January Check-In

STAND WITH MINNESOTA RESOURCE AGGREGATOR:

Before anything else: I want to share this resource collecting mutual aids, food support funds, rent relief funds, Go Fund Me’s and organizations to help support people on the ground in Minnesota as they stand against ICE. The on-the-ground feeling during Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago was all-consuming, terrifying and also empowering, being a part of street-by-street level community organizing against fascist ICE goons who were in the alley behind my house, throwing tear gas a block from my kid’s recess play lot. Knowing that what we went through in Chicago is a small fraction of what people are experiencing in Minnesota right now is hard to imagine. Sending all my love, support, and extra budget to our neighbors in MN. What a nightmare.

HOLIDAY CARD, 2025

For the past few years I have drawn holiday cards to send to a wide net of people, old and new friends, colleagues and acquaintances I’ve admired and collected from the many jobs and communities I’ve moved through. The timing of making the card is awful: in order to get it printed and mailed on time, I need to be drawing it at the same time I’m buried in Thanksgiving hosting prep, birthday logistics for my youngest (including my traditional gift of a birthday portrait), and all the end-of-semester administrative and care work for both my students and my children. “I’ll never do this again” I promise myself annually, sweaty with rage. But then the cards come back from the printer and I spend a long late evening writing the names of friends I care about but rarely get to see on envelopes, thinking about them with love at the time of year that nights are getting longer and twinkle lights shine in windows and the air is full of crisp almost-snow electricity, and I soften and re-commit.

I hope you & yours had a lovely winter holiday! We went to Solstice and Christmas and New Years parties, hosted family from out of town for Christmas, played baseball in at our neighborhood park every night after dinner, went ice skating, played games and watched movies. Magic Season—Thanksgiving through the end of winter break—is even more non-stop than usual: all holidays happen in my household because of the labor of my body and mind. I love these holidays: meaning-making rituals give life structure and meaning, so making them special for my kids/extended family/friends is imbued with deep pleasure. Also, the cleaning and meal planning and cooking and re-setting and kid-energy-managing is non-stop and exhausting. I’ve watched enough Upstairs/Downstairs British dramas in my life to recognize that Magic Season is a quarter of the year when I move fully Downstairs, you know what I mean? And also: this was the first year where my rest was able to be even part of the calculation of how time was spent over break. I finished a puzzle and a book! A revelation.

Kids are back in school and my classes start back up next week, so I’m back Upstairs. I’m teaching two classes this semester instead of one, the new-to-me senior Comics Capstone and a new course I developed called “Making Comics from Life,” focused on making diary, memoir, and personal essay comics. Both are dream classes to sink my mind and heart deep into, and also, both 6-hour classes are on the same day, 9am - 9:15pm! This schedule works best in balance with the other responsibilities in my life, but now that I’m facing it I’m doing a lot of introvert-nervous-laughing about being on for 12 hours straight. I’ve half-joked with my husband that the day after my teaching day this semester I might take up weekly residence at the Korean spa in the suburbs and work from the quiet, dimly lit room filled with rows of cushy recliners and talk to *nobody.*

BOOK PROGRESS

Bit by bit, line by line, pages are accumulating. It is slow but feels good to see the portfolio book fill with finished pages. I have about ten more pages before I’m done with the chapter I’m working on, which is the most narratively and emotionally difficult section of the book. Kind of like doing spot blacks on the page first to later fill in a balance of tone, I needed to set my emotionally heaviest anchor first so I can make it more subtle in conversation with other stories. I shared this on Instagram so I’ll share here too: I over-drew an image and had to start over, which rarely happens anymore and was a real morale-crasher. I usually have an intuitive sense of value balance on a page, hard earned over my years inking, but this one got muddier and muddier and I over-drew it into illegibility. Is the do-over version still a little over-drawn? Sure, but them’s the breaks, that’s how my pages look.

Before: blur your eyes, look at it from far away. Where even are the edges of the birds and the string and the nest? Awful.

After: more striking! Busy but better. Makes my eyes vibrate in a way I like. That’ll do.

Also, inspired by a studio visit with the brilliant and lovely Glynnis Fawkes last November, I bought myself a little new year gift of a hand broom to sweep away eraser crumbs. Glynnis has two hand brooms! If you’re going to spend all day erasing bad lines, it doesn’t hurt to make the task more cheerful with a little hedgehog brush.

HOURLY COMICS DAY IS COMING UP:

I have really missed drawing daily diary comics. I put them aside in order to be more disciplined with the hours I have to draw, putting all the ink I have time to sling into the Big Book. However: Hourly Comics Day is fast approaching! On February 1, cartoonists make a quick comic documenting what we did for each hour we’re awake, and it can be as loose or as serious an exercise as you want it to be. If you are reading this Substack it’s either because you are related to me (hi mom) or you care about comics, as a creator or reader. I encourage everyone reading this to give it a try! Because Feb 1 is a Sunday my hands will be full at home with my family, so I’ll be taking notes and drawing them up over the next few days. There are no rules, do it however you want! My first attempt at hourly comics day was 2020; I took notes all day and drew them into comics that I shared at a Zine Not Dead reading on Leap Day, my very first diary-ish comics and my last public event before Covid. They only exist as a PDF slideshow called Snake and Raccoon, which you’re welcomed to read if you want! They’re pretty funny.

BOOK CORNER:

I’ve been on a good reading kick recently! Here are some that I had big reactions to, love or hate: I won’t waste time on books that were just fine. Thanks for indulging some little book reviews:

• The Antidote by Karen Russell: Loved it loved it, even though it was imperfect. Set between two historic weather events in the dust bowl in Nebraska, the book focuses on a character known as The Antidote, a prairie witch. She goes into a dissociative fugue and people can magically deposit their memories into her like a bank to withdraw at a later date; the book starts as she wakes up from a calamitous dust storm completely bankrupt. POV shifts between characters navigating the fallout, good and bad, from the storm and the void witch’s bankruptcy. It is also big-picture about white colonialism of the American West, about the way memory is manipulated by those in power, how forgetting is a balm that wounds more than heals, and the violence that truth-rejection enacts on everybody involved. Some elements felt too tidy, and other parts too messy, or grasping for a big moral statement I didn’t think was quite believable or earned, but what worked really rocked me. Among the many huge feelings this book carved into me was a feeling of borderline-romantic love for women authors: the worldview of the book and the way magic works is so much about a woman’s embodied experience of trauma. I’ve read a lot of fantasy and magical realism, and I’ve never read anything quite like this. I’ll be thinking about the magic and these characters for a long time.

• The Animals In That Country by Laura Jean McKay: Another wild trip which I loved despite imperfections! A fast-moving pandemic sweeps through Australia; in addition to fever and pink eye, the virus lets people understand animal communication. It’s not Dr Dolittle, more what would it actually be like to hear the non-stop thoughts of sex and violence and hunger and domination from non-human consciousnesses: things devolve quickly. The main character is a truly messy fun-time party-alcoholic grandmother (very much not the protagonist you’d expect to follow in a dystopic road trip book, which was fun!) whose world revolves around her love of her granddaughter and her work at a nature park; the other protagonist is a dingo she rescued as a pup. I miss them both now that I’m done reading.

• On the Calculation of Volume, I and II by Solvej Balle (audiobook): I’ve only read the first two volumes of this series but man it’s great. It’s Groundhog Day, but with a grounded, educated, middle aged woman as the time-stuck person. She wakes up on November 18, then the next day is Nov 18 again; everyone else resets but she remembers, she ages, her cuts heal, she can carry some objects through the days with her but not all. It is, by narrative necessity, slow and repetitive. It is also subtle and deft, with moving insights about what makes life meaningful. Book 2 ended on a cliffhanger, but I’m listening to this series as audiobooks while I draw and book 3 isn’t out as an audiobook yet! GAH.

• Katabasis by R.F. Kuang (audiobook): On paper I, Marnie Galloway, should love this book: it’s a journey to the underworld (fun!) following two set-up-to-eventually-fall-in-love grad students (okay!) who are competing for the attention of a withholding advisor (relatable!) who they accidentally killed (oh no!) and are trying to rescue from hell (oh shit!), and they are all magicians (oooh!) and the magic mechanics in this world are based on formal logical paradoxes (*literally* my undergraduate degree)! Friends, I hated it. It was smug and fannish. It name dropped philosophers in the same way the worst person you know would name drop that their cousin is a movie star, aren’t you IMPRESSED. I saw all the twists and turns coming just from the back-of-book summary. And the main characters, who were set up by the structure of a journey to hell to Learn and Grow, stayed the same in every meaningful way! Baaaaarf.

• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (audiobook): ***If Lonesome Dove means a lot to you, stop reading here, I don’t want to debate I just want to vent*** I was going into a week I’d set aside just for drawing and wanted a long book to listen to, and I’d read enough people mention this as a favorite book who I wouldn’t expect to love a high-genre western so I thought why the hell not, I’ve never read a western before! What a great story structure: a classic Odyssey. The characters are iconic and memorable: I think all Texans know a chatterbox Gus and a silent McCrae. My dad is a McCrae. Clara, my heart: I’ll meet YOU in the cottage. Newt, you poor kid: devastating to witness the way masculinity wounds and replicates itself. Etc etc etc. LOTS to celebrate and appreciate; the writing was good, the pacing kept momentum, there were jokes, there were tears. And also, wooof, literally every woman but Clara is a Whore. (God bless sex workers! This is a sex-worker-friendly reading! The sex workers were given different personalities, which is better than what you can say for many books that include sex worker characters! And, in a book by a man about Men in a genre about Men, the universality felt hateful.) Wooof it was hard to read the Classic Western Genre representation of indigenous peoples. I texted my friend Sarah when I finally finished to say that I found it compelling enough to finish and I became semi-obsessed with it along the way, and also I hated it and everything it stood for? I have loved books with difficult and outright unlikable protagonists; I have loved books with personally and sociologically upsetting facts as a central premise of the plot; asking fiction for moral purity is, I think, lazy and boring. That said, fiction is an empathy machine; reading Lonesome Dove at this moment in history, in January 2026, when American white supremacist fascism is at a nakedly ambitious zenith, is being asked to feel deeply for Iconic American Men--literal cowboys--as they commit violence or do nothing to disrupt structures of violence against women and people of color on a journey to expand America’s colonialist footprint. There are elements of deep critique within, in dialogue and in story structure, but I don’t think it did anywhere near enough to offset the thrust of the book. (The literal last word is “whore.” Fuck you.) If this is the Pulitzer Prize Winning book that many call the best of the Western genre, and I feel obliged to acknowledge all the things I really enjoyed and worked for me while also having major icks, I wonder if these problems are inherent to the genre rather than the book? I don’t know. I read an interview with McMurtry where he said he struggled with how the book was received, saying he was trying to write an American Inferno but everyone received it as Gone with the Wind. My bro, I think it’s because that’s what you wrote. I also think listening to this while drawing during the day while simultaneously reading The Antidote at night, which directly engages with very similar questions about what it means to be a white American in the expanding West, helped put Lonesome Dove in its lowly place in my heart. Thanks but no thanks: QED.

xoxo m