,” Lion Forge editor-in-chief Andrea Colvin said in a statement about the project. “Maia spares no detail in this deeply affecting account of eir search for eir true gender expression, even when that expression turns out to be something e had realized was possible.”

Gender Queer: A Memoir will be released in May. Read on for an exclusive preview.