London-based illustrator Mrudula K’s zine 'I’m Still a Dyke' explores queerness, gender, belonging, and the experience of coming to terms with identity in a homophobic environment. Drawing on her childhood in a small town in India, the zine follows an animalistic hound through a surreal landscape shaped by memories, fear, anger, and the search for community.
Originally from a small town about three hours from Mumbai, London-based illustrator Mrudula grew up falling in love with many different forms of storytelling. She experimented with anything she could get her hands on, from writing novels, and making short films on YouTube to photography and animation. It was only after she got her first full-time job as a Junior Designer at an art magazine in Mumbai and began working with illustrators on editorial features that she realised illustration was what she wanted to pursue. “Illustration stuck with me more than the other art forms I tried out — it opened a whole new world of possibilities and gave me the freedom to explore image-making without the limits of having to ‘pick’ a medium,” she notes.
This eventually led her to pursue an MA in Illustration at Kingston University in London. Experimenting with different storytelling formats from an early age, she says, helped her expand her illustration practice and understand the kinds of mediums and visuals she gravitates towards. Mrudula currently works as a freelance illustrator, with her practice drawing on themes like queerness, memory, home and migration. This has led her to work at the intersection of illustration, culture and heritage — “quite an interesting niche to have found,” as she puts it. Over the past year, she has worked with The Storybox Collective, the National Trust, and the Met Office on projects exploring histories and cultural archives.
Her new zine, 'I’m Still a Dyke' (2026), comes from her experience of growing up queer in a homophobic environment through the eyes of an animalistic, hound-like creature. Drawing from her childhood in the small town, Mrudula uses both emotional and visual memories of where she lived to create the world the creature inhabits. The zine also reflects on her experience with gender and coming to terms with being non-binary and, as the title suggests: a dyke. With each page combining text and image, it becomes a visual poem, taking the reader through vivid grassland moors as the hound searches for its community.
One of the places Mrudula kept returning to while making the zine was a hill about twenty minutes from her house, where she would go with her family and spend evenings hiking up and down the slopes. It wasn’t a big hill in hindsight, but as a child it felt huge to her. “When we visited, my mum and dad would let me wander around on my own, a rare opportunity in my childhood,” she shares. “I still remember vividly the feeling of the yellowing grass, the wind, the soil. The hill felt like the only place where I felt unobserved, free.” That experience became central to the visual language of the zine: from its terracotta earth and swaying grass to its red sunsets. The hill also becomes the place where the hound’s struggle begins and ends.
Much of Mrudula’s childhood, she tells us, was spent hiding and being aware of the pressure to conform, both as a queer person and as a girl. “As I grew older and began to understand my own identity, that sense of suffocation tightened, like a noose closing in,” she shares. In the zine, which draws from a mix of expressionism and collage-style illustrations, this shows up through manipulations of space — a closing circle and narrow pathway for that sense of threat against the openness of the landscape, which signals release.
The hound came from the links Mrudula sees between queerness and monstrosity, from queer-coded villains to historical witch hunts against women who lived together. She keeps returning to Frankenstein as one of these queer-coded “monsters”, and sees a similar sense of rejection in the hound. Its uneven black ink spreads, which look like glitches or smudges, come from the idea of being seen as broken or unnatural. At the same time, the animal represents loyalty and resilience. “In many ways, I see the hound as a version of myself: searching for its pack, and determined to continue moving forward for as long as I can,” she notes. There is also an undercurrent of danger in the zine, expressed through its reds and oranges, but those colours hold her anger as much as fear.
"When someone speaks about a queer person being rejected or lost, they often talk about the grief and sadness that comes with it. The anger we may feel, as a queer person, at the injustice of it all, is rarely talked about. Especially when you grow up being perceived as a woman, anger doesn’t feel like a permissible emotion. This zine felt like a way to unpack and process some of those feelings."Mrudula K
Having made out of the place that had none for her to be herself, Mrudula’s source of strength now lies in remembering that there are people who love her for who she is — something she also hopes other queer and marginalised folks who are still looking for a place to belong take from the zine. “I hope that they will find their community, and that they should keep fighting for it,” she says. “The last line in my zine says – ‘I can no longer look my Aai [mother] in the eye, but I get to look in my lovers’. And only in one pair do I get to keep myself.’ I'm grateful that even if my family may never see me for who I am, my chosen family absolutely do. With them, I get to be who I really am and stop hiding.”
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