Finding "Finding Dee"...

(...Or, how all this got started.)

I suppose a good place to start here would be at, y’know, the beginning. My name is Dee Fish, and I’ve been making comics in one form or another my entire life. But for the purposes of this introduction, I entered the world of WEB comics in 2001 with the-then daily comic strip, Dandy & Company.

It was the slightly skewed misadventures of a dog and his boy, inspired by everything from Peanuts to Bugs Bunny to DuckTales. It was the comic I drew for YEARS online, and occasionally still return to for fun.

In 2016, I came out as transgender to my friends and family, leading to much drama all around, as one might imagine. But for readers of “D&C”, who were accustomed to seeing me AS a character in the strip, the Cartoonist, THIS is how I came out":

It was a relatively fun way to introduce the concept that I wasn’t that other guy anymore and hit the proverbial ground running. And while I continued drawing new Dandy & Co. strips weekly until 2018, this single strip started something.

It started a LOT of people telling me that I should make a comic about my experiences coming out. Friends and fellow cartoonists nudged me to take the ideas that I had already been writing as a fairly negative and kinda whiney blog and make comics out of them.

Now, I had no intention of making a depressing, angsty comic out of my experiences. I was already finding that venting in a blog wasn’t particularly healthy for me, so when considering a comic, I decided to take the path I most preferred to walk creatively.

Like a LOT of cartoonists, I had ALWAYS wanted to draw a strip in the papers. At the height of its success, Dandy & Co. had ended up in a couple of small, local papers and that was awesome. But again, the FORMAT of comic strips just… makes me happy. I love making them.

So, I decided that my blog, called “Finding Dee”, would transition (AH! See what I did there!? AAAAH!!!) into a comic strip in the same structural style as “Dandy & Co.”

It premiered in January of 2017, one year to the day of when I came out as transgender, with THIS strip:

Well. MOSTLY this strip. This is the edited-for-mainstream-print version, where I took out the excessive use of f-bombs that the early strip had. (That’s a story for another blog post. lol)

Originally, the strip was monthly, but something weird happened: people liked it. People liked it to the degree that it quickly eclipsed the webcomic that I’d been drawing at that point for just shy of 20 years. So, after a few months, it became a weekly strip. Occasionally, it’s twice a week when I’m firing on all cylinders.

It also LOOKS a lot sharper than this early strip. Lol. Be gentile.

I will be running new strips here every Monday, and reruns from the 7 years of archives the rest of the week. Hope you enjoy, and if you do, subscribe and help me spread the word!