PRIDE MONTH 2025! Our Inside Look feature at Broken Frontier provides creators with the opportunity to share exclusive commentaries on their comics projects with our readers, giving insights into the genesis, process and themes of their work. It’s one of the oldest regular features at BF, first appearing on the site back in the mid-2000s and also one of our most well-received. Today, as part of our Pride Month 2025 celebrations Lonnie Mann talks about the origins of and process behind Gaytheist: Coming Out of My Orthodox Childhood (reviewed here last year at BF)…
Gaytheist: Coming Out of My Orthodox Childhood is an autobio graphic novel / memoir about my experiences growing up as a gay boy in an Orthodox Jewish family, and community. From one point of view, I started working on it in 2011, when I made the very first prototype in the form of a 10-page mini-comic while taking a summer “Cartooning Hothouse” course at the School of Visual Arts in NYC.
But I think I’d been imagining telling some version of my story in some medium – not necessarily as a comic – since long before that. I just knew that while my story was full of all the weird trappings of an Orthodox Jewish upbringing, it would also be quite universal in important ways for many queer folks. I didn’t really know I’d be able to turn it into something tangible until I started studying illustration and cartooning, though.
A handful of years later, after having gotten a bit of cartooning under my belt with various mini-comics, and a kickstarted travelogue comic about a couple trips I took to Iceland (titled Thoughts From Iceland), I finally hunkered down and started writing the first draft of the script of a full-length graphic novel version.
I knew the main themes of the story would be growing up 1) Orthodox Jewish, 2) gay, and 3) in a dysfunctional family. I started the creation process by writing a list of specific stories and events from my childhood, through my final achievement of financial independence after graduating college. I labeled each of them with their relevant themes, and ordered them chronologically.
Once I had all the specific events I knew I wanted to connect in a coherent story, I started writing a comic script for each story, and while doing so, I’d add connective tissue and anecdotes within and between them to flesh out the narrative. When I finished the first draft of this version, it wasn’t even separated by page yet – it was just narration, action descriptions, and dialogue, all in text form.
From there, I took all that and laid it out page by page, deciding where to separate each panel, figuring out their sizes and placements. It ended up being a little over 200 pages. I created a ~15 page sample of what the “finished art” could look like in order to begin pitching agents.
I managed to get an agent, and we pitched many large publishers, but unfortunately, everyone declined. Looking back, I can definitely see why, and I can say that this bump in the road ended up benefitting the final book greatly. Not to say it wasn’t very disappointing at the time, of course!
That was in 2018. I spent about 3 years rewriting the script, on-and-off. During that time, I created a 14-page comic on the side, for the comic anthology American Cult (2021, Silver Sprocket), a book of short comics about cults that have existed and/or currently exist in America. That comic is called Orthodox Judaism is a Cult, and well, it pretty much does what it says on the tin – it’s a comic essay arguing why Orthodox Judaism fits the “BITE” model (Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion Control) used for defining cults and authoritarian control groups.
I ended up very thoroughly overhauling the script for the graphic novel, giving the pacing a lot more room to breath, revising its overall tongue-in-cheek writing style to a more mature tone, and entirely removed an adult Lonnie narrator character who originally appeared on the page and spoke directly to the reader, and sometimes to the younger Lonnie in the comic, in a meta 4th wall-breaking bit that just didn’t work like I’d hoped.
Another part of the project’s evolution was an experiment my partner Ryan and I tried out, to see what the comic might look like if we drew it together. When I was drawing it by myself, I was using a monotone reddish color scheme, which I figured could look good while simplifying the coloring process. But for our experiment, I decided we should try a full-color approach, based on some concept art I’d done for the comic previously.
We both loved the results of our test pages, and decided to just keep going. This led to the final drawing process for each page starting from the script, and proceeding to my extremely rough (see: stick figures) sketch to lay out the panels and text, as well as who would be in what panel, and the general camera angles, etc.
I’d then send that to Ryan, which they’d base their very nice sketch on. I’d use Ryan’s sketch as “pencils” to do my final “inks” over top (though this was all done digitally). Next, I’d color the page, and hopefully be done! Although there were of course times when edits occurred after, based on feedback. And usually, if the scene had more complex lighting (e.g. underwater or at night), Ryan would usually do a second pass over my colors to improve it further.
Something I forgot to mention, is after my 3 years revising the script, my former agent ended up getting too busy with other projects, and could no longer represent me. So while Ryan and I were working on drawing this new and improved version of the comic, I was also trying to find a new agent, as well as pitching publishers directly.
Very fortunately, through a very lucky series of events, I ended up able to connect with the eventual publisher of Gaytheist, Street Noise Books! I saw a random retweet from someone I didn’t follow, asking about comic pitches; I DMed the person in response to the RT; they referred me to two people, both of whom declined my project, but one referred me to yet another person; and that person ended up being the head of Street Noise Books.
One final, minor snag, was that the final page count of the revised script was just far too long for a debut graphic novel. It was 345 pages of script, not counting anything else like chapter introductions, copyright info, dedication page, etc. In the end, we decided that we could rework it to end the book at about pg 200, just under 60% of the way through.
While Gaytheist isn’t officially a “Book 1” or anything, I obviously do hope to continue the story with a follow-up comic someday, picking up where I left off, and bringing it to its originally intended conclusion. So, if you happened to enjoy the book, cross your fingers for me, and please recommend it to anyone you think might enjoy it!
On that note, the digital version just came out within the last couple months, so if you’ve been holding off, now might be a good time to consider that newly available option.
You can read a sample of the first few chapters at www.lonniecomics.com.
Article by Lonnie Mann
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