INTERVIEW: Melanie Gillman Chats About Craving Queer Community in Other Ever Afters

a detail from the cover of Other Ever Afters by Melanie Gillman

Other Ever Afters: New Queer Fairy Tales collects Melanie Gillman’s fairy tale comics in their distinctive lush colored pencil art. The stories are diverse, poignant, and progressive, and I was thrilled to sit down with Melanie Gillman over Zoom recently and ask all kinds of questions about fairy tales, queerness, and their intersections.

The cover of Other Ever Afters by Melanie Gillman has the title handlettered and surrounded by characters and items pertient to the stories in the book

I’ll start with a question about intersections. The queerness in the stories in Other Ever Afters is really varied: there are a lot of different ways to be queer in these stories, while the intro and the conclusion refer specifically to girls thriving. So I was wondering about how you see those issues linked.

With that intro and conclusion, I wanted to lay some groundwork and prime the reader to think about ways girls and women specifically have been treated within the scope of fairytales and classic folklore as a genre, but that doesn’t mean the collection is exclusively commenting on that. That’s kind of the starting point, and it’s not quite so much about a limited, narrow view of gender, it’s kind of like here are the types of characters, and the types of character tropes I’m going to be starting with, and we are going to be branching out from there in a variety of directions.

I’m taking an older form of storytelling, a Western European fairytale tradition, which is what I’m riffing off of in this collection, a folklore tradition that existed before we had a more expansive way to discuss gender, but moving it into a more modern take on those particular tropes.

I like the idea of the intro and conclusion as being an almost literal frame around the collection. Like, here’s what you’re presented with; now, within that, let’s see what else we can do.

I feel like there’s a message the readers and ideally the characters are supposed to get from what happens in the story. And I think the ‘message” in a lot of these stories is to trust the right person. In some cases, trust your own instincts rather than relying on society to tell you what is trustworthy and what isn’t. That seems connected to the queerness of the stories. Like, know what to reject so you can build something healthier and better. Do you feel that trust issue is a major lesson we need to learn?

A lot of the characters I write in these stories have a core longing, especially in the beginning of the stories, and it’s not always a longing they’re super conscious of, but it’s there in their chests. And I think the readers can see how the character’s longing shapes their interaction with the world. It’s a queer longing for sure, but it’s not always a romantic or sexual longing. It’s connected very deeply to a longing for community, and trust is one of the factors that needs to be in place for them to fulfill the longing that they’re navigating throughout these stories until they find people who they can trust and rely on and build community with.

A lot of the character arcs in the collection involve meeting a new person, and then we as the readers get to watch as the character learns to trust that other person, but it goes a little deeper than that, too, since it’s about that longing for queer families and queer connections and queer relationships in different forms.

It’s about a craving for human connection, which is more difficult to achieve in the kind of starting positions of the societies these characters are moving through, which are often set up in a more medieval power structure, with rigorous social stratifications and things that are not super conducive to queer community building.

When you’re talking about the starting positions of a lot of these characters, it’s making me think about thresholds, which are important in a lot of scholarly discussions of the fairy tale form. In the stories in Other Ever Afters, it seems like the climax is often when a character recognizes they are at a threshold and makes a decision that changes everything. Is that something you consider integral to this genre?

I think in fiction in general you want characters who have a level of agency and at a certain point will be pushed into making decisions that will affect the narrative in some way or other. A lot of these stories are about slowly nudging the characters toward the moment where they do have to make a critical decision of some sort.

And I’m not sure that’s necessarily unique to fables or fairy tales. Many short stories end up being structured somewhat around that. In fairy tale comics you are working in a very condensed style, so those moments of decision-making end up feeling maybe more weighty, because you are working in extremely short form style with connections to older styles of storytelling.

In Other Ever Afters, I do find it significant that the climax is more psychological than action-based.

Yeah, these stories are much more about character relationships and character interior development, so the climaxes in these stories are much more about characters making personally monumental choices, or moving into personal points of no return rather than global conflict fight scenes.

That’s a really interesting point that they’re personally monumental decisions, because I think another thing that characterizes the stories in Other Ever Afters is that often what is a happy ending for the character making a decision, ends up being better for the world overall as well. The idea of class uprisings, interracial relationships, and all these other progressive issues are here interconnected, coming together in the personal decisions being made. It seems like there’s a link between queer happy endings and progressive changes.

Melanie: Oh, one hundred percent. So many of these stories are around a theme of queer longing that is not strictly in an individual “I want a girlfriend” mode. It’s also a longing for community and longing to find a broader connection to more than just your romantic partner. So a lot of these characters’ decisions are more about laying down the groundwork to creating a community where they can thrive.

I one hundred percent agree with you that this seems like a very queer stance to be taking on fairy tales in general! In these stories it’s like, “okay, what can we do to make meaningful change that will affect the people around me and the people I love? In a broader sense than just who I’m married to.”

I really appreciate that about this collection. What other new or newly-retold fairy tales do you like and recommend?

A book that was extremely on my mind was Emily Carroll’s collection of horror comics, Through the Woods. Those are horror comics, but Emily Carroll is borrowing a lot from fable structure when she’s telling those stories. It’s even referred to deliberately on the page in a lot of cases.

The way she is adapting a style of classic tales but moving it into stories of her own choosing, that for sure was something I was thinking a lot about when working on this collection, especially the introduction and conclusion. So anyone who hasn’t picked that up should definitely do so.


If you pick up Other Ever Afters now and feel like you want more of Melanie Gillman’s fairy tale expertise after you devour it, you can watch the recording of their Friday Night Workshop for SAW on creating fairy tale comics, and of course you can revisit their earlier graphic novels, As the Crow Flies and Stage Dreams!

Melanie tells me you can also look forward to the next 24 hour comics day —“which is where many of the stories in Other Ever Afters originated” — when they will be “posting original pages of a story” on Twitter. This year will be a “sexy adult horror queer” comic in progress. “It’s weird and gross and I’m very excited about it,” Melanie says.

Note: This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

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Emily Lauer

Emily Lauer

Emily Lauer lives in Manhattan with her husband and daughter. She teaches writing and literature at Suffolk County Community College where she studies comics, kids' books, adaptations, speculative fiction and visual culture. She is the current editor of the Comics Academe section here on WWAC and a former Pubwatch Editor, and frankly, there is a lot more gray in her hair than there was when this profile picture was taken.

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