A Texas Art Teacher Creates Comics In His Off Hours

It’s not every day you see a comic with the phrase “gay snakes.” But that’s exactly what happened when I attended the Houston Zine Fest in November and came across Chris Kill, one of over 50 vendors at the cornucopia of weird and wonderful self-published comic strips and books too underground for the mainstream. 

Gay Snakes (now up to three volumes with fans clamoring for a fourth) is exactly what it says on the xeroxed, tract-sized paper. Kill has an instantly accessible absurdist humor. One snake curled around a clutch of eggs offers to be an egg donor for a same-sex snake couple, who are appropriately grateful. Another couple share a moment in the bathroom where one assures the other that early molting bald spots don’t make his husband less perfect. It’s downright wholesome, if admittedly strange.

“There was a Friday night that . . .  you know after a hard day at work I had a couple drinks, and I drew two snakes kind of sniffing at each other’s tails, and I just wrote down the phrase ‘gay snakes,’” said Kill in a phone interview. “The next day in the sobering light of Saturday, I looked at them. I just felt like that’s such a funny idea, and it has become the most popular thing I’ve ever produced.”

While wholesome, it’s also one of the reasons that Kill publishes under a pseudonym. His day job is as a Texas middle school art teacher. In the current environment, publishing something called Gay Snakes, no matter how sweet and innocuous, could be a problem.

Though Kill has always liked art, he never saw himself becoming a comic strip artist. Two creators changed his outlook on the medium. One was Jeffrey Brown. These days, he’s most famous for his books re-imagining Star Wars as a Family Circus-style strip, but before that he wrote largely autobiographical work.

The same is true for Kill’s other main influence, Ben Snakepit, who has been putting out comic strips about his day-to-day life for more than two decades. Snakepit in particular has become a mentor to Kill, who launched his career with a zine about having multiple sclerosis.

“There’s a very raw quality to Chris’ work that makes the reader empathize with him,” said Snakepit in an email interview. “He needs to tell his story, and he’s not going to let his technical limitations stop him.” 

Kill is more than Gay Snakes. One of his other popular series is S*** My Art Students Say, two collections of the wit and wisdom of seventh graders that will make you cheer and weep for the next generation. He also recently published a polaroid photo zine focused on gravestones and roadside crosses.

Kill says that his students often know that he self-publishes art and sometimes try to track him down. While it’s always flattering to be the cool teacher, he keeps his work separate and uses their interest as an educational tool instead.

“I do sometimes show the students work that I’ve done, especially more in recent years as as I wrote them with young people in mind,” said Kill. “Of course, the kids will inevitably ask, well, where can I buy this book? A lot of the time, you can also just sort of redirect it to them and be like, Well, show me what you can do. I want to see what you do. And they’ll draw you their pictures, and you can kind of try to bring up the next generation of artists.

Like most teachers, Kill has a small collection of art current and former students have trusted him with. Even when it’s very silly, the art reflects the artist. As Snakepit says, the biographical and the visual resonates with young minds.

“Comics are very simple and easy to understand in just a few seconds,” Snakepit said. “The reader isn’t afraid to invest that small amount of time, and that gives the artist a chance to convey their message instantly, whether the reader wants it or not.”

Meanwhile, Kill continues happily. He has no aspirations of becoming a full-time comic artist, preferring to work when and wear he can and using venues like Zine Fest to find new audiences on his terms. Creating regular strips is hard work; and he’s in it for the art.

It also lets him keep focusing on subjects he wants to. His graveside collection, Memento Mori, isn’t the kind of thing that will reach a wide audience, but it made him happy to collect the images after the passing of his own mother. Even Gay Snakes, ridiculous as it is, is a potent commentary in a state where LGBTQ+ organizations are banned at public schools. Whether drawing on in the classroom, Kill is teaching.

“I want to be able to be myself, but also do my duty of being a good educator and being a contributor to the community, which is why I like teaching in the first place,” said Kill. “I like getting out there and helping out. I don’t have children of my own, so helping the youth and bringing up creative minds? I think is a good way to contribute to the world.”