Tender - April/May 2025 Edition of Devin's Chicago Comics Book Club Digest

Also, Some Thoughts on Fetuses

Hello, everyone! We were back to needing a large table, so that was nice. Since I was the only one who went to C2E2 and it was the weekend prior to our meeting, I shared some of my experiences. Hopefully, I’ll be able to share some of them here as well. The bar where we meet moved their Trivia Night to Mondays, too, so we didn’t feel so rushed to leave at the end. This is going out while I’m on my way to the Court Theatre to see a staged adaptation of Jason Lutes’ Berlin, so forgive me if this newsletter is a bit rushed.

In this issue: What We’re Reading - About What We’ve Read - Shameless Self-Promotion - Some Thoughts on Fetuses

I felt the need to apologize more than once for selecting this as something to discuss while we ate dinner. Lol There were references to horror classics that were both obvious (the main character’s name, Carolanne, felt like a clear nod to Poltergeist) and subtle (a recurring image evoked The Ring, which I didn’t realize until someone pointed it out). The Substance also came up, but I haven’t seen it yet. I was surprised the burgeoning subgenre of “pregnancy horror” wasn’t mentioned, but there was so much to talk about that I forgot as well. As with any comic set in Chicago, we had fun pointing out familiar places (RIP Owen & Engine). One eerie coincidence in that regard was that one of our members used to live in a building that was exactly the same as the main character’s, right down to the alley. They had pictures that looked identical to some of the panels! One person wasn’t sold on the art style, but we all thought that cartoonier was better than realistic for some of the more gruesome imagery. The colors were vibrant when they needed to be and very evocative. A big point of discussion was whether certain sequences were real or imagined. Everyone also agreed that Carolanne’s husband, Lee, sucked as a person.

Our next meeting will be Wednesday, May 21 to discuss Cyclopedia Exotica.

What We're Reading

May 21 - Cyclopedia Exotica by Aminder Dhaliwal

June 18 - Flamer by Mike Curato

July 16 - Squire by Sara Alfageeh and Nadia Shammas

August 20 - Hostage by Guy DeLisle

September 17 - Gaytheist/Growing Up and Getting Out by Lonnie Mann

October 15 - Trese, Volume 1: Murder on Balete Drive by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo

November 19 - Ginseng Roots: A Memoir by Craig Thompson?

Next month’s selection is not on hoopla, so make sure to secure a physical copy from the library! There are plenty for everyone. We planned out our selections for almost the rest of the year, including a fantasy comic and another Webtoon.

About What We’ve Read

Tender was nominated for Book of the Year at the 2024 Harvey Awards. Beth Hetland has been a faculty member of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for more than a decade and spoke with them about her inspirations and process. She also spoke with Newcity Lit about her themes, process, and being a comics creator in Chicago.

Before creating Tender, Beth Hetland created several zines and shorter works. You can find several of them for sale on her Storenvy page. I attended a workshop at CAKE a few years ago where she walked us through how to create the pizza-slice format of “Team Work Makes the Dream Work,” and I’m still impressed with how it experiments with the form and structure of comics. You can learn more about her and her work at her website.

The latest NEWS digest is available here. The next NEWS digest will be posted in two weeks on Friday, May 9.

Shameless Self-Promotion

I am in the process of submitting to two more anthologies! One just needed a script, so that’s good to go. The other requires artwork, but I found a collaborator through my friends at The Comic Jam. Hopefully there will be more good news in this space soon!

C2E2 was a couple of weeks ago, and I’m still working on a retrospective. I gave out several copies of Blackout #0 and The Passion of St. Alban of the West, and I saw lots of old friends. My next big project will be setting up an online store to make my comics more widely available.

I have no further updates on Geek Collective’s Archetypes #2 or Prism. I know the artwork and other contributions are coming together for the latter and that it will be crowdfunded, so stay tuned!

The first anthology to publish a comic I wrote, CyberSync, is available for purchase. It’s gone into a second printing!

Some Thoughts on Fetuses

Before I start, I want to issue a major spoiler warning. Spoiler warning! Don’t read any further until after you’ve read Tender! I assure you, it’s worthwhile.

As harrowing as the body horror elements of this story were, the most gutting moment was seeing Carolanne with the remains of her baby. Lee’s callousness compounded the devastation, and I couldn’t help but think about how her situation has been criminalized in several states.

The physical, psychological, and emotional distress caused by losing a pregnancy, whether intentional or not, will have the possibility of prosecution added to it, all thanks to people who describe themselves as “pro life.” It is unimaginable cruelty designed to treat a fetus as a person while completely ignoring the dignity and wellbeing of the person who suffered through its loss.

As a former evangelical, I get asked often about what changed my mind about abortion, but it wasn’t one experience. There was no argument that convinced me, no single moment of clarity. I had access to most of the same information before and after recognizing a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. I chose to ignore most of it because I wanted to believe the lies I was told. Lies that became entrenched as part of my identity and shut down any meaningful discussion before it could begin, chief among them that abortion is murder.

Abortion is not murder.

Most abortions take place before a fetus develops a nervous system or internal organs. “Partial-birth abortion” is not a medically recognized term, and the procedures described as such in lurid detail from pulpits and by pundits do not actually happen. The “fetal heartbeat” that has been the cornerstone of so much legislation is not the beating of an actual heart. The reason someone gets an abortion is no one else’s fucking business.

The last church I attended had a woman speak on how she regretted her abortion. She was held up as a brave example of a repentant sinner. Now, I think about how she wants to impose her regret on everyone else. I can’t write to how she came to regret her decision, if that regret was part of her religious conversion or if it came later because being a Christian means being anti-abortion in so many evangelical churches.

It’s a difficult cognitive hill that people who have been lied to have to climb, and many of them don’t want to; they know what they know, and anyone who offers a conflicting viewpoint is doing the work of the devil. There is an ecosystem of lies to reinforce the idea that an embryo deserves more rights than a person.

I understand how the need for some kind of metaphysical consistency leads some to equate abortion to infanticide and to keep going all the way to homicide. Consistency can be an underrated virtue, but it also can be a gadfly for petty minds. It’s the slippery slope fallacy dressed up with moral sanctimony. But terminating a pregnancy is not infanticide and it very much isn’t murder.

If a fertilized egg has a soul, does it lose that soul when it fails to develop a skull? If it counts as a potential human, does that potentiality get revoked when it fails to make it to the uterine wall and is expelled during menstruation? And if carrying a pregnancy to term is going to end a person’s life, who am I or anyone else to force that person to die? What really is homicide in that circumstance?

As I wrote above, there wasn’t one thing that made me repudiate my old beliefs, but what got me to start questioning them was simple: I started listening to women. It’s one thing to scream about abortion being murder, but it’s very different to look someone in the eye and tell them that the nonviable pregnancy they’re carrying should be allowed to kill them.

It should not take horrifying stories to get someone to understand the concepts of privacy, empathy, and religious liberty. No one who has had an abortion has to justify that decision, and they should be allowed to make it for themselves. If abortion is against someone’s religion (and there are plenty of religions that allow for it), that should not mean it is the law for everyone. But here we are.

I wish that I had realized sooner how much I was hurting people, and I wish the people who currently hold the views I once held would do the same. There isn’t much I can add beyond that.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below. What are some of your favorite body horror movies? Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask any personal questions about the essay topic. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Take care of each other. Make sure to be here next month for Cyclopedia Exotica by Aminder Dhaliwal!