Thank you for all your kind words — a real morale booster; totally has me jazzed about our work on Tough!

So, just for fun, I decided to make a T-shirt out of my favorite panel from “No Kissing” — the one where Mike is responding to being told more than ten minutes have passed while he and Rob were making out. I love his expression here and it captures a lot of the Yaoi 911 vibe — both the realism and the humor. And frankly, I think this panel is kinda cool and edgy on a T-shirt — it’s something I’d actually wear.

I’m using RedBubble to make these shirts because, well, they’re known to be the best for this sort of thing — highest quality printing on 100% cotton preshrunk American Apparel T’s. They come in lots of different colors. And I’ve created some different flavors (with and without the swear word), so hopefully there will be something for everyone.

I’ve even added a version with the text “Time flies when you’re having fun…” for those who might want a little Yaoi 911 in-joke on their chest. Those who know our work will give you a wink and a smirk; those who don’t won’t ever be the wiser. Great way to show your support on the down-low.

There are light and dark versions of each (with the text/logo in either black or white):

And if you don’t want to be seen with the F-word on your chest, I’ve got you covered there too — T-shirts with the swear word censored and without the text bubble at all!

Anyway, these were a lot of fun to make. Please let me know what you think about them in the comments. And, if you like what we’re doing here at Yaoi 911 and want to show your support, grab one of them!

Hey! This panel comes from one of our free yaoi comics! Want to get it? It’s easy! Just fill out the form on the Free Comics page and the link will be sent right to you!

Learn More!

• Are posters more your thing? Well, we’re also offering posters of the covers of our comics at the Yaoi 911 Print Store — totally worth checking out!
• Want to read more about “No Kissing” – the free yaoi comic this panel is taken from — and what other readers are saying about it? Then read our master post Yaoi Comic “No Kissing” Is Ready For Download!!
• “No Kissing” is actually Chapter Two of our gay teen graphic novel Tough. You can read all about Chapter One here!

Howdy

I’ve gotten several requests for this, so I’ve decided to make my “tweets” public for anyone who might be interested. My Twitter username is “alexwoolfson“. And in the spirit of fellow self-publisher and all-around cool guy Wil Wheaton, I’m letting you know here what to expect from me on Twitter.

(Oh, and what is Twitter, you ask? Well, it’s one of those online things you actually have to try out to truly appreciate — I dragged my feet on joining my friends on it for over a year because I just didn’t get the point — but here is a pretty good introduction. You should also read that Wil Wheaton post, too, just to get a very experienced perspective. Basically, Twitter users write short 140 character messages that are broadcast to anyone who “follows” you. These “tweets” are, in theory, answering the question “What are you doing?” but are really used for anything you want to share with your friends and the world.)

I don’t tweet a lot about yaoi

For me, Twitter is mostly a quick way for me to share what I’m thinking about or find cool in a given moment to my friends (and you, Dear Reader, I certainly think of as a friend!) Whereas, I try to stay completely on-topic on this blog, Twitter is a chance for me to share and comment about all the other things that turn me on. I do tweet the milestones with our comics (such as receiving new art I’m excited about), but mostly I’m commenting about media I’m enjoying (usually sci-fi TV or movies), making comics in general, writing in general, social media in general, marketing ideas for book publishers, cool tech toys and sometimes just how I’m feeling. It’s like tiny samples of my mind shouted out to the universe two or three times a day.

It’s personal, baby

Now, I do my absolute best to make sure everything I write on this blog will have value to a lot of people and especially yaoi fans. I spend a lot of time on my posts here and think very hard about what I’m going to post about before hitting that Publish button. But for me, Twitter is best when it’s uncensored personal sharing — when I don’t spend a lot of time trying to make a tweet perfect or even really thinking about it much at all. If it’s on my mind, it’s sent out on Twitter.

This means that my signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter is going to be a lot lower than it is here. And what you’ll read about through my Twitter account is more about me, personally, than it is about yaoi or any of the other topics on this blog. If reading stuff like that appeals to you, definitely check me out on Twitter. If not, my feelings won’t be hurt — in fact, I’d totally understand. Stick with the blog.

(Oh, and you probably shouldn’t follow my tweets on your phone. I tweet at all hours, even very early in the morning. Save your sanity and save my Tweets for your Twitter homepage or your computer. )

I do read all of my @alexwoolfson replies

And if things aren’t too crazy, I will definitely respond back. I do read every one of those @alexwoolfson replies and your thoughts and interest in me and my work are much appreciated. In fact, the comments I have received on this blog and through that Feedback button (down in the lower right of every blog page) have really been awesome support and make all the hard work worthwhile. You, Dear Reader, are why I am making these comics — and your thoughts and opinions matter a lot to me. If I’m swamped with writing a script or notes for our artists, it might take me a bit to get back — but I will absolutely try my best!

So, why follow Alex on Twitter?

To recap, you should follow me:

• if you want to know more about me personally
• if you want to see sneak previews of Yaoi 911 art
• if you’d want to learn about writing, how to make comics, marketing your art/writing, smart ways to use social media (like Twitter and Facebook) or how to successfully publish your own work
• if you’d want to see videos and other topics that just tickle the geek in me
• if you like my sense of humor
• if you’d actually care what I’d have to say about sci-fi and fantasy TV shows and movies

Still undecided? You can see some of my most current tweets over in the sidebar on the right. And you can follow me (and/or read even more of my tweets) over at my Twitter page.

See you there!

Sadly, not the actual book that we are in -- Amazon doesn't offer it...

So late last year, I was chatting with my buddy and colleague, Tommy Roddy — he’s the creator of Pride High, a series of comics about gay teen superheroes in high school… (C’mon, y’know you’re curious — click it! ) — and he turned me on to this guide that comes out once a year which offers readers excerpts from a bunch of gay comics. It’s created by the folks at Prism Comics and serves as a kind of a who’s who and what’s what for the gays in both mainstream and independent Western comics.

Anyway, I reached out to them, one thing led to another and now there’s an excerpt from “A Shot in the Dark” in the current issue! Just picked it up from my Local Comic Book Store twenty minutes ago and everything. How cool is that!

Of course, there’s also a bunch of other gay comics in there (including an excerpt from “Roulette” by yaoi creator Tina Anderson) — so if you like the guy-on-guy action (and can handle a little girl-on-girl action) it’s definitely worth a look.

You can read more about it here:

Prism Comics: Your LGBT Guide to Comics 2008 in Comic Shops Now!

Oh, and if you’re a Prism reader who’s looking to read the complete, full-color version of “A Shot in the Dark”, just fill out the form on the Free Comic page — a download link will be emailed to you right away.

(UPDATE: THERE’S A NEW, MORE USER-FRIENDLY WAY TO GET THE COMIC THAN REGISTERING. SEE BELOW OR JUST FILL OUT THE FORM OVER ON THE FREE COMIC PAGE.)

So let me tell you, we’ve been awful busy lately putting together the book — super busy, crazy busy, so busy, in fact, that I haven’t had a chance to mention yet that the first story in the book. “A Shot in the Dark,” is completely finished and ready for public consumption. Well, all that is going to change right now. I’ll be posting its final pages up here (like I’ve done with its in-production pages ) sometime soon, but in the meantime, I’d like to give out a preview PDF of this complete full-color yaoi comic to those readers who’ve registered their email address with this blog. Just as a special treat.

Now, like I said, I’m going to post it up here anyway — so if you’re squeamish about registering, don’t sweat it, you’ll be able to read it here soon enough — but I promised to offer special promotions to registered members and until I have something to sell, giving members first dibs at a free yaoi comic seems like a nice way to say “thank you.”

UPDATE (8/5/07): So I’ve now sent out the download link to all registered members of this blog. I had to use a new email address — yaoi911@gmail.com at gmail — because my web provider has a very strict anti-spam policy and wouldn’t let me send out more than a few emails at a time. This, I suppose, is a good thing — and I support them in their anti-spamming goals. And it got me thinking that sending emails out to my registered users probably isn’t the best policy.

Even though I’d like to be able to communicate (and give free comics!) to the community of Registered Members, seeing as we are living in the Age of Spam, the last thing I want to do is send email to folks who don’t want it. Instead, if you want the link to the comic, you should sign up for the Announce List which you can see over there in the right sidebar (“Send me a free full color yaoi comic!”). (Or, alternatively, just fill out the form on the Free Comic page — it’s the same thing.)

Using an announce list, I can be absolutely certain that everyone I send an email to — be it with a link to a free comic or a special members-only discount on the ones for sale — honestly will want to get one from me. Living and learning here, friends…

So, to make this clear: If you want the comic, you should click on Free Comic and fill out the form there. Kay?

I hope you enjoy the comic. And I’d sure love to hear what you think about it. Please use the comments section of this post to let us know!

Some things I’ve been reading lately have gotten me thinking about “The One True Yaoi.”

Recently, Tina Anderson got some heat for not writing what one yaoi fan considered authentic Boys’ Love works. And an interview excerpt (EDIT: scroll down for the August 9th post) over at Comics 212 demonstrated the lines even creators (perhaps especially creators) try to draw between yaoi and “homosexual” works (prompting me to write a comment that received a very kind mention over at the excellent MangaBlog.) [Edit: And now Christopher Butcher himself over at Comics 212 has weighed in with a very interesting and thorough take on this. Very cool. Please check it out.] (EDIT 2: This would be the August 18, 2006 post which you now have to scroll down for on this page as well.)

I’ve talked about my motivation some in “Why Yaoi?” but I wanted to tell you the story behind why I’m making these books and what you can expect in them.

When I was a teenager, I was a big movie fan. In particular, I loved sci-fi and action films — and if you could combine them as James Cameron did in Aliens, I was in heaven. I suppose there were a lot of other boys who were interested in those kinds of films, but growing up as a gay boy, I was craving something more, something that nobody seemed to be interested in providing — action heroes who liked other guys.

Now, in the 80s and early 90s, there were beginning to be a number of images of gay characters in mainstream films, but at best, they were comic relief, more typically they were portrayed as either bad guys or victims (or in the case of Miller’s Crossing, repeatedly both.) Nobody, it seemed, believed that gay guys could actually be the heroes.

Of course, there were a lot of messages I got while growing up gay that told me that I was not as worthy as the girl-seeking guys — the fact that the word “gay” could be blithely used by all my classmates for anything negative being high on that list — but the one I felt I could actually do something about was this lack of heroes on screen.

I was already writing fairly regularly by my mid-teens — short stories and theater plays, a couple of which even got produced in my home state of Vermont — but I knew that being a writer wasn’t going to be good enough. I needed to be the one who had the true power to shape the message of the film — the director. So, I dedicated my life to developing the skills and experience to make the films I wanted so desperately to see as a young man. (And now you have my filmmaker origin story. )

But as I got older and more experienced, it became very clear to me that realizing my visions in film was going to take years and years of development. I’ve worked on a number of low-budget independent movies, including my own — so I knew that was an option — but ultimately, they weren’t the kind of stories I wanted to tell. I wanted to make a big-budget sci-fi/fantasy action movie where the guys kiss at the end (and perhaps in the middle, too!). Yet I knew that even in this post-Brokeback Mountain age we live in, raising millions of dollars from investors for a boy-on-boy blockbuster would be nearly impossible.

Of course, I could have just rewritten my scripts as conventional prose novels — and I did consider this — but in the end, I’m a visual storyteller. From the moment I saw actors breathing life into one of my plays onstage at the tender age of 16, there was no turning back. I didn’t want to merely describe to people what I saw in my head — I wanted to show them.

So for a long time, I despaired of ever getting a chance to tell these stories the way I wanted to. I still wrote them, mind you — but I knew that unless lightning struck, they would never be more than Sisyphusean exercises, shared only among those close to me.

But a few years ago, a new friend — LB — rekindled an old passion: anime. And as I watched classic Ranma 1/2 and Oh, My Goddess, I started to realize that there might be another satisfying way to tell these expensive stories — with drawn art where the only limits are those of imagination. I did some research on producing an animated film and discovered it would be nearly a costly as a live-action movie. Yet I knew I was on to something. And then, as I was reading some fine online literature, it hit me — why not tell these stories as graphic novels?

I was already a fan of such American classics as Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Miracleman, so I knew the form could be used to tell some amazing stories. And my developing exposure to anime, manga and yes, slash-fiction, let me know there might in fact be a market for the kind of stories I wanted to tell.

What kind of stories are those? Character-based action-romances with strong plots but where the ultimate focus was on the relationships. I knew it was a strange combination — thrilling fantasy-action and sweet, warm-and-fuzzy guy-on-guy romance — but as I became more familiar with yaoi, I realized I had finally found a home for the stories I wanted to tell.

And for the same reasons that it wasn’t enough for me to just be the writer of the films I made, I’m passionate about being the publisher of these books as well. This is my opportunity to realize a life-long dream and I’m going to create the kind of books I’ve always wanted to read. And that means publishing a full-color graphic novel on nice, coated paper with fun action, sweet romance and writing intended for a mature audience — and by “mature,” I mean for those looking for developed, three-dimensional characters and plotting that does not insult your intelligence. (And for the first Yaoi 911™ book, we are creating a collection of five comic “short stories” where some cute guys try their best to rescue the guys they love. You can see art for the first of those comics here.)

Will the yaoi community consider our work “true yaoi”? I don’t know. While women are drawing many of the stories, obviously I’m not a woman and I’m writing and publishing them. The guys in our stories are going to look like guys, not androgynous bishonen — and not necessarily impossibly beautiful guys either. (Cute yes; impossibly beautiful, not so much.) And while every relationship has power dynamics, I’m not likely to follow the traditional seme/uke conventions found in classic yaoi works — frankly, I think more complex, less hetero-traditional relationships are more interesting. Perhaps for some, those choices alone will mean three strikes and I’m out of the whole yaoi game.

But reading other yaoi works — by women and for women — gives me hope. I know they are “meant” for women, but I really connect with a lot of those stories, both published and fan fiction. No, I’m not going to make any special effort to follow yaoi conventions — other than trying to appeal to the female audience I feel so connected to. Instead I am going to tell you stories that I’ve been wanting to tell you all my life. And I’m going to do it with passion and heart and with every intention of making you, my reader, smile, laugh and hopefully fall in love with my characters a little. As I, myself, have fallen in love with the characters of other yaoi creators.

Will the fans consider it “true yaoi”? Who knows — but I do promise you that I will do everything in my power to tell really fun and interesting guy-on-guy romance stories. After all, you are helping me realize a life-long dream — the least I can do is show you a good time.


Enjoy reading articles like these? Don’t miss out! Subscribe and get them emailed right to you — for free!

Learn More!

• Wondering “Why yaoi? Why not just write for other gay men?” Find out in Why This Gay Man is Creating Yaoi!
• Curious about how to create your own yaoi book? Start with How to Write a Full Comic Book Script and How to Find the Perfect Yaoi Artist for your Graphic Novel!
• Looking to buy a sweet yaoi book? Check out Yaoi Review: Sweet Revolution by Yukine Honami and Serubo Suzuki!
• Want to see how our first comic is coming along? (Or just want to look at some pics of the cute boys fighting monsters and making out?) Click on over to Yaoi Art: “A Shot in the Dark” Inks! (Age 18 and over, please!)

It started as an in-joke between me and fellow filmmaker (and best friend) Bill S. I was going over various title possibilities for this upcoming Yaoi story collection and had been well convinced of the necessity of coming up with a title that would immediately grab the attention of its intended audience. You see, I had been reading on a (now defunct) creator forum called The Engine the sad tale of an indie comic called “Elk’s Run” — a very well-reviewed David Lynchian/Twin Peaks-type story that nobody was buying because they thought it was about hunting or taxidermy or some such. (I’ve since heard that things have improved for the creators now that the secret of their storyline is out…)

Well, I was determined to not make the same mistake.

I thought “Might as well hit the nail on the head! My book’s about cute guys trying to rescue the guys they love — how about Yaoi Rescue Stories! My audience will know at a glance that the book is for them! That’s brilliant!”

Bill was not impressed.

But as he is a good friend, he grudgingly suggested that if I had to be so artless, that I should at least call it Yaoi Rescue Comics. Now I’m sure he was offering me good advice, but for whatever reason, I liked that title a lot less (all one word of it changed…) and we went back and forth about it for some time, trying to come up with something both artful and descriptive. Finally, in desperation, I joked, “I’ve got it, I’ve got it! How about Yaoi 911!”

And he died laughing. So, it became our code word for the project, and then eventually the code word I used with everyone. (Every personal writing project needs a secret code word, you see. Can’t have anyone stealing the real, oh-so-original title, right?)

Flash-forward to a series of conversations I had with local comics publisher, friend and comics promoter extraordinaire, Larry Young of AiT/Planet Lar. He has a lot of good advice for small publishers and during our many helpful discussions, he fell in love with my code word and argued strongly that I should use it. Mostly jokingly, I imagine, but often enough so that I had to think — could this be the title I was looking for?

Well, thought I, with a title like Yaoi 911™, there’s no doubt that this is a Yaoi book. And it seems pretty clear from the “911″ that these are adventure stories. And there definitely is the suggestion of “rescue” there. But mainly, I like the sense of whimsy and humor that’s the title promises — yes, these are adventure rescue stories and yes, most are pretty dramatic, but they don’t take themselves too seriously. Let’s face it, I’m not writing a CPR manual — Yaoi is supposed to be fun!

And ultimately, I am hoping the whimsical nature of the title will help people remember it — and maybe even turn to this website “For all their Yaoi emergencies…”

Enjoy reading posts like these? Don’t miss out! Subscribe and get them emailed right to you — for free!

Learn More!

• Want to learn how to create your own yaoi graphic novel? Start How to Write a Full Comic Book Script!
• Want to see what some of yaoi art looks like? Check out Art for Yaoi 911™!
• Just looking for a good book to curl up with? Take a look at our Reviews!
]]> http://www.yaoi911.com/why-yaoi-911/feed/ 0