When I arrive at Leo’s flat in East London, he’s nervous. He has a flight to Maryland early the next morning for SPX – the Small Press Expo. It’s the event of the year for the independent comic world. Leo is up for an Ignatz award for My Body Unspooling (2024). ‘What do you get if you win?’ I ask. ‘A brick,’ he says, ‘but it’s the best brick ever.’ Later, Leo tells me the winning brick for Outstanding Comic tipped his suitcase over the weight limit on his return flight to London. ‘I paid the extra, of course,’ he concedes, delighted but embarrassed by the recognition.

We sat down to discuss Leo’s most recent graphic novel, Boy Island (2024), which was first serialized on Instagram in 2020 and now published by Silver Sprocket. Our conversation spanned metaphors for transition, weird sex, fine art snobbery, and cis parents. As I set up for our interview, Leo and his girlfriend, Allie, discussed whether she should stay. ‘I just like you being around me,’ said Leo. Allie agreed, and so became a third presence in our discussion.

Rosa Appignanesi: I wanted to start by talking a little bit about the background to Boy Island. How did the project begin?

Leo Fox: During Covid there was quite a surge in people in the independent comic community serializing comics on Instagram, and I was quite interested in doing something like that because it was different from the way I worked before – sitting in my room by myself for ten months and then it’s done and out in the world. When I started writing the script for Boy Island, I wasn’t originally thinking, ‘oh yeah, I’m going to serialize this one,’ I was just on holiday and bored and thought let me give this a go. I’d written probably 75% of the script beforehand, which I don’t usually do. I would normally have written the entire script. And it was a good feeling, having to stick to a schedule and just put it out there without getting too in the weeds about it.

What went into the content of the story?

In terms of content, I guess I was at a fraught point in my own transition, and thinking increasingly about the scary landscape in the UK for trans people, the sort of endless discourse nightmare, and also endlessly bickering with my mom. And I remember I said to Allie, ‘I’m going to make this comic where all the girls live on one island and all the boys live on another island.’ And she was like, ‘That’s a shit idea.’

Allie: I didn’t say it was a shit idea! 

You literally did though!

Allie: Well, I wasn’t that enthusiastic.

What made you go for it, despite Allie’s lack of enthusiasm?

Hmm. I think the stories I like have a kind of fairytale, mythological simplicity. Boy Island’s got this very basic premise that is almost a child’s view of the world. It’s a good elevator pitch, with a simple internal logic. That’s also what made it so good for Instagram – ‘oh, it’s about a trans guy on an island with the girls’ – you could jump into the story at any point. Lucille’s almost a non-character in that way. He’s just ‘the trans guy,’ and his mom could be any transphobic mom. They don’t have many traits beyond those archetypes. They’re symbols. Also, it just seemed funny. There’s something so fun and cartoonish about ‘the desert island,’ and I had these half-formed ideas about older comics with that kind of outdated trope. Like Tintin and Looney Tunes, which I read and watched religiously as a kid. And Krazy Kat – a lot of that takes place in this ambiguous sort of desert.

That feeds nicely onto my next question. You begin Boy Island by dedicating it to ‘all trans people everywhere. Safe travels!’ I’m interested in your metaphor of the journey, the ‘safe travel,’ as another version of transition. It’s such an old framework for storytelling – the Odyssey, Gilgamesh, etc – and I wonder what about it spoke to you in relation to Boy Island?

Because it’s kind of a cliche, right? It’s the thing people say about being trans, and I think making it hyper-literal in that way is kind of funny. That sort of hero’s journey, epic quest thing is such a cliche too, I thought it was ripe for satire. Actually, I originally envisioned Boy Island to be way more satirical than it turned out to be. I think it reads as very earnest, but it was supposed to be much more tongue-in-cheek. The idea of ‘transition’ as a journey from one place to another is so overly simplistic; it doesn’t feel true to my or anyone else’s experience of transition. So, I was surprised by how much people bought into the metaphor. People were commenting stuff like, ‘I went to Girl Island,’ or, ‘I would live on one of the islands between Boy Island and Girl Island.’ I was like, ‘Guys, it’s supposed to be that islands are a stupid idea! Stop investing in this as a real way to think about gender!’ But it is a compelling framing to buy into because, for the most part, it’s in keeping with the way we’re trained to think about gender.

Do you mind the earnestness with which Boy Island has been received?

No, I don’t mind. I think it’s good. If I had made something really cynical about my issues with narratives around transition, it would have aged worse. I’m really grateful that people have found it valuable. I was surprised by how willing people were to go along with it, but it was a nice surprise which encouraged me to keep making it. It was interesting though, in earlier drafts, Jounce was much more ambiguous – more of an agent of chaos than a symbol of transsexuality. But I kind of prefer the version of him that becomes the symbol of non-normative gender and sex.

Can’t he be both?

Yes, I suppose he can be both. I was going to say I didn’t want it to be propaganda, like, purely celebratory, but maybe I do want it to be propaganda. Why am I so scared of making propaganda? Hahaha. I guess because that’s what my mom would say about it.

Following on from that, it really struck me that Lucille’s body doesn’t change throughout the book, but rather it’s his physical surroundings that change. Boy Island exteriorizes the experience of transness, and in doing so, refuses a fetishized fixation on the trans body that we often see in mainstream media. What went into your depiction of Lucille, and your decision to show a world, rather than an individual body, in transition?

This kind of goes back to the thing I was saying about the islands being ambiguous about whether they’re fake or not. I wanted it to be ambiguous as to whether being on Boy Island would ‘masculinize’ you. I didn’t want it to be that you step onto Boy Island and suddenly your body morphs into a ‘man’ or any of that shit. The islands are constructs, right? If Lucille’s body changed immediately upon arrival that would be totally undermined. Instead, I wanted it to be phrased more like, he was always a boy and just realized that he wanted to live in a different way, rather than he was a girl and he decided he wanted to become a boy. That’s much more how I feel about my gender, and I don’t want to put words in people’s mouths, but I think that’s a common thing amongst trans people.

And yes, I wanted to de-emphasize his body being the problematic agent. We’ve got enough media about trans people that’s like ‘I hate myself blah blah blah.’ I wanted to show him being scared and uncomfortable, but not self-hating. Lucille’s got this innocence. He’s kind of like the platonic ideal of a trans person if none of the structures and discourses around transition existed. It wouldn’t occur to Lucille to hate himself unless he was told by someone that he was ugly. Which then is interesting because it’s like, why does he want to go to Boy Island so much? He doesn’t know anyone, it’s a scary and uncomfortable place. The more you think about it, the more Boy Island falls apart as a concept, and that’s why, at the end of the book, everything in the world has to fall apart, because I didn’t want it to end with anything that underlines the gender binary being respected.

You have a formal background in fine art, studying at the Slade. How does that influence your comics? What is it about the graphic novel form that appeals to you?

I would say my relationship with ‘fine art’ as a concept is pretty fraught. If anything, being at Slade has made me feel much more committed to making things that wouldn’t be considered fine art by a lot of people. I had a lot of internal back and forth about what kind of artist I wanted to be and what kind of art I wanted to make, and what kind of culture I wanted my work to be seen in. I kept expecting there to be this moment where I understood something about it that everyone else seemed to understand. And I just kept coming back to the idea that none of this fucking mattered and that I want to tell stories in a way most people can get. I found Slade to be an extreme example of the whole fascistic cultural mechanism of fine art, which relies on people feeling inadequate. I just want people to get my work. Of course, the other implication of ‘getting’ is that literally people can access and easily own it. People are so much more likely to be able to afford buying a book than a painting. I’m beating around the bush, but basically, I’m saying I don’t want to make fucking furniture for rich people.

Shall we talk about erotics? Boy Island, like the best of books, is a horny book. Fairy makes this terf argument for policing gender binaries as a pro-erotic action: ‘I just wanted to reintroduce the ability to fantasize.’ Jounce announces himself as ‘the porn and the worm.’ What is the importance of erotics in the story you’re telling?

So much of the discussion about gender is actually about sex, right? People’s fear about trans people is inextricably linked to their fear about others having weird sex. The idea that there’s an island where boys live and an island where girls live is so kinky! It’s such a horny idea that men and women need to be separate – that shit is so perverse. I also found the idea of Fairy being this hyper self-conscious, deeply sex-averse entity really funny and true to the way transphobes are in real life. The way terfs will talk about trans people is so hypersexualized. The perceived sexual threat of sexual difference. I didn’t want to shy away from that because there is also this idea in the trans community of being the palatable kind of trans person, of that being the way we’re going to ‘win’. That’s bullshit. There’s no path to trans liberation which doesn’t involve perverts and weirdos because we are the perverts and weirdos, and that’s good. 

Boy Island is also about who gets to be horny. Starman is always talking about fucking and sucking, but for Lucille, a lot of his desire is deeply intertwined with shame and dysphoria, and that’s so much more of a compelling idea to me than transitioning seamlessly into a heteronormative version of sexuality. When I came out, my parents were like, ‘is this because you’re a lesbian and you can’t be gay.’ Absolutely the-fuck-not: The idea that you transition to escape from a state of erotic ostracization to one of ‘normality’ is such an unproductive narrative, and I wanted to make my position on that very clear.

That was another thing which really struck me: Your portrayal of Lucille’s mom. You write with both empathy and critique about the fears that parents project onto their trans children. Here’s a quote from the book: ‘Why do you want to be a boy? And it means you might go away from me. And you might smell different! It might be dangerous!’ Could you reflect on that portrayal? Is there anything you would like parents to take away from Boy Island?

Yeah, I think the things Lucille’s mom says are the most generous interpretations of a lot of parents’ reactions to their kids coming out. In reality, it’s often a much more vitriolic gut reaction of ‘that’s gross.’ That’s definitely true of my own parents. I wish I could say I thought about how cis parents might feel reading the book, but I fucking didn’t because it wasn’t for them. But it has definitely been interesting since it came out and a bunch of my family members bought the book and I was thinking damn, because Lucille’s mom is so obviously my mom. They look the same. This definitely isn’t the last thing I’m going to write about my parents. I’ve got more to say, more to complain about. One’s parents are just endlessly fascinating, aren’t they? What’s the point of having to deal with these guys if I can’t at least make art about them? Someone reviewed it in the New York Times, actually, and they said something to the tune of, ‘it’s good that you let the transphobic characters speak.’ Which is, um, not how I would have put it. I don’t think that transphobes need their voices amplified. But it’s true to the extent that I didn’t want to shy away from it.

And I suppose, I also had this kind of misguided idea that maybe if I can express how I’m feeling eloquently enough then, you know, it will all fall away and my mom would be like ‘yes, I get it now, I was wrong.’ Obviously, it’s much more complicated than that, but maybe I was hoping for something from her… She likes it though. She’s completely unfazed. The only criticism she has is that she never said the thing about female-only spaces, which is true, that was a joke about wider stupid culture war shit. But everything else, she’s like ‘yeah, I said that shit. Co-signed. Don’t take it back.’ In the end, though, Lucille’s mom becomes this quite sympathetic character. I couldn’t quite bring myself to make her the baddie. His mom says some horrible shit, but she also helps him. I guess I would want parents, ultimately, to take that away from it. Help your fucking kids. Ultimately you ‘getting it’ is not that important. Just make their lives easier and not harder, and listen to them say what’s going to make it easier.

How do you work? Are you a rigorous storyboarder?

I always have a script. I don’t thumbnail or storyboard, I like to give myself room to surprise myself. If I had planned out what was going to be drawn on every single page I would have gotten really bored. I think making the script super legible and clear, so you can always tell what’s going on, means I have much more freedom in the visuals being more abstract or symbolic. So, it’s somewhat organic. The only thing that really changed is that I cut the Lucille and Starman sex scene. No one fucking believes me! People always think I’m joking, but I’m not joking. It ended up being cut because, by the time I got there, I was like, this would be totally bizarre, and there’s a limit to what Instagram will let me do. I don’t regret it – it would have sucked, it would have made it so weird.

Will we see Jounce again? What’s next for the Boy Island characters?

Starman is in the next one. I can also tell you that Lucille will definitely come back in some shape or another, but probably narratively distinct from the version of him that we see in Boy Island. I would like to have Jounce appear in something else, but I’m not sure how. I do like him a lot, but I can’t really imagine how he would exist outside of the world of Boy Island. His existence is completely demanded by that setup – he would be kind of extraneous to the real world. But I definitely like those types of characters who are deeply symbolic; the patron saints of a certain thing. I find that a really fun concept, but don’t expect it of me anytime soon. Hmm… okay, think that’s all I got!