Carta Monir's Life is Art

The transgender Renaissance woman behind "Lara Croft is My Family”

Carta Monir (undated photo)

Trying to describe Carta Monir in a few words is like trying to describe a sunset to a sightless person. The usual descriptive words are useless. Colors means nothing to a person who has never seen them. Limiting a description of Monir as simply a transgender artist inadequately encompasses her expansive creativity.

The best one can do is to start with Keith Haring's observation that “Art is life. Life is art.” In Carta’s case, her life is her art.

Carta exudes the sort of casually confident intellect that allows her to pause the interview to blow her nose, while off-handily commenting, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” in reference to Gay Talese's seminal profile of “Old Blue Eyes” in a 1966 ESQUIRE article. It surprises the interviewer that she has read it. And she expects the interviewer to have read it as well.

Born and raised in the Midwestern United States, Carta came from a family dominated by her emotionally and sexually abusive father. Attending college in Minnesota, Monir co-founded and published a student's comic magazine. After graduation, in 2012, she moved to Ann Arbor, where she still resides.

The public was introduced to Carta's art and her family dynamic in 2017, when the online publication Zeal, published her autobiographical comic strip, “Lara Croft is My Family.” Spanning the early years of Carta's life, the comic centers around her father's obsessive playing of the “Lara Croft” video games, while the rest of the family hovers around him, watching obediently.

“Lara Croft Is My Family,” ZEAL (2017)

Carta's “Lara Croft” is depicted in forty short comic strip panels. Each one occurring as memories actually do: in short flashes of recalled emotion and trauma.

This subtlety harrowing tale touches on her father's relentless criticism, her mother's illness, and death, Carta's coming out, and beginning her transition in its wake. These life-defining events are told in a series of quick withering jabs that accumulate viscerally and with devastating effectiveness.

“Lara Croft Is My Family” panels (2017)

This effort won her the 2018 Ignatz Award for Best Online Comic. If she had stopped there and produced nothing more, Carta would have already fixed her place as a rising comics star. But she did not stop there.

She acquired an old Risograph from a local print shop that was clearing out space. In times past, this digital duplicator was popular with churches which used it as a cost-effective way of reproducing their weekly bulletins. Carta, like many cartoonists, saw it as an art tool. So was born Diskette Press. and the freedom provided by self-publishing her work without editorial censorship.

It cannot be avoided mentioning Carta’s sexually explicit work. But like everything else about Carta, it is not that simple.

She readily reveals that so much of her life has been defined by sexuality that it is impossible to exclude it from her work.“Yes, my work is transgressive, but that's a low bar,” she asserts, “any work that shows nudity is transgressive.”

Circa 2020, Carta began exploring and desconstructing taboos and fears installed in her around sex and identity. Particularly those involving gayness and transness.

“My work will sometimes find a wider audience that I can't anticipate,” says Carta. “I make the work for myself, what I want to see. It’s not commercial. If it finds a wider audience, that's OK, by not goal.”

A residency at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles in 2022, exposed Carta to performance art. Under the tutelage of legendary dominatrix, Mistress Odette, Carta delved into the esoteric world of BDSM and pain performance.

For Carta, it was the beginning of her calling herself a performance artist. She had already been making masochistic porn and publishing transgressive writing, but through Mistress Odette’s teaching, she developed the experience of connecting with an audience in an unfiltered way.

“An Evening of Pain,” performance at Tom of Finland (2022)

Her performance art is a part of Carta’s current exploration of her own sexual history, an expansion of the self-published “Napkin,” and more writing on disability as regarding sexuality.

You see, Carta has even incorporated her diagnosis of Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS) into her art.

An inherited genetic disorder that affects the body's connective tissues, hEDS first manifested in Carta while in her early twenties. She quickly went from merely being double-jointed, to repeatedly being injured carrying trays and getting sprained wrists from pouring tea at her hostess job in a gay bar.

Carta considers herself lucky to have adapted day-to-day routines to avoid injury. Strategies such as not lifting anything heavier than a gallon of milk, have been acquired. But recently, her legs have have impacted her ability to walk. Even short distances are difficult for her and she is frequently relying upon a wheelchair to get around.

“Passing,” panels from THE NIB (2018)

The constant pain and mobility issues have understandably limited Carta. Subsequently, she has turned to podcasting. Under the title of “Huge Pages,” Carta takes on the task of reading vintage erotic magazines from her extensive personal collection, cover-to-cover for her listeners. It is a unique and typically creative effort, describing the graphic imagery through words alone.

Which harkens back to the beginning of this profile. It is nearly impossible with words alone to describe Carta Monir succinctly. Yet, she managed to do so herself when asked that question by interviewer Philippe Leblanc back in 2018.

“I usually say I’m a cartoonist and podcast host. If we want to be more thorough, I’m a transgender woman.”

So be it. The artist has spoken.

Carta Monir (2025) [screengrab]