Lee Lai is a cartoonist, illustrator and educator from Melbourne, Australia who is currently living in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal. She has Chinese ancestry through her Hong Kong born father. Lai self-published a zine prior to debuting a full length graphic novel in 2021. Lai’s short story comics have been featured in a number of magazines including the online magazine Liminal.
Fiction (Graphic Novel)
Cannon
Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2025.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
We arrive to wreckage—a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heat-wave, this is where we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in little beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, well, she destroyed it. The mess feels a bit like a horror-scape—not unlike the horror films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror films on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their rote relationship. In high school, they were each other’s lifeline—two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down.
Yet, when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself—very uncharacteristically—surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her the hell outta there.
Fiction (Graphic Zine)
First Year
2nd ed.
Lee Lai supported by the Cha-Ching Comics grant, 2017.
Limited edition of 150 copies.
Fiction (Graphic novel)
Stone Fruit
Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2021.
PN6733.L34 S76 2021
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties to Ray’s niece, six-year-old Nessie. Their playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in all three of their lives, which ping-pong between familial tensions and deep-seated personal stumbling blocks. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron isolate from each other and attempt to repair their broken family ties — Ray with her overworked, resentful single-mother sister and Bron with her religious teenage sister who doesn’t fully grasp the complexities of gender identity. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up and learns they have more in common with their siblings than they ever knew.
At turns joyful and heartbreaking, Stone Fruit reveals through intimately naturalistic dialog and blue-hued watercolor how painful it can be to truly become vulnerable to your loved ones — and how fulfilling it is to be finally understood for who you are. Lee Lai is one of the most exciting new voices to break into the comics medium and she has created one of the truly sophisticated graphic novel debuts in recent memory.
Awards and Honours
2022 Doug Wright Award for best book (Finalist)
2022 Lambda Literary Award–LGBTQ Comics (Winner)
Links
Lee Lai personal site on Cargo
Lee Lai’s comic “Nice Young Man” in Liminal, 22 March 2021
Publisher Drawn & Quarterly
Publisher Fantagraphics Books