Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Spectacle
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Rosalarian
BIRTHDATE: 6/12/1986
WEBSITE: https://rosalarian.com/
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
www.spectaclecomic.com
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2018067733
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2018067733
HEADING: Gedris, Megan Rose, 1986-
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005 20180519073106.0
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010 __ |a no2018067733
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca11355524
040 __ |a ICrlF |b eng |e rda |c ICrlF
046 __ |f 1986 |2 edtf
100 1_ |a Gedris, Megan Rose, |d 1986-
370 __ |e Chicago (Ill.) |2 naf
372 __ |a Graphic novels |a Webcomics |a Illustration of books |2 lcsh
374 __ |a Authors |a Illustrators |2 lcsh
375 __ |a Females |2 lcdgt
377 __ |a eng
400 1_ |a Rose Gedris, Megan, |d 1986-
400 0_ |a Rosalarian, |d 1986-
670 __ |a Gedris, Megan Rose. Spectacle, 2018: |b t.p. (Megan Rose Gedris) p. 135 (b. 1986; making comics since 1996; lives in Chicago) back cover (webcomic creator; Yu+Me Dream)
670 __ |a Amazon website, May 15, 2018 |b (Megan Rose Gedris; aka Rosalarian; comics writer/artist)
PERSONAL
Born June 12, 1986.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Graphic novel writer and artist; web comic creator.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including Crossed Genres, edited by Bart R. Leib and Kay T. Holt, 2009; Oomph: A Little Super Goes a Long Way, edited by Bart R. Leib and Kay T. Holt, Crossed Genres Publications, 2013.
SIDELIGHTS
Writing under the pseudonym Rosalarian, Megan Rose Gedris writes and draws graphic novels, comic books, and web comics. Her work focuses on LGBTQ characters, women, adventure, erotica, surrealism, and humor. Based in Chicago, Illinois, she has created the “Yu+Me: Dream” series and “I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space” series. She has also been a traveling performer in burlesque as the dancer Florence of A’Labia and designs her own fabric and costumes.
Yu+Me: Dream
Gedris’ Yu+Me: Dream lesbian graphic novel follows jaded Fiona who hates her stepmother and would rather sleep through her high school life, that is, until Lia joins the school, and suddenly Fiona has woken up and taken notice. But it’s difficult to pursue a gay relationship in a Catholic high school. As Fiona and Lia discover their feelings for each other, a boy named James insinuates himself into their lives, Fiona is blackmailed by her classmates, and she learns information about her mother’s death. But suddenly Fiona actually wakes up…out of her coma. When Fiona realizes that Lia is trapped in her dreamworld called Nod, Fiona enlists a group of rebels to rescue her.
Begun when Gedris was just out of high school, Yu+Me: Dream (“yume” is dream in Japanese) started as a black-and-white story that evolved into full color and various mediums as Gedris’ skills developed. The mediums become symbolic as Fiona travels through different planes searching for Lia. “While some would call this execution gimmicky or complain of it being hard to keep track of the different characters, Gedris’s solid character designs allow for seamless transitions between formats,” observed Jes Schroeder on the Journal Star website.
Darlin’ It’s Betta Down Where It’s Wetta and Spectacle
Gedris wrote the erotic Darlin’ It’s Betta Down Where It’s Wetta in 2012, described as girl-on-girl by a girl for girls. In the story, mermaid Pearl finds the naked and horny human, Chloe, on the beach. Since Pearl has heard of vaginas, she suddenly wants one of her own and seeks out the sea witch to give her one. In a review online at Lesbrary, Danika Ellis noted the humor, subtle watercolors that add interest to the story, and different body types. Ellis said: “For a fun, quick, and sexy read, I really enjoyed this collection.”
With the graphic novel, Spectacle, in 2018, Gedris goes to the Old West. Anna is an engineer, inventor, and fortune teller at the Samson Brothers Circus. She doesn’t believe in the supernatural, but changes her mind when her twin sister Kat is murdered and appears as a ghost who wants to share Anna’s body. With the help of the circus denizens, including the bearded lady, contortionist, and snake charmer, Anna searches for Kat’s killer. Along the way, Anna learns that there is much more going on in the paranormal world from the victims of a corrupt sheriff. In a review in Booklist, Kristina Pino praised the artwork, thick-outlined, stylized figures that evoke mood and vibrancy of the story. Pino added that readers who like “comics featuring diverse casts or readers looking for mystery or paranormal comics will be delighted.”
Explaining the continuity of themes between her works, Gedris told Kat Overland in an interview on the Women Write About Comics website: “The themes that are always present are concepts like chosen family, women as important, and adventures that reveal layers in the worlds I build. I love world-building and figuring out the mechanics of those worlds and letting the characters play around in there.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor liked Spectacle’s diversity of characters and plot, saying: “Humorous and heartfelt, creepy and captivating; readers will eagerly hope for another volume.” Praising the ethnically and religiously diverse cast, strong protagonist, and paranormal elements, Jodeana Kruse commented in School Library Journal that Gedris “takes full advantage of the circus context to explore otherness with the circus ‘freaks.’”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2018, Kristina Pino, review of Spectacle, p. 36.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2018, review of Spectacle.
School Library Journal, March 2018, Jodeana Kruse, review of Spectacle.
ONLINE
Journal Star, http://blogs.pjstar.com/ (July 6, 2014) Jes Schroeder, review of Yu+Me: Dream.
Lesbrary, http://lesbrary.com/ (April 7, 2016), Danika Ellis, review of Darlin’ It’s Betta Down Where It’s Wetta.
Women Write About Comics, http://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/ (December 15, 2017), Kat Overland, author interview.
Rosalarian is the pen name of Megan Rose Gedris, a comic artist and writer based in Chicago, IL. She likes sparkly things, tea, mermaids, pizza, gin, shoes, cheese, lace, and kittens. Her favorite color is all of the colors!
Her work primarily focuses on women and queer people, with themes of adventure, surrealism, relationships, and humor. Since becoming a member of FilthyFigments.com when it launched in 2010, Rosalarian has produced a large amount of erotic work, and enjoys creating sex positive smut. She enjoys experimenting with different styles and media for each new work.
Bibliography
An avid seamstress, Rosalarian began designing her own fabric, and has several of her designs available for purchase. Themes include mermaids, Cthulhu, flowers, and food.
When not making comics, she performs burlesque as Florence of A’Labia, singing and dancing and telling raunchy stories. She creates all her own costumes.
She travels extensively, both for comics and performance. To book her for either, please contact megan at rosalarian dot com.
Twitter | Facebook | Tumblr
Smash Pages Q&A: Megan Rose Gedris on ‘Spectacle’
The longtime webcomics creator discusses her latest collaboration with Oni Press.
Megan Rose Gedris has been making comics for years. From Yu+Me to I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space to The Lady Eudora Henley and Darlin’ It’s Betta Down Where It’s Wetta, Gedris has been producing thousands of comics pages nonstop and more than a dozen series online and in print in many genres.
Her current project is Spectacle, an ongoing series published by Oni Press about Anna, a fortune teller and an engineer working at a traveling circus. In the first issue her twin sister Kat is murdered, though she lingers as a ghost, which comes as a shock to the scientifically minded Anna. The series is about finding Kat’s murderer, but it’s also about exploring the people who made up the circus and examining their lives. It is not just a beautifully drawn book, but a strikingly insightful look at a community of outsiders and performers.
How did you come to comics?
I read somewhere once that all kids draw, and artists are just the people who didn’t stop when they reached a certain age. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t making up stories and drawing pictures to go with them. My first sequential art was inspired by a lot of newspaper comics like Garfield and Calvin & Hobbes when I was ten or so. I filled notebooks with comics I drew and my classmates passed them around. When I was in high school, I started writing queer stories, and I wasn’t ready to show those to people I knew, so I started making webcomics and sharing them with strangers.
How do you describe Spectacle?
Plot-wise, it’s a supernatural murder mystery set in an old-timey circus. But really, it’s a story about sisters, it’s a story about loss and not wanting to let go, it’s a story about outcasts who are far more interesting than the people who shunned them, it’s a story about chosen family, it’s a story about faith and science, and a story about trust.
How did you end up publishing Spectacle through Oni Press?
I’ve been making webcomics since 2002. Some of them caught the eye of Oni Press editor Ari Yarwood, who sent me an email asking if I had anything new I’d be interested in pitching. I’d just put the Spectacle pitch together to send to another publisher, so I already had it ready to go. I looked at my bookshelf and realized I had so many Oni titles on my shelf, and I make the kind of stuff I want to read, so it seemed like a good fit to have them do my next book.
After self-publishing, was there much adjustment as far as working with an editor and publisher?
It wasn’t much of an adjustment. It’s all been extremely positive. A good editor isn’t going to change the essence of what you’re making. They’re there to make it stronger and make it the best version it can be. Ari has caught plot holes and confusing wording. The biggest adjustment is just writing scripts that someone other than myself will read. For the most part, since I write and draw my self-published comics, my scripts only had to make sense to myself. But often, I’d write something and not draw it until a year or two later, and by that point I’d forget what I was intending with my vague script. So now my scripts are less confusing to other people and my future self.
I know you’re a burlesque performer, and do you think your experiences performing and touring helped shape aspects of the book?
Absolutely. I started writing Spectacle before I started performing, but Spectacle took me five years to develop, and in that time, I gained so much insight from going on tour and performing for weeks or months at a time. There were so many details about road life I never would’ve understood without experiencing it. I drew a lot of journal comics while I was touring hardcore, and one thing I noticed reading back on them was that 99% of the interesting parts of tour didn’t happen onstage. Likewise in Spectacle, we rarely see the actual performance the circus puts on. It’s all about how show business attracts larger than life people, interacting with other larger than life people. It’s this weird little bubble where you find yourself crammed in a vehicle with a stranger who is your best friend a week later. You find yourself unable to be idle. Days off aren’t relaxing. Staying in one place causes anxiety. Best friends become enemies a week later. You go back home and have so many stories that nobody even believes. So you have to write it into fiction.
You like to end your issues with cliffhangers. Do you feel that this style writing shapes the story?
I’m writing the comic like a show. Every act should leave the audience wanting more, cheering for the next performer, carrying that energy and building it up higher and higher. When you have to take an intermission, you want them ravenous for the next part of the show. You don’t want them to wander off and forget to come back. You want them to come back the next time you roll into town, and they bring their friends.
You’re always posting comics online and you’re making other art. Are you working on anything else?
I’ve joined two shows in Chicago, both as a performer and art director. I’m doing a bit less burlesque these days, and more weird performance art, just trying to keep it fresh for myself. I’ve done over two hundred burlesque shows, and I still love doing that, but I have other things to express as well. My comic creation process is a bit solitary, and audience feedback comes months or even years later, so I love collaborating onstage for a live audience. It gives me a lot of energy.
For those who pick up the collection and go, “Oh my god, I need to know what happens next!” What would you like to tell them?
We’re going to see a lot more of the freaks, and their subculture within a subculture. We get to see the situation from Kat’s point of view. And we get to see more ghosts and more monsters. I really like drawing monsters!
Making a Spectacle with Megan Rose Gedris
In Comics, WebcomicsDecember 15, 2017Kat Overland21 Views0 comments
Making a Spectacle with Megan Rose Gedris
Megan Rose Gedris (handle: Rosalarian) has been doing this comics thing for a long time—her first webcomic, YU+ME: dream, debuted in 2004, and she's been creating ever since then, with the sadly now offline pulp comic I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space, erotic tales like Darlin’ It’s Betta Down Where It’s Wetta on Filthy Figments, and a
Megan Rose Gedris (handle: Rosalarian) has been doing this comics thing for a long time—her first webcomic, YU+ME: dream, debuted in 2004, and she’s been creating ever since then, with the sadly now offline pulp comic I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space, erotic tales like Darlin’ It’s Betta Down Where It’s Wetta on Filthy Figments, and a webcomic about being trapped in a small town, Meaty Yogurt. Along with all that, she’s also an accomplished burlesque performer!
Gedris is now embarking on a new project with Oni Press, Spectacle, a webcomic about a pragmatic engineer, Anna, who works as a psychic in a traveling circus, and what happens when she discovers that the supernatural is real. I was able to interview her about this new YA project, which is slated to be released as a three-volume series while also being published online.
Spectacle, Oni Press, 2017
As someone who’s been a reader since before YU+ME: dream was finished, your art has gone through a lot of evolution and experimental stages. Spectacle is a great combination of your loose-limbed figure work and bold inks. How did you develop your style for Spectacle, and how did you decide how you’d implement it? Do you think there will be any experiments in style as the book progresses?
In recent years, I’ve been working on a lot of short stories rather than big long series. Short stories are great for me because they’re a chance to experiment without commitment. If I end up hating the art, at least I only hate 12 pages instead of hundreds. So after all these experiments, I found the things I most enjoyed were chunky, organic lines, watercolor textures, and simple shapes for characters. I still love drawing more realistic, detailed people, which I’m doing for the covers, but for the internal art, I love how cartoon-y it is. It makes the characters more flamboyant and dynamic, which is great for such over the top characters.
Do you see a continuity between your different projects, from your earlier work to your erotica to now? Or is each project an exploration of different themes?
The themes that are always present are concepts like chosen family, women as important, and adventures that reveal layers in the worlds I build. I love world-building and figuring out the mechanics of those worlds and letting the characters play around in there. The degree of how detailed I get with that depends on the length of the story rather than its content. Most of my erotica doesn’t get that deep, because most of it is short, but longer ones like Eat Me have tons of behind-the-scenes inner workings. I also really love exploring relationships that aren’t romantic. I think platonic love and self-love and familial love are all just as important as romantic and sexual love. Drawing erotica for so long has been a lot of focus on sex and romance. In Spectacle, Anna, being asexual and aromantic, means the story focuses on some other types of relationships, especially with her sister. I’m really enjoying writing these interactions and showing their equal importance to romance.
I know that you’re quite an accomplished burlesque performer, and I was wondering if your performing background is what drew you to the circus as a setting—or was it something else?
I came up with the idea for Spectacle about a month before I started performing. In retrospect, it feels meant to be. I had a lot of plans for the story that changed as I performed more and learned what it’s like to actually be in a traveling show. And granted, my experience living on an old-school bus traveling around in the 2010s doing burlesque is different from circus performers traveling by train in the 1800s, but it’s more about the little things that give you perspective. When will my next shower be? If we don’t sell enough tickets, how will we eat? This person in the show is driving me crazy and I can’t get away from them. The audience loved this act in Texas, so why do they hate it in Arizona? So many little conflicts I never would’ve known about if I hadn’t gone on the road.
What drew you to partnering with a publisher for this book, and what especially drew you to Oni?
Sometimes it’s just so hard doing everything myself. After years of self-publishing webcomics, which means not only writing and drawing but marketing, maintaining a website, selling merch, printing books, storing books, distributing books, answering emails, and the hundreds of other behind-the-scenes duties, I was ready to have some help. I put a pitch together so I could shop it around, and somehow Ari Yarwood read my mind and emailed me out of the blue a couple days after I finished it, saying she liked my work and if I ever had any ideas I wanted to pitch that I could send them her way. I looked at my bookshelf, noticed how many Oni titles I had on it, and decided it was a good fit. It’s been so nice to have an editor going over my work. It makes things better. A good editor doesn’t say, “I don’t like this, change it.” She challenges me to make things clearer, tighter, better. The story is stronger after having another set of eyes on it before it goes in front of an audience. I love it.
Why did you think the floppy/single issue format was the right one for this book? How does that mesh with running it as a webcomic?
When I was working on YU+ME, the chapters in the first part were arbitrary lengths ranging from 13 pages to over 100, because I figured webcomics meant no rules and no rules meant better. Then I started work on the ill-fated Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space, which was going to be printed as single issues, and I found that the boundaries of fitting a story into 22-page increments helped with the pacing a lot. Things got less rambly, and I learned to prioritize and highlight the important parts of my story. Every series has a beginning, middle, and end. With single issues, every 22-page issue has a beginning, middle, and end. Then we have webcomics, which are a one page at a time deal, so every page has a beginning, middle, and end. You have to write a script differently depending on if it’s an OGN, serialized by issues, or a webcomic. I’m excited to be Oni’s experiment with webcomics. I love making webcomics, and now I get to do that with a team to help me. I actually have a bit of a social life now that I’m not doing 100% of it on my own. It’s great.
You can read Spectacle online now.
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Print Marked Items
Spectacle, v.1
Kristina Pino
Booklist.
114.16 (Apr. 15, 2018): p36+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Spectacle, v.1.
By Megan Rose Gedris. Illus. by the author.
May 2018. 136p. Oni, paper, $15.99 (9781620104927). 741.5. Gr. 9-12.
Gedris' debut begins a new series featuring an engineer-fortune teller and her newly deceased sister, who
sticks around as a ghost. After Anna's sister is murdered, other odd, paranormal things start happening
around the circus they travel with, and she is suddenly imbued with the ability to speak with other ghosts,
who are more than eager to share their stories. The book features a lively cast--exactly what you'd expect
from a circus troupe--complete with a bearded lady, a snake-conjuring opera singer, and a charismatic
contortionist, all of whom are depicted in a spectacular palette of rich colors. Gedris' thick-outlined, stylized
figures add to the mood and vibrant tone of the story. Tension runs high when their leader is hauled off by
the local deputy sheriff, and they have to come up with enough money to bail him out and move on. There's
a lot to love here, and fans of comics featuring diverse casts or readers looking for mystery or paranormal
comics will be delighted.--Kristina Pino
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Pino, Kristina. "Spectacle, v.1." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2018, p. 36+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537268116/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6db681d5.
Accessed 23 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537268116
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Gedris, Megan Rose: SPECTACLE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Gedris, Megan Rose SPECTACLE Oni Press (Young Adult Fiction) $15.99 5, 22 ISBN: 978-1-62010-492-7
Webcomic artist Gedris (YU+ME: dream Omnibus Book Two, 2014, etc.) delivers a compelling tale of
supernatural mystery set in the Old West.
Brown-skinned, curly-haired identical twins Anna and Kat are inseparable members of the Samson Brothers
traveling circus. Anna is a pragmatic inventor working as the carnival fortuneteller, while Kat is an
impulsive and performative knife-thrower. But when Anna wakes to discover Kat has been murdered--
literally stabbed in the back--she is unsettled to find that Kat's soul hasn't moved on. Represented as a
translucent, green, floating version of herself, Kat takes up residence in her sister's body, finding safety and
security there while she teams up with Anna to solve her own murder. Gedris' expressive lines and bold
colors bring to life the Old West setting, and the characters have varied skin tones, gender presentations, and
body shapes. The marginalized identities of troupe members are hinted at but rarely explored, with the
exception of a Chinese immigrant's experience working on the railroad. The cliffhanger ending satisfies,
opening up just the right number of questions.
Humorous and heartfelt, creepy and captivating; readers will eagerly hope for another volume. (Graphic
fantasy. 12-adult)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Gedris, Megan Rose: SPECTACLE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959831/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7ab40231.
Accessed 23 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959831
Spectacle, Vol. 1. By: Kruse, Jodeana, School Library Journal, 03628930, Mar2018, Vol. 64, Issue 3
GEDRIS, Megan Rose. Spectacle, Vol. 1. illus. by Megan Rose Gedris. 136p. Oni. May 2018. pap. $15.99. ISBN 9781620104927.
Gr 9 Up—Bold lines surrounding panels with equally bright colors are appropriate foils for an audacious story about a travelling circus. Anna and her twin sister, Kat, were taken in as members of the Samson Brothers Circus. Kat can throw knives with—usually—accurate precision. Lacking her sister's keen hand-eye coordination, Anna has compensated by "telling fortunes." Intellectual and skeptical Anna initially balks at working as a psychic, so she creates a conjecture engine that calculates probabilities and helps her reach scientifically based conclusions. Her life takes a tragic turn when she finds Kat murdered in their shared train car. Kat begins to inhabit Anna's mind and body as both of them attempt to find Kat's killer. Worse still, Anna discovers that she can see other ghosts, including the victims of a corrupt sheriff in one of the show's whistle-stop towns. Gedris makes a conscious effort to incorporate ethnically and religiously diverse characters and takes full advantage of the circus context to explore otherness with the circus "freaks." The abrupt cliff-hanger ending will leave readers anxiously awaiting the second installment. VERDICT While this title isn't explicitly YA, the plot, fascinating cast of characters, art, and strong protagonist will appeal to fans of paranormal and mystery plots.
Book Review: Spectacle, Vol. 1 by Megan Rose Gedris (2018)
May 22nd, 2018 7:00 am by Kelly Garbato
Engaging premise and setting, but a deeply unsatisfying ending.
three out of five stars
(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley. Trigger warning for ableist language directed at the circus “freaks”.)
Twin sisters Anna and Kat are performers in the Samson Brothers Circus: Anna tells fortunes, while Kat is a knife-thrower. Whereas Kat’s talents are all too real, Anna is a fraud. Well, kind of: while Anna tells the rubes what they want to hear, she can predict the future and decipher the past with the help of her self-made conjecture engine. It’s kind of slow and not very flashy, so – like Anna – it mostly stays in the background.
When the circus’s train is stalled out in the middle of the desert, Kat turns up dead, stabbed in the back with her own knives. Not wanting to alarm the other performs, circus owner Jebediah Tetanus (how’s that for an evocative name?) tasks Anna with solving the murder in secret. But things go from bad to worse when a series of tragedies beset the circus, including Tetanus’s own arrest at the hands of the corrupt deputy sheriff. Not to mention Kat’s lingering spirit, which flits in and out of Anna’s body to hide from pursuing demons.
So I really wanted to love Spectacle – and some of the elements here are great – but there’s a lot going on. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that very little is resolved by the end of chapter five. Usually I expect that a TPB has a self-contained story arc, but Book One of Spectacle feels more like the first two-thirds of a story. The ending – in which one of the roustabouts suddenly sprouts a rhino horn – is deeply unsatisfying, to say the least.
The art wasn’t initially my favorite – so many blockheads! – but it grew on me pretty quickly. I enjoyed the setting, which is some time in the mid (?) 1800s (?). This makes for some great old timey humor, such as when the circus doc diagnoses Anna with hysteria and prescribes coffee. With a side of heroin.
The story features a cast of pretty fascinating women characters, from Flora the would-be fat lady/current snake charmer to Lucy Chen, a clown who did it all for love. I really hope that my suspicions about the source of the weirdness between Anna and the bearded lady pan out; a cute F/F romance makes every story better, okay. I wish that we’d seen more of Eve and Lynn, the conjoined twins; there’s a lot of ableist yet era-appropriate language thrown their way, and I want desperately for the story challenges this as the plot unfolds. The collision between science and the supernatural also holds some promise going forward.
P.S. WHAT GIVES WITH THE PICKLES!?!
(This review is also available on Amazon, Library Thing, and Goodreads. Please click through and vote it helpful if you’re so inclined!)
Reviewing YU + ME : Dream
Jes Schroeder
Posted on July 6, 2014
Occasionally webcomic stories reach their end, turning into a complete narrative as the creator intended. While these stories don’t have the usual qualities of a regularly updated comic, from time to time you stumble across a comic that’s still hosted in its entirety online, free to view for everyone. Such is the case with the comic YU + ME: dream. Started in 2004 by Artist Megan Rose Gedris just out of high school, it ran until October of 2010, spanning six years and a variety of mediums from start to its eventual finish.
YU+ME: Dream stars Fiona, a struggling outcast at her Catholic School. The story starts as a coming-of-age style narrative: Fiona has to deal with her feelings for the new girl at school, Lia, while handling her indifferent step mother and barely-there father. She meets different friends and people along the way that help her feel like a normal person. The story quickly evolves to something so much bigger, tracking across the entirety of the dreamscape world called Nod.
YU+ME: Dream is a great example of a story flourishing and expanding with time, the art changing and evolving as the creator’s skill grows. It starts off as a simple black-and-white story, turning into full color and then to various mixed mediums, even clay! The variation in the mediums becomes symbolic after a fashion – representing the different planes that Fiona and her companions travel through while she completes her quest. While some would call this execution gimmicky or complain of it being hard to keep track of the different characters, Gedris’s solid character designs allow for seamless transitions between formats near the end of the comics.
YU+ME: Dream is a wonderful introduction to Megan Rose Gedris’s other works as well. The story itself is up in its complete form on her website or periodically available as a two-part omnibus in physical form. You can check when the next batch is being sold or read her other works on the site.
Danika reviews Darlin' It's Betta Down Where It's Wetta by Megan Rose Gedris
Posted on April 7, 2016 by Danika Ellis
I’ve been following Megan Rose Gedris’s work ever since her webcomic YU+ME: Dream was in its early days. The only comics of hers that I hadn’t read were the ones hosted on Filthy Figments, an adult comics site with a subscription fee. So when the book version of Darlin’ It’s Betta Down Where It’s Wetta came out, I was eager to snap it up. Lesbian mermaid porn comics! And by Rosalarian, who is notorious for love of (weird) mermaids.
Down Where It’s Wetta is made up of short arcs, all featuring the same characters. This is definitely a porn comic, so it’s light on plot, but there is enough variety in setting to keep it interesting. The book begins with Pearl, a mermaid, encountering a naked and horny girl on the beach. Pearl decides she wants to have a vagina of her own, so she tracks down the sea witch to try to make a deal.
After that, the plot mostly compromises of Pearl and Chloe (the human) trying temporarily to be responsible and quickly deciding to have sex instead. It can get a little repetitive read as one volume (instead of the individual spaced out, as they were originally on the site), but they’re still enjoyable.
I love Gedris’s artwork, and this volume is no exception. The subtle watercolor-like shading in the full-color edition really adds interest to the pages, I thought. Although the focus is definitely on sex, I also really enjoyed the humor in Down Where It’s Wetta. The author makes a few appearances in the pages, including defending her use of a half-page detailed illustration of shoes as definitely pornographic. Chloe, especially, makes for a ridiculous (and entertaining) character to read. She makes the kind of choices that you wouldn’t be able to stand in a friend but lap up in a fictional landscape.
For a fun, quick, and sexy read, I really enjoyed this collection. My only complain would be that there isn’t much of a variety of vulvas in this collection: they all look pretty much the same. That’s a shame, because Gedris excels at representing many different body types in a more general way. That’s a pretty small drawback, though, so it’s still definitely one I’d recommend.