Somewhere between southeast Portland and the town of St. Helens, along Oregon’s Highway 30, the idea began to form.

It was almost a decade ago, driving 30 miles to and from work, Monday to Friday, 400 minutes a week in a white Toyota pickup with nothing to fill the time but AM talk radio. That’s where I met Michael Savage, Tony Snow and Rush Limbaugh, and that’s where the “Killweather” graphic novel was born.

A dystopian, nightmare trilogy set at the intersection of journalism, politics and involuntary sex reassignment. That’s the elevator pitch.

The longer version is that the book is a mordent, political satire about a particularly nasty, right-wing pundit, Cooper Killweather, who uses the marginalization of transgender people to ascend the political ranks. The action all kicks off with Cooper pushing a hypocritically named Transgender Dignity Act that serves to criminalize the medical practices associated with sex reassignment. The story explodes off that set up, and Cooper’s life is unalterably changed in the aftermath.
Cooper Killweather, the character Frankensteined from those AM radio personalities who provoked and incensed me all those hours in my truck, was a conspicuously provocative protagonist. But he had what I felt was the subversive appeal of a quintessential antihero, and he represented a surprising starting point for a redemption story.

That possibility of redemption through the honest, natural introduction of empathy is what’s continually renewed my passion for this narrative, that and the incomparable artwork of Abraham Mong, whose kinetic, imaginative illustrations defy all conventional notions of comic book art.

As I further researched elements of the story, especially the policy and legal issues affecting transgender people, ideas and themes began to dovetail in unexpected and compelling ways. My experience was that transgender people represented one of the last groups to endure a maintained and societally accepted level of outright discrimination. In places where it would be unacceptable to question a black, Jewish or Muslim individual’s right to express their identity, for instance in a school setting, workplace, or the military, there might be heated and public debate over the same right being extended to a person with a non-binary gender identity.

Gender dysphoria continues to be widely misunderstood in mainstream American culture, let alone in more conservative and fundamentalist settings. It made sense that in an Orwellian, Philip K. Dick styled, dystopian near future, sex reassignment and endocrinology might be outlawed by fanatical powers more concerned with political and financial gain than equality and social justice.

'My experience was that transgender people represented one of the last groups to endure a maintained and societally accepted level of outright discrimination.'

I’ve done some interviews now and the issue comes up, with some sensitivity at times, whether I have the personal experience to do justice to transgender issues or if the story is in some way exploitative.

My response has been that my goal was always to craft an entertaining story with human characters that happened to unfold in a politically charged setting dealing with these issues. The first book deals with oppression as a tool of the powerful, exploiting vulnerable people who don't fit a mainstream mold for personal and political gain. But I've learned a lot from correspondence with the Transgender Law Center in SF in my research on the public policy and legal issues that are prominent in the first “Killweather” book, although pushed to the absurd limits of Tea Party, neocon propaganda within the context of the comic.

My hope is that the book will be able to make some kind of comment on binary approaches to complex issues overall, and how the idea of a non-binary appreciation of gender and identity is a compelling corollary to a non-binary approach to the political system, and how limited, viable choices are one of the roots of a lot of conflict in culture. But I'll just say thank you for reading, and I hope readers will share the project with friends, coworkers and the community at large to help us spread the reach of the book, and awareness about the issues it reflects.

“Killweather: A Dystopian Graphic Novel” is currently almost half way to a fundraising goal of $6,700 on Kickstarter.com, which will go to finalize artwork and print the first installment of the trilogy. They have until November 29th to reach their goal.

See http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/563251676/killweather for more information about the project.