My latest comic, Ixtab, is now available for sale!
As the blurb says:
Ixtab is a reigning rock-queen, making her Mayan cultural heritage the cornerstone of her music and her act. But how does that fit with the family that adopted and raised her? Written by Sigrid Ellis. Art by K.C. Solano. Technical assistance provided by Erik Nelson.
This project came out of the iFanboy Sequentially Ever After Contest. I wrote a ten-page script and asked K.C. Solano if she could do a bit of art for the contest. She did, and our entry won an honorable mention from iFanboy.
But Ixtab means a bit more to me than that. Ixtab is a result of my decision to use my comics writing to make comics more inclusive. To make, in comics, the invisible visible. To write stories about the breadth of humanity, to include people of color and women and children and the elderly, to include people with differing levels of physical and mental ability, to include a variety of genders and sexual orientations. To, simply, put my money where my mouth is and make the world a tiny bit wider, a tiny bit more open, with each thing I write.
Ixtab tells of a girl adopted from Guatemala by a white family. It tells of the importance of names, of myths, of families made and found and lost. It’s also about a goth rock star who is not on drugs, not sleeping around, who has a plan and the passion of being a teenager.
Ixtab is for my daughter, who loves Pink and Britney Spears and Paramore, who loves macabre stories about dismembered heads, who notices that she is often the only dark-skinned child in a group of white people, who loves her flamenco class and likes to sing and play the piano.
Karla Xiomara, this comic is for you. The first of many, I hope.
Filed under: Comics, Ixtab, Optimistic Humanist, Parenting, Racism | Tagged: Ixtab
