American cartoonist, writer and illustrator Niki Smith is perhaps best known today for queer-friendly graphic novels for young people such as The Deep & Dark Blue and The Golden Hour, but her career began somewhere considerably more adult. Smith spent roughly a decade creating erotic comics for the online publisher Filthy Figments, producing around six hundred pages, all the while experimenting with different styles, palettes, brushes and approaches to storytelling. She has described these short comics as a kind of artistic playground, an opportunity to try something new each time.

Smith was born in North Carolina and spent the first five years of her life there, frequently visiting the state's beaches with her family. At five, her family moved abroad, where she learned a new language and encountered winters dramatically different from those of her childhood. The experience was so disruptive that much of her earliest memory subsequently faded; as she has put it, she knows she was there largely because she has the photographs to prove it. The family eventually returned to the United States, and Smith grew up in Kansas, whose cattle farms and county fairs would later provide the setting for The Golden Hour.

At college, she initially imagined a career simply as an artist, without knowing whether she wanted to pursue illustration or gallery work. Two professors noticed that her work had a distinctly sequential quality and encouraged her to try comics. She did, enthusiastically.

By 2014 she was contributing to Smut Peddler, including the graphic story Farmgirl, while her Filthy Figments output included such varied work as Eleven Days, No Questions, Rings on Her Fingers, Delay and Ink. Her later collection Bruised Fruit brings together ten of these erotic comics, reflecting the wide range of scenarios that characterise her work – queer and straight, cis and trans, couples and polyamory, vanilla sex and kink.

Crossplay grew directly from this period. Two earlier Filthy Figments stories provided the characters and premise for a much more ambitious graphic novel, in which cosplay, fandom, gender and sexual attraction become thoroughly entangled. Smith’s own description of the transition is revealing – the original stories were ‘more porn and less plot’; Crossplay retained the sex but added a much richer ensemble of relationships and identities.

Since then Smith has moved between erotic and mainstream books and comics with remarkable ease, producing acclaimed books for younger readers while returning to her earlier erotic work in Bruised Fruit.

Niki Smith now lives in Munich, Germany, with her wife and two cats. Her enormously versatile artistic trajectory is unusual but perhaps not surprising, exploring in both her adult and young people’s work an abiding curiosity about bodies, identity, sexuality, desire, and the seemingly endless potential of graphic storytelling.

Niki Smith’s website, where you can read about all of her work, is here.

Similar artists

Colleen Coover – American cartoonist whose explicit and all-ages comics mirror Smith’s genre-crossing career.
Robert Crumb – American originator of the underground comix scene.
Melinda Gebbie – An American who moved from underground feminist comics into mainstream graphic novels.
Katie Gilmartin – A printmaker exploring lesbian history and identity.
Dorothy Iannone – Joyous and explicit, her decades of work celebrated polyamorous loveon.
Natalie Krim – Contemporary American illustrator whose frank scenes normalise sexual pleasure and desire.