The Portland State University Collaborative Comics Project aims to change the narrative around homelessness through ethnographic cartooning based on the experiences of PSU students. The project will culminate into the 10 comics published as a booklet and sold by Street Roots vendors. Street Roots spoke with 8 of the artists to learn more about their process. Read all the interviews here.
Cartoonist Quinn Amacher has been self-publishing comics since 2015, and doodling since childhood, but her comic for Portland State University’s Collaborative Comics Project is her first non-fiction work. Amacher’s work generally focuses on the surreal, exploring real-life themes and social issues with fantastical elements. She’s currently in the process of serializing her five-issue comic series “Syncing,” a story set in a flooded neighborhood. Her comic for PSU’s project, “Street Lights,” tells the story of Lee, a trans man who experienced houselessness in the 1990s.
Sarah Hansell : What themes do you usually like to focus on or explore in your work? What sort of comics do you like to create?
Quinn Amacher : They’re usually always pretty surreal, but using that surreality to explore some human truths. As part of my end-of-program project for the IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) program, for instance, I did a comic that actually was about houselessness, although in an oblique way. It was about a mother and daughter looking for bottles together, and then the daughter has to overcome an encounter with a malicious person made entirely out of trash. So sort of fantastic, but trying to communicate something real.
Hansell : You really focused on sharing Lee’s story through his experiences of loss and of community and I was wondering what brought you to that choice?
Amacher : Yeah, he had actually requested that the story focus on the people he had known during his time experiencing houselessness. I think his motivation for that becomes explicitly clear on the last page where he writes that he, being the adult human he is now, that has a job and is housed, is the result of a tremendous amount of collective effort and resources.
He had said that he wanted to focus on the people he knew, and because he wanted to do that I did it, but it also resonated with me because I think so much of what you could say sustains the culture of enforced houselessness is the ideology of individualism. And so making a comic about houselessness also being a resistance against individualism, which is an ideology which is so latent in everything we do and in all the stories we read, really appealed to me.
Hansell : What impact do you see this project having on readers?
Amacher : (For) the project as a whole, the fact that it’s going to be sold through Street Roots means a lot to me. Like I said, I sell comics in stores around town, but just to know that my work is going to be on the street feels really incredible. I don’t know how they’re going to format the book when they make it, but it is going to be full color. So already I imagine it possibly standing out to somebody who might regularly encounter a Street Roots vendor and not buy a copy of Street Roots …
And I mentioned before the belief I have in the political potential of comics. I think because we’re in such a visual culture, and because so many people have grown up with comics and cartoons, that kind of imagery draws people in, in a way that maybe text doesn’t. And my hope is that these comics will draw people in and allow them to see themselves in these stories, so that when they encounter houseless people or when they think about houselessness in the future, they won’t be able to abstract it away from themselves. Because through these stories they will have experienced a tiny bit of it already. Does that make sense?
Hansell : Absolutely. One thing I was thinking about in reading this comic was how common houselessness is for queer and trans folks, and trans folks in particular. How do you see this comic contributing to awareness and understanding around the experience of houselessness among queer and trans folks?
Amacher : I think the reality of transition — not all trans people undergo or need to undergo medical transition — but the reality of that process is that access to it is incredibly restricted. Even more so than access to housing. In some of the photos that Lee included, some of the friends that he had taken photos of — and these didn’t make their way into the comic — were trans …
I just think about houseless people that are trans that have access not only to housing, but to any kind of gender care or transition care, and so it’s kind of a double erasure then, because all houseless people are already erased. And it feels weird to say that they have both their humanity and their gender erased, because I think gender is included in humanity. I guess my hope is that it might create more questions in people’s minds as they think about houselessness or see unhoused people. It’s one more thing that we often just don’t think about.
Hansell : Did anything about meeting or working with Lee surprise you, or change your mindset or understanding?
Amacher : I think his story is really incredible. We ended up deciding that we weren’t going to reveal what his current employment is, but just his path from four years unhoused to who he is now is just really amazing. And you know, at the same time I do want to emphasize in the comic that it isn’t just his achievement, right. A community propelled him to where he is now.
I think even beyond the topic of houselessness, we are all created by each other. Even those amongst us who seem the most accomplished, that’s not an individual effort, it’s always a community. And I guess I would say that it’s changed how I think about the potential of what we can create together, but also who we can create together if that makes sense.
Hansell : I love that. Can you speak a little bit about the importance of queer and trans representation in stories, comics and comics creators?
Amacher : It’s kind of funny having grown up reading Peanuts or whatever in the newspaper. There are so many comics now about transness. You’ll see headlines, ‘Marvel introduces first trans superhero,’ or whatever. And that is sort of like the innermost echo of these changes that are happening all around the margins. Where more and more comics are being produced by queer creators, by and about queer people and trans people, and all sorts of marginalized groups.
Again, I do think that the comics medium is one that really draws people in, in a way that other media doesn’t. And it’s mostly movies now, but I think that the prolonged success of the Marvel comics universe speaks to the way comic characters really capture people’s imaginations. And it can speak to parts of our psychology and our libido that other art forms don’t.
And so when I think about queer and trans stories, and comics in particular, even though they are often cartoony, I think that there is a part of our humanity that comics really speak to. That’s why they continue to be popular even with the advent of the internet. I think that’s what queer and trans comics can do, is assert the existence of an aspect of our queer and trans identity that TV shows, movies, magazine articles — can’t.
Hansell : Speaking a little bit to your own experience as an artist, what drew you to comics as a creator? And what’s your favorite part about creating them?
Amacher : When I was younger I thought I was going to be a writer. I was like, ‘I’m going to write!’ and I didn’t have a lot of faith in my drawings, but I still doodled all the time. It sort of seems silly in retrospect how long it took before I thought to combine the two. But for me, again, I wanted to be a ‘serious writer,’ who took on ‘real themes.’ And I still feel like I do that in my comics work, but I also have this freedom to really do anything with them, to do things that I would be afraid to do in writing, but also to do things that I think just wouldn’t work as a poem or a piece of prose.
Hansell : How long have you been creating comics?
Amacher : I would say I’ve been drawing since I was a kid, always doodling and often putting words in there … When I went home a couple years ago, I was looking through my childhood notebooks, and I’d see all these comics about being trans, stuff I wouldn’t remember having drawn, but little characters and speech bubbles. It was crude, you know, but I guess all my life.
Editor’s note: Street Roots has partnered with Kacy McKinney and her team at PSU to publish the PSU Collaborative Comics project. Street Roots’ vendors will sell the publication alongside the newspaper beginning Feb. 2.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots . Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today .
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