We were lucky to catch up with Risiko recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Risiko thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

The most meaningful project I’ve worked on is my webcomic, Arcade Alex. It’s a romantic/erotic comic that started as a single chapter about two gay men, one cis and one trans, who meet at an arcade and fall in love. I grew attached to the characters and have developed it into a whole story that is still in progress.

As a trans man myself, I wanted to see more guys like me in comics and erotica, and found the content out there to be sadly lacking in stories about trans folks, especially stories that are told respectfully. And I wanted to show what it’s like to date a trans person as well as what it’s like to date as a trans person, and to demystify the transmasculine experience. I knew I could make a difference and create something of my own.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a trans man in my mid 30s who has been drawing all of my life. My art has generally been a hobby over the years, as I’ve always preferred to work behind the scenes, and have shied away from sharing my work with anyone except close friends. I’ve worked on a handful of creative projects before this, but nothing of this scale.

I decided to go public with Arcade Alex after being encouraged to do so by my friends – they said that it’s something special, and other people should see my comic. I’m very thankful they encouraged me to do so.

Although I acknowledge that there are few stories with transmasculine protagonists, I don’t think that the story is extraordinarily groundbreaking. It’s just a story of two guys in love. But trans readers have reached out to me and told me that it’s given them confidence and have helped them find themselves. Gay cis readers have told me that they didn’t realize what trans men deal with and this helped them understand. This kind of feedback has made me realize that this little project has meaning. I know, for myself, how honest, genuine representation can make you feel seen. I hope I can do that for people in my community too.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I’ve always been hard on myself and have struggled to see myself as both a man and having worth. Although I’ve written the titular trans man character, Alex, as being very confident and assertive, there are times when his insecurities – and mine – come through.

I try to keep the tone of the comic light overall, as the point is about finding yourself and trans joy, not another record of our suffering. A comic, especially if you’re working alone, is a very long term project – it takes so much time to produce a single page that it can take years to progress weeks in comic time.

I’ve noticed that my opinion of myself and my confidence has grown as I’ve transitioned, and subsequently, that my earlier outlines of chapters or Alex’s dialogue don’t feel right. There are times that he’s hard on himself or asks for acceptance or forgiveness for things that he doesn’t have to. I’ve chosen to rewrite some of these scenes because they don’t reflect Alex’s character accurately, nor the trust that he’s built in his relationship with his boyfriend, Kaz.

Learning how to balance my own journey of self-acceptance with Alex’s journey that I want to show for my readers has been eye-opening – sometimes I’ve grown without even realizing it.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I generally don’t receive a lot of hate mail for my comic, which frankly, pleasantly surprises me. It’s hard to open a news site or social media these days without seeing negative opinions about the trans community. However, in the first year that my site was up, I had one memorable interaction.

I moderate the comments section on my site myself, and first time posters’ comments are immediately kicked to me before they go live. This helps me make sure my readers aren’t seeing hate speech. Generally, I can shrug off the comments, but this guy was particularly persistent and sought me out on Instagram.

He was angry because he had apparently left a comment that was kicked to me for moderation, and assumed I had deleted it (good assumption – I did after I saw it.) He went on a rant, and against my better judgment, I engaged for a few minutes before I blocked him. His opinions really got to me, and put me in a slump for several days. The therapist I was seeing at the time even said maybe I should take my comic offline.

But I didn’t want to take the comic offline. After several months online, his statements were really the first hate that I had gotten for my work. Whatever the guy’s issue was, didn’t have to be my issue. I still remember what another trans guy friend of mine said – “Congrats, man, this means you made it. You got your first hater.”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://risikocomics.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/risikocomics/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/risikocomics
• Other: Email: [email protected]