ShortBox's online comics fair is great (and ends soon!)
I'm writing in haste here to tell you about ShortBox Comics Fair, because it is an online yearly event that has been illuminating my month of October for four years now. This year, it will end on October 31st (8 PM UK time); so here are a few words just in case this post reaches people who would be interested.
ShortBox Comics Fair is a digital comics fair for indie comic artists from all over the world (with all comics available in English, and possibly other languages), and I think it's really great. Each year in October, it houses new comics, only available during that month. Some authors may pursue physical or digital publishing elsewhere later down the line, but clearly not all of them; and so this is a wonderful incentive to discover comic artists. It's also just nice to browse titles without algorithm nonsense and to support actual artists in this capitalist AI hellscape.
If you read this before November 2025, you can see that for yourself here.
Each title is accompanied by a little blurb, a few pages, and content warnings. I've been buying each past edition a batch of titles that caught my eyes based mostly on that (or other people's recommendations), and it's been full of happy surprises. There's always been some title or other that stayed with me vividly.
This post is also in part to tell you about two of them that found me this year. Both have made me bawl my eyes out from how much I felt like they captured something of me, in different ways, and I need to talk about them.
The first is PolyBiCarbonate Lifeforms, by Deepti Megh.
It retraces the author's understanding of her bisexuality during quarantine, her first sapphic relationship, her first contact with polyamory. It's full of queer joy and ache and mutual support and communication and it just feels really raw. It's also a lot of things intertwined with this: struggling with mental health, both alone and as a couple, and sacrificing oneself for the other; grieving the death of animal companions; understanding one's needs and wants, easing panic attacks, finding intimacy; unlearning and accepting insecurities with a therapist; building queer homes and support networks.
My experience of queerness isn't the same; but something in Deepti Megh's depiction just shakes me to my core. She captures something of the euphoria and the struggles and the attempts at taking care of each other that I have felt so strongly in the past years with my partner and ex-partners; something of the glowing joy and spiraling difficulties of a queer daily life with low mental health that I just don't find in most fictions or non-fictions.
Somehow, PolyBiCarbonate Lifeforms echoes so much of my recent relationships in the soft and safe queerness it carries, both in the romantic and non-romantic forms they take. It's the kind of work of art I want to send to people to make them understand what it feels like. Words fail me, and this comic doesn't.
I ended it in tears, and I hope it gets to reach others, too.
The second comic I want to talk about is An Excess of Self, by pautipeep.
An Excess of Self is a long, uninterrupted talk of two characters on a hike. They talk of the (beautifully illustrated) fauna and flora they see, of being overwhelmed, of difficulties about fitting in and communicating, of their sense of self, of how to survive in a world going to shit.
Both characters are also slowly understanding themselves as autistic. It's exceedingly rare to see works of fiction depicting autistic characters that feel like fully-fledged people (these two really are); and even more with two of them interacting. I have felt kinship in many things they do, from the sensory overload of a walk in nature to infodumping about fun biology facts. Feeling seen in all this, once again, is an incredible feeling.
More than anything else, this comic wrecked me emotionally in the way it talks about the self. My sense of identity is blurry and bruised, and one of the two characters describes hers in a similar way so, so aptly. And not only in bad; also in what it allows of feeling interwoven with people, how powerful it is in the right context, how it doesn't need fixing but asking the question of how to take care and bring joy to a wavering self.
I initially considered copying excerpts of one of the characters' monologues, but it felt like weakening the actual act of reading this in the comic. So I won't.
I don't know how to tell you this in any other way. Pautipeep just gets it. I just didn't think I'd read it put this well into words (and pictures!) one day, and this comic just does. I've broken into tears from that feeling several times through my read, and I'm probably going to print and stick some of these panels to my bedroom walls at some point.
An Excess of Self also ends with an important message about how humanity is built on the stories we tell, how they reflect and shape our views of the world, and how important it is to be mindful of how the ones we re-tell in these cruel times affect other living beings. Those are not explicitly mentioned, but reading this it is hard not to think of the barely halted Palestinian genocide, the current wave of anti-trans violence and laws, or the general rise of far-right ideas and governments across the world right now, among others.
I wish you strength to survive, interwoven with the people and places and beings around you. An Excess of Self, to me, captures some of that feeling of supporting each other, being kind to ourselves, and carrying on the best we can.
This is more or less all that I wanted to say. I can only encourage you to buy some comics at the fair before it ends. There's so much: from sapphic crush pushing you to break out of the mold in an all-girls' school to short sad poetry about lesbian erasure, by way of cooking-oriented slice of life with a talking cat (if we move away from my obvious interest in sapphic stories), I've only scratched the surface of more than 140 titles still available for a few days.
I'm going to buy a new batch while I still can. I hope you find stories that move you too.
Happy reading!