December! ☃️

Livestream! I'm going to do one tomorrow @ NOON CST! I have no idea what I'll be drawing! Could be fanart! Exclamation points!

The New Yorker

Ah, occasionally working on spec for a prestigious cultural magazine does have its benefits: my one-panel comic was a daily cartoon for The New Yorker this week!

And what ya don't see! Ever wonder how a New Yorker cartoon comes to life?

1) Brainstorm ideas—most of them will be bad.  The caption goes through several rounds of revisions before it is finalized.

2) Choose an idea, and sketch and refine it. 

3) Send your batch of cartoons to the TNY cartoon editor, Emma Allen. She graduated from Yale a few years before I did. We never crossed paths, which is good, because I probably would have found her terrifying as a freshman. She and her assistant Colin (and I think several other billion people) weigh in on what should go in the magazine next week and what should go online. 

4) Get an email back that with the notorious, stomach-vaulting, "O.K." in the subject line. That's all it says!!  Rejoice because that means your hard work was not for naught!

5) Emma, Collin, two web content editors, a copy editor, the New Yorker's in-house lawyer, and a registrar at Conde Nast all get emails about your dumb cartoon. Then it goes online. Friends from college will see it and go "hey! I know her!"

Emerald City Comic Con

The pandemic rearranged so much of our lives, including the events which we use to mark time. One event was Emerald City Comic Con, which is usually jam-packed with comic fans and held in March with bright sunny skies. This year it was rescheduled to December, with sparser crowds and scattered showers. But the feeling in the convention hall was bright. People were eager to be excited about things, ready to connection, and searching to recapture normalcy.

Conventions are usually a tiring affair. They're long and noisy and socially draining even for someone like me, who is a massive extrovert. But seeing excited readers, sitting with my artist friends, and walking through aisle after aisle of creativity was a jumper cable to the brain. I thought ECCC would be especially exhausting this year, but it was the opposite! I've sipped a bit from the cup of life! My favorite moments:

• Buying a commission of Ted Kord (The Blue Beetle!) by Kevin Maguire off of a random con-goer. I had to do some convincing to get this guy to part with it but he ended up reading Check, Please! And he enjoyed Check, Please! And then he grabbed a commission from me—and get this—it was of Ted Kord! Now, that's business!
• HOT POT!!!!
• I had a really good sandwich that tasted exactly like Thanksgiving. 
• The tags from some Dinluke fanart I did this week are a story from the convention: “#at the comic convention i saw a woman with a mask and the picture on it was grogu fully eating kermit's leg #and i asked her about it because i did not understand it at first and she was like grogu likes frogs— OH DEAR GOD I shouted #puppet on muppet violence.”

The fanart in question:

The mask in question. (Please let me know if you know the artist!)

BARDA & FLIP

I'm trying! Very hard! To not work! ON multiple stories at once!! So at the moment I'm trying my hardest to completely finish the script for Barda before returning to penciling FLIP. One day I will learn to stop juggling creative projects.

2022 & Thank You

It's the last newsletter of the year. Thank you, patron, for sticking with me through another 365 days of comic pages, livestreams, and chaotic fanart. Thank you! It was a challenging year in my personal life and I appreciate your support now more than ever. It's thrilling to look forward to the future, and I do so despite uncertainty...but I hope there's more art to come!

Thank you for facilitating that.

That's it for me!