Heterotopias: Tillie Walden’s Queer Orientations

by: Michaëla Cogan , March 30, 2023

Tillie Walden’s work has been noticed for its emphasis on architecture, but it also owes much to storms. Born in 1996 in Texas, a state known for its tornadoes and hurricanes, Walden now lives in Vermont where snowstorms are just outside the window. Her prolific career in comics also follows a weather of its own, from its sudden beginning at the age of 17 when she first took a revelatory class with Scott McCloud, to her precocious contracts with the British Avery Hill publishers, who discovered her talent while she was still a student at the Center for Cartoon Studies, where she teaches today. Her immediate worldwide success places her among the prominent new North American voices in graphic narratives: despite her young age, she has received critical acclaim (two Eisner Awards and three Ignatz Awards) for her work now comprising seven volumes, a children’s book, a tarot card set, and some varia.

Her first published volume, The End of Summer (2015), is set in a snowy mythical kingdom with Nordic and Japanese overtones. An oneiric piece with a fable aesthetic, it obliquely addresses the gravity of rape and incest, in the form of an on-going, mostly non-verbal implicit conversation—that held between point-of-view character Lars and his twin sister Maja, who seems to be the victim of her father’s sexual abuse. This narrative inaugurates some autobiographical references (Walden also has a twin brother, John) but much fewer than the next two books requested by Avery Hill Publishing: I Love This Part (2015), a one-panel-a-page comic centring on a baby queer love that develops between two middle-schoolers, and A City Inside (2016), a dreamscape of a girl’s lifespan as she comes of age, finds love, grows old and comes into her own. Those two volumes feature an unnamed blonde tween-teen who looks like Walden, and a BIPOC love interest, both characters reading as early variations of a theme that later works will serially develop. In the 2017 memoir Spinning, Tillie’s first crush, modelled on real life, acquires a name—Rae—and somewhat more background as a character, whereas the operatic romance On A Sunbeam (2018) goes overboard in its epic (more than four hundred pages) and overtly fictitious rewriting of two girls in intergalactic love. Are You Listening? (2019), set in rural Texas, is a road trip towards an imaginary town named West, a trip whose phantasmagoric decor matches the emotional state of the characters—the crazier the road, the closer they edge towards their own trauma—and ultimately allows healing to happen. Clementine (2022) is the first volume of a trilogy set in The Walking Dead universe, from which it draws its generic blend of western, frontier myth and survival story. Finally, if her presence in queer storytelling is manifest from her beginnings, her latest volume, Tegan and Sara. Junior High, which will be out in the spring of 2023, ratifies her as a major voice in the queer pop canon: written by legendary Canadian indie twin singers Tegan and Sara Quin on the basis of their 2019 memoir, it follows by just a few months the airing of an Amazon TV series of the same name co-developed by Clea DuVall, thus confirming Walden’s intermedial inclinations.

Walden’s later works involve the blending of voices and the borrowing of storyworlds, in a form of artistic and generic cannibalism that allows her to bridge the gap between her personal experience and other narratives. In that regard, it is striking that her only overt memoir providing a transparent autobiographical input is Spinning, and that whichever mainstream appreciation this book has found, it did not induce Walden toward self-writing. Although Spinning may have been publicised as a turning point in her coming-out narrative, in the light of the rest of her works it appears as just a stepstone in her development of multiple narratives, most of which are not limited to personal retelling but exploring variations of the queer self. This is not to say that recurring biographical motifs do not inform the whole—such as a first interracial lesbian love, school bullying and sexual harassment trauma or Walden’s fascination for storms and snow. But there is an obvious contamination between reality and fiction, between her unique lived experience and the range of its diverse representations, between what readers have come to recognise as her idiosyncratic style and the multiple ways in which she draws inspiration from former graphic artists. The lushness of Walden’s visual imagination indeed hosts direct quotes and winks to, for instance, Winsor McCay or Hayao Miyazaki. Foremost perhaps is her matrimonial legacy of queer feminist stories (some of which—for example, those of Alison Bechdel—have already been told in graphic form), and its momentum in her own arising artistic vocabulary, a locus for as-yet unheard voices.

The characteristic visual-verbal language of comics is perhaps congenial to Walden’s singular treatment of time, space and story, for which she provides her own queer revisions, thanks to the use of ‘unnatural’ (Baroni) or ‘impossible’ (Alber) prolongations. As Hillary Chute puts it in Comics as Literature? (2008), the act of reading comics is by definition ‘nonsynchronous’ and ‘disjunctive,’ because it places the reader in the position of both ‘reading and looking for meaning’ (452). To ‘look for’ implies searching for a meaning that may not be preexisting or monolithic, perhaps to interpret. In response to Walden’s personal geography, to the new ‘orientations’ (Ahmed) that she chooses to give time, space and story, the reader may in turn reshape their own perspective of the world, and prove her works to be truly ‘heterotopian,’ in Michel Foucault’s sense of the term: an illustration of those figurative spaces that interact with the real world without resembling it, heterotopias ‘are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ [1] (24). Such subjective representations, subversive contestations, and transgressive inversions certainly depend on the bending and reframing of ‘real,’ or simply existing, images and narrative tropes, thus allowing for new embodied, or ‘enacted,’ realities.

‘Large ageing houses’: Contesting the Architecture of Patriarchy

Tillie Walden is noted for her ornate architectural details and elaborate perspectives, a trait some [2] have traced back to Winsor McCay, from whom she has certainly inherited the singular aesthetic of placing gigantic, out-of-scale people in urban or natural settings. ‘I’m obsessed with architecture. I’m obsessed with worlds and world-building,’ she says in a 2017 interview (Fahle). In life, as on the page, space is structured and allows the body to situate or, to use Sara Ahmed’s terminology, to ‘orient’ itself according to its surroundings: external architecture frames the range of movements and, to a certain extent, materialises the limit between inner space and the public sphere without. This has repercussions that go beyond the mere physicality of moving bodies, as it also involves the limitation of pulses and instincts by societal norms. This connection between spatial layout and psychological configuration manifests in I Love This Part: while in the first half of the story, the oversized Tillie and Rae characters tower over a series of settings which they inhabit with their own creative sense of self, their sudden break-up—forcibly induced, it is suggested, by Rae’s homophobic mother—is followed by ‘silent’ pages no longer featuring people but landscape alone, with the effect of erasing or muting the sense of self previously developed and even hyperbolised. More specifically, in the 53rd panel, an overpowering bottom view of a church, visually denoting a set of dogmatic views, seems to explicate the cause of the oppression: the official delimitations of this given public space leave no room for the ‘desire lines’ (570) described by Ahmed, those unofficial paths not intended by architects but that users fabricate themselves by treading repeatedly on the ground, forging new ways by means of their singular volition. However, in keeping with its core constraint of one panel per page, one backdrop per emotion, the storyline proves somewhat redeeming as it follows through with the point-of-view characters’ sentimental ups and downs, zooming in and then out of facial close-ups into ostensibly non-inhabited landscapes. Thanks to a double or fusional focalisation (both image and words do not privilege one girl over the other, but develop instead a sort of shared conversation, in-person, online, and finally in absentia), the girls’ connection is sealed on a narrative level as well.

Materialising an architecture of oppression paradoxically serves the purpose of liberating the characters from its violence. In its first version (a three-page prequel was added in the second edition), A City Inside opens on the description of the unnamed main character’s childhood house, her father’s ‘large, aging house’ (150) in the South, complete with moldy carpets and Kafkian corridors. Slightly undermined by the intrusion of playfully camouflaged octopuses, fish and Miyazaki-style round white ball-creatures hidden in page corners, this Southern Gothic influence justifies the girl’s need to ‘escape those Southern ghosts’ (153) and break free from the ‘spirits of [her] old home’ (170). The Gothic motif of the decaying mansion is also at the heart of The End of Summer, Walden’s first published work featuring the confined existence of an extended aristocratic family with antiquated ideals of nobility. All blonde, with distinctly Scandinavian names such as Lars or Hedda, they are kept by closed doors and windows from the dangers of the outside world where the wintry season is three years long. The high-ceilinged house itself functions as a vast decorative closet in which, under the innocuous guise of play and family time, a number of family secrets, ranging from murder to rape and incest, tacitly prosper. As in Nordic noir there is a tension between an apparently still and bland social surface and the misogyny and racism depicted as lying underneath. Only the shattering of the walls eventually brings snow tumbling in, prematurely, before the predicted end of the winter season. This regenerative act is accomplished by the mother-queen in her exasperation over the father’s blindness with regards to the obvious wrong done to two of the daughters: a pregnant Hedda and a sexually abused Maja. The breaking of the house destroys it, along with the ones protected by it—both parents die in the event—but it is the only way for the children to take over their parents’ rule and, in so doing, reverse their inheritance of patriarchy. The destruction of the patriarch (parricide and regicide) is a running theme which the story further explores through the retelling of this fantasy world’s beginning, in a myth reminiscent of Norse origin stories [3]: as Lars reads about mythology out of a book, he connects the murder of a giant called Ymir, born from the elements, to the murder of his own gigantic cat Nemo, in charge of his protection [4]. At the root of the violent system are only men: the three mythological brothers who kill Ymir, the father who silently bears witness to the violation of women in his house (and might even be guilty of incest, it remains unclear), the older cousin Per or Perry (whose name originates in the Latin root pater) who assaults Maja and has inadequate physical contact with Lars.

In the final pages, the point-of-view character Lars, who is also the narrator of the text boxes, remembers an instance of his and his twin sister Maja’s childhood at ‘the end of summer,’ a season opposite the one experienced in the story, a season in which they were able to climb out of the house and onto the top tower, from where they looked down below: one fell, the other pulled them back up, both survived. In contrast with the rigid immobility of the life indoors, this moment of vertiginous risk propels them both into their future—it is implied that Lars dies of his incurable disease, and that Maja lives on—into a dynamic motion that is the only exit from a decadent patriarchal world.

In Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze writes about the specifically American ‘dream of establishing a function of universal fraternity that no longer passes through the father, but is built on the ruins of the paternal function, a function that presupposes the dissolution of all images of the father’ (1997: 78). When what Deleuze calls the statue of the father is brought to the ground, this loss allows other ambiguous, amorphous portraits, that he metaphorically names ‘Squids’, to surface and in turn exert their potency.  This lack of stable references certainly informs Walden’s post-father, or post-patriarchy architectures.

In this volume, the circulation of voices and silence, of self-expression and secrecy, owes much to Hillary Chute’s explanation of a ‘disjunctive’ mode of reading comics in her article ‘Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative:’

Comics moves forward in time through the space of the page, through its progressive counterpoint of presence and absence: packed panels (also called frames) alternating with gutters (empty space). Highly textured in its narrative scaffolding, comics doesn’t blend the visual and the verbal—or use one simply to illustrate the other—but is rather prone to present the two nonsynchronously; a reader of comics not only fills in the gaps between panels but also works with the often disjunctive back-and-forth of reading and looking for meaning (452).

Indeed, the verbalised narrative, contained in text boxes that are Lars-centric and elliptic speech bubbles, is not sufficient to make sense of the full story. The rape, the suggested implications of incest (with the mother’s indirect words ‘our daughter is pregnant … I will kill you if you ever go near her again,’ 34), and the mother’s final rebellion are all made somewhat explicit by visual clues that are images. In fact, more often than not, those images do not directly illustrate the immediate text, but drive the reader in other, more unconscious, directions. For instance, Lars is the obvious narrator, and the reader witnesses most of the story through his point of view, but this is disturbingly incomplete: when quiet and reflective Maja suddenly breaks out at the dinner table, throwing a fit of rage and spilling her food and tea everywhere, the text soberly notes ‘Something isn’t right with Maja,’ (17) but fails to connect her abrupt personality change to her sexual abuse. However, Lars’ very incapacity, his frailty in dealing with life and its complexities, is the very condition of another narrative: through his failing eyes, his manifest impossibility to act and therefore to protect his sister, the reader accesses the implicit focus of the narrative: that of Maja. He is the means through which the monolithic family story gradually fissures into fragments, thus exposing its empty spaces and hidden secrets. One of those instances occurs as he loses consciousness because of his mortal illness, and although words are scant, the layout of the panel takes over the narration, in one of Walden’s most daring formal experiments, as the words ‘I don’t want to go’ are cut in thin stripes separated by white spaces that simultaneously fracture the panel and Lars’ voice and its consistency into incoherent fragments. Although Maja’s abuse is never illustrated directly, the narrative gravitates around this tacit event in further indirect, inverted, and unconscious ways: on page 15, in one of Lars’ daytime terrors illustrated by a succession of stills, the uncanny image of two men one on top of the other, perhaps in the midst of love-making but more accurately performing some form of sexual abuse, intrudes upon the page absolutely unexpectedly (as it is the only occurrence of a dark-haired person in the entire story, one of the men remains heterodiegetic). Two pages later, during Maja’s breakdown at the dinner table, Walden’s typically curated lines become blotchy and imprecise, as uneven as the girl’s own unruly voice: ‘This must be overwhelming for you all. God forbid a young lady should open her mouth. More tea, mummy?’ she blurts out in a very Mad Hatter gesture, before being carried away by three men with a last outcry ‘DON’T TOUCH ME’ (17). Lars’ seizure comes just a page later, as an immediate and—for the reader, who has by that time been given a number of clues—logical consequence of Maja’s disappearance. The visual precedes the verbal—at times supersedes it—when it is not building a storyline of its own, one that does not follow the reader’s rational need for a chronological and logical plot, but instead roams where angels fear to tread, in the ‘nonsynchronous’ unconscious of dreams and associations. It is the only way, perhaps, to give a voice to the silent stories, those of the women whose abuse goes unwitnessed, unexpressed, unpunished.

Despite the general impression given by The End of Summer of a dreamy account of childhood and the long carefree summers preceding coming of age, what really ends here is not so much summer as innocence, and the corresponding possibility for oblivious play. In the pages preluding to their enthronement, the two twin heirs are shown covered in blood, not their own but that of the slaughtered giant Ymir: one may intuit that they have indirectly contributed to the murderous ways of their community if, in turn, they persevere in their family upbringing. In their case, going back to the origins implies breaking away from the traditional, inherited narrative, to turn, perhaps, an endless winter into a new summer. This is probably what Avery Hill Publishing House was thinking about the year they published The End of Summer, when they asked Walden for something light, a story that would delight the readers who had been impressed by her precocious debut as a CCS student. That same year, I Love This Part came out, an almost-happy queer love story based on material that her first work had left unexplored. Having done away with some old houses, Walden was ready to jump out of that architecture into a new one of her own.

Cities Inside: Inverting Public Spaces

In her consistent use of architecture as structure for the storyworld and the page, Tillie Walden shows her ability to use form as a constraint—one to be contested, as in the case of obsolete patriarchal scaffolding that jubilantly falls apart when the house of End of Summer is submerged by regenerative snow—but also one to be nourished and developed. For instance, in a 2017 interview with The Guardian, Walden expands on how writing her memoir Spinning involved choosing a very formalised layout in order to let memories and feelings find their way safely onto the grid of the page:

I’ll use The End of Summer as a comparison: I was really able to fall into [that] story and let the story really affect the layout in a kind of crazy, surreal way. I felt like if I gave myself permission in Spinning to really feel that free, then I would lose track of all the narrative threads. There was so much more to carry in this book and I felt like using a grid, using these smaller pages, and keeping it within this realm really helped me manage everything (Micheline).

In a similar manner, the oneiric landscapes of A City Inside were later, in second edition, complemented with a framing narrative that served as a logical prequel, or prologue, to the dreamscapes that followed: as the protagonist lies down in what appears to be a therapist’s office, she surrenders to her meandering thoughts about herself, thus justifying the following  pages. Although the move may have been editorial, this conversation between what is deemed as objective or factual (the office) and the more imaginary elements (the dream) highlights the transformative and performative power of imagination and feelings: when new spaces are built inside, outer barriers are simultaneously overcome.

In an author’s note to Spinning, Walden writes about her approach to memoir as a literary genre, about how it allowed her to shy away from autobiographical expectations, such as the necessity for strict chronology, factual exactitude, and exhaustivity. She evokes her choice to stay away from ‘memorabilia’ (the actual objects and iPhone photographs that remain from her skating days) in order to edge closer to her ‘memory.’ Instead of ‘an external story,’ she wanted ‘every moment in the book to come from my own head, with all its flaws and inconsistencies … [With] each memory that I started to put on the page, a new narrative emerged.’ ‘[It] was about sharing a feeling,’ she adds, ‘it ended up not being about ice-skating at all’ (393). Often presented like a sports memoir about figure skating, topped with a coming-out story, Spinning turns out to be much more than those ‘external’ elements. What Walden remembers most about the sport is ‘the feeling of skating fast and just the feeling and motion of ice skating,’ (Wong), not so much the culture coming with it—a socially constructed girl culture that Céline Sciamma had already tackled in her first feature film Water Lilies (2007), set in the universe of synchronised swimming [5]. While outside appearance presents a two-dimensional surface, Walden delves into the depth of skating; into what it felt like to move, not what it meant to others watching—and judging. For example, each of Spinning’s ten chapters opens with a page describing a skating move, a ‘Twizzle,’ ‘Flip jump,’ or ‘Camel spin.’ Despite the lasting resentment she still has with regards to the sport environment, those steps are still part of her, and they evoke positive sensations: ‘I learned to do a twizzle when I was about 6. It was simple. You push forward on one foot and rotate once. That was it. For some reason they always made me laugh. Something about the quick motion made the blood rush to my head, making me usually burst out in giggles’ (357). They form a sort of corporal lexicon she can delve into while writing:

It was all memory. I would close my eyes and do the jump in my head, and my body would kind of twitch. It probably would look very strange to anyone who was in the room with me but my left leg would kind of go up and my right arm—as if I was about to do the jump, and I’d remember how it was and draw it immediately after having felt it. You do something like [ice skating] for so long, it’s all muscle memory … I wanted to remember how it felt. (Yu)

Spinning is thus an apt example of what in Graphic Women (2010) Hillary Chute calls ‘put[ting] the body on the page’ (26). With her focus on rendering the action itself, in its sheer lightness and joy, Walden re-centres the narrative on an embodied sense of self: although her character Tillie is never able to come out as a lesbian to her fellow skaters, she grows in other ways, transferring her skating skills to other areas of life such as crushes, music, or drawing. This act of translation pervades the volume, as the lines etched on a frozen rink gradually turn to lines sketched on a blank page. It is the same sense of jubilant motion that on pages 311-312 animates a lifted arm holding a pom-pom and a lifted pen drawing clowns or, on pages 314-316, a leg raised in an arabesque echoing another pen bent over a page. True to the tradition of coming-of-age narratives, Walden’s story is one of resilience, of an individual’s capacity to reinvent themself through imagination. Spinning is not only about revolving on skates, it can also be about spinning one’s own tale, or at least spiraling out of what one no longer desires: the ultimate hurricane memory on which the volume ends injects just the necessary dose of chaotic disruption to free Tillie from her skating story and throw her into life. That story is fuller, not linear, certainly not simple, and it does not blind itself to painful memories such as gay panic: ‘A first love is important to anyone. But when you’re both young and gay and in the closet, it’s something else entirely. It wasn’t the thrill or freedom I felt that I remember—it was the fear’ (198-199). As the artwork reframes the two teens embracing from a close-up to a final whole-page panel presenting them from a distance, with rays of light shining from a window, emphasis is put, once again, on fear as a result of the outside world and its invisible, but very potent, systems of normative judgement.

The opposition between the intimacy of the private sphere and the potential threat of the public one is a trope in Walden’s work. It is indeed also a trope in feminism, for that matter, since the need for protected, or safe spaces, is formulated in order to escape, or temporarily avoid, the dangers of a space shared with cis men. In her fiction, characters are not specifically separatists, nor do they systematically have conflictual relationships with the men in their lives, such as fathers, brothers or teachers, although all three are portrayed as abusers at some point. Sometimes, aggressivity comes from a mother (Maja’s mother rushing her out from the dinner table), a female schoolmate (bullying is one of Walden’s autobiographical motifs) or simply normalised girl culture (the homophobic ‘truth-or-dare’ games depicted in the early comics ‘What It’s Like to be Gay in an All-Girls Middle School’). Sometimes, it is just frustration at what the external world imposes on one: in My Parents Won’t Stop Talking (2022), the children’s book Walden co-authored with her wife and CCS fellow Emma Hunsinger, protagonist Molly is shattered when her two moms delay their family walk to the park to have a friendly chat with their neighbors, the Credenzas. Exasperated at her own defenselessness in this unhappy situation, she finds out how to break free from her anger and connect—quite comically—to her inner life: with the help of her own imagination, she can turn into a slide, an animal or even into the park itself! (Hunsinger’s experience as a comic strip artist for the press lends the necessary expression to the moment). This comical twist materialises a safe space that Molly finds out of range, outside the traditional delineations of what is considered shared space, to which she does return empowered, thus enacting the liberating quality of her evasion.

A City Inside further explores the need for reflective times away from the everyday, and also ends with a return to life, in a way that is strongly reminiscent of Winsor McCay’s series ‘Little Nemo in Slumberland,’ a weekly strip that ran in the New York Herald from 1905 to 1927 (and was briefly renamed ‘In The Land Of Wonderful Dreams’ for a three-year period in the New York American) depicting a child having fantastic dreams that are always interrupted by his awakening in the final panel. The tension between the fiction of dreams and the factuality of life which informs Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, this ‘effectively enacted utopia’ that has a ‘location in reality,’ serves as a starting point to foregrounding the impact of the imagination on lived life. In Are You Listening? Lou and Bea’s itinerary starts with the guidance of a road map, but ends in the confusion of roads inventing themselves as a result of the driver’s performative desires, as if to materialise Adrienne Rich’s quote that features on the title page: ‘The guidebooks play deception; oceans are / A property of mind. All maps are fiction, / All travelers come to separate frontiers.’ In her work on queer phenomenology, Sara Ahmed expounds upon the formation of what she calls ‘performative’ lines: ‘[l]ines are both created by being followed and are followed by being created. The lines that direct us, as lines of thought as well as lines of motion, are in this way performative: they depend on the repetition of norms and conventions, of routes and paths taken, but they are also created as an effect of this repetition’ (555). While Ahmed recognises the factuality of existing lines, carved by repeated use, she also insists on the possibility of novel lines, generated by unprecedented acts that, if reiterated enough, in turn become habitual and inscribed. At the beginning of the story, Lou and Bea follow the conventional road, the one they can find directions to on a standard map, but the more the trip unravels, the more this given itinerary becomes useless, meaningless. As the pictorial language shifts to far from realistic disappearing roads and vanishing landmarks, the two women enter the realm of the second kind of lines, those ‘followed by being created,’ at times existing only for the split second their car passes through but gone as soon as their pursuers get too close. It is not really a road trip to the town named West, which they never really find, unless they are looking for a spectral place featuring an enigmatic doorway to nowhere, but rather a mapping of the new intents that materialise in the space they inhabit fully, to the point of modifying it.

Rendered in a lavish and extravagant style, teeming with intertextual and intermedial references (to road movies such as Thelma and Louise, westerns, Kafka) the illustrations point to another kind of journey—Lou’s emotional progress as she ultimately comes out of her protective shell to free herself from her burdening secret. It is in a secluded space that she is able to let go of a trauma caused by rape, the safe space of an indoor pool whose tranquil waters are in stark contrast to the frantic car-chasing that precedes its discovery: bathing naked underwater, both women come to terms with an emotional truth that lies below the surface. Walden’s storyworlds are saliently airy and celestial, with their characters soaring in outer space, floating in the sky, or gliding on solid ice, but the watery element is as eloquent as it is scarce. Whether the calm lake in Alma’s yard in On A Sunbeam where the team take a dip after their adventures, or the underground river where Mia and Grace share their first kiss, liquidity equates the emergence of latent desires with the felicitous state that comes from the surfacing of these alternative selves. In keeping with Luce Irigaray (1991)’s urging to ‘remember the liquid ground’ (37), the protagonists do not crash into the solidity of an existing stable ground but rather dive into an indetermined matter that allows them to be, and even to become, themselves. As Astrida Neimanis puts it in Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017): ‘I refer to this onto-logic as an “amniotics” … [w]ater is articulated as always both “being” and “becoming” … [w]ater is what comprises bodies but also that which bathes bodies into being’ (68). The ‘amniotic’ or ‘gestational’ quality of water makes it one of those matters that can ‘bring new things into the world’ as much as it allows the process of ‘reconfiguring that world,’ Neimanis asserts, recontextualising Karen Barad’s terms of agential realism. In Are You Listening’s specific narrative arcs, the indoor pool does indeed provide a welcome interruption of regulated time—as the constant threat of administrative-looking gangsters has been feeding speed into the plot up to that moment, the fast pace of action is broken by the intrusion of passive reflexivity in the water—as well as a regenerative space for the two women’s bodies to undress and unveil their inner depths. This revealing or revelation is not really—or not only—a discursive act with the other (as in an erotic conversation), but is foremost a personal act of remembrance. Lou and Bea bathe in the same water, or Irigaray’s ‘immemorial waters,’ each of them experiencing a different kind of homecoming, a coming-to-terms with their own versions of grief and trauma. Hence, despite other generic influences (including action comics), Walden develops a feminist vocabulary, a liquid lexicon that makes it possible for women characters to open, to be silent, to heal. And then, to return to the public space with renewed energy, as if the private agency of water could capillarise the more solid edges of the external world until this world’s former contours are no longer recognisable: by the end of the story, Lou has learned to drive, and she is heading somewhere to get her driver’s license. Leaving (home, the road, reality) has become a means to survive, and even to live, in the real (masculine?) world and to develop in it as herself: in that regard, it is noteworthy that her encounter with Bea does not result in a love affair, but in a queer friendship of sorts, one that does not distract her from the inner story she needs to tell herself.

As opposed to the linear rigid architectures, bodies of water allow for different page, and colour, treatments. Pools and lakes are there to bathe in, to wash in, to have fun or to make love in; unfrozen (confer the oppressive icerinks of Spinning), liquid water allows fluidity, connects the inner worlds of possibilities to the outer world of restriction. ‘It’s not on the MAP,’ (71) Lou panics when Bea heads stubbornly for an unknown town named Big Springs. It is not recorded in any map (true places never are), because there is a need for her to, in the wake of the protagonist in A City Inside, ‘write stories about places you wanted to go but that didn’t exist yet’ (157). For the writing to be performative, fiction must be taken for granted, as a necessary starting point. Believing in one’s own voice involves going beyond the suspension of disbelief, a trait originating in Walden’s own penchant for the outlandish esthetic of some Japanese anime: ‘Studio Ghibli has completely shaped my visual vocabulary and how I think about stories,’ she says in a 2017 interview. ‘They just present the world and basically ask you to accept it as truth. I just love that. I think it’s so powerful to just present your own story and your own narrative as a reality’ (Wong).

‘It’s not on the map’: Representing Queer Spaces

While Walden’s first works are set in interiors that carry the weight of tradition, On A Sunbeam, first published in instalments as a free webcomic before being made available in print, steps into another kind of openness. First of all, it takes place in outer space, a setting that is neither historically nor geographically defined, but approximatively corresponds to the future of Earth once it has colonised other planets: indeed, human beings are still considered to be ‘Earth kids,’ even though they travel in spaceships and visit exoplanets during their school field trips. Walden confirms she has little knowledge and interest in science-fiction as a genre [6], but insists on the plasticity of outer space as a decor allowing different desires to be shaped: ‘My initial goal with Sunbeam was to create a version of outer space that I would want to live in. So of course that includes tons of queer people, no men (did you notice?), trees, old buildings, and endless constellations’ she writes in her presentation of the online webcomic.

Away from Earth, the world is both familiar and different. Walden, like Alison Bechdel before her, [7] as Hélène Tison notes in Female Cartoonists in the United States—Bad Girls and Invisible Women (2022), creates a narrative centred around lesbian characters, a storyworld which ‘give[s] life to a fantasy: a world that is entirely organised around female, lesbian characters’ (147). But while Bechdel, or Diana DiMassa, do portray some men, albeit in an uncompromising grotesque way, Walden does away with them completely, giving birth to a world with literally no men (neither cis nor gay nor trans—there is, however, one non-binary character named Ell, who uses they/them pronouns). This fantasy, which is in keeping with Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto and her injunction to ‘eliminate the male sex,’ would relate to what Dana Heller calls the ‘mapping of a lesbian space’ (32), a cartography acting as a necessary ‘labor of love for the lesbian nation’ (29). In the real world, the lesbian nation [8] can only materialise for a limited time span in dedicated places (separatist communes or safe spaces, for instance) and, as such, remains a fictive utopia—somewhat akin to Monique Wittig’s feminist utopia Les Guérillères (1969), set in a man-dominated dystopia and embodying under the pronoun elles (later translators have suggested ‘they’ as a more accurate rendering of this French feminine third person, originally translated by David La Vay as ‘the women’), what Adrienne Rich later described as ‘the lesbian continuum’ (Of Woman Born, 1976) to affirm the possibility of a community of women connecting around various aspects of their lives—as elders, lovers, workers, etc.

In On A Sunbeam, such a utopia is postulated by a clear obliviousness to any form of male antagonism. Elif Batuman wrote of some of Céline Sciamma’s more recent work that her feminist cinematic grammar relied on a ‘non-agon,’ that is on her stubborn choice not to deal with antagonists, on saying nothing about ‘the obstacles, the enemies, the traps, men’ [9] (emphasis mine). Similarly, On A Sunbeam, with the interest it takes in everyday teenage drama—such as chatting up crushes during detention, stealing flowers for girlfriends minutes before the school dance, navigating a first job experience with the help of sandwiches and late-night card games—could not be less involved with the trope of the angry lesbian [10] in a violent relationship with the heterosexual world around her. As there is less to fight for or against on a systemic, structural level, more room remains for other questions (such as ecology or classism) and for nuance, most notably with the character Ell, a nonbinary teen on-the-spectrum who can, but will not, talk (one of the only heated debates in the book is related to using Ell’s correct pronouns), or with Mia and Grace’s romance which branches out in unexpected ways, quoting the codes of chivalrous love only to subvert them.

In the beginning, a double plot evolves—as in some Victorian novels—along two timelines: one in Mia’s past (her years at an upscale boarding school where she meets her first love, Grace), and one in her present (as she works exhausting shifts with a team of space archeologists who restore old buildings left behind by former civilizations). In the second timeline, she and Grace have been separated, and the efforts her team (managed by interracial lesbian couple Alma and Char, silent Ell and boisterous Jules) make to revisit and revive past structures follow her own need to repair painful memories. In time, though, her quest leads her across the universe to ‘The Staircase,’ the island-planet owned by a clannish community of women wearing Amish hats. TS (for The Staircase) is where Grace comes from, and where she now lives and where the star-crossed lovers might reunite; it is also the rest of the universe’s major antagonist, mainly because of its strict laws concerning its people (who are not allowed to travel in and out of its borders) and its unique environment: ‘full of healing rock, hot mineral water, and a ton of indigenous wildlife that can’t survive anywhere else’ (314), the land is coveted by the entire galaxy, but highly protected by its local inhabitants. This location reads as a hyperbolised version of the Earth if it were not endangered by man’s hubris; it also enacts an intriguing reversal of America’s guilty past, as Grace’s family, who are drawn as people of colour, are also the rightful owners of the land. TS is peopled by animal-shaped ‘ancient beings’ who serve as spiritual forces; its people revere as a national hero Sid, a woman who is described as a gifted mapmaker; it is thus Edenic in its respect of matriarchal lineage and nature—an eco-feminist paradise of sorts. However, TS is also plagued by bigotry and collective trauma, some of which originates in Ell’s banishment from the community. If this complex weaving of fascinating and repulsive qualities matches Mia’s attraction to Grace and to her mysterious upbringing, it also gives depth to Walden’s storyworld, because it carries the narrative out of the utopia/dystopia dichotomy. Walden’s ‘lesbian nation’ is ‘put on the page,’ it is given a presence, a volume, and a body, but it is not so much idealistic as aesthetic. Walden, who has an irreverent approach to genre, playfully juxtaposes intense and paratactic action scenes (at times alternating up to four plot levels on one single page) with stills of people quietly sleeping. In Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art (1993), Scott McCloud states that ‘comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged staccato rhythm of unconnected moments—but closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality’ (67). In other words, ‘juxtaposed pictures are always narrativised in the process of reception’ (Stein 6) because the reader has a prominent role in ‘translat[ing] sequential images into a continuous narrative by imaginatively filling in the gutters between the panels and by negotiating the complex interaction of pictorial and verbal information in the page’ (Stein 6). In a way, the more Walden departs from a linear, logical, and understandable storyline, the more the reader becomes active and involved in the reading process, the more the ‘agon’ is moved to an aesthetic level.

This rhythmical approach to storytelling certainly traces back to motion pictures and anime, where the spectator is stimulated through a pulsation of both images and sounds (but not words). It is also enhanced by Walden’s colour palette (she numerically colours her own sketches). For instance, while On A Sunbeam is mostly drawn in warm and cool hues such as magentas, blues and greys, it includes a quite rare patch of green (the only occurrence in all of Walden’s work, to this day) when the space crew lands on Earth, in ‘Alma’s house’ (304). The characters are mesmerised, not disconcerted, by the environment they seem to be coming back to (as Jules throws herself on the lawn with a yelp, ‘Ahh! Grass!,’ she must be familiar with the concept), but the reader is also visually taken aback by this sudden change in colour tones, so that the reading experience becomes an ‘immersive’ (Stein 9) one. However, familiar Earth is not to be dwelled-on: although it is the only place with green grass (even The Staircase can boast no such colour), and objectively the best place to be, the vastness of space around continues to magnetically draw the characters to their next adventures. In that regard, it would be interesting to see how the tension between the earth element, usually denoting a stable reality, and the versatility of etheric space, enabling metamorphoses, could fit in theoretical readings of feminine bodies and their performative desires.

When Mia finally reaches Grace, she admits to the breach in their love relationship. ‘We’re not in love and we’re not kids. Not anymore. This is something totally new’ (475). If Grace agrees to join her and her friends on the spaceship, the narrative leaves many possibilities open as to whether their romance will be rekindled, evolve into a friendship, or generate new configurations in the group. The two lovers have reunited as in a true happy ending, but instead of being sealed by monolithic interpretation, their love remains polysemic. In fact, to be precise, it is not so much ‘totally new’ as informed by layers of memories and experience. Not only is Walden enriching the existing vocabulary for young queer love stories that end more-or-less well, but she is also developing much needed archives, ones that account for diverse storylines and document the variety of possible lives to be lived. If there is a gap to be filled in the telling of queer histories, one way is to invent the missing parts or, to use Chute’s expression in Graphic Women, to ‘animate the archive’ (175).

The post-apocalypse in which Clementine (2022) is set is also devoid of a past. Parents are gone, and with them all possibility of a pre-existing structure in which to evolve. Culture is non-existent, books are rare, language scarce. Surrounded by the constant threat of zombies, called ‘walkers,’ the teen protagonists—proto-pioneers of a new frontier—have only their own survival in mind as they navigate a dying world—a dystopia to say the least—a world it is now their responsibility to reinvent. Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore developed their comics series The Walking Dead from 2003 to 2019 and adapted it into a TV show that ran from 2010 to 2022. From 2012 to 2018, Telltale Games and Skybound Games both launched video games stemming from the original storyline. In the last two decades, the zombie universe of The Walking Dead (TWD) has become part and parcel of American popular culture—it is a case study example of transmedia (Freeman), a phenomenon inducing crossovers between different artistic genres and diffusion practices (TWD by-products and paraphernalia can now be purchased), thus generating fan attention internationally from comics readers, TV enthusiasts and gamers alike. Fanfiction abounds, and fans have repeatedly asserted their power to alter the narrative even as it aired, an interaction bordering on co-authorship that researchers call ‘transtext’ (Kurtz & Bourdaa) [11] (the ongoing TV series, whose final episode aired in November 2022, indeed differs from the original comics in many ways). In the video games, each character can explore different optional destinies depending on what choices one makes as a gamer—as a result, favourite character Clementine can live or die, or date either a guy or a girl, which leaves the game quite open, or unfinished.

The Walking Dead universe is at once polysemous and predictable: death is the rule, life the exception. It relies on a combination of action and emotion and has its roots in some of America’s deepest myths of frontier-seeking, survival, and the quest for good among evil. It also provides grounds for some (debated) minority representation and explores marginal forms of community-building and alternative family ties, as survival implies losing people you trust and caring for people who are strangers to you. In his book Queering the Family in The Walking Dead (2018), Bronx scholar John Ziegler suggests a critique on The Walking Dead’s zombie narrative which, as he puts it, ‘reflects cultural anxiety over the family unit. Threats of familial destruction or conversion come not only from zombies but also non-heteronormative relationalities … The traditional nuclear family’s persistent dominance in the post apocalypse of The Walking Dead propels efforts to contain possibilities for alternative family structures, which repeatedly arise’ (1). Ziegler thus resents the choice to end the comic series with a return to order (i.e. the nuclear family model) which he sees as an ‘attempt to normalise, naturalise and police sociosexual ideologies’ (1): the horror narrative is staged as a chaotic interruption of an order viewed as original (implying a necessary restoration of repression over the object of horror, that is zombies), and not as a transition towards another order of a more complex kind (a reformed society in which zombies and people-turned-zombies might play a significant role). As a result, Ziegler sets high hopes on the interpretative (not to say exegetical) power of the fan community to invent meaning beyond what was explicated in the show and comics. [12]

Even though Tillie Walden may not explore the zombie semantics in its fullest range (they are mostly treated as an almost monotonous backdrop), her take on the Walking Dead universe, initiated by Skybound Comet in 2021, must have been envisaged by the franchise as a welcome queer twist—a nod to the more adamant fans?—especially as the title character, Clementine, still a child at the end of the video games, is one of the most beloved, and had fans sobbing about her early demise. Walden’s upcoming trilogy (one volume issued per year from 2022 to 2024) indeed promises to explore Clem’s life and loves as she grows out of teenagerhood. Walden’s appropriation of the franchised zombie universe may be questionable, because it raises questions of artistic contamination: how far can the queering go within a pre-existing culture that has become mainstream? To use the zombie metaphor, can she cannibalise the established narrative without herself ‘turning’ (zombie jargon for being bitten)? If her task is to create queer archives that will convincingly change the course of life once the apocalypse is over, she has to tackle the ‘homotopia’ of the dominant narrative, reorient it, and make room for a heterotopian rendering.

One of the first people Clementine meets on her journey, as she drags herself and her amputated leg (having been bitten in the last episode of the video game, she bids a kid called AJ to cut her lower leg off with an axe—Walden has her find a prosthetic leg later—so that she survives as a human and also as a disabled character), is Amos, a blond Amish visionary who is getting ready to leave his village for his ‘rumspringa,’ a sabbatical or initiation. He is an optimist; she is a cynical realist. In the first volume, he dies after falling for a girl, while she survives after falling (metaphorically, but also literally: down a crevice) for a girl—this is Walden’s first reversal, or revenge, on the ‘bury-your-gays’ trope. Clearly, the narrative is not utopian, as Walden stays true to the series’ high mortality rates. However, Clementine does meet Ricca, the ‘last Sephardic Jew’ in the world (a hint at Walden’s Jewish background). When they are first introduced, Clem is intrigued (‘I’ve never met a Ricca before,’ 72), perhaps because Ricca represents the new frontier: she’s from up North, Canada, but her name sounds like a truncated version of America [13], and their budding queer romance sets the premises of a new world that is brave, but not only that. By the end, neither can walk—or just barely—but their physical frailty does not impede their capacity to imagine a future together. They have ‘a lot of people… people who are still around… and people who aren’t… to make proud’ (208). Their version of utopia is indeed rooted in the past and its memories: in the beginning, Ricca is the only one to possess a dictionary of sorts, and they read through tales learning new vocabulary words together—their new lexicon is made from the remains of the old, lost language. The adults are not quite all gone yet either, for example Tim, a half-zombie living in an underground cave who is still conscious enough to save their lives and to tell his own story of survival. His story implies a husband lost early to the zombie ‘disease’ and is too reminiscent of the AIDS epidemic not to read as a homage to lost queer elders. This is one instance where the zombie metaphor actualises as a political statement undermining TWD’s normalised discourse equating health to moral purity. Perhaps in Walden’s world zombies are not to be repressed but integrated—could they be the underground minority, the target of society’s fear of contamination? Or just the symptoms of an obsolete, decaying system? In all cases, there is no turning back, no return to a prelapsarian utopia: Amos’ plan is to ‘wait for the old world to return’ but Clem knows that ‘nothing is coming back for [them]’ (36).

There is only life left—and driving, a running theme in all Walden’s works. Clem and Ricca speed downhill in a snow engine with as much raucous joy as Mia rides her hoverboards and spaceships, and as Lou feels when she finally learns how to drive a car. Maybe the world cannot be changed, but there are ways to drive through it.

The day Tillie becomes aware, toward the end of Spinning, that she wants to quit skating, she is driving home at nighttime: as she lets this realization come to the surface, her speed increases, and she ends up leaving the road, headlights ablaze, and heading into a field. “Everything began à l’anglaise” would say Deleuze in Essays Critical and Clinical, “but continues à l’américaine” (77). To end a story on the main character, especially a woman, holding the wheel and driving into the distance is one thing, maybe a way for her to her maneuver her itinerary, to retrieve the reins of her own narrative, to be endowed with a sense of active direction. But it is yet another to allow the car to actually diverge from the road and evade any direction altogether, as in the iconic Thelma and Louise ending (“Let’s keep going”), or with Kelly Reichardt’s more reticent cinema, for instance when Jamie inadvertently (but consciously?) drives her truck off the road in Certain Women (2016). This would make for what the French call “hors-champ” (literally ‘off the field’) and equate creating a space that could exist beyond any delineated perimeter, and open on another dimension that the usual senses of perception could hardly grasp before, not so much a counter-space that can only partly reverse or inverse the homotopia of a patriarchal world as a radically different orientation within space itself—an odyssey with no other destination as the self.

Conclusion

In the prologue to A City Inside, the girl character asks, ‘Will there be a place?’ a question which elicits the reassuring response ‘There will be a place’ (144). This exchange seems to relate the finding of one’s space to someone else allowing it to happen, but this is only on the surface. The reframing of the point-of-view character’s intimate geography is indeed tied to her own travelling within an imagination that unfolds into a ‘city inside’ the page, gradually giving shape to a new Jerusalem that is built with each line and dot placed on the white surface: ‘a new city will be built’ (175), ‘you turn away from it all and walk into your new home’ (177), ‘you’ll live the rest of your days in that city’ (178). The emancipation that emerges from developing this idiosyncratic, heterotopian narrative is auto generative: with it, the character reinvents herself, gives new shapes to her identity, thus freeing herself from the oppressive structures of her past, in a movement that crystallises the whole of Walden’s work: from the church, to the father’s old house, to dreamscapes, to water, to outer space, to the post-apocalypse, the main protagonist gradually comes to in a meaningful, autoreferential realm, one that is never quite finalised and always on the verge of change.

Upon their first encounter, Ricca and Clem have a laconic exchange about their pasts, and Ricca tells her about the place she comes from, Canada. ‘Is my origin story not interesting to you, Clementine?’ (77) she says flirtatiously, echoing the beginning of the story where Clem expresses her original desire to go ‘up north’ (26), although ‘nowhere specific’ (41), wanting ‘to keep pushing north, maybe see Canada’ although she doesn’t know ‘any Canadians’ (58)—that is to say, not yet. Perhaps Clem’s ultimate frontier is not Canada itself but another land that is hers to uncover, though not colonise; a territory that has no materiality but lies solely in-between herself and Ricca, a fragile interface at the junction of their two personalities, delineated within the breadth of their sparse conversations. Maybe this shared realm is not so much a destination as it is a place of origins, the starting point of a relationship in-the-making (and a serendipitous hint at Walden’s next collaboration with the Canadian Quin twins).

In the Scriptures, the story of Moses leading his people out of Egypt without a map, directions, or any precise sense of destination makes for a singular relationship to space, given that the travelers are coming into a God-willed destiny while also being at the height of forced displacement. As a foundation-narrative of a promised land that Moses himself is not allowed to enter, the Exodus could be about a queer heterotopia—a place that becomes true only while it is sought, but never quite found nor appropriated. In the same way, Walden’s characters appear to weather their own exile, generating their private storyworlds as they move on, creating lexicons and novel relationship modes, following an itinerary that is not inferred from external standpoints, but built into their particular sense of becoming.

Notes

[1] ‘There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilisation, real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias’ in Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces”  [1984]. Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring 1986). Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 24. One may note that Foucault also evokes the concept of ‘heterochronia’ which may prove useful in the study of queer temporalities.

[2] See comics historian Warren Bernard’s introduction to the collection Alone In Space (unpaginated).

[3] ‘[T]he traditions which have most deeply influenced the post-Renaissance West—the Greek, the Hebrew, and the Norse—all represent human culture as beginning after a tribe of monstrous, patriarchal Giants had been killed off. And the tales about Giants which European and American kids most love are symbolic accounts of such giganticides’ (Leslie Fiedler, “The Dream of Giants,” Freaks. Myths and Images of the Secret Self [1978], New York, Penguin, 1981, p. 93).

[4] The murder of sacred animals is a motif in Walden’s work, perhaps in an echo to Hayao Miyazaki’s animist tales such as Princess Mononoke (1997): in Japanese, the term mononoke may refer to haunting spirits or ‘changed’ beings. For instance, Walden’s On A Sunbeam includes a cosmic-scaled fox referred to as an ‘ancient being’ whose killing is the most punishable crime.

[5] ‘Years later, while researching her film, Sciamma was struck by how different synchronised swimming looks depending on whether you’re above or under the water: on the surface, a show with hair and makeup, dazzling smiles, and a pretense of effortlessness; underwater, legs churning furiously in order not to drown. Like the water lily—a delicate flower with a hidden mass of roots—it was a visual metaphor for what Sciamma called “the job of being a girl”’ (Batuman).

[6] ‘The closest I’ve ever gotten to being into sci fi was having an ET doll … my point being: I know nothing about either the genre of science fiction or the actual mechanics of existing in space … I’ve seen a few snippets of all the big popular space movies, and they always bore me. Why are they so full of white hallways and white men? The inception of On a Sunbeam came from my perpetual disappointment and boredom towards any story set in space.’ From www.onasunbeam.com, retrieved 5 November 2022.

[7] See Alison Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For (1983-2008).

[8] The concept of lesbian nation, developed by Jill Johnston in the late 1960s, refers to the construction of an economic, social, and cultural space based on separatist structures, meant to definitively liberate women from dependence upon men and to establish equality between them.

[9] ‘Since the days of Greek drama, it has been widely accepted that narrative centres on the agon: the conflict between protagonist and antagonist. Sciamma increasingly doesn’t care about antagonists. In Portrait [of a Lady on Fire (2019)], she made a decision “not to tell about the obstacles, the enemies, the traps, men”’ (Batuman).

[10] For a comical approach to this trope, see Hélène Tison’s analysis of Roberta Gregory’s Bitchy Butch: World’s Angriest Dyke (1999), one of the first lesbian stories contributed to Wimmen’s Comix (#4, 1974), or of Diane DiMassa’s The Complete Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist (1999) claiming itself part of the ‘queer punk movement “homocore”’ (unpaginated introduction).

[11] In such a deadly universe, the fans’ disarray is frequent because favourite characters often die prematurely. Such narrative choices have often been interpreted as political, given that TWD boasts the diversity of its cast, which seeks to represent racial and LGBTQ minorities—when the gay couple Jesus and Aaron, or lesbian Tara Chambler were killed off, the fan community expressed exasperation at the fact that other much-loved, but straight, characters had been spared (in a deviation from the original comics plot).

[12] ‘E]ven if the TV show and comics themselves resist a revolutionary reimagining of the family and the ideology that both reproduces it and is reproduced by it, we as viewers, readers, fans, and scholars can use this particular apocalypse to reflect on and enact those changes ourselves. The hope must be, then, that such radical reshaping will take as many forms and reproduce as efficiently as zombies themselves but without requiring the end of the world’ (Ziegler 111).

[13] In fact, onomastics bring together idealist Amos and disillusioned Ricca as two complementary variations on the American identity. In that regard, it is telling that by the end of the first volume of the trilogy, Amos has already died while the tougher, pragmatic Ricca is still there, even though she is severely injured.