Avery Kaplan, The Beat:
“AVERY KAPLAN: Can you share the origins of The Chromatic Fantasy with us? How did the graphic novel come together?
H.A.: There are a couple different places this came from.
First, I had a brief fixation on historical clothing in around 2018, I think, and I started drawing two unnamed characters to put different outfits on. I started giving them lore sort of passively, where I was thinking I wanted them to have these fancy clothes without actually being aristocracy, and decided they were just very good thieves. (Though I guess that’s what aristocracy is anyway.)
So I just kind of had these throw-away characters laying around, and I had another goal of just wanting to produce any original finished work, even if it wasn’t very good, after spending a long time on a project that I ended up not liking and won’t ever be finished. So I just started writing whatever fun things I felt like coming up with with these guys, thinking “this is the worst thing anyone’s ever made but at least it will be done, and then I’ll have experience making something that I can use to make something better later.” I really wasn’t thinking this would be more than just, like, a little thing I did that maybe a few people would read.
Eventually I started taking the project too seriously.
Second, I really wanted to make something just gnarly stupid gay. I wanted the characters to be overtly and specifically gay and trans, with no room for other interpretations. Absolutely no subtext. And I wanted to draw them kissing a lot.
They are two men. They are gay. They are having gay sex and have romantic feelings for each other. They are both trans men. They are explicitly trans men. They are not women in disguise and they are not “discovered” by anyone at any point.
But I also wanted it to be genuinely entertaining on its own. Outside of wanting to make things gay as shit, I’ve always been drawn to write stories that are surreal and weird and avant-garde. ”
Read the full interview on The Beat‘s website here!
