#kind of want to redraw an old strip now

[fenori]

Okay so quick question- WHO GAVE EZEKIEL THE RIGHT TO STEAL MY HEART??????????? I just read his bio and hmmmmmm- I fell hard

EHEHEHHEHE :^))) THANK YOU FOR LIKING MY BOY!!!!!!!

//his bio for anyone interested tho i am.. seeing if i can make a comic sometime HHH WHAT IS TIME AND ENERGY THO– 

look forward to more draws at leaST–

[stygianflood]

Like the Shoreline and the Sea (Ethan x F!MC)

Summary- Ethan is asked out on a date right after Miami in Book 1. Ethan’s PoV

Genre, rating, words- Angst, teen, 2k

Open Heart fanfic tropes- birthday, office.

March Challenge Day 13 prompt Someday; April Challenge Day 9 prompt Smell of the Rain 

A/N: nor��westers-  violent thunderstorms in northern plains of India, before the onslaught of monsoon.

Title inspired by Leonard Cohen’s Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.

‘This will improve our understanding of adiposity and sarcopenia in this population, help identify thresholds predictive of metabolic risk, and ultimately prevent or ameliorate… ’

Better prevent than ameliorate.

‘...ameliorate the long-term impacts on health and…’ 

Twenty five years should be long enough.

Hers is a singsong voice, the warm, trilling kind. Mellow sun dances on the frills of her dress. The yellow one. 

The man at her side twirls her on the empty kerb. Dips and kisses her. Her laughter is all that is pure and golden.

A child follows them, embarrassed. She bends down to kiss him, and he is furious. 

The scene shifts.

The child is on the front porch, eyes set somewhere beyond the wild bergamot bushes. 

Tear tracks on pink cheeks mingle and dry with dust from his afternoon’s exploits. Something like a steely resolve troops in his eyes.

Ethan Ramsey has been staring at the same sentence for fifteen minutes now.

Whoever coined the term ‘nostalgia’ from the Homeric nostos and algos was speaking of anguish caused by an inability to return. But they failed to discern the inevitable tethering of reminiscence with habituality.

That is more or less the case with him. Louise Ramsey walked out on her husband, and eleven year old son some twenty five years ago right before his birthday. For a very long time now, home is not about apple crisps or kitchen gardens. 

About this time every year, a crevice in his mind he likes to call the amygdala dwells on the same days. 

Almost as a ritual. 

He is a scientist. A rationalist. And like every year, he reminds himself there is work to do.

Unless there’s a knock at the most unpleasant hour.

He never returns to the article. Never manages a come in. The distraction walks in, messy hair knotted with a pencil. Probably because she has lost another hair tie. 

He mustn’t be that aware. 

But she talks too much. 

‘Dr. Mukherjee.’ He sounds gruff. They’re supposed to be redrawing their boundaries, even if he is the only one making an effort. ‘I thought your shift ended-’

‘Two hours ago.’ Rigours of a sixteen hour shift mark her visage. Her smile is a little too conniving for his comfort. ‘I had work afterwards.’ 

She starts shuffling papers on his desk, permission be damned. He pinches the bridge of his nose, and manages an exasperated sigh. Since when have interns started walking into his office with… birthday cakes?

‘What do you think you’re- It’s not my-’

‘I heard rumours that Dr. Ramsey had to cancel a date.’ She sounds amused. He does not miss the split second glance she shoots his way before continuing. ‘On his birthday, too. Such a shame.’

He scoffs.

‘No one knows it’s my birthday.’

‘Oh, they do. They’re just too afraid to… ah, invoke the wrath of Dr. Ramsey.’

Of course, she is not one of them. She has absolutely no regard for the immutable drill he has observed for nearly four decades. And why must she, when her sole intent is to swivel the rusty axis of his life.

Ethan has never known the first shower of an Indian monsoon. It is sudden and torrential, just as it is feared and revered. It smells like summer, and mango blossoms. 

Ethan has never known one until this year.

‘I’m thirty seven, Rookie,’ He manages weakly. 

‘And I would’ve bought the candles accordingly if I knew that.’ 

The tealights she arranges look so much better, he thinks. The cake is a simple blue and white affair. Not the ones that have more icing than cake, he notes. Not the ones he disapproves of.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Terminator

‘I could’ve whipped something up without sugar,’ She rambles, suddenly starting to blush. ‘Or ordered one. But I only just came to know it’s your birthday. And there wasn’t a lot of-

‘Thank you, Apu.’ Tresses of warmth curl about his chest and the gravel of his voice.

Ethan has avoided birthday cakes for a decade now. Unless it’s Naveen’s birthday, he thinks with a pang.

In his time with Harper or his brief involvements in med-school, no one has ever convinced him to do birthdays. He checks himself. This is just an intern being kind.

But interns aren't kind to Dr. Ramsey, are they. 

She assures him the photos are not for social media. They settle on the couch, it’s his first birthday cake in over a decade. 

He is glad for an innocuous reason to look at her, laugh at jokes that in any other company would draw his scorn. She is oddly comforting. Unlike most interns who avoid his office at all costs, she moves about it as if she was meant to be here all along. 

He must have stalled birthdays worth twenty years only to spend it on a couch with her. 

The plates are disposable. It is nothing like the restaurants that come with his status, for there is an endearing simplicity about it. 

It almost feels like… home.

He steals occasional glances at her. It has been four agonisingly long days after their return from Miami. And for all his attempts to redraw their boundaries, it has been a non-return of sorts. 

Aparna drives him to distraction, flouts each and every one of his rules. Seeks him out in supply closets and muddled dreams. And every time he breaks her heart a little more, he finds himself floundering in his own squalor.

The German counterpart to the English ‘nostalgia’ is ‘sehnsucht’. Like ‘nostalgia’, it has the charm of what has been. But unlike it, it also has the enigma of what has never been. Miami will remain the swansong to an ideal that slipped through Ethan’s fingers. 

A surge of anguish ripples through him as he realises all of this is his for the asking, and he will have none of it. 

‘It wasn’t a date,’ He blurts out.

He wouldn’t tell her that if he wants her to move on. Not truly.

‘You don’t have to-’

‘She is Declan’s associate in Panacea. She suggested signing the contract with the Diagnostics Team over dinner tonight. So…  just business.’

Claudette Wilson is the most promising young face of Panacea, and Ethan needed less than a minute to know why. 

Sleek, dark hair styled at her nape played up her high cheekbones. The ruby of her pliant lips, almost risqué for a meeting such as this, always lingered a little longer on the rim of her coffee mug. Even the measured spoons of her laughter came with an all too enticing lilt.

Ethan has met the other type. Vacuous and synthetic. But the steely glint in her eyes came with a weighty intelligence. An unfaltering wit. And when a perfectly manicured hand brushed the contours of his cuff, he knew it was never meant to be just business. 

She was irresistible. And so was he.

That afternoon, the bitterness in his mouth had nothing to do with coffee. He learnt he would refuse Claudette even if her pay checks did not come from Panacea.

Aparna falls silent, almost as if discerning in his words everything he left unsaid.

They have run out of jokes and topics for a harmless chat. He is getting terribly comfortable with her again, he realises alarmed. And she is fidgeting with the ring on her finger.

She’s nervous too. He knows. He could define every twitch and turn of those fingers. 

Somewhere in their conversation they have edged so close that her knee juts into his thigh. The couch is surprisingly small for two people. Minutes pass, and despite himself, he does not want her to leave. 

His fingers rest on her flustered hands, it’s a deep-rooted reflex. Looking down, she weaves his hand in both of her own. Even as the adrenaline surging in his blood incites him to flee, the delirious part of him emerges stronger and more naive.

He thinks she is leaning in. Soaking up the mayhem in his eyes. The slight movement causes wisps of errant hair to slip from the messy bun. There’s new growth around her brows, a faded scar on her forehead. But it’s her eyes that still hold sway over him. 

They stroked him with a strange, silent awe on a balcony on the shores of the Atlantic.

She is nothing like interns that hover around him year after year. Sucking up for recommendations. Sometimes more. She can devour him, and just as easily cast him aside without batting an eye. 

And yet she is here. Snuggled in his office while her friends call it a night with cheap beer and rowdy escapades. 

But she is different tonight. The quiver in her eyes tentative, even wary.

His hand rises of its own accord, tucking strands of hair behind her ear. Inadvertently, it brushes her face, lingers a little longer against her cheek.

She caressed his face as the ocean crashed around him. It was like falling from the top of a precipice. Tumbling into the amorphous, a terrifying weightlessness. He waited.

‘It’s getting late.’

She smells like the hospital, muted shades of honeysuckle, and like herself. 

The cool breeze hummed a steady rhyme against the tumble of her midnight blue dress. Bits of the moon bounced off the dark curtain of her hair, plunging into her eyes. Ethan had never seen such fathomless eyes.

‘I should go.’ She leans into his palm, eyes fluttering close. 

‘You should.’ 

And then she caught him. It was the hollow of her neck. It was soft. Like the rest of her. 

Neither of them move today, silently imploring the other to charge. Or retreat. The battle drum in his chest is a dull ache. Throbbing and inconsolable.

The ridges of her collarbone bore traces of his ruin. Traces she covered every morning and stripped every night, like the rites of a godless liturgy.

His free hand is still laced in hers, the other drawing her face nearer. 

Her lips are inches from his own as he draws a languid finger across them. Her warm breath spills on his lips, warring and mingling with his own ragged ones. 

Her mouth was stained with wine. Numbing and inciting. He was battered, and bruised. Marooned at her side. And she was warm. So warm.

His hand traced the pummelling of her heart, kneading the softness of her chest. Her tongue jousted with his own as the ocean lapped at its shore. Tireless and persevering.

She was wild. Like her Gangetic nor’westers on a sultry afternoon. He was bewitched. She was doing something good to him.

Suddenly the air around them is ripped by the sound of his phone. 

It’s his father.

The two of them recoil to their own spaces, Ethan horrified that he let himself stray so far yet again. Silencing the still erring device, he faces Aparna bracing for another apology.

‘I know.’ 

Her smile is placid, all traces of vulnerability gone. He is vaguely aware of the gentle pressure on the hand still clasped in her own.

‘Happy Birthday, Ethan. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ 

She is gone before he can marshal his thoughts.

Ethan flops back into the couch, shivering and alone. The incandescent glow from the solitary lamp drenches the office in a soft, ethereal haze. She might not have been here at all but for the little things she scatters around him every time she forays into his life.

Today she leaves with him a caesura. It thwarts the cadence of a life he has been putting together since Miami.

After a minute, or perhaps a staggering nightmare, when he rises to pack the rest of the cake, he sees it. 

She must have forgotten her hair tie was in her pocket after all. 

It stares up at him from the floor, the silken, mute witness of his transgression. He gingerly picks it up, and turns it in his hand as though it houses some ancient sorcery. 

Laying it on his desk, he considers texting her. But scarcely does he scroll down to her name when he stops himself. And pockets it. 

Somewhere in the Atlantic, waves still crash upon the rocks, moistening, but never quite lingering. 

The waves are relentless. Someday, the rocks crumble into fine sand.

Thank you for reading this! Let me know if you’d want to be added or removed.

[jundoe]

After Maxx started colouring these, I finally finalised the lines... L-R: Shion, Kurou, Nayuta, Shika, Jouichi - or, as they used to be known, Shiratori, Tomo, Kei, Shikage, and some defunct guy called Mitsuka. Here is weeb story: this could be an old art redraw of sorts, but it’s really more a "please God no" revamp of something 14 years old... When we keep saying "that 'band manga we keep talking about fueled by 2ks v-kei nostalgia that will probably never happen" we really mean "that 'band manga' we came up with in 2003," which is why we know it'll never happen, being that it's been 14 years. To be fair, it's been shelved deep for most of that, but after finding our old J-rock CDs in the move last year, we started talking about and somehow redesigning these guys...or gutting most of them and really only keeping the two ‘S’s in some way. I'm going to be sUPEr embARRASsed now and stick something dated 2004 under the cut with a lot of evolution exposition. It's REALLY AWFUL with prime weeb-stage Jun art so please don't click if you think you might never be able to look at me again...I might never be able to look at you again... QAQ

Actually, what’s the Chinese equivalent of a weeb? Back in 2003, we were rEAlly into J-rock and the V-kei subculture, and ended up planning a band manga about a band named Ennui trying to recruit a genius songwriter dead-set against joining a band. I know. Please don’t say it. This was by far the most weeby and deliberately (??) tropey of our projects, and, heck, yeah, it was horrible fun and mostly an excuse for Maxx to design endless V-Kei costumes. Oh wait I just looked down at the art again I take it back it’s just horrible.

Wow, I remember struggling so hard with “Tomo.” Looking at this, clearly the struggle never ended. Anyway...we really only cared about Shikage and Shiratori, with the other three largely band/anime trope characters that we hadn’t fleshed out much, so we ended up vastly redesigning them for more updated trope - uh, I mean, hopefully marginally more interesting characters.

Ennui → LEAVE: We went from an unironically named pretentious band name to an ironically named terrible band name that Maxx vectored a logo for and so we can’t change anymore. Ennui used to be a newly-assembled indie band desperately seeking a songwriter. LEAVE is a label-created unit scraped together from the leftovers of the three groups that were disbanded from the voluntary formation of Hanami, whom I love 500% more than these losers.

Shikage → Shika: One of the more defined incarnations of a perennially ported OC character concept of mine...back then we named him “Shikage” - literally “poem-shadow” - because we were pretentious teenagers, but now that we are old peopleTM with a better grasp of Japanese, that is clearly the worst name ever. I still have a lot of nostalgia for it though, so I shopped around for a kanji set that could let me preserve the “Shika” part, and ended up with 子華, which is exactly the traditionally pretentious kind of name someone like his dad would have chosen, so I’m really happy with that. I kept the defining element of his character, which is to say his murder face, and swapped out the inexplicable 90s anime extension-ponytail for an actual ponytailable hairlength. The glasses ended up getting shuffled over to “Shiratori,” and now he’s second guitar instead because keyboards are out of vogue and we never ended up designing a rhythm guitarist?? It’s embarrassing but 14 years later I still really love this terrible kid haha...

Kei → Nayuta: He’s vocals so you know he’s the main character...a character that literally had no character, the kind of guy you call the “MC” in a dating sim...so we ended up just basically overhauling him into the opposite kind of main character that has no character: the singer who’s the singer because he can’t play any instruments at all and keeps forgetting the lead singer of a V-kei band isn’t supposed to smile. Really the only thing we kept from the original design is a cropped approximation of his characterless hairstyle. Since even his name had no character, we just picked a whole new one - I wanted to see if I could still stick the “poem” kanji in somewhere, and ended up with 夏詩 for Nayuta, which is an absolutely awful name and I couldn’t be more delighted.

Tomo → Kurou: We basically scrapped Die from Dir En Grey and ended up with Wolverine Lite or maybe Maxx from the darkest timeline so help me. That one was a weird process of evolution, but it happened. Somehow, he managed to keep the same hair colour and approximate expression - and the hell struggle argrhagh I spent so much time shaping and reshaping that damned mohawk strip... OH NO WAIT he also kept the pauldron, I don’t know why Maxx keeps putting one pauldron on this guy, but after he designed the new outfit, he looked back at this and went, “Oh f- he has a pauldron here too.”. He also inherited the “K” that we scrapped from “Kei.”

Shiratori → Shion: Yet another terribly-named character we loved enough to want to keep parts of. Shiratori is an untenable anime-ism that means “white bird,” so I swapped it out for Shion, which, while still being clichéd, is at least an actual name that I actually like and still preserves the feel of the original to me. Actually, pretty much only the general feel of his character - and his height, for some reason - was preserved. He doesn’t even play the drums anymore, having migrated to the bassist position Shika would rather have (not least because when we started talking about this again, Maxx was convinced he was the bassist and we argued over this until I dug out this picture and showed him we wrote “drums” in 2004 - and then we cut Mitsuka so Maxx got his way after all), and his character and backstory have been shaken up, along with a massive haircut. Still love him though.

Mitsuka: Mitsuka, being a legacy character from the Mana days, didn’t make the cut, since we never really liked him anyway, and we already had a bassist after the reshuffle. He’s been replaced by Jouichi, who is the guy people kept saying would never make it in a band and is just happy to be here and do his best, a really nice boyTM, which is sort of terrible for a V-kei band, but at least he’s in good company with Nayuta, I guess.

I don’t know why I told you all this, but now you know what horrible weebs Maxx and Jun were back in 2003-4.

[squick-writes]

Months after starting this fic (formerly known as Just Like Old Times), I finally published the final Chapter 3 - Achievement Unlocked: Sex on a Plane. Hurrah, they fuck in the bathroom at last! Thanks for your patience.

Pairing: Trip/Virus (DRAMAtical Murder)

Summary: Virus and Trip are flying out to a different country to conduct some good old-fashioned yakuza business for a week or so. Not everything goes according to plan. There are more than a few surprises along the way.

Additional Tags: Cavity Search, pat-downs, Anal Fingering, Virus gets strip searched by a customs officer while Trip watches, In Public, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, some domestic fluff I guess, Virus is totally not an alcoholic, Mutual Masturbation on Public Transportation, Docking, Anal Sex, Mile High Club

The complete work is now an AO3 exclusive due to the number of edits I made throughout each chapter but here, below the read-more are some of Virus’s internal thoughts which were cut from the final version for the sake of pacing (and which also conveniently function as a teaser for what’s to come).

                                                      ====== ✈

"I think for it to be joining the mile high club," Trip said slowly, shaking his cock a few times out of habit, "You have to have sex. As in, actual... what's the word?" His piercing artificial blue eyes made contact with Virus's own. "Penetration."

Virus was already feeling just the slightest bit violated from what had just occurred, as much as it surprised him that he had sort of liked it. "And that didn't count?"

"No."

"Hm." Virus tilted his head, watching Trip's eyes with shrewd and careful interest. They appeared darker; the pupils were blown wide. "And? What are you suggesting?"

Trip had never been one for doing too much talking. "Are you ready?" Trip intoned, maintaining eye contact. He took a step forward again, ominously nodding downward to a part of Virus that was significantly lower. His hands were already positioning themselves above Virus's hips, hovering there for permission.

Virus's eyes widened. "Why do I have to-" he protested.

"You're smaller," explained Trip, unwilling to hunt for a less potentially offensive term even as Virus frowned and mouthed, by like 3 centimetres. "It's just easier... logistically." He licked his lips; his eyes were now glued to the fabric bunched around Virus's waist, though he didn't move to touch or undress him yet, and his voice had dropped almost half an octave into something of a lower, more desirous tone which, while very familiar to Virus, was not usually directed at him.

It was disturbingly similar to the way he sounded when he was looking forward to inflicting some kind of violence.

A chill wave of prickling sensations rushed down Virus's neck and throughout his spine, erecting goosebumps on his skin. He briefly became hyper-aware of the fact that he was locked in a very small space with someone he had never come to fully understand, his back literally to the wall in a situation which prevented any means of escape without making an unwanted scene.

What would Trip do if he refused to go any farther now? His mood and intent were obvious. Would Trip attempt to take him by force, then? Would he be content to just walk away unsatisfied?

Such concerns always faded the instant Virus had them, of course. There had been plenty of time and opportunities for Trip to do whatever he might have wanted to Virus, and he had never taken advantage of him, not once in the many years they'd known each other. There was an unspoken line between them which had never been crossed.

It was his choice. If he wanted, he could redraw the line a little to the left...

He considered what he knew about achieving more powerful orgasms by pleasuring the prostate and (willing himself not to glance down at it) imagined what something as thick and robust as Trip's waiting, upwards-arching cock could do if applied correctly. He doubted it would change anything between them. Nothing ever really had. If he were to tell the truth, he'd been craving something of that particular nature since earlier that day, when the dutiful attentions of the airport staff had caused his libido to kick it up a notch.

And Trip's cock had felt inviting in his grasp..

⚜ Read the full chapter here - it’s free! ⚜

Or, pick an earlier chapter:

Pt. 1 - Tumblr draft -> AO3 Pt. 2 - Tumblr draft -> AO3

Thanks in advance for any support you show my writing! In such a quiet corner of fandom, it’s difficult to find the Motivation to post anything so I really appreciate every like, reblog, comment, and kudos I get!

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“Back in 2002, Steven Appleby inadvertently outed himself in a comic strip about a cross-dressing superhero saving fashion victims from pinstripes and overalls. The strip, published in the Guardian, brought “Dragman” swooping down to earth in a mauve ballgown and yellow wig. Although Appleby had been out for several years to his close friends and family, he realises now that the new character embodied an urge to go further. “I’d had enough of leading a double life. Cross-dressing in secret once or twice a week felt dishonest and stifling,” recalls the 64-year-old artist. “I’d learned to be comfortable with being a transvestite and now I was desperate to live as one.”

Eighteen years later, Dragman is back as the star of his own book. His adventures take him from the tip of the Shard to a fetish club deep beneath London’s railway arches, on the trail of a serial killer who specialises in murdering transvestites. But before he can solve the crimes he has first to overcome the enmity of a superhero community that is not only transphobic but has banned any rescue that is not strictly covered by insurance. By instinctively saving a young girl as she plummets off a rooftop, Dragman has outlawed himself.

Appleby created the book at his studio on a busy south London street, where he opens the door to a colourful gathering. His wife, Nicola Sherring – to whom he remains married though they separated many years ago “as a biblical couple” – is sharing a sandwich with Charlie, a scarlet cockatoo, who sits on her shoulder, watched jealously by Una, an accident-prone one-eyed pug (named from Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies – “U is for Una who slipped down a drain”). Sherring is responsible for colouring the book while Charlie plays a bit part in it, swooping around a conservatory. “He wasn’t meant to be in it at all, but Nicola sneaked him in, says Appleby, “so I had to redraw a whole spread.”

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The relationship between fiction and autobiography is seldom as delicately nuanced as it is in Appleby’s protagonists. Like Dragman’s alter ego August, he discovered his transvestism after trying on a woman’s stocking that he found down the back of a sofa at the age of 19. Like August’s long-suffering wife Mary, Sherring was a carpenter when the couple met. “She came to make bookshelves for my flat and we just got on so well that I kept finding more jobs for her to do, and then we fell in love.”

While August keeps his secret locked up in boxes in the attic, Appleby was honest with Sherring from the start – even though he admits that their marriage involved a certain amount of denial. “I assumed my other issues would fade into the background or even go away, because I certainly hadn’t fallen in love ever before. And so I thought, wow this is amazing, maybe it’s the antidote.”

Sherring already had two sons and they had two more together. When their younger boys were nearring the end of primary school, Appleby felt he had to tell them. “I was feeling increasingly itchy about it – not depressed, but just kind of incomplete,” he says. “I wanted to be a joined-up person and I also didn’t want to have this secret from the family and particularly from my boys.” With a couple of friends, he and Sherring went off to a wig shop. “I wanted something short, so people wouldn’t notice a change, but then I put on this style (he pats his trademark black bob), and all of them said, ‘that’s the one’.”

Back home, his sons “didn’t bat an eyelid. They were probably watching TV or playing computer games.” On a car journey to their Northumberland holiday cottage a while later, a school friend started moaning about how embarrassing her parents were. “I said to them ‘What must I be like?’ And they replied ‘Oh no, Dad, you’re not embarrassing at all. You don’t wear lace dresses to school like you do at night.’”

The cottage, which used to belong to Appleby’s mother, provides a link to his childhood, which was spent in a leaky old vicarage near the Scottish border. He was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, the oldest of four children. His mother was Canadian and his father worked for his family’s quarrying firm, which was slowly going bust. After a local Church of England primary school, where he won prizes for plasticine modelling, he boarded at a Quaker school from the age of 11. “I loathed it to begin with, but in the end I wouldn’t wish it away,” he says. “It���s that mixed thing, because I have huge respect for the Quakers and I still have friends from school.”

He hung out in the art room and got involved in a band, going on to do art and design at Manchester Polytechnic, “mainly because I found art fun, and because my academic subjects weren’t brilliant”. The experience delivered an existential shock. “Suddenly I found lots of people could draw much better than me.” He dropped out for a while to join a band, before returning to do graphic design at Newcastle Polytechnic, followed by illustration at the Royal College of Art, where he was tutored by Quentin Blake. “He taught me that you didn’t have to be a brilliant drawer if your drawings have personality. You can draw a car really badly, as long as it has the spirit of a car.” He flips the book open on a sweetly wonky green Mini, in which Dragman tootles around when he is being August.

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This revelation didn’t entirely cure his sense of inadequacy, and he took a job at a design firm, Assorted iMaGes, founded by a college friend, Malcolm Garrett. Together they ran high-profile campaigns for bands such as Buzzcocks and Duran Duran. “Malcolm would design the album covers and I’d do the other things like playing cards or bubblegum cards. It was fun, but after a few years I got frustrated, because you’re doing it for other people.”

One of the first characters he created was Captain Star, an obsolete astronaut stranded on a distant planet with an outsized ego, who was invented for a strip in New Musical Express and went on to become the star of a TV animation series voiced by Richard E Grant and Adrian Edmondson. Commissions from Punch, the Guardian and the Times followed. He collected his work into a series of books that make him appear to be a self-help guru: Normal Sex was followed by Men: The Truth and The Truth About Love. His Loomus cartoons about a small boy and his dysfunctional parents, which ran for 11 years in the Guardian Family section, were published as Steven Appleby’s Guide to Life.

It’s all a question of curation, he says. “So for Normal Sex, I collected everything I’d ever done about sex and divided it into sections.” Published in black and white in 1993, its opening pages are a characteristic mix of awkward truths and absurdist humour: “Some individuals are attracted only to themselves. Other confused people believe they may belong to a hitherto undiscovered sex. Of course creepie-crawlies have sexual worries too. Worms have trouble deciding which end is which …”

Dragman is his first venture into sustained narrative, and it has already been optioned for a live action TV adaptation. In some ways, he says, it’s a strange choice of subject because “I’m not crazy about superheroes at all, but I loved the Batman series that I watched in the 1960s and, looking back, I probably wanted to be Catwoman.” He read the Dandy and the Beano alongside his sister’s comics, Bunty and Diana. “I did move on to superhero comics a bit, but not all that much. Then I got into science fiction. I loved Philip K Dick, particularly, because nothing in his books was ever quite what it appeared to be, and that seemed to be reality to me. Maybe it reflected the secret life that I had.”

Which brings us back to the question of gender. Unlike Dragman, Appleby doesn’t have a transvestite alias, though he lives full-time in woman’s clothes. He briefly investigated gender reassignment but decided against it, citing his encounter with “Colin the mouse man” – a pest-controller – as an example of both the challenges and rewards. “Colin arrived at the door and I opened it and said, ‘Hi. I’m Stephen. I changed my image a few years ago,’ and he laughed, and we had this whole conversation. On his second visit he brought me a couple of leopard print screwdrivers, with little fluffy bits, and said ‘I was given these for Christmas. I thought you might like them.’”

He now lives partly in his studio and partly back at the family home with Sherring and her partner, a son and his girlfriend, a nephew, and, of course, Charlie and Una. Friendship is important to him, cropping up time and again in his professional life. When he wanted to try out the ideas in Dragman, it was to a member of his old school band that he turned.

The book is full of Appleby’s unique brand of punning fun. If it has a message, it’s that it pays to be honest, and capitalism isn’t honest: it steals souls. Its warning is knitted into a plot that is indebted to hard-boiled detective fiction and soap opera, as well as to his own experience of the cross-dressing scene.

“I would know people as Deirdre or Susan and have no idea what their male name is, or whether they’re a plumber or a lawyer,” he says. “I just feel so lucky that the world allows me to be myself. ””

Check out this cool man who wears whatever clothes he wants, without feeling the need to chemically alter his appearance or pretend it affects anything other than his dress sense!