by Joe Carlough, Illustrated by Ally Shwed
Microcosm Publishing
11/7/2023, paperback
SKU: 9781648412097
Heteronormative platitudes got you down? Color these joyful queer affirmations instead! Next time someone pulls out an old walnut like, "It's just a phase, they'll grow out of it," you can correct it to, "I love your strong sense of self!" Sick of hearing trite shit like, "It could be worse"? Cross it out with a Sharpie and replace it with, "I'm sorry you're going through this." Not everyone in your life may know how to talk about feelings and affirm your experience, but you can do it for yourself and the community you create. Joe Carlough's thoughtful and humorous revisions of everyday platitudes pair perfectly with Ally Shwed's colorable scenarios of all sorts of queer people bonding with each other, expressing their emotions, and learning to love themselves a little more every day.
About the Contributors:
Joe Carlough is a queer artist from Philadelphia. He runs the zine press Displaced Snail, the DIY record label This & That Tapes, and together with his partner Katie Haegele, the East Falls Zine Reading Room, a cataloged collection of over 1,600 zines. To date, he's sold over 24,000 copies of roughly 300 zine titles, most his own work, some for hire or in collaboration with organizations like Microcosm Publishing, Joyful Noise Recordings, Womanly Mag, and the Mütter Museum. He's worked with artists for publishers from indie to Random House, and musicians such as Deerhoof, No Joy, Spencer Moody, and Serengeti.
Ally Shwed is a cartoonist from Jersey City, NJ. She attended the Savannah College of Art & Design and has created work for clients such as The Boston Globe, The Nib, Vox, The Intercept, and First Second Books, among many others. She also publishes comics through her micropress, Little Red Bird, which has been nominated for multiple awards; and when she's not creating editorial cartoons or editing anthologies, she's usually drawing cats.