Lines of Light

A month ago, encouraged by this wonderfully clear explainer comic from Maia Kobabe, I bought an eSim for someone in Gaza via Connecting Humanity. Like Maia, mine took a while to get assigned and activated, but this morning IT HAPPENED.

Suddenly, two of my eSIMs were activated on the same day! The Airalo I’d purchased 4.5 months earlier and my second Nomad. I began buying top-up packages immediately.
I felt like I had planted a seed in the fall and waited all winter for it to sprout. Seeing it activated was like watching the first new leaves break the soil. (Maia watering tiny seedlings thinking “Watering my eSIMs!”) Sadly, only .07 GB of data was ever used on my Nomad. It was never used again after that first day.
(This is just an excerpt from Maia’s full comic. You can read the rest here.)

I try to pay a lot of attention to how taking various actions makes me feel. Not because activism shouldn’t include things that are difficult or painful, but because I’m a human creature and I know that I gravitate towards things that bring me pleasure or fulfillment. If I can embody my values in a way that’s rewarding, I’m going to be far more effective in my work. I see this in the people I admire: a kind of joyous integrity that drives fundraisers and community events, art projects and experiments.

The feeling I got seeing that eSIM activated and streaming data was very similar to what Maia describes in her comic. A burst of hope! A jolt of delight! The understanding that a stranger across the world, in unimaginably horrifying circumstances, has the chance to reach out and be heard—to connect.

In a season where everything about the internet feels poisoned, I’m reminded that data can mean hearing a loved one’s voice, subscribing to updates from emergency personnel, letting your children distract themselves with a cartoon on YouTube, or sharing the lived reality of life in a war zone. These are all means of spiritual and physical survival, and we can gift them to others.

If you feel moved to give it a go yourself, there’s an ongoing 5% discount code for Nomad Middle East eSims (NOMADCNG) and I have a personal code for 25% off (LUCYUADYUW) anyone’s first order. The full instructions for purchasing and donating eSims can be found on Connecting Humanity’s eSim page.

(Enormous respect to Mirna El Helbawi, the organizing force behind Connecting Humanity and Maia Kobabe, for always sharing such clear and humanizing comics. The title of this post comes from a chapter about the internet in Dan Nott’s fantastic book Hidden Systems.)

Sail Cargo Resurgence

Back in 2016 I had the pleasure of working on a piece for The Nib about renewed efforts to bring wind-powered shipping to the international trade scene. I chatted with a handful of passionate, fascinating people and just got to scratch the surface of what was happening at the time. Somewhere in the years that followed, between multiple changes in hosting and ownership, the comic disappeared from The Nib’s archives, so I’m re-posting it here on my own site to make sure it stays up for future readers to investigate.

(I’m still mucking around with the best way to format this kind of thing for my own site, but this’ll do for now. You can use the arrows to scroll through thumbnails, or click the image to read in a bigger carousel viewer.)

One Quick, One Slow

Two lovely pieces of feedback on the blog in very different mediums recently: a tiny, encouraging email from Rob right after my last entry and the sweetest postcard from Piper that arrived in my PO box sometime in June (but given the way life’s been going I didn’t manage to stop by and discover it until well into July).

Maybe it’s because blogging is often a much quieter affair than posting on social media, but I love these little blips and boops of connection. They hit harder than comments and likes and reblogs. They feel more personal. They remind me to reach out and email people (or write them a card!) when their work strikes a chord.

I had cause to do this recently with Ursula Vernon, whose work I’ve been following since I was in middle school. She’s been sharing some very vulnerable comics about dealing with breast cancer and I thought “My god, if not now, when?” It’s been over TWENTY YEARS and I’ve never taken the time to tell this person how much discovering her website and her comics and her delightfully eccentric illustrations meant to me as a weird tween without a lot of artistic friends. It’s an impossible gift when someone’s been a fixed point in your creative community for that long.

It reminds me that even if social media is crumbling around us, people can endure. The impressions we make on one another outlast the silos and the buyouts and the implosions.

But it’s good to come out and say so every once in a while.

A Blaze of Kindness

The Terra Nova Expedition is the Millennials’ polar expedition. We’ve worked really hard, we’ve done everything we were supposed to, we made what appeared to be the right decisions at the time, and we’re still losing. Nothing in the mythology we’ve been fed has prepared us for this. No amount of positive attitude is going to change it. We have all the aphorisms in the world, but what we need is an example of how to behave when the chips are down, when the Boss is not sailing into the tempest to rescue us, when the Yelcho is not on the horizon. When circumstances are beyond your power to change, how do you make the best of your bad situation? What does that look like? Even if you can’t fix anything, how do you make it better for the people around you – or at the very least, not worse? Scott tells us: you can be patient, supportive, and humble; see who needs help and offer it; be realistic but don’t give in to despair; and if you’re up against a wall with no hope of rescue, go out in a blaze of kindness. We learn by imitation: it’s easy to say these things, but to see them in action, in much harder circumstances than we will ever face, is a far greater help. And to see them exemplified by real, flawed, complicated people like us is better still; they are not fairly-tale ideals, they are achievable. Real people achieved them.

I am leaping out of my chair and whooping and cheering and hollering about this passage from Sarah Airriess’s latest Patreon post. (The whole essay was released early for Patrons, so you can either become a supporter to read the whole thing today or just wait it out until it becomes more widely available in a month. Personally I’d recommend the former, because Sarah’s Patreon is one of the best around, but I’m biased.)

This talk originally accompanied the launch of The Worst Journey in the World, Vol. 1, Sarah’s graphic novel adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of the Terra Nova Expedition. I’m holding my copy right now, and it’s one of the most beautiful comics I’ve ever seen. Again: my appreciation is probably heightened by the fact that I’ve been following along on Patreon for years as she’s shared the process behind every page, but even without that context it’s a beautiful, beautiful book.

A page from "The Worst Journey in the World" showing a view of pack ice from the rigging of a tall ship.
A page from The Worst Journey in the World showing two characters observing a beautiful sunset.

In the microcosm of caregiving, I’m learning this lesson over and over again: it isn’t the systems that make it bearable; it’s the people. It’s Gabriela texting to say she’s bringing over a rotisserie chicken. It’s Jim coming by in an hour to take my dad out for a visit to his favorite coffee shop. It’s Jen holding space for our cohort of young caregivers to show up and commiserate with each other over Zoom because she went through what we’re going through and wants to pay it forward. It’s Hayley texting a loving thought from across the country when I somehow need it most. It’s Sarah picking up my watch from the place in Ventura that I keep forgetting to stop at and then coming to help me build a bed frame. It’s also whoever left a free mattress in the parking lot behind Vons.

I think back on the way I lived through the first ten years of my career and it feels so different. I was bolstered and supported by community, it’s true. I was even asking them for help at every turn to make my books and my work possible! But somehow the ways I’m relying on others right now feel so different. I’m humbled so much more thoroughly by letting people in during this season of my life because it’s not just creative anxiety anymore. That’s peanuts. That’s easy.

This is the real shit.

It’s not freezing to death in Antarctica shit, but some days it feels real close. I’ve feared and loathed the thought of anyone seeing me like this for so long, but time and time again I see that people want to help each other. Or, at the very least, my people want to help me. And my dad’s people want to help me. And my hometown wants to help me.

I just have to let them in.

Matt Thoughts

Got to catch up with the inimitable Matthew Bogart on the phone the other day after an embarrassingly long lull in communication (although his Patreon updates make me feel like we’re good pals just chatting away on the regular, so maybe that’s why I lost track). At one point he said “That’s the entirety of comics for me: turning story into space” and I think that’s a REAL GOOD LINE! I wrote it down immediately because YES! EXACTLY! What a great form of wizardry to practice.

But now I’m thinking about why it is that pictures occupy spatial real estate for me in a way words…don’t?? I’m tired and it’s the end of the day so I’m not going to dig into why right now. Just chucking it into the posterity machine.

Anyway: Matt’s a good dude. The last time I saw him he was letting me borrow his corner rounder during the Pandemic. That’s a real friend.

Octopus Pie Eternal

Four panels from Octopus Pie Eternal. Hannah, a woman with shoulder-length hair, looks furious in the top three panels. Over her head a balloon reads "You wanted to disappear. Gone in a puff of smoke! That was you, Hanna. It was you." By the third panel, her fury has turned to resignation. She says "Then I've made a mistake." In the fourth panel, she and her male partner face each other in the interior of a camper van in the woods. The side of the van is drawn as if it's missing, the better to see them looking at the floor, silent and alone.

I didn’t always keep up with Octopus Pie during the ten years Meredith spent making it regularly, but every time one of these standalone followup stories comes out, I’m blown away. Seeing webcomics creators approach characters they first started crafting in their 20s with the added life experience of becoming 30-somethings is just…it rules. It’s magical to see characters age as we age, becoming concerned with the types of life transitions and regrets and hopes that meet us with each passing decade.

And even beyond the content: THE STORYTELLING! I yelled when I saw these three panels because they’re magnificent. The tones, the panel borders, the scale, the expressions—all of it comes together to create this perfect denouement after a raging argument. And the van? The fuckin’ long shot crafted from a tiny space that shouldn’t by any rights work the way it does but it works so well??? I love seeing things like this. I miss seeing things like this.

I hear people talk about missing webcomics because Google Reader died, but the truth is there’s still plenty of RSS reader technology out there. There are more webcomics than ever. So why do I still fall prey to that feeling? Is it that I don’t have what it takes to invest in new stories or characters? That the selection has gotten too overwhelming? That I spend all my time making comics so I can’t relax by reading them anymore?

I’m not sure. I just know that reading this reminded me of what it felt like to be a kid in college with a bookmark folder of ten different stories I would gladly immerse myself in every day of the week, week after week, year after year. Stories that made me think I could do this too. Stories made by people who became my colleagues and friends.

Stories that it’s nice to return to every now and again, just to peek through the window and make sure everyone’s doing okay.

2021 in Reading: The Big List

Trying not to be precious about year-end stuff right now because I’m feeling stuck, but here’s a big list of things I read in 2021! Reading was hard this year for…well, you know. All the reasons. I needed a lot of comfort food to get through the upheaval of moving home, and for huge swaths of time I felt as if I’d lost access to the part of my brain that thrilled to Alberto Manguel or Le Guin in the first part of the year. I’m still sort of there.

Read a lot of comics (thanks, Danielle’s studio library and also The Actual Library) because I started drawing a graphic novel and it turns out reading more comics helps your brain think in comics??? Who knew. I still feel like I’m scratching my way towards figuring out what really makes a comic work for me. It takes a lot to get me excited about them, which feels somewhat icky as a person who knows first-hand how much fucking time they take. But there it is!

Started trying to track rough start/end dates towards the second half of the year because I got curious. I’ll probably stick with that into 2022.

Bubble and The Liar’s Dictionary both made me laugh out loud. The Creative Habit and Always Coming Home reminded me how I got to be the way I am. I’m sure there are other books I felt feelings about but I’m just going to HIT PUBLISH.

See previously: 2020’s Big List

LegendRough Guide to Ratings
🎭 – Plays
📝 – Poetry
📖 – Books (Fiction)
📓 – Books (Nonfiction)
💬 – Graphic Novels
❤︎ = Yes
❤︎❤︎ = Oh Yes
❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Oh Hell Yes
  1. 📝 An Ocean of Static – J.R. Carpenter
  2. 📓 The Book of Delights – Ross Gay ❤︎
  3. 💬 Oksi – Mari Ahokoivu
  4. 📖 The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories – Ed. Mahvesh Murad & Jared Shurin
  5. 📖 Solaris — Stanisław Lem
  6. 📖 The Liar’s Dictionary – Elly Williams ❤︎❤︎
  7. 📖 There but for the – Ali Smith ❤︎❤︎
  8. 📓/📝 Bluets – Maggie Nelson ❤︎
  9. 📖/🎭/📝/📓 Always Coming Home – Ursula K. Le Guin ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  10. 📖 Never Mind – Edward St. Aubyn
  11. 📖 Bad News – Edward St. Aubyn
  12. 📖 Some Hope – Edward St. Aubyn
  13. 📓 A Reader on Reading – Alberto Manguel ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  14. 📖 Mother’s Milk – Edward St. Aubyn
  15. 📖 At Last – Edward St. Aubyn
  16. 🔄 📖 Guards! Guards! – Terry Pratchett ❤︎
  17. 📓 The Mother of All Questions – Rebecca Solnit
  18. 🔄 💬 Delilah Dirk and the Pillars of Hercules – Tony Cliff ❤︎
  19. 📖 The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R.R. Tolkien
  20. 📖 The Mezzanine – Nicholson Baker ❤︎
  21. 📓 Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert ❤︎
  22. 📖 The Two Towers – J.R.R. Tolkien
  23. 📖 The Return of the King – J.R.R. Tolkien (Finished April 20th)
  24. 📖 Wonder Tales of Seas and Ships – Frances Carpenter (April 22nd – April 27)
  25. 🔄📖 The Raw Shark Texts – Steven Hall (July 20th – July 27th) ❤︎❤︎
  26. 💬 Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut, Ryan North, Albert Monteys (August 4th) ❤︎
  27. 💬 Lucky Penny – Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota  (August 4th)
  28. 💬 Kodi – Jared Cullum (August 6th)
  29. 💬 The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist – Adrian Tomine (August 8th)
  30. 💬 Girl Town – Casey Nowak (August 9th)
  31. 💬 My Life in Transition – Julia Kaye (August 9th)
  32. 💬 Bubble – Jordan Morris, Sarah Morgan, Tony Cliff, Natalie Riess (August 12th) ❤︎❤︎
  33. 📖 The Accidental – Ali Smith (August 23rd)
  34. 💬 Don’t Go Without Me – Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (August 24th) ❤︎❤︎❤︎ 
  35. 🔄 📖 The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil – George Saunders
  36. 📖 Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen (Finished Sept. 8th)
  37. 📖 All Systems Red – Martha Wells (Sept. 10th)
  38. 📖 Artificial Condition – Martha Wells (Sept. 10th)
  39. 📖 Rogue Protocol – Martha Wells (Sept. 10th-11th)
  40. 📖 Exit Strategy – Martha Wells (Sept. 11th)
  41. 📖 The Absolute Book – Elizabeth Knox (Sept. 30th? – Oct 17th)
  42. 📓 The Library at Night – Alberto Manguel (April 22nd – October 19th)
  43. 📖 Sphinx – Anne Garréta (Oct 28-30)
  44. 💬 Draw Stronger – Kriota Willberg (Oct 30)
  45. 📓 Goodbye Again – Jonny Sun
  46. 📖 The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle – Stuart Turton (Nov. 18th-20th) ❤︎
  47. 📖 Milk Blood Heat – Dantiel W. Moniz (Nov. 20th-22nd) ❤︎
  48. 📖 The Devil and the Dark Water – Stuart Turton (Nov. 27th-Dec 2nd) 
  49. 💬 Piece by Piece: the Story of Nisrin’s Hijab – Priya Huq (Dec. 6th)
  50. 💬 The Legend of Auntie Po – Shing Yin Khor (Dec. 7th) ❤︎❤︎
  51. 💬 Treasure in the Lake – Jason Pamment (Dec. 9th)
  52. 📖 The Glass Hotel – Emily St. John Mandel (Dec. 15th-17th) ❤︎
  53. 📓 The Collected Schizophrenias – Esmé Weijun Wang (Dec. 18th)
  54. 💬 Tell No Tales – Sam Maggs and Kendra Wells (Dec. 15th-21st)
  55. 📓 The Creative Habit – Twyla Tharp (Dec. 22nd) ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  56. 📓 Intimations – Zadie Smith (Dec. 28th) ❤︎
  57. 📓 I Shock Myself – Beatrice Wood (Dec. 25th – Dec. 31st) ❤︎

Jesse

The first funeral I ever attended wasn’t for a family member; it was for a cartoonist.

Three illustrated comics panels done in ink with a grey-blue watercolor wash. Panel one: a woman rides up a hill on a bike. Panel two: she takes off her helmet, looking sad and worried. Panel 3: a wide shot of mourners at a funeral, all looking back at her.

Dylan Williams passed away in 2011, shortly after I’d spent a formative semester as his student in the IPRC’s Comics Certificate Program. He’d battled leukemia for many years, but I didn’t know him as someone struggling with a disease. I knew him as a generous teacher with an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure and unsung cartoonists, a champion of small press creators, and a source of quiet humor and encouragement.

I’m almost certain that the first time I met Jesse Hamm—or maybe only saw him—was at Dylan’s funeral.

I realize, looking back, that Steve was there, too. And Greg. And probably countless other Portland comics people who would come to feel like a patchwork family in the years that followed. I was just a newcomer to that crowd at the time, still trying to find my place within the medium, but the funeral left a huge impression on me. I ended up drawing my thesis comic about that year in the IPRC program, and my first convention experience, and Dylan’s death, which led to my first Kickstarter, which led to my becoming an intern at Helioscope (then Periscope Studio), which led to the career I have now, ten years later.

A graphite portrait of Dylan Williams, a middle aged white man with short buzzed hair and a pencil behind his ear. He's smiling gently.
Dylan Williams, by Jesse Hamm

I remember using this portrait Jesse drew for his memorial post about Dylan as reference when working on True Believer. It was uncannily accurate and tender, as were his recollections of Dylan as a publisher and community member.

Toward the end of his post Jesse wrote:

Dylan understood that comics are really for and about people — that people are what give comics value. Like he said elsewhere in that interview:  “Encouraging people is like the greatest feeling in the world.” And he did encourage people. One blogger recalls: “He was able to say …the things I needed to hear in a way that I actually heard them. [H]is support and encouragement changed my life.”

It felt so true to what I knew of this man, even if I’d only known him for a short while.

Three comics panels in ink with a grey-blue watercolor wash. Panel one: the exterior of a building with the words "Individual voice is something to be treasured and respected" coming from a window. Panel two: the words "You've gotta make comics your own way. Every time." over a classroom full of students. Panel three: Dylan saying "Don't forget that" from his seat at the head of the table. Lucy enters the room panel left saying "Hey guys" and clutching a notebook. She's rushed.

I was in the middle of writing a difficult email yesterday morning when I opened the Studio’s Discord page and saw that Jesse was dead. A blood clot in his lung. Sudden and unexpected and impossible and awful and so far away from me at this laptop in California. Far away from my studiomates. Far away from the cemetery where we had buried Dylan a decade ago—the same one where another dear friend buried his mother late last year.

Seeing the outpouring of love and grief on Twitter from cartoonists who’d known Jesse through his threads of advice and educational PDFs, I found myself reaching for that old post about Dylan.

Rereading it this morning wrecked me all over again, because so much of what Jesse wrote about Dylan echoes what people have been saying about him: that he was impossibly knowledgeable, and fucking funny, and deeply opinionated in a quiet sort of way. That he wanted to encourage people. To help us see and appreciate all the thoughtfulness and knowledge that goes into practicing this craft.

An ink and watercolor comics panel showing a classroom full of students seen from outside the window. Dylan sits at the head of the classroom saying "Whatever the project, we have to think about the stakes. We have to ask ourselves: why am I doing this?"

I’ve felt distant from the idea of the Comics Community for a while now, trying to figure out my place in an industry that’s changing so rapidly, caught between different generations and genres of creators.

But this loss, like Dylan’s loss, feels like a smack in the face; a radical recalibration toward what brings us to this practice. What binds us to each other as a wider community. How lucky we are. What a wealth of information and knowledge there is out there. And of course, as with any death, the question of who we are. What we’re doing. How we’re impacting the people around us.

I kept thinking about how much Jesse knew, and what a staggering loss that is, but then yesterday a studiomate told me she’d just drawn a page earlier this week with a piece of his advice in mind. “I literally think of him every time I use it.”

That’s how this works, if we choose it. We share our knowledge and our enthusiasm and we welcome people to the fucking table so they can make the things they came here to make.

Dylan couldn’t have said it better. And now we have to keep saying it for both of them.

Thank you for everything, Jesse. We love you.