Chesca Hause

Making of "Emotional Damage"

Added 2025-02-18 15:54:46 +0000 UTC

I used to laugh at my Mum for crying during movies, but my oldest must have kicked a valve on the way out, because since becoming a mom I cry at the drop of a hat! Wholesome threads on Twitter are a particular weakness. I'll go in swearing I'll just "read a couple" but they keep coming and before you know it, I'm bailing before breakfast! I figured I couldn't be alone with this, so I decided to do a comic on it.

The premise was to leave readers confused about what she was crying about until the very end. I wanted Joel to be eye-rolly, like this crazy thing we're seeing happens all the time, but I didn't want him to come across as uncaring.

I tried starting with the comic shorter, but Fran needed more panels to ramp up the emotions. I got stuck at one point trying to make panel 4 face more extreme than the already very extreme panel 3. After trying to draw some crazy expressions, I realized I could just bump face 3 up to 4 and then add a face at the beginning instead!

The reveal at the end was difficult. A lot of wholesome threads are pet recuse ones, which wouldn't work in a talking animal world! I had to go rooting around Twitter for wholesome thread ideas and managed to make myself cry again! Eventually I landed on a post I'd seen before about babies getting glasses and their happy smiles as they see their parents for the first time. I needed to explain the post in as few words as possible and calling them "blind babies" wasn't quite right, so I went with a "deaf baby" hearing his mom for the first time instead. In retrospect I should have probably picked something else because when I looked up babies getting their hearing aides, they were just crying! Not very wholesome at all! 😂