What is "FINDING DEE"?

to those closest to me first. But as a creator of comics that frequently appeared in my own comics AS myself, there was no way I could avoid the fact that I was coming out as a transgender woman.

So I hung a big ol’ lamp shade on the idea and had the star of my OTHER comic strip, Dandy Q. Dog, walk in and ask the basic question. Or, in his case, just stare blankly. It’s his way.

This comic strip appeared at dandyandcomapny.com in January of 2016, shortly after I had come out to my friends and family to an overwhelmingly positive response. Or, at least, those that DIDN’T like it kept their opinions to themselves and just silently unfriended me on social media and talked about me behind my back. Yay!

Shortly afterwards, I started keeping an online blog called “Finding Dee”. It was just written diary posts chronicling my everyday life dealing with the trials and tribulations of being 41 years old and coming out as Transgender in a small, rural Pennsylvania town. I wrote in this blog for a few months, with each post leaning further and further into the darker and more depressing observations I was making. To make a long story short, a blog I started as a form of therapy was NOT helping.

So, as I neared the first anniversary of my coming out and having lived full time as I am for almost a year, I was thinking a LOT about my experiences and how they really shaped so much of my day to day life. And I had listened over that year as a LOT of folks told me with a certain regularity that I totally should make a comic out of those experiences.

And that is how we ended up here. FINDING DEE launched online in January of 2017 as a weekly online comic strip that allows me to keep a sort or fictionalized diary of my experiences, while striving to find the HUMOR and relateability in situations that otherwise are massive causes of stress. Turns out laughing at yourself is a much better form of therapy for me.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy the little slices of life at FINDING DEE and keep reading as I continue to share these adventures with you.