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Melanie Gillman is an American queer non-binary cartoonist, illustrator, and lecturer, specializing in LGBTQ comics for Young Adult readers, including the webcomic As the Crow Flies.[1][2] Their comics have been published by Boom! Studios,[3] Iron Circus Comics, Lion Forge Comics, Slate,[4] VICE,[5] Prism Comics, Northwest Press, and The Nib.[6]
Education
Gillman received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Colorado Boulder and a Master of Fine Arts from the Center for Cartoon Studies.[7]
Career
Teaching
Gillman began teaching Professional Practices at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in 2015, and was later appointed Senior Lecturer in Comics.[8] They teach courses at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design and the Art Students' League of Denver and have been a writing fellow with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship program since 2017.[9]
Publications
Gillman's first graphic novel Smbitten – about lesbians, swing-dancing, fancy hats, and vampires – was produced as part of their Masters thesis at the Center for Cartoon Studies.[10]
In 2012 they began As the Crow Flies,[11] a webcomic about a 13-year-old African American queer girl who finds herself at an all-white Christian backpacking camp. The first volume of As the Crow Flies was funded through Kickstarter.[12] The Amelia Bloomer Project named it as one of their 2019 top 10 books for readers from birth to age 18.[13] As the Crow Flies received the Stonewall Book Award Honor in 2018,[14] was also nominated for the "Best Digital/Webcomic" Eisner Award in 2014[15] and the "Outstanding Comic" Ignatz Award in 2016.[16] The Society of Illustrators awarded Gillman a gold medal for it.[17]
Gillman was co-editor with Kori Michele Handwerker and a contributor to The Other Side,[18] an anthology of 19 queer paranormal romance comics published in 2016. In 2016, they began writing an ongoing Steven Universe comics series for Boom! Studios.[3]
Under Lerner Publishing Group, Gillman published Stage Dreams in 2019.[19] The story centers around a female Latinx outlaw and a runaway trans woman in New Mexico during the Civil War.[20] Citing their interest in historical fiction and the lack of queer representation in such stories, Gillman aimed to create a story which depicted queer history prior to the Civil Rights movement.[19]
In 2019, Gillman received the opportunity to create a compilation of queer fairy tales from Random House Graphic after the success of a series of queer fairy-tale comics Gillman published online garnered widespread popularity. [21] The opportunity led to the publication of Other Ever Afters in 2022. [22] Gillman noted following a Western European fairytale format of storytelling to reinterpret old stories in a more modern point of view. [23] Gillman's intent behind the stories of Other Ever Afters was to provoke readers into thinking about how women and girls are treated within traditional tales and stories. [23]
Personal life
Gillman lives in Columbus, Ohio. Gillman is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns.[22]
Bibliography
Books
As the Crow Flies (2017)
Care Bears Volume 1: Rainbow River Rescue (2016)
The Other Side: An Anthology of Queer Paranormal Romance (2016)
Steven Universe #1 (2017)
Steven Universe #2 (2017)
Steven Universe #3 (2017)
Steven Universe #4 (2017)
Steven Universe #8 (2017)
Steven Universe: Warp Tour (2017)
Steven Universe: Punching Up (2018)
Stage Dreams (2019)
Other Ever Afters: New Queer Fairy Tales (2022)
References
External links
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