The police are maybe not a reliable judge of whether something’s a hate crime based on, you know, their whole deal.
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Trung Lê Capecchi-Nguyễn (only kind of around)
@Trungles
cartoonist. reader of cards. author of GLAAD and Eisner-nominated, 2x Harvey Award-winning OGN The Magic Fish. he/they 
. rep’d by
. rep’d by Trung Lê Capecchi-Nguyễn (only kind of around)’s Tweets
From the tweeter who once said “Everything Everywhere All At Once is bad actually because it’s about a boss refusing to pay her taxes” comes another searing hot take, “Barbies are for rich people”
Remember when that Japanese artist made gorgeous, free tutorials available in two languages, and twitter’s reaction was to bully them off the internet for suggesting that anybody adjust their way of working
My whole life changed when I realized that pro wrestlers are just buff theatre kids
Tomorrow, I am getting married, and I’m feeling extremely mushy about it. On the left, two teens from rival Catholic schools. On the right, the same two goofs a dozen years later, now with chickens.
No generation knows how a printer works, literally half the process of servicing any printer of any generation is prayer
Every time Neil DeGrasse Tyson comments on things, I'm reminded that it's important to fund the arts and humanities.
Happy new year, friends. Chúc mừng năm mới, các bạn 🐯 The tiger is out
I will never understand how people get mad about fanfiction, an entirely optional thing that you have to find on purpose with more than a little effort
The cultural bit is important, but on a base form level I don’t understand how some viewers don’t understand 1) empty nest syndrome and 2) visual metaphor. Like???
|￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣|
It is completely fine
and ok to not like that
popular thing, but also
you are not special for
not liking the popular
thing ✨✨✨
|＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿|
(\__/) ||
(•ㅅ•) ||
/ づ
“Artists are gatekeeping art” sure yes the way carpenters are gatekeeping tables and chairs and shelves, the way electricians are gatekeeping electricity, the way writers are gatekeeping prose, the way gardeners are gatekeeping shrubbery
I totally did this in my twenties. It fried my brain and injured my hands, and I haven’t fully recovered from either of those things. You don’t ever quite bounce back from burnout.
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Unsolicited career advice:
Work your butt off in your 20s. Forget about work-life balance & all the other BS you hear about. You're still young, can test yourself physically & train your mind to work under long, intense pressure.
Identify limits, have fun & keep fit for energy.
We have to talk about how a mainstay of stochastic terrorism against Asians includes how Asian immigrant women in vulnerable service professions are violently sexualized and reduced to punchlines in much of the American popular imagination and everything it begets.
I’ve just seen The Fifth Element for the first time, and I did not anticipate one single thing that occurred in the movie
In 2022 I hope you get your revenge 😌
If you’re avoiding misappropriating “spirit animal” but don’t wanna say “patronus” or whatever, you can just... have... a favorite animal. It’s called Your Favorite.
people on here really cyberbullied a literal kid into publicly disclosing his sexuality because they felt he was *tricking them* by drawing boundaries around his private life
Lol unfriend every person who thinks politics are theoretical abstractions that won’t ever adversely affect people’s lives
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Fun fact. You can have differing political views from your friends AND STILL BE FRIENDS 
Most queer kids have, at some point in their childhood, considered the possibility that they might have to go it alone in case their coming out goes badly. And now Abbott wants to deprive the trans kids who *do* have loving parents of their family support. Just evil.
The more I travel the more I realize that the sense of enchantment people from the US feel about their vacation places abroad comes down to cities and towns having big walkable areas, reliable public transportation, and very old buildings that are well-kept.
❄️ Mei, checking in! ❄️
Suffer with me now.
There’s a thread on here about Disney kids’ movies about intergenerational trauma (Turning Red, Encanto, Coco), and it posits that the movies wrap up too neatly, and that sometimes it’s good and fine to leave your family actually. Which. Fine? But this is a deeply white take.
That’s nice. I have allergies right now, so I’m still wearing a mask. No stranger on the street knows my vaccination status, so I’m still wearing a mask. My mask sometimes matches my shoes, so I’m still wearing a mask. I do not want to be perceived, so I’m still wearing a mask 😌
“What made you pursue art?”
Pro artist: Picasso changed my life and moved my spirit to make art.
Me: When I was eight I got mad I couldn’t frost the toaster strudel exactly the way it looked on the box and VOWED that SOMEDAY I would be so steady of hand and intention.
I hate that a common thread among queer folks is like, "Well, the ins and outs of my sexuality and/or my gender aren't really anybody else's business, but due to compounding moral panics from decade to decade I have to get cozy with oversharing to remind people I'm a person."
John Mulaney was never, like, trying to be *for* us; he’s just Tumblr-hot, and terminally online people got confused.
Lol the White House inviting BTS to address anti-asian violence in the US is the clearest indication the administration thinks of it as a PR problem and not a systemic problem
Just FYI if someone talks about art history in terms like “degeneration,” they are one hundred percent a fascist.
I just feel like you need to see John Bauer’s illos for Agneta and the Sea King from 1910
I don’t have much to add because artists are killing it at explaining themselves, but I just want to point out that AI art apologists fall in line with a broader anti-expertise sentiment we’ve observed in people’s attitudes around health and science, too.
“And I don’t think you should have rights or participate in public life, but let’s discuss this civilly, don’t be rude” like do they hear themselves
These tiny little books are saving my butt every single day
You don’t have to be good at drawing to make a good comic. Your pictures just have to be effective at communicating what you want them to communicate. That’s all. That’s it.
Dolly Parton has been involved in various works for the public good since at least the 1980s. Any adult who’s still surprised at this is admitting they can’t reconcile her good works with her public image. She exposes misogynists by literally just minding her business. An icon.
Heartstopper is very tame—which is fine and lovely—because it is a kids’ show, and I would like a lot fewer “why can’t all queer content be this wholesome uwu” takes about it. Queer stories are not required to make anybody comfortable
Ok but why are so many NFTs just like hatefully ugly, like if an american Adult Cartoon boinked an encarta CD-rom cover
Based on the way adults continue to treat the teen Parkland survivors and kids like Greta Thunberg, it makes sense that Sandy Hook never moved even a lick of legislation. We as a nation have never cared about the children. It was never about the children, and we should be ashamed
Between all the recent AI art dust-ups, the animation guttings, and now the Bayonetta news, it’s sure looking like people just hate paying all sorts of artists across all industries
My language of origin has twenty non-familial pronouns and over twenty different pronouns for family members. Calm down.
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"they" will not become a part of general usage, not for political reasons but because there would be no pronoun to distinguish between a singular subject ("they") & a plural subject ("they"). language seeks to communicate w/ clarity, not to obfuscate; that is its purpose. twitter.com/JoyceCarolOate…
Wtf fandoms??? You can’t just co-own a thing just because you really really really like it! I REALLY REALLY like toaster strudel but you don’t see me rolling up into Pillsbury and accosting Gretchen Wieners’s dad like, “This is mine now also, legally, because of liking.”
Honestly, I find the discourse around depicting narrow monolid Asian eyes in cartoons and comics intensely frustrating because a lot of folks have come down on that it’s racist to depict them at all, which is wild to me because that’s just what some eyes look like!
I wish people understood how incredible it is to see hybrid language use onscreen like this. Multilingual households talk like this.
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Second time this month a white critic has called an Asian-led film “exhausting.” Not an issue by itself, but it goes hand-in-hand with ignorantly glossing over specificities that make these movies resonate. That “Chinglish?” Not a flourish. That’s how my family spoke growing up.
I’m so baffled and concerned at how this was interpreted as a test of patience and not as an obvious means to push the boundaries for how poorly an employer can treat its employees.
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Hey if someone has muted you or blocked you or whatever, they have made themselves unavailable to you. Going about circumventing those things to get ahold of them just reinforces that they did the right thing cutting you out.
The Witcher is about the importance of having a hype man and a manager
The shift to blockbuster kids’ stories about generational trauma makes sense to me. Most people my age endured significant trauma that was kinda just brushed off as culture or parenting style or whatever
My mother requested that I brag unto the Internet that she wished for a better organized pantry in passing a week ago, and my dad immediately built and installed all these shelves.
Anyone who’s mad about She-Ra is just mad somebody earnestly made a show for young girls that gross men can’t co-opt away from them.
You.
Yes, you.
You
Should do something self-indulgent today.
Ellen seems... less for gay people as much as she is for straight people who are theoretically into the novel idea of having a gay friend. That's who she comforts.
People wanna ban my book for only gay reasons, nobody ever ever mentions the cannibalism 😔
Instead of telling an artist you think they suck, just shut up and give it a couple years. By then their skills will have grown and, god-willing, so might your people skills.
LOL the folks who are like “men can’t be friends with men bc Gay” are the same people who are like “men cannot be friends with women bc sex,” and it’s such a weird way to admit you have no friends
Thank you for the Eisner nomination! 💖
The Hollywood Reporter talked with me about my debut graphic novel, and they’ve got the cover reveal! Take a look!
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Creator Trung Le Nguyen talks about the creation of 'The Magic Fish', centering on a young Vietnamese immigrant who struggles to tell his parents that he's gay thr.cm/8F26zk2
You know what, some of us I Did the Group Projects Alone people need to admit that it’s maybe because we had trouble making compromises or communicating expectations with our collaborators.
Man. The extent to which a lot of adults seem to think kids have all this agency, like they can just go to a bookstore or a public library without their adult taking them, that they have money to buy things, that they aren’t being closely watched and penalized.
Not six years ago I might have been swayed by the argument that anyone reading BL who is not a cis gay man was fetishizing us, and then I thought about it for two seconds and it falls totally apart.
Lol you can’t “culturally appropriate” Christianity, not when it’s presently trying to insinuate itself into every facet of the culture, not when it actively sends missionaries to evangelize, and not when it presently petitions to formally assert its principles in government.
I really wish twitter wouldn't even put tweets on my timeline that show up as "This tweet is unavailable." Just scrub it from my timeline. If it's unavailable, it's not my business, and I shouldn't have to think about it.
I wonder how many petty fights we could avoid if we could admit that maybe a thing isn’t for us instead of, like, invalidating the tastes and experiences of the people who really take to the thing.
My fiancé wouldn’t let me just send these
I cannot wait to share this book with you.
This is a universally appropriate and reasonable reaction to strange men trying to engage with you and your kids in public tbh
My wardrobe is mostly black because I’m an artist and any decision about color is personally exhausting to me
Can Michael Bublé please just sing Santa Baby as it was intended without any of this No Homo buddy junk, just be straight up gay for Santa like the rest of us
This is Edwina. She will fight you.
The last time someone asked me why my characters were gay, I just said, “Tell me why I’m gay,” and then they left lmao
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YOU. DO. NOT. NEED. A. REASON. FOR. A. CHARACTER. TO. BE. QUEER.
Adventure can happen to anyone. Cis/Straight is not a default setting.
I need a reason for why someone leaves their stasis. I need a reason for them to fight. I don't need a reason for who they were born as.
Currently obsessed with the notion of Princess Bubblegum having Bubbletape hair
Replying to
For these specific stories, part of the intergenerational trauma is the specter of family separation. It seems really disingenuous to ignore that part, particularly for characters of color.
Hello! I am a queer Vietnamese-American comic book artist and author who loves Tarot, mermaids, and drawing hair like spaghetti noodles.
You can support my work on Patreon: patreon.com/trungles
💖
Hey comics people, Vogue has archives of runway shows and looks organized by season and designer dating back to the 1990s. Please level up your comic book fashion game. The resources are available and free.
Yep. Filed two years ago and registered last year. All sketchbooks, tutorials, and prints. This is so scummy.
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ATTENTION ALL ARTISTS!
No longer participate in #inktober. Jake Parker (person who started the tag) has Trademarked it and their lawyer is shutting down ANYONE who is selling things like sketchbooks of their OWN artwork using the word.
facebook.com/groups/artista
Beatrice over the course of six months 🐓
I’m non-binary. I don’t really feel the need to explain it. If anybody asks I’ll be like, “Who are you?”
😚 Hey if you cultivate a social frontstage for strangers and have a backstage for friends you’re exercising normal, healthy boundaries, and anyone who says you’re being fake for it doesn’t have respect for your personal boundaries. ☺️
I wrote this back in 2012, and I just had another one of these chats with my dad. He’ll never not worry about his gay kid.
My spouse and I have known each other for literally half our lives so far. It’s very gay. 💕
Don’t think I ever did post my Starfire fanart from a while back, so here you go
I love “the mutual” as a Twitter relationship. It’s great. It’s like “we probably don’t know each other that well, but we both like each other’s timelines and trust each other not to be weird in the DMs.”
Time to repost a bunch of very early concept art for The Magic Fish
