After the positive reception of Phantomtits volume one, author and Carleton University graduate Cara Tierney hopes their upcoming second volume of the graphic novel will continue challenging readers’ preconceptions about the transgender community.
The first of the stories’ three volumes, self-published in November 2020, explores the main character’s transgender identity through a semi-autobiographical retelling of Tierney’s double mastectomy, also known as top surgery in the transgender community. The main character discovers their family’s history with breast cancer and uses that knowledge to get top surgery. They decide to cremate their breasts and are then haunted by the breasts’ ghosts at the end of the novel.
With plans to publish the second volume by early 2022, Tierney said the next installment of the story will adopt a more fantastical tone which will further explore how trans people view their bodies in relation to gender.
“The main character has to figure out what these ghost breasts do, what their powers are—if they have any powers—and then what their relationship is with the main character,” Tierney said.
They added that this new tone will be used to comment on how the public perceives trans people.
“Hopefully, the absurdity of being accompanied by ghost breasts will reflect upon some of the absurdity of anti-trans rhetoric,” Tierney said.
As the story evolves, the development process behind the novels has shifted too.
Since volume one was based on Tierney’s unique experiences, they wrote most of the story and dialogue. The novel’s art was designed by Ottawa-based artist and illustrator Pascale Arpin, but the reference images were provided by Tierney, who took them during independent photoshoot sessions.
The second volume’s tonal shift has made the development process with Arpin much more collaborative, according to Tierney. Writing and panel design have been done together, which has made the processes more efficient despite their busy schedules.
Within Ottawa’s transgender community, there have been positive responses to volume one. Aaron Daniels Casey, a transgender man who works at the Comic Book Shoppe, said that Phantomtits provides good commentary on how hard getting top surgery can be.
“It’s like this for all surgeries relating to trans folks,” Casey said. “I’ve been on a waitlist for three years for something that I don’t even know when it’s going to happen and it’s something I know will make me a lot more comfortable and happy with my body.”
Casey added that because the novel is both educational and fun to read, it makes the subject of top surgery more approachable.
“Medical stuff can be so scary and taboo to talk about,” he said. “When you can joke around and just be saying ‘boobs’ … as childish as it is, it makes people laugh.”
The Comic Book Shoppe sold its initial shipment of the first volume quickly. Now the shoppe is selling an additional shipment “pretty steadily,” according to Casey.
Phantomtits has also been supported by other local businesses, such as Black Squirrel Books on Bank Street and the Ottawa Art Gallery.
Tierney said that after selling their first copies at the Ottawa Art Gallery, they contacted bookstores in Nova Scotia, P.E.I., and Newfoundland. This gave them the opportunity to talk to bookstore owners in other provinces about the LGBTQ+ community.
“I had a really wonderful conversation with a [bookstore] owner in P.E.I. who started it off by saying ‘I’m sorry if I ask questions that offend you, but I want to be a space where queer people can come and find books,’” Tierney said.
This P.E.I. bookstore owner, Nancy Quinn, runs the Seaside Bookshop. Quinn said she mostly sells used books, but she wanted to support Tierney’s novel because she felt it would help her and the community learn about transgender peoples’ experiences.
“I didn’t even know the actual phrase—the correct phrase ‘top surgery,’” Quinn said. “I was like ‘Oh my god, this is kind of like discovering a new language. It’s awesome.’”
Quinn said she has been mentioning the novel to people who browse the “sexuality” section of her store, where she sells books about feminism and LGBTQ+ subjects.
When Phantomtits volume two is released, Quinn said she intends to sell it in her store. Independent of the novel and Tierney, she also reached out to PEERS Alliance, an LGBTQ+ support organization based in P.E.I., to offer her bookstore as a space for their meetings.
“Maybe the conversation hasn’t started because there really isn’t a place for it, but maybe I can facilitate that,” she said.
Tierney said they hope their work as an artist can help more people learn about LGBTQ+ identities and communities.
“Figuring out I was queer and trans often felt like a very isolated and individual process, whereas identity is … something that we forge in the collective,” Tierney said. “Sometimes an artwork can be like a bridge into a community or conversation that you otherwise feel disconnected from.”
Featured image by Spencer Colby.
