I’m Aria! I’m primarily a storyteller, and I am primarily telling the story Kidd Commander. I write, draw, and do whatever else needs doing to wrestle it into existence.

I grew up in a house on top of a mountain in Tennessee and taught myself to draw and write in the woods. Growing up weird in Appalachia was intensely isolating so almost all of my social and artistic connections came from the Internet, and I’m still very active online even though I live in Colorado now. In addition to the physical isolation, I was raised in a Christian cult obsessed with the end of the world, which meant my in-person access to different ideas and ways of life was also extremely limited. I owe almost all of my artistic (and empathetic) development to webcomics, libraries, and freely accessible passion projects on the old web, and I try my best to repay that by making most of my work easiliy available to anyone with an internet connection.

It’s a cliche to say it, but I’ve been writing and drawing forever. I’ve never wanted to do anything but tell stories, and I spent most of my adolescence starting and abandoning ideas because I was trying to do what everyone says to do and start small with something I don’t care about too much. That didn’t work, and by the time I finally started Kidd Commander in 2013 the artistic frustration had built up so much pressure it’s still carrying me along all this time later. I worked on KC all through college while I coasted through an English degree, and I’ve done everything I can to keep it my full-time focus since I graduated.

While frustrating, the experience did jumpstart the realization that I’m very bad at pretending to care about things when I don’t, mostly because I am usually caring about something else a whole lot. I’ve put in a lot of effort to slough off the irony-poisoning and misanthropy of my upbringing and I strive for all of my art to be as sincere as possible. One of my intentions with Kidd Commander is paying forward my experience of being helped along my process of deprogramming from Christianity by other passionately humanist stories. I hope my work can be something that reassures other people as trapped as I was that there are better ways to live, and let them know there are other people out here who feel like they do, and that’s not going to work if I flinch with my storytelling. I try very hard not to.

I escaped Tennessee with my partner and our cats in 2023 and now we’re in Fort Collins, Colorado. It is impossibly lovely here. When I’m not working on my own stories, I like looking at other peoples’ stories, lifting heavy things and putting them down again, and eating breakfast food.

If you’re wondering, you can use any pronouns to refer to me!

Press Bio

After a rigid evangelical upbringing backfired catastrophically, Aria Bell grew up to spend all their time making adamantly humanist stories. She’s been doing that since 2013 with the comic Kidd Commander, and now that she’s finally escaped Appalachia for Fort Collins she gets to do it in a place where her books don’t mold or get banned by the school boards, hopefully.