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NIF 2025 Interview with A F Azar

Flyer announcing the brand new Nib and Ink Fest from the Cartoonist Cooperative. Text appears above and under an illustration of the Cooperative's mascots Inkling (an ink pot) and Nibford (a dip pen) browsing an aisle full of blue glowing digital comics, picking some up and admiring them in excitement. Text reads, "Nib and Ink Fest. May first to May thirty-first of 2025. NIF is a new online comics festival run by Cartoonist Co-op members, you don't even need to go outside! The event will have a marketplace, panels, interviews, portfolio reviews, and more! Learn more at https://nif.cartoonist.coop." On the sides of the flyer are also the Cooperative's logo on the left side and a scannable QR code on the right.

Art by Mariah-Rose Marie | Letters by Becca Carey

Nib + Ink Fest, the Cartoonist Cooperative’s very first, month-long, virtual comics fest is happening this year starting May 1st! We’ll be featuring comics and zines in our Marketplace, comic previews in our free Sampler, a collection of one-page comics from our Co-op members for our Oops All Comics! Zine fundraiser, and online events each weekend throughout all of May.

You don’t wanna miss this, so be sure to sign up for our NIF Mailing List, where we’ll be sharing even more sneak peeks at what’s to come! You’ll also be notified when all the links go live for getting your own copies of all these great comics!

Now let’s get to know A F Azar, one of our NIF 2025 contributors, participating in our NIF Marketplace and also has a comic with us in our Oops All Comics! Zine.

On a solid yellow background, a mushroom character with a dopey smile walks on two legs. The mushroom has a white body and giant lumpy purple cap.

A F Azar

A F Azar is an Ohio-based illustrator, cartoonist, and zinester. In his free time he walks at local parks, visits local thrift stores, and experiments with all kinds of DIY. He enjoys making art about loving transmasculinity, story arcs driven by trauma, and juicy romance. Always trying new things, he hops around genres and techniques as inspiration strikes.

Participating in NIF Marketplace and Oops All Comics! Zine.

Where to find A F Azar

BlueSky: @afazart

Twitter: @afazart

Hi, A F! We’d love it if you could introduce yourself and tell us about your background in comics.

AA: Hello! I’m A F Azar, I’ve been self publishing comics as part of my illustration practice since 2020. I’ve been drawing comics since I was a kid though, stapling notebook paper together and using crayons to spontaneously come up with stories about polar bears in space, Pokémon trainers teaching their Wigglytuffs fake game breaking moves, then on to embarrassing Naruto yaoi comics by the time I was in middle school. Nowadays, I take making comics a bit more seriously. My work ranges from serious to silly and from fictional to autobiographical. I try not to force myself into one niche so I can keep things fresh and drift between shifting inspirations. Also, keep it a secret but in addition to my professional-facing work, I self publish NSFW comics under a pseudonym.

Tell us about your comic(s) featured in NIF!

AA: Out of It Then In Again is a collection of five autobiographical comics I drew from 2021-2023, when I was in the throes of the psychological effects of living along and being stressed the fuck outtt about everything during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. As one of the comics mentions, I graduated from college in spring of 2020 into a world that was scary and could not help me and my peers. These comics were cathartic, especially the ones that were entirely spontaneous with no script, as I had no better way to express what I was working through. The first comic in the collection is a hopeful one! I drew it right after New Years 2020-2021 as a sort of mantra, trying to believe in a good year to come. As the rest of the comics reflect, things remained difficult until I learned to cope with living with it.

I’m particularly proud of the imagery in these comics. A lot of it has personal significance to me (that you are free to wonder about, I think it enriches the reading experience), and in each comic I experiment with techniques for depicting it. As my life changed, so did the things I cared about in my art.

A black ink illustration on a white background of a mass of writhing imagery. The linework is thin and wispy. At the top deformed skulls, particularly mouths, are stretched and pulled into each other. In the middle a row of hands hold knives, arranged like animation onion skins, in a swinging gesture. In the bottom left corner is a human figure turned away from the viewer, showing their spotty and textured back. Title over the art reads, “Out of It Then In Again,” subtitle reads, “collected autobio comics from 2021-2023,” by “Aaron Azar.”

Can you talk about your visual style? How did you develop it?

AA: My visual style changes with every project I do. I believe that in the same way different stories with different subject matter require appropriate choices of aspects like tone and writing voice, art needs to be suited to the comic. Part of this is influenced by the formal illustration training I received–we were taught to be able to replicate a wide range of styles and were encouraged not to limit ourselves. However, hand of the artist is a real, inescapable thing. You can tell that all the art I make is definitely made by me even if the styles are as different as they can be. Particularly in my comics, things like what tools I use, what fonts I pick, how I approach greys, how I stylize figures, line weight, panel and speech bubbles stylings…they all change based on what I feel the comic needs. 

This is pretty obvious in Out of It then In Again. In the opening comic, I wanted the depth of a collage-inspired style, as well as the personal and cultural associations with collage (fun memories of scrap booking as a child and the association by some of collage with an innocent/amateur-ish crafting practice). The imagery is all things that brought me joy in 2020. In comparison, the final comic is done in a highly detailed, scratchily textured style which provides a grimey edge perfect for the subject matter.

Underscoring the variety is a commitment to making drawing the comics as efficient as I can without sacrificing integrity of vision. I want the art to look good, but I don’t want to spend days on a single page or commit to a process that is unnecessarily obtuse (you will not catch me traditionally lining a comic that is more than 10 pages long ever again). Life is too short and the health of ones wrists is not infinite. I try to draw smarter, not harder, as often as I can.

Panel 1: Close up of a stressed face, mouth off screen, in a horizontally hatched linework style. Text: Well. They actually ARE getting better. Panel 2: a figure sits at a computer desk, sweating and crying. The figure is abstractly styled with odd proportions. Their desk is covered in flowers, whole multiple paper like panels overlap around him like screens. Behind him are three large geometric rectangle rising from the ground, in a sketch style. Text: I did a bit of therapy. Panel 3: Multiple faces from a 1-10 happiness scale. On the left, a large sweaty orb with a distressed human face, teeth clenched, is surrounded by other pained orbs. The faces overlap as we move to the right, growing slowly happier, until the tenth orb: a face smiling sweetly with rosy cheeks and cute chin, radiating a halo like a saint or the sun. Text: Learning to cope.
A series of 4 panels across the top, close up so gnarly gnashing teeth with no lips. The first mouth is closed, the second is open, the third is wide open and spraying spit, an the fourth is a close up of the teeth, now sharp with a blood spray. Panel 2: Borderless. Many gesturing hands erupt from a sleeping face. One holds scissors, pointed towards the source. Text: My problems are still here. But it’s easier.
Panel 1: Vertical inset panel. Three disembodied eyes with threadlike nerves looking around, depicted as geometric cones emanating from the pupils. Panel 2: Four eyes in a neat row, conjoined by their nerves, look straight up at two hands. One holds scissors dripping blood heavily, while the other hand hovers above it. This hands fingers have matching slice wounds. Text: I got tired of it all. I adjusted. This is life. It won’t stop until it ends. Panel 3: A figure, stylized to appear sinewy, with no eyes and blending into the environment. The figure grips a fleshy mass of nerves while a wall of eyes look on. Text: All I know how to do is waste time, energy, and money. So, whatever. WHATEVER.
Full page image. A figure sits in a chair in front of a screen, pouring food into his mouth. We see some of his organs, the food dropping into his stomach. He is drawn in an abstracted style, each part of him a square/rectangle that overlap in many places. Text: I’m not spilling the details of my guts to anyone! I’ve decided, I just don’t care. I can’t care, to survive! But I don’t know how long I can hold out. I do care, a lot. I feel so dramatic. I’m keenly aware of how not special I am.
Panel 1: Two cartoony hands drip as they dig into an abstract oily black substance–dirt? Blood? Something else? Text: It’s easier if I imagine myself as someone else entirely. Panel 2: Side profile, close up of a chin and collar bones, which melt away into the slimy, textural world. Panel 3: A face emerges from a dark environment, eyes nearly pitch dark with the rest of his face in shadow. Text: I can forget that I hate my body. Panel 4: Two hands hold a pile of bloody teeth in their palms. Text: I’ve made up a new person. Panel 5: Close up of a neck, human face turned away. Mysterious circular lumps climb up, visible in the throat. Panel 6: Anatomical drawing of the bones and organs in a humans body, abstracted and cartoonish in style.

How has your work changed over time and how do you feel about its development?

AA: I’ve gotten a lot more into making fiction comics over autobio/nonfiction work. Part of it is I am less quick to share personal things about my life, but it’s mostly just a shift in interests. Lately I’ve been drawn to short form narratives that are unserious and silly. If I’m going to spend all this time on a project, I want it to make me smile! But something else looms…a harsh reality: fiction just sells better than nonfiction (in my experience). 

I’ve cultivated an audience that wants fiction, and additionally wants adult content (I publish under my pseudonym more often than my professional name!), and if I want to eat I gotta cater to them. Adding on to that, most of the peers I’ve connected with also specialize in fiction or adult comics. I’m not complaining, just trying to explain an objective truth about my experience self publishing. And I certainly would not waste all this time on anything I don’t want to make, but it does feel disappointing at times that even if I am passionate about a project, even if I think it rocks and turned out fucking awesome, if it’s not a genre people want they just won’t read it. Events like NIF are very exciting because it’s an opportunity to reach the people who do like autobio/nonfic, that I’ve failed to reach on social media.

What kind of themes do you find yourself having to fight against or have a natural draw towards in your work?

AA: Being transgender babyyy, it influences litcherally everything. My autobio work is colored by my life as a trans man even when it’s not explicitly about it. My fictional work will always have a trans man character. Even if you never actually see that he’s trans, he is. If there is one thing you can always count on me for, it is to include a fruity ass T boy somewhere.

Can you tell us about your newest projects/projects you have in development? Feel free to plug anything here as well eg. socials, website, shop, etc.

AA: My most recently published project is a zine called IT’S ME, a collection of self portraits I drew Lynda Barry style, available digital and physical on my itchio. My latest published comic (under a pseudonym!) is It Wasn’t Even My Fault!, an original 18+ BL comic featuring a transmasculine love interest, sharing a bed, sneaky masturbation, mischievous friends, and trying to tell your chaperone that you wanna fuck him so bad.

Heavily inspired by yaoi and comedy manga, it’s very silly and a whole lot of fun! Looking to the future, I’ve got another adult comic in the works that is very nearly finished, about transgender best friends searching for a lost cisgender boyfriend across the 9 layers of party hell. I’m aiming for a February 2025 release at the time of writing this, so check out my itch.io if you want to find it!

We also asked each of our contributors to talk a bit about their experience with the Co-op!

What would you say to someone considering joining the Co-op?

AA: Join even if you’re second-guessing it or unsure, particularly if you think you can’t meaningfully contribute or aren’t ‘good enough.’ The support of the Co-op, even if you don’t put it to use, is a big motivator to keep on making comics. From the sense of comradery to the wealth of knowledge available, the Co-op is an invaluable resource that exists to help you. There are always ways for you to give back, and ways for others to give back to you. The foremost values of the Co-op are generosity and community. Like, I’ve hardly spoken in the Co-op discord but I lurk a lot, and just witnessing the way other people interact feels like being back in a classroom with like minded peers. It’s energizing!

What are your hopes for the future of the Co-op and its impact on the comics industry?

AA: Let us all work together to improve working conditions for all comics workers. I want to see those page rates rise. I want to see union benefits, even. It feels like a lofty, idealistic goal but nothing is impossible and the Co-op is so large, it really makes it feel like bargaining power is not impossible for cartoonists.

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An anthropomorphic nib holder wearing a VIP badge on a lanyard and an anthropomorphic inkwell wearing an event wristband excitedly run up the steps of a club entrance towards doors flung wide open, gesturing for the viewer to come along. Inside the club, the indistinct forms of anthropomorphic comic pages are raving. Handwritten text on either side of the doors reads "Join us in the Coop!"

Art by A.C. Esguerra | @blueludebar

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