{"id":720,"date":"2021-02-12T16:20:24","date_gmt":"2021-02-12T16:20:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/galesaur.com\/tfww\/?p=720"},"modified":"2022-08-25T17:49:52","modified_gmt":"2022-08-25T17:49:52","slug":"the-gargification","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/galesaur.com\/tfww\/the-gargification\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gargification"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Words cannot encapsulate how much JOY this brings me.

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Reader, I could extol the many virtues of this piece, or I could get right down to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today’s guest is the brilliant Ben Wilgus<\/a><\/strong>: an award-winning cartoonist, writer, editor, and – what timing! – birthday-haver. He is deeply powerful and dearly beloved, and this conversation was just a huge treat. Brew yourself a tasty tea and sit back with us, won’t you?

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Good morning, Ben! Today, we are indulgently imagining a stroll through a sunny botanical garden. Please join me in observing this very small cactus.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am picturing the very small cactus that sits in a place of honor in my Animal Crossing<\/em> house. Internally, the remainder of this conversation will be conducted whilst taking afternoon tea in that sunny digital courtyard, discussing the price of turnips in between other business.

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Our stonks have been doing a deep dive for two weeks now and I am surviving only on the kindness of friends. ALAS.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, first of all, I need to know and the people deserve to know. Please, I implore you: explain everything about this piece. No stone left unturned, if you will.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gale, it is hard to know where to begin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was drawn as an entry for the \u201cMonthly Gargoyles<\/em> Contest<\/a>\u201d — a community challenge in which artists would all draw a new work based on the same theme, and then those works were voted on. This particular entry was drawn for the September 1999 theme, \u201cMystery Gargs,\u201d which confusingly enough was supposed to be Gargoyle versions of comic characters. I didn\u2019t know<\/em> that I was a tiny gay, but I was definitely a tiny gay, and so immediately hauled out my Tank Girl<\/em> trades and began the process of selectively copying from them in order to create this work of unblinking shamelessness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like…there\u2019s so much <\/em>going on here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The process of creating a gargoyle version of an extant character — of \u201cgargi-fying\u201d them, if you will — is more complicated than one might think. Will you preserve the existing skin color? What about the interior of the wings? Will you choose from the library of established wing-shapes — bat, feathered, pterodactyl — or strike out into new territory? Will there be horns or ridges on the brow? The knees and elbows? The joints of the wings? Will the wings feature small grasping claws at their apex? Will the tail taper to a point, or will it bear spikes or a hard knob of bone? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then, of course, there are potential modifications to the costume. As you can see, I elected to accent the inhuman aspects of this transformative interpretation of Jamie Hewlett\u2019s Tank Girl<\/em>, including details such as a tail-warmer and wing piercings. There\u2019s no \u201cright\u201d way to do this, but personally, I feel it\u2019s best to lean in<\/em> to the theme, rather than fight against it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And finally, there\u2019s the style in which this was drawn. Those familiar with my body of work will see that while this is easily identifiable as a 90s Wilgus \u2018Shop, certain elements borrow heavily from Hewlett\u2019s Tank Girl<\/em> comics. I\u2019d say the hair, the lettering, and the smoke plume are the most obvious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please note that I had to go digging around through Archive.org<\/a> to double-check my memory here, and so can present you with this contemporary artifact:

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If you don\u2019t mind my interjecting for JUST a moment\u2026 first of all, I adore all of this. It truly encapsulates the mood of a generation. The *laff*. The ^_^. But also, your signature? It\u2019s looking at me. Right at me.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometime in middle school, I began signing all documents with a smiley face after my name, heavily influenced by Wakko Warner and by my own desire to be fully on my bullshit at all times. It\u2019s difficult to replicate with a keyboard, but the closest interpretation would be <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<=\u2019P~<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only….smiley-er.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When first establishing myself as an online entity, I created the handle \u201cAl =)\u201d for use on the Gargoyles Fan Website and Station 8, the two primary nodes of Gargoyles<\/em> fandom at the time. While I dropped the smiley face from my signature on school papers, it became cemented at the core of my fandom identity. Over time, it evolved into the icon found in my signature on this piece.

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Perfect drawing, perfect smiley.

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That is <\/strong>wonderful.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You drew this in the year of our Lord nineteen-ninety-nine, a time which witnessed the release of Adobe Photoshop 5.5, some gentle concerns about computer programming, and the birth of <\/strong>The Matrix, <\/em><\/strong>among other things. What was the <\/strong>Gargoyles <\/em><\/strong>fan community like? How did you get into it? How did your participation in online fandom affect your creative process? Basically, please tell me everything about your Internet Experience.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I suppose I\u2019ll bring you with me to the first step on the road to this image: the 1994 debut of the Disney animated show, Gargoyles<\/em>. I was thirteen, I had spent most of middle school devoted to Star Trek: The Next Generation<\/em>, I loved cartoons but wished that the Disney Afternoon wasn\u2019t so silly<\/em>, I was the kind of baby nerd who only cared about adult characters and wanted all of them to be low-key wrestling with an existential crisis at all times. As such, Gargoyles <\/em>and all of its angsty byzantine melodrama may as well have been crafted for me personally. Also, <\/em>nearly all of the characters were cool monster people with wings and tails and huge fun-to-draw feet so: flawless, perfect, not a single complaint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The energy this EXUDES.

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The show debuted right as I was starting my freshman year of high school, and it just-so-happened that I lucked into a school that had some pretty unusual infrastructure for the mid-90s: Internet-enabled computers which we could use to do basically anything, as long as we were comfortable doing it in a public place with teachers potentially lurking behind us. I was a giant-ass nerdlord with zero shame, so I immediately plugged \u201cGargoyles\u201d into Alta Vista<\/a> and thus, propelled myself directly into fandom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fast-forward through four years of exactly what you\u2019d expect: Geocities fansite, chatting with college students on primitive auto-reloading HTML \u201ccomment rooms,\u201d being taught how to use ICQ and IRC and then sneaking out of bed to yell about shipping at midnight. I was gifted non-Geocities webspace by one of the guys who ran a Gargoyle<\/em>s fansite I was heavily involved in, and I taught myself all of the essentials of 90s fandom: elaborate website layouts built on HTML tables, Webring curation, and stealing time on the yearbook computers to color fanart in Photoshop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tank Garg was drawn during my freshman year at NYU, at the cusp of my very first fannish upheaval. Gargoyles<\/em> was my first fandom, and shall always remain dear to my heart. But the second was about to arrive.

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You very kindly provided me with a selection of your old fanart, and between this and the timeframe we\u2019re looking at, I think I have a guess as to what that second fandom might have been. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ben\u2026 were you, like, super into Harry Potter?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I super was!!!! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And here\u2019s the thing: when it comes to every other fandom I\u2019ve ever been involved with, no matter how nuts things got or how much time has gone by, I\u2019ve held onto the little nugget of sincere affection that got me to care about the thing in the first place. Like, I have made myself cry with decade-old fan soundtracks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that\u2019s not how it\u2019s panned out in this specific case, for a lot <\/em>of reasons. Most of which you can probably guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was deeply, deeply<\/em> involved in Harry Potter fandom in my early twenties, starting while I was in college and carrying into my first year as an Adult With A Real Job. I ran an invitation-only fanwork archive which gained some notoriety at the time. I made a lot of wickedly smart friends. For the first time in my life, I spent hours and hours on in-depth conversations about the craft of writing as I discussed the books themselves and the stories my friends and I built around them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then, as the series progressed, my ability to reconcile my idealistic hopes with the reality of the text eventually collapsed. I remember having pretty serious arguments with close friends and colleagues regarding the morally bankrupt architecture of JKR\u2019s wizarding world, the disturbing choices she made regarding the fates of her characters, and what their stories revealed about her thoughts on what makes for a good and honorable life. I read the seventh book on a bus coming home from Otakon, and within a year I think I\u2019d given all of my copies of the series away. I went from the white hot center of HP fandom to basically never wanting to talk to anyone about it at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Needless to say, I was not particularly surprised when JKR took a hard turn into TERF-dom. And by then, I\u2019d long-since shed any emotional attachment to the series. But looking back, it really does feel like a break-up with a shitty ex. On the one hand, I\u2019m obviously better off, and as time goes on I\u2019m uncomplicatedly grateful to my past self for deciding to leave. But on the other hand, I invested so much <\/em>time and thought into this world and these characters, I held them very close and dear in my heart during a formative time in my life. And narrative is so important to me! It\u2019s what I do for a living! It takes up more room in my head than basically anything else! I know I have a lot of company in this, but it\u2019s unsettling when one of your formative texts turns out to have been poison all along.

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Thank you, sincerely, for opening up about this. I know we here at the Fanart Emporium have historically kept things Light and Fun, but being emotionally invested in fandom can also have its complications – and I\u2019ve definitely had to grapple with this as well.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The important thing is, all of these experiences made you,<\/em> and you\u2019re amazing!! The conclusion to your epic queer time-travel duology, Chronin<\/a>, <\/em>was released in late 2019 (available at your favorite indie bookstores and comic shops, everybody go read it). You\u2019ve spoken in <\/strong>other interviews<\/strong><\/a> about how creating these books over the course of a decade helped you to kind of examine your own personal experiences and process what you were going through in your life, and I love that Chronin <\/em>is out there in the world for other people who might be at similar points on their queer discovery paths now (although hopefully with less timeline displacement). Would you say that your teen fanart served a similar exploratory purpose for you? Were there themes that you noticed yourself coming back to?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

God, it absolutely <\/em>did, although of course I had no awareness of this at all at the time! Zero!! The idea of \u201cslash\u201d shipping (ie what we called The Gay Stuff back in the day) had like….never really occurred to me before I got to college. And then I read a Harry\/Draco fic by Astolat<\/a>, mostly at random, and was immediately like…oh. OH.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I was still almost completely <\/em>detached from and ignorant of the culture and community of actual queer people. So I\u2019d latch onto visual conventions of how characters were drawn and the kinds of clothes they wore or situations they were in, because I found them compelling, and incorporated a mishmash of all of it into the fanart I drew. And looking back, it\u2019s some gay shit!<\/em> Often also kinky as hell <\/em>on top of everything else! And I had no idea! Please imagine 20-year-old Ben drawing Draco Malfoy in a BDSM collar while thinking about how he\u2019s obsessed with Dreamy Rival Harry Potter and how maybe they could go to a loud club and dance to Depeche Mode someday, all while thinking, \u201cThis is nice also I am completely straight and boring and none of this has anything to do with me :)\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[screaming]<\/em><\/strong>

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Sighing wistfully for an AU where JKR isn’t determined to endanger the lives of countless people.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In defense of Foolish Young Ben, though, I did<\/em> encounter some pretty brutal gatekeeping at the time, mostly from straight women \u201c\u201d\u201dfriends\u201d\u201d\u201d telling me that I was being gross to be so interested in gay culture. I\u2019m pretty sure they thought I was trying to fetishize these poor gay boys (fictional or otherwise) but looking back, it\u2019s so obvious that I was a tiny gay moth drawn to the flame of queer culture and queer content. I just had no idea what I was doing!\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I drew a lot of intensely horny deeply queer fanart and hibernated inside of it for…. *coughs*adecadeortwo

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