Seeing Him PDF Now Available for Download!

the cover for seeing him, a transgender romantic comedy comic. On it we see a city skyline in negative silhouette. Walking below it are a young woman and a transgender man, smiling and holding hands.
Seeing Him Written by Kai and Drawn by me. June 2015.

Seeing Him is the story of Kate, a roller skating rink owner, and Adam, a transgender doctor, who fall in love and start making a life together. Also, shenanigans ensue.

Since its publication online in 2015, Seeing Him has had two homes – both of which, unfortunately, ended up closing down.

But the third time’s the charm! Seeing Him is now available as a PDF download in my Ko-Fi shop for $1.

As an addendum: In the original webcomic run of the story, a page in Chapter 2 had a deeply negative reception. After a review of the comic, I – Kelci – have elected to remove this page from the final product. This is because the page in question did not impact the rest of the story in any meaningful way. I have done this for the comfort of the reader, and to reflect the growth of the author and artist behind this project.

So if you have the means, get the PDF comic over on Ko-Fi!

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading!

You. Are. Awesome.

Writing for Comics 101 – Making Pages You Can Actually Read

In today’s lesson of Writing for Comics 101, let’s talk about making pages you can ACTUALLY read.

How do we do that? By not packing the pages with an obscene amount of dialogue.

Or at least, if you HAVE to keep so much dialogue, how to pace it out so it’s not a word brick.

This technique is something discussed in more detail in Making Comics by Scott McCloud, so what I’ll do for today’s post is share my mistakes so you can learn from them.

Let’s take a look at this page from Seeing Him, written by Kia Crawford and drawn by me:

seeing him transgender webcomic page 25

To be honest, there’s a way to get the information across that we need, without using a fuck-ton of dialogue.

We could:

  • split this between two pages,
  • condense the banter,
  • condense the backstory drop,
  • change the page layout,
  • change the balloon layout,
  • or any combination of these.

At least past me had the sense to split the dialogue into separate balloons. That way the page felt, at the time, a little less like a word brick.

This is me spit-balling some ideas right now on how to fix this page of Seeing Him: we could change the camera focus in the second and third panels, to cut away to framed photos on the walls. Those photos could showcase the history of the venue. With that edit, we can split the dialogue up some more, re-frame where the speech balloons sit, and make the page feel like less of a collection of talking heads.

Compare this page to The Legend of Jamie Roberts, page 65, written and drawn by me.

the legend of jamie roberts genderqueer lgbtq pirate adventure webcomic page 65

Here, I let the space breathe and tell the story for me, without so many words.

Whether you can draw or not, comics are a visual medium. Let the environment and scenery describe for you what words could not.

If you have questions, or need feedback, let me know in the comments. I’m happy to help.

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading!

You. Are. Awesome.

‘Seeing Him’ Has a New Online Home

Seeing Him is the story of Kate, a small business owner, and Adam, a trans male doctor, who fall in love and have adventures with their outrageous friends. It was a webcomic funded on KickStarter, then funded on Patreon to keep it going, and updated from June 2015 to December 2015 on Pink Dollar Comics.

However, Pink Dollar Comics is now gone. Which also meant that Seeing Him briefly disappeared.

Now, I’m bringing it back online.

seeing him webcomic kate yay

Continue reading “‘Seeing Him’ Has a New Online Home”