The Walking Dead and queer coming-of-age collide in Tillie Walden’s Clementine

polygon.com:

Since releasing her debut comic The End of Summerin 2015, Tillie Walden has become one of the most prolific, influential, and awarded cartoonists of our time. She’s created some of the most affecting and powerful comics of this century, from her sprawling queer science fiction epic On a Sunbeam to the intimate autobiography of Spinning.

In that same span, comics and graphic novels about queer people — especially YA titles — have become ever more prominent and popular. In 2021 book shops sold 30,698,081 comics, more than 2019 and 2020 combined. That means more people than ever are buying and reading comics. Over the years, queer graphic novel bestsellers like This One Summer, Gender Queer, The Witch Boy, andThey Called Us Enemy have began to appear on the bestseller list with more regularity.

Webcomics have long been a space for queer stories, but the massive Kickstarter success of Ngozi Ukazu’sCheck, Please!— the second volume of which went on to become an NYT bestseller — paved the way for even more queer stories, including the massive print success of Webtoons like Lore Olympus (featuring multiple queer characters) and Heartstopper (gay romance), NYT bestsellers both. Beyond literary publishers and webcomics, DC Comics has published an abundance of DC original graphic novels which have examined, celebrated, and highlighted queer heroes in a way that we’ve rarely seen in the main universes of big two comics.

And it’s not a stretch to say that Walden and her catalog have played a key part in this landscape. With the upcoming release ofClementine: Book One, Walden steps into a new world: long-form licensed comics. She talks about taking on the fan-favorite character from Telltale’s Walking Deadvideo games, her growth