Star Projector

Signing Off for 2025

My joke for year was that the worse the world gets, the better my personal life becomes, in seeming direct proportion. Which is to say: big picture, this has been a hell of a good year. I turned 40 on a lifelong-dream solo trip to southern Spain, walking and eating and drawing to my heart’s content for a whole week. On the other side of a summer running around with my funny, beautiful, brilliant children, I spent almost three weeks in residence at Ragdale working on my next big book, making pages I’m proud of. I enjoyed tabling at comic shows again this year (which last year felt weird and disconnected), glad to have ease and pleasure in that space again. In my third year of teaching I’ve found confidence in my pedagogical sea legs, dug in deep and thoroughly loving the very good work of helping a new generation of talented cartoonists find their own voices and refine their craft. And I get to spend all of my days flirting and laughing with an embarrassingly handsome and caring partner, with the ease and deep knowing that comes with almost 20 years (!) of flirting and laughing together. This isn’t to say there aren’t also stresses and health crises and family concerns, or that there aren’t abundant times when I have faltered and needed to mend. But there are years where hardships are the defining facts of the year, and 2025, thankfully, wasn’t one of them. I know how rare these kinds of years are.

I was going to write out some lists of favorite books and comics, but who needs another highlight reel from someone else’s aesthetic. Instead, here is a little two pager from the book I’m working on. These were among the first pages I drew, a sugar comic that will sit in a bed of salt and vinegar. One of the many challenges of this book is working through how to talk about love without sentimentality. I re-drew these pages a few times while I was trying to figure out how I was going to draw the book (one time was watercolor! really throwing spaghetti at the wall). I still have quibbles with the first page but the second page feels correct, which locked in the black/white balance for the rest of the book. Our hands draw the way they want to draw, and mine are inky black.

This is me signing off for 2025: happy solstice and happy new year. Make some light in the darkness. Go eat a strawberry. What a gift to be alive.