5/29/2023 0 Comments Cincinnati comic expo bags![]() Creators of all colors, creeds and stripes use Black women’s bodies as their own personal punching bags. What if Dylan makes her ugly? momentarily bounced around in my head, which became, What if Jay is writing something that makes her ugly? It’s not like the thought was unwarranted. In the week between the photos being taken and him sending me a few illustrations, I was in the seventh grade again. It wasn’t until after the shoot was done that the doubt started to kick in. So last December, Dylan invited me over to his house and took photos of me that he would then use to illustrate Fat Mucket. She’s also a take-no-shit kind of person in the way that Black women often are forced to be, a characteristic with which I can definitely relate. ![]() He pitched her to me as a “bad ass Amanda Waller-type” and as a visibly fat person who had grown to appreciate her own visual aesthetic, I’ve afforded the same respect to “The Wall” over the years. I had no reservations when Jay Kalagayan asked if I was interested in meeting with Dylan Speeg to model for the character. That’s why I fully credit cosplay for my decision to serve as Fat Mucket’s character model for MeSseD’s upcoming season. You can’t do any of that and spend a lot of time worried about what other people think of you. Hell, I’ve gotten my oil change while in costume. I’ve left my house in costume in full view of my neighbors. I made the decision early on that if I was going to continue to do cosplay, I had to get comfortable with a certain amount of feeling “on display.” As such, I’ve put myself in situations that I couldn’t have imagined 15 or 20 years ago. In the last eight years, I’ve become so much more comfortable with seeing myself on screen in some way, whether in video, in photos or in drawings. But as time went on, the memory of seeing myself drawn in such a way still lived on in my bones. ![]() At that age, I was far too young to understand terms like “colorism,” “fatphobia” and “sexism,” and how these things would shape my life for years to come. However, 13-year-old me saw that drawing and felt nothing but embarrassment, the hot shame of being publicly humiliated prickling my spine. ![]() Now, buoyed by the distance that time inevitably creates, I can honestly say that he could’ve been a pretty decent artist. In his depiction, my lips were chapped and cartoonishly large, bushy eyebrows crowded my forehead in a unibrow formation, and he gave me a moustache that nearly rivaled that of Wallace and Walter Scott of The Whispers. When I was in the seventh grade, a boy in my class, one of the biggest bullies in school, drew an incredibly detailed sketch of how ugly he thought I was. Little serves as the character model for Fat Mucket in the upcoming season of MeSseD! In this post, she talks about seeing herself on the comic book page. ![]()
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