I’m Hallie Bateman. I’m 36 and live in Cincinnati Ohio with my husband , our twin toddlers Max and Nora, and our dog Spinelli. I’m a Leo, the middle child between two brothers, and 5 feet 11 inches tall. I grew up on a hobby farm on top of a mountain in rural Northern California. I was painfully shy growing up but am now a pretty loud extroverted introvert. My parents, who are now divorced, met as journalists at the local newspaper and raised us around tons of books and talk of writing. I studied writing in college but discovered illustration halfway through and merged the two.

After college, I worked as an illustrator/Art Director at a tech blog in the bay area for a while, then I moved to New York and started to focus on illustration and comics full time while being a terrible barista. My time in New York was a magical 2-year whirlwind. I made a name for myself as I made comics for the finest alt-blogs the mid 2010s had to offer, met my now-husband Jack, and started making books.

In 2016, I moved to LA and started working as illustrator/art director for a mental health nonprofit for teens & young adults run out of UCSF. It was an incredible job that funded my ability to work on books, which are my life’s passion but don’t pay very well.

In the last 10 years, I’ve made four books, two of them with my mom, . I don’t believe in moms and daughters being best friends – so fucked up!! – but if I did, I’d admit we are. She’s who taught me how to live and how to write and I worship her, but also can be a brat to her. We spend a lot of time saying “LISTEN TO ME” while talking over each other.

Anyway, What To Do When I’m Gone (2018) is my mom’s instructions to me on what to do when she dies, starting the moment she dies. Our second book, What To Do When You Get Dumped (2024) is about my mom’s journey through heartbreak after being heinously dumped by my dad. Both are funnier than they sound! Directions (2021) is a book of handwritten advice on construction paper, and my first picture book, Eggasaurus (2022, written by Jennifer Wagh) is about baby dinosaurs and was a delight to draw.

My years in LA were incredibly happy and productive, but also I was a workaholic who burned the candle at both ends. In 2022, the mental health nonprofit folded, and suddenly I was out of a job and very fucking stressed. We’d already been contemplating a move to Jack’s hometown of Cincinnati, and this pushed us over the edge.

In 2023, after 7 years in LA, we drove across the country to our new home, and began our new chapter. We’ve been here for three years and I have discovered that I love the Midwest. I love the seasons, I love the people, I love the affordability and quiet and space. It feels humane!

When we moved, I was deeply burnt out and needed some time to recover. I shut a lot of my work down. I stopped freelancing, stopped posting on Instagram, closed down my online shop. The timing was optimal because 6 months after we moved, I got pregnant with twins!

Max and Nora were born in February 2024 and I took 6 months to be with them, and since then I’ve been slowly ramping my work back up. My first picture book as author & illustrator, What’s So Great About Nicholas?, comes out in 2028. It’s about a jealous girl plotting to ruin her little brother’s birthday party. I’m working on another picture book and a novel, but they’re still in early stages. I’m trying to be patient, to allow my art to arrive on its own timeline, or closer to its own timeline.

I started this Substack newsletter, HALMAIL, in December of 2024. Instagram had become a barren wasteland where I alternated between feeling invisible and feeling all too seen by hostile strangers with mean things to say. Jack kept encouraging me to try Substack, and I finally caved, thinking, what the hell, let’s try it. And it turns out I really like it! I think of this newsletter as a container for my art, whatever it looks like on any given week, with no expectations.

HALMAIL is free because I want to keep it fun and accessible for me as an artist, and for you as a reader. As I said in a recent interview, I don’t want to make art in a void. Connection and communication with an audience makes my art come alive. I want to reflect and be witnessed! I want to move you! I want to make your days a little better, help you feel your humanity, help you feel less alone, help you feel joy.

Here, my art feels more alive than it has in a long time.

In the apocalypse film Snowpiercer (2013), everybody has their end-of-world job. There’s the guy who gets the food, the people who care for the kids, who wage the war – and then there’s the old scruffy dude who writes everything down and draws stuff on the wall with an old lump of coal or whatever. I remember watching that movie in the theater when it came out and thinking, that’s me! I’m that guy! This is my role on the apocalypse train and I take it seriously. Art is sacred to me. It’s my purpose here on earth. I’m not religious, but if I was, art would be my religion.

Speaking of apocalypse: A.I. is a thing now, and I am so fucking tired of hearing about it. But I will say it’s thrown me passionately back into the arms of my creative practice. I see how vital art is to my own wellbeing, and society’s. I’ve always been a physical paper kind of artist, and now I’m leaning more heavily into physical media than ever. I want to leave pencil marks and paper folds, show evidence of my human hands collaborating with materials to bring my art into existence.

I don’t want to punch the first little seed of my idea into A.I. and have it pop out a perfectly smooth hunk of glop. I want to see where the first little seed of my idea wants to take me. I want to disappear into it, travel beyond it, get lost in the process, get that good transcendent feeling. I want to feel the dry grit of the charcoal on my fingers. I want to make a surprising creative decision because there’s extra paint to use up, or not enough paper to start over. I want to empty my pencil sharpener every few weeks and be amazed by the density and volume of the shavings. What a rare and special thing to have a mind and a heart and hands and the capacity to make art. I am a human being, and I shall not squander such luck!

All that’s to say: I hope my work inspires you to make your own damn art, too!

Okay, that’s all. I’ve had to pee almost the entire time I’ve been writing this! Thanks for being here,

❤️ Hal

PS: If you have any questions, shoot ‘em in the comments. And if you want to, introduce yourself! I’d love to know who you are/ where you’re from / anything else about you that you’d like to share.

If you’re new here or missed these, here are some favorite HALMAIL newsletters so far:

• On my bookshelf: What It Is by Lynda Barry

• In 2016, I had an eating disorder

• Make journal comics for a month, change your life

• The pen that started it all

• My most embarrassing moments

• It should be noted that Demi’s full statement contains more nuance, and it seems like we agree human art is irreplaceable, and she even goes so far as to say that A.I. “probably” isn’t regulated enough! But man, I just can’t get on board with her limp, weak stance that there’s no fight to have here, that it’s a losing battle, that there isn’t anything to fear.

  A.I. is totally deregulated and in the hands of malicious, powerful, corrupt people. I think A.I. is certainly something to fear, for creatives, for humanity, for the planet. I think it’s our responsibility to call for A.I. regulation – and at the very least, to say we think A.I. “art” sucks ass!!! Of course there are plenty of influential people who are doing and saying & selling worse things than Demi! That little chunk of her quote has just made the rounds recently and it’s what got my mind churning during these sleepless hours. Demi, if you’re reading this, let’s talk!

• Drawn with a few random dried-out markers and silky smooth, delightful to use Marabou art crayons on a yellow legal pad.

• Long live human human human art! is inspired by a quote by French avant-garde artist James Ensor: “Long live free, free art!”

• Shop my books.

• Shop my prints, etc. Brand new 100% of Dreams Come True print went live last week! Thank you so much for your kind words about that piece.

• A nice thing to do: buy a tee shirt, all proceeds go to important causes.

Notes:

• Drawn on a yellow legal pad with a total mish-mash of supplies, including india ink, a gel stick highlighter, gouache, the awesome and very appropriately named OPTIMIST INK from St. Louis Art Supply, and copic acrea paint markers Jack got me for Mother’s Day, which ROCK.

• Legal pad usage inspired by Lynda Barry, my creative north star.

• Here is the sign, painted by LA-based sign painter James Manning, who you should hire!

  

• If you’re in Cincinnati, join me for an in-person journal comics workshop this weekend! May 23, 2 hours, $65.

• Shop my books.

• Shop my prints, etc.

• A nice thing to do: buy a tee shirt, all proceeds go to important causes.

The best drawing I’ve ever made?

My dear pal (Max and Nora’s godmother!!!) came to visit recently and we paid a visit to my friend ’s studio for a little art hang. It was so lovely for me to witness the two of them to meet. It felt like my life before Cincinnati and my life in Cincinnati merged a bit by the magic of an old friend meeting a new one. Healing!!

We went on a lovely jaunt through Julia’s neighborhood and saw the most incredible thing just minutes into our stroll – an auto mechanic leaning deep into the hood of his car, his ass almost fully out of his pants. We passed in stunned silence and then gushed about it afterwards. Was it not a remarkably smooth ass?? One might even say supple!!!!

After our stroll, we returned to the studio to draw. I picked up some homemade vine charcoal (!!) Julia made and sketched the full moon moment. We all appraised the drawing when it was finished and agreed it was possibly the best thing I’d ever drawn.

New comic in Cup Of Jo

I still can’t believe this moment happened! I asked the kids about it the next day and they gaslit me, but I know what I heard.

Read the comic!

Rejected New Yorker Cover

I decided to share this rejected New Yorker cover sketch over the weekend, since it was Mother’s Day.

For those curious, why yes, the New Yorker cover submission process is incredibly opaque and a bit frustrating! I dream of having an actual cover one day. I know my work is good enough – but I don’t know if I can handle going through the process, dealing with the silence on the other end, the waiting. It feels a bit severe and joyless to me! But maybe it’ll get easier the more I do it and become numb to the rejection. Anyway, it felt good to slap the New Yorker logo on my art.

➡️ A bunch of folks asked for prints, which are here!

Mother In Repose print

Thanks for being here!

❤️ Hal

Notes:

• Full moon drawing done with homemade vine charcoal on vintage construction paper.

• Julia Lipovsky on Instagram - her work is incredible! She does an online course called Passages – “mapping life’s movement through art and writing” – that has rave reviews and is by all accounts transcendent. Next one starts June 29th. Maybe we should all take it together??

• Jacqueline Suskin’s Substack and her website where you can find her many incredible books. I love A Year In Practice! That book taught me so much and I still return to it each time the seasons change.

• My new Cup of Jo comic

• The book I’m reading to my kids in the Cup of Jo comic is A Little Island by Margaret Wise Brown. It’s so beautiful and sweet!

• Mother in repose print

• New Yorker sketch was done in pencil in my sketchbook and colored on my iPad

• I think it should be someone’s job to go through all the rejected New Yorker art submissions and respond to the artist and say some nice encouraging things like, this is cool! good job! gorgeous colors! keep going! send us more when you’ve got em! I would do that job!

• My bandana in the above photo – you can’t really see it but it’s the Frog Bandana by Anne Bishop and it’s so cute and I love it.

• If you’re in Cincinnati, join me for an in-person journal comics workshop! May 23, 2 hours, $65.

• Spain retreat still has spots open!

• Shop my prints, etc.

• Shop my books.

Back in 2014, I mostly reviewed actual pens, some of which are now discontinued, but this was the first time I reviewed a root vegetable. Enjoy!

❤️ HB

Notes:

• To try at home: Grab some carrots and India ink and go to town on some printer paper.

• Pen Parade was transcendent! I’m proud of it still. It got a sort of cult following, and I know people were sad that I stopped. I didn’t officially end it, I just stopped doing it. (I do this a lot, I think I get bored easily. Remember when I was illustrating the dictionary?) Anyway, HALMAIL feels more sustainable. I haven’t boxed myself in, at all. Any format is allowed, any idea I have fits. I still geek out about art supplies all the time, but it’s just me being me. Here’s a few Pen-Parade-esque HALMAIL dispatches:

  • I bought some rubber stamps

  • The pen that started it all

  • Doing bad, drawing anyway

  • When your favorite pen is discontinued

• Currently reading Mason Currey’s new book Making Art and Making a Living and I’m loving it. I also just re-read Women At Work, which I want to write more about soon, but holy shit, it’s so great. As is Daily Rituals! All required reading for creatives.

• Shop my prints and cards.

• Shop my books. Mother’s Day is coming up and if you’re looking for a great gift, look no further than What To Do When I’m Gone. I posted a bit about the book’s origins here.

• I’m leading a journal comics workshop in Cincinnati later this month. Two hours! $65! A creative practice that’ll change your life! Join us.

• Write and make journal comics with me in Spain this fall!

• A nice thing to do: buy a great tee shirt, support important causes.

Notes:

• Written with a black Akashiya Sai Watercolor Brush Pen

• Painted with MÅLA paints from the IKEA kids section

• On yellow legal pads

• I always wondered how my beloved Lynda Barry made such maximalist paintings and collages on notebook paper. Turns out it can hold paint pretty dang well! I’m excited to keep working with it.

• Omg I found the same jacket on Etsy if you want to match me. This one’s a medium, mine’s an XL.

• The True Cost is a great doc on fast fashion’s impact on the environment and is free to watch on Youtube.

• I have begun to pay to recycle textiles that are torn and stained irretrievably with pre-postmarked bags from Retold. Fill them over time and ship them off when they’re full, tell yourself it balances out the styrofoam you threw away the other day.

• The muffins I’m making are from The Passionate Vegetarian. Here’s a similar-ish one. I also made these chickpea muffins which are great.

• Jack, who I quote above, is my lovely husband.

• If you’re in Cincinnati, join me for an in-person journal comics workshop! May 23, 2 hours, $65.

• Spain retreat still has spots open!

• Shop my prints, etc.

• Shop my books.

Notes:

• I learned about Human Design on this podcast, got my free chart here, and it’s been verrrrry interesting to learn about. I usually kinda roll my eyes at personality test type things but Human Design has resonated with me deeply. I’m a projector!

• This newsletter was drawn with a Crayola Take Note! Marker and a handful of colored pencils a pink notepad.

• The statues in my drawing look like Oscar statues but they were some sort of realtor award that looked a lot like an Oscar.

• Shop my prints & greeting cards on Buy Olympia.

• Shop my books

• 🚨 A good thing to do: contact you representatives and demand the release of the children being detained by ICE. You can call via 5calls, or text congress via resist bot texting “resist” to 50409.

Our love story began when we followed each other on twitter around 2014, when I’d just moved to Brooklyn. I DM’d Hallie and was like, wait, another funny Hallie?!? Should we hang out?! We got coffee, and the hang stretched into an epic long very fun New York day that ended on a rooftop, which stretched into being friends ever since.

It was surreal meeting another Hallie. Of course, we bonded about how we’d both been called Haley and Holly our whole life.1 But beyond our names (or could it be because of them?) we just felt like kindred spirits. We both had brown hair and glasses. We both loved to giggle, goof around and make things. We both were anxious and coped by making jokes. And we both had a hard time in middle school! (I don’t know why that is so important, but it is. I want an I HAD A HARD TIME IN MIDDLE SCHOOL bumper sticker.)

Anyway, I felt, and still feel, a huge sense of relief and comfort knowing that there’s another Hallie out there, and I was so excited to gab with her about her debut novel, Like This, But Funnier, which came out last week. It’s about Caroline, a TV writer in LA who’s married to a therapist and is struggling to get any TV pitches off the ground. When she starts to borrow details from her husband’s client notes, things finally start to take off – and then spin out of control. It’s a hilarious wild ride and you can get your copy here!

Like This, But Funnier

Hallie Bateman: In those blissful years when we lived mere minutes from each other in LA, I remember going for a walk with you in Mount Washington – you know that hillside that’s probably full of ticks?

Hallie Cantor: Yes! Where there was that cool swing.

HB: That was the first time where I heard you say, “Yeah, I think I want to write books. I don’t know how I would go about it, but I want to do it.” And now you’ve done it! It’s been so cool to witness you make the transition from being a TV writer to becoming a full-blown novelist.

HC: I don’t remember that walk, but I do remember a different walk. You, me and Ariana2 were on a hike. We were setting intentions for each other, talking about what we wished for each other. And you guys were both like, “We think you need to make something that’s just yours from top to bottom.”

You’d both seen me trying to get a TV writing job, waiting for someone to give me an opportunity, trying to develop a show and waiting for someone to approve it. I was so frustrated. And you guys were both like, “You need to make something that’s just for you.” And that was a huge encouragement and that’s what I was trying to do with the book. I owe a lot of it to you guys.

HB: I remember at some point years into our friendship, asking you if I could read your scripts. I’d seen the shows you’d written on, Arrested Development, Inside Amy Schumer, Lady Dynamite. I knew you were credited on certain episodes. But I’d never actually read the scripts you’d written fully yourself, the scripts that caused people to give you those big TV writing jobs.

When I read them, I was so blown away. They were so funny and beautiful and so Hallie Cantor. I remember feeling a bit enraged and incredulous that, due to the way that Hollywood works, these scripts got you a job, then just sat in a cabinet somewhere. Executives read them, head writers read them, but nobody else got to read them.

HC: That’s the really hard part about development and being a TV writer. So much of the art you’re making just exists to get you in a certain room. Maybe get you paid to develop it, but the odds are slim that it’s ever going to reach an audience. For me, it started to weigh on me and make me feel like, am I even creating anything? Because this is just going to sit on an executive’s desk somewhere.

I wanted to try to write a novel because it’s not beholden to the same process as TV. I thought, if I write a novel, even if it’s a bad novel, I can just put it on the internet or self-publish it and I’ll feel like I’ve made something.

HB: How did you begin?

HC: At first, I had this idea that with a novel, you need to just sit down and let the muse flow through your fingertips and let the characters tell you what they want, blah, blah, blah. You can’t outline, you have to just tap in. But it never worked for me. I got so paralyzed and frozen up.

So I decided to try writing it more like a script, where I have a concept and a hook. I outline it, and then I just write each scene. Act one, act two, act three.

As for the concept, I was thinking about how a lot of people in my life didn’t seem to really understand what the TV development process entailed. They’d be like, oh, okay, so you sold a show, when’s it going to be on TV? Where’s what channel? And I was like, no, no, no, there’s so many weird hoops to jump through, this can take years and I might not get paid.

I wanted to share that with people. And I also wanted to get the frustration off my chest about how difficult it is to balance wanting to create art, wanting to make money, and wanting to get the validation of people seeing it. All of those frustrations were sort of swirling in my mind.

So I thought, what if I wrote about a TV writer? And then I thought, what if I wrote it about a TV writer who’s married to a therapist? Because as you know, I am married to a therapist. And part of my professional unhappiness at the time was that Dan, my husband, had changed careers and begun his training to be a clinical psychologist. And he was so happy doing it. And it’s not that his happiness made me unhappy, but it was hard to see somebody feel so fulfilled.

He was the expert in what he was doing. And I felt so powerless in the Hollywood system, begging executives to take me seriously and to listen to my stories and think they were good enough. Meanwhile, he was getting to hear all of these stories from his patients and they really valued his opinion and trusted him and he was getting to help them redefine their stories and –

HB: They’re having an actual connection. And as your book depicts, Hollywood comes with so much bullshit.

HC: Yeah. We were both having these Zoom meetings, and I saw all these parallels between our careers. We both were trading on our personalities in a way. I was having to be really charming to these executives. He was being warm and nurturing or whatever you want your therapist to be. It was about the personal connection in both cases, but they felt so different.

I had some envy, then I had the idea. Sometimes my husband will drop a random little tidbit about a patient. Not identifying them, just repeating a funny story or something. So I thought, what if this TV writer accidentally uses something her therapist husband told her about a patient, and then the pitch actually goes, so she’s in a position of trying to stop her pitch from getting made. Which felt really funny to me, because I was trying so hard to get my pitches made. What if it finally happened, but with an idea that I really didn’t want it to happen with?

HB: I remember you telling me at one point that you’ve always loved books about therapists and therapy, even before Dan became a therapist.

HC: Yes! And I love shows about therapy. The show In Treatment is amazing. It’s fictional, but it just depicts people’s couples therapy sessions. I can’t get enough of it. I just think therapy is so cool and interesting and a way into people’s secret lives and how they are with themselves, which we never get to see.

At one point in writing this book, there’s a scene where the main character is in her own therapy session. My editor was like, oh, do we need this? I don’t know. I kind of feel sometimes therapy scenes are a cheat to tell you what the character’s feeling. And I was like, yeah, but who cares? I want a book that’s all therapy sessions!

HB: Ha! Totally. Was it cathartic to write all the Hollywood stuff? When I read it, I felt like, oh, fuck, she’s been thinking about this for a long time.

HC: Big time. It felt really fun to write. And kind of satirized, but kind of not even satirized? A lot of the time I just word for word wrote a note that I got one time on a script that still bothers me. And those were often the sections where people were like, “This is too wild. This would never happen.” And I was like, “Nope, it happened.”

HB: Around the time you were wanting to get into books, I was thinking I should get into writing for TV. I am so glad I didn’t! Your book is such a cautionary tale.

HC: There’s lots of wonderful people in Hollywood, and it can be so much fun if you are getting to work with nice and smart people in a writer’s room or something – that’s so much fun and doesn’t even feel like work.

HB: I get it. You have to cover your ass because you still want jobs. You’re like, “I happen to love Fox and Universal.”

HC: I do. And Paramount and Disney. I love them all.

HB: You used your experience in Hollywood to build yourself a bridge out of it. Not that you’re totally out of it, I know that TV writing is still part of your life, but now there’s a book on shelves with your name on it. You are a novelist! I’m sure that’s empowering.

HC: So much of the development process is just fielding notes from many, many, many different parties who are not always concerned with how to tell the best story. They’re concerned with fulfilling their corporate mandate, servicing their star actor, or whatever.

Getting to just be totally in charge of the world of my book and what happened in it was so freeing. It helped me trust myself and my voice more. I decided, if something makes me laugh, it’s going in the book, and I don’t need to justify that to anyone, at least until I started to think about selling it and working with an editor.

HB: One thing I wanted to talk to you about is how Funnier has some of the best depictions of a supremely anxious person’s inner monologue that I’ve ever read.

HC: Hahaha. Thank you. Yeah, I just imagine what it might be like to be that kind of person.

HB: Do you feel like you had to exaggerate that at all or did you feel like you just captured what it’s like inside your head?

HC: I was exaggerating it for comedic effect, and the actions Caroline would take aren’t things I’d ever do. But in terms of her internal monologue... I don’t think it’s true to me now, or even me when I was writing it, but it certainly was true of me maybe a couple years earlier. And it was scarily easy to dial right back in.

HB: There’s this great disparity in the book between how she sees herself and the world that she’s operating in. She’s so arrested by her self-loathing. She’s in writer’s rooms, pitching big studios, walking through the life of someone successful. But she can’t see it. It’s very relatable.

HC: In Hollywood – and probably many different industries – you’re trained to think of yourself as replaceable. Don’t get a big head, you should be happy to be here, a lot of people can do this job, you’re lucky to be paid so well. There’s this mindset of not having a lot of self-compassion and being hard on yourself. It’s something I’ve had to work very hard to try to train myself out of. To try to be like, how could I have a more charitable look at myself?

In the book, Caroline, the protagonist, is the one causing all her own problems. If she could just be grateful and appreciate herself and be happy, she’d be okay. But the central tension in the book is her relationship with herself and how she’s just finding it really hard to let herself be human.

HB: Did writing this book change you as a person?

HC: The biggest change is that it gave me confidence to set a goal and achieve it. I had wanted to write a novel for a very long time. And whenever I met anyone who had written a novel, I was like, “How did you do it? It’s magic. What are your secrets?” And they’d always be like, “Oh, you just do it.” So now I get to be on the other side and be like, “You just do it. “

HB: And now I’m calling you and being like, how did you do it?!

HC: But you’re going to just do it! But yeah, it felt really good to take my fate back into my own hands. And writing this anxious character who can’t find compassion for herself certainly demonstrated to me how silly it is, how much of a waste of time and energy it is to be beating yourself up like that. It inspired me to take my own lessons and be nicer to myself.

HB: Speaking of me calling you begging for your advice. I called you yesterday and told you how there was a piece of personal history that I felt really uncomfortable folding into my novel-in-progress. And you said that discomfort might be a signal that there’s something there worth exploring. I thought that was really interesting.

HC: I think a lot of the time, especially if you’re writing about a character who doesn’t know how she’s feeling or has some shame or anxiety or something about what’s going on. If you’re feeling that way, that means there’s juice there. My favorite writing teacher in college used to say, “You know more than you think you know. “

HB: Wait, can you explain?

HC: You know more than you think you know. So you might not know where that experience is going to fit into your character’s life, but you might know the experience belongs there. You have this instinct, I don’t know if it’s your unconscious or the book speaking through you or what, but it happens so much when you’re writing something really long, like a novel. Things will just sort of click into place and you’re like, oh my god, I didn’t even try to do that.

But you have to get into this state where you just are trusting that the work will lead you in the right direction and be okay with veering off and trying something that might not end up being something usable, because it leads you to somewhere that is. And there’s just this weird process by which some part of you knows things before you can articulate them to yourself.

HB: I love that! She sounds like a great teacher. Also, I think you would be a great teacher… Do you have any tricks that help you untangle something when you feel stuck?

HC: There’s a trick that I like to use if I’m trying to think of a funny name for a restaurant or answer a plot question, I try to write as many bad ideas for it as I can. I’ll be like, “You got to come up with 10 of them.” And even if they’re really stupid – really, really stupid. Like, she shits her pants and then she has to leave the meeting.

HB: You love to write about shitting!

HC: I know. That one is basically in my book. But the trick is something that I learned from a friend in college who was in an improv group. They played this warmup game where you get a category you have to keep thinking of specifics ideas for it. You get past all the obvious things and then your brain is forced to make weird connections. Often you’ll say four bad things and then one will pop up that you’re like, “Oh, maybe that is something!”

HB: My final question: What tools and supplies do you like to use?

HC: I mostly use my computer for drafting and editing and stuff. But when I am away from my computer, or if I’m doing morning pages or whatever, I like to use a long yellow legal pad – they make an extra long kind! And I’m very specific. I like a narrower line because then it just feels like I have endless lines to work on. I also love to flip her sideways and then you can do a nice timeline. I like to use that a lot for plotting.

HB: My legal pad is so short, I’m so jealous!

HC: Having the extra inch or whatever feels very luxurious to me. And I don’t have to get stressed out thinking that I might have to turn the page. All of my writing tricks are about reducing fear.

Thanks to Hallie Cantor for chatting with me, I hope you enjoyed the peek behind the scenes of her new book and our beautiful same-name friendship. Follow Hallie. Order Like This, But Funnier. Get your own extra-long legal pads!

Thanks for being here,

❤️ Hal

Notes:

• Thank you to Ariana Lenarsky and Adrienne Rush for contributing questions for me to ask Hallie!

For the first time in years I’m doing pet portraits again! I’ve taken a long break but am excited to draw your creatures again. Bonus points if you commission me to draw an unusual pet. I’ve drawn horses, a hedgehog and an entire flock of chickens and they’ve all been a delight! But of course I’m obsessed with your cats and dogs, too.

Commission a pet portrait

A Beautiful New Mural in LA

My dear pal Sofia Lacin is an incredible public artist and runs Studio Tutto along with her longtime collaborator Hennessey Christophel. Their murals and installations are not only gorgeous but so densely thoughtful in how they communicate about the natural world. Recently they collaborated with the National Gallery to reimagine a lost mural by French impressionist Mary Cassat. I heard about it as Sofia was preparing to paint it, but wasn’t prepared for how stunningly gorgeous the finished piece is, both aesthetically and in every facet of its creation.

They partnered with middle and high school students who were displaced by the Eaton fire in LA and created a huge, stunning mural that makes a strange new campus feel more like home for the kids. The girls end up painting fire-following plants, along with themselves, in the mural. I teared up watching this 15-minute doc about it. Click if you want to watch people make art, feel hopeful about today’s young people, and learn about native plants and art history!

Watch the short doc 😭

This Is Terrible, This Is Wonderful by Rani Ban

, legend of warm-hued drawings with writing, has a new book out today! It’s called This is Terrible, This Is Wonderful. It’s made up of handwritten essays and poetic tangents with illustration mixed in, all about the wild yin-yang of being a new parent.

A lot of modern parenting memoirs, at least in my experience, tend to skew quite negative. Often, they detail weeks without showering, birth trauma, difficult postpartum experiences, and include the positive aspects of parenting only as a footnote1. By the time I was pregnant, I was terrified. I’d consumed so many dark, scary stories about how hard parenting was. And although it is hard, I’ve been relieved every step of the way that none of it is as bad as I feared.

All this to say, I often have to weigh a few factors before gifting a parenting book to a new or expectant parent. But I can confidently say you could give This Is Terrible, This Is Wonderful to any parent! Rani maintains a deep sense of perspective throughout the book. She documents the beautiful and difficult parts with curiosity and love, always in relation to each other, always assuring the reader that they don’t cancel each other out.

Personal, universal, funny, beautiful! Five stars from ‘ole Hal.2

This is Terrible, This is Wonderful

I started caring for my paint brushes

I decided, more than a decade into my illustration career, to finally begin properly caring for my paint brushes. This decision comes as I gear up to paint my next kids book and am experimenting a lot with watercolor. Here’s what I did:

1. Overhauled my paint brushes. I found all the old nasty beat-up brushes that are suitable now only for children or use with glue and I quarantined them in a separate area. I’ll use them for craft projects, collage, etc.

2. Filled out my collection. I went to my local art store and bought an assortment of new brushes. I really like the Princeton Neptune brushes and got them in a variety of sizes. I also purchased my very first Kolinsky Sable Brush after the salesperson told me her teacher had the same one she’d used in art school. They’re expensive as hell but apparently if you care for them, they last forever.

3. Wash after every use with brush cleaner.

4. Shape and dry upside down in a paint puck rinse cup.

It’s only been a few weeks but it’s going well! The sable brush is amazing, and I also got a synthetic sable one and it’s great, too.

Scenes from Cincinnati’s No Kings March

This was my first time attending a march in Cincinnati – my mama took the babies for the day so we could go. There were so many people there and marching and screaming together felt deeply cathartic. There were so, so many boomers! Like, way more old people than young people? Which made me feel, A. happy, grateful and impressed, and B. slightly worried about the young people. We theorized that maybe they’re all home watching youtube? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

PS: Another general strike is planned for May 1. Mark your calendars.

Spain retreat is still enrolling!

This coming October 26 - November 2 I’m teaching a micro-memoir retreat! I teamed up with writers and to conceive of a retreat focused on writing and drawing in small formats – after all, anything big has to start small!

Come to Spain with me!

Thanks for being here,

❤️ Hal

• Shop my prints, stationary, etc.

• Shop my books

• Commission a pet portrait

• This is Terrible, This is Wonderful

• “Their School Burned Down. Mary Cassatt Gave Them Hope.”

• More deets about the retreat in Spain

• 🚨 A good thing to do: contact you representatives and demand the release of the children being detained by ICE. I had no energy to make a call yesterday but was able to text congress via resist bot texting “resist” to 50409.

My ability to capture moments in my life like this is a skill I’ve honed from years of making daily comics (and hourly comics) for stretches of time. It’s a practice that awakens the senses and hones storytelling ability, engaging the hand and heart and mind by combining drawing and writing. Making daily comics helps me be interested in my own life, which is the first step to telling a good story – being interested in it.

If you’d like to explore how making your own journal comics might deepen your own creative practice, I want to remind you that I’m teaching at a retreat in Spain this fall, and there are still a handful of spots left!

Learn more

I conceived of this retreat with the wonderful writers and – we’re all passionate about micro-memoir. As Molly puts it, anything big has to start small, and it’s so true. Every book I’ve made has started as a single comic, a loose sketch, a small idea, and grown from there. We are so excited to have dedicated time at a gorgeous villa in Southern Spain to explore micro-memoir in written and sketched forms.

Please know, the retreat is open to all skill levels, whether you write or draw, or are just curious about folding more art into your life. Whether you’re a professional or just want to bond with a loved one on an unforgettable creative vacation (sign up together!), I promise you will come out of it with loads of inspiration –plus a portfolio of stories and an illustrated travelogue of your own.

Join us in Spain!

Okay, that’s all! Here’s today’s comic!

Notes:

• Shop my prints, stationary, etc.

• Shop my books

• The above comic was drawn with the Mangaka Flexible Pen (Medium) - the Medium is actually out of stock but try the Fine one! It’s such a great pen, and waterproof. I’ve gifted it to a few people and they unilaterally love it.

• More deets about the retreat in Spain

• A nice thing to do: Adopt an NPR station (I adopted one in Alaska!)

Growing up, my parents would take us to Mountain Bookshop in Sonora, California, and I would beeline to the back left corner of the store, where the comic books lived. My brothers and I accrued a vast collection, the core of which was Foxtrot, Garfield, The Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes. I loved getting lost in the Fox family’s long, lazy summers and Calvin’s imagined battles with alien creatures. I loved the dark, absurd jokes in The Far Side and Garfield’s adorable drollness.

At school, my teacher would send me home at the end of each week with a grocery bag full of drawings I’d made during class. I filled notebooks with my own comics and made dark, absurd Pokémon comic strips with my brother Nick. I took photographs of our menagerie of animals, made movies, wrote screenplays and published parody newspapers. I made art constantly, but it never, ever occurred to me that I might be an artist. It wasn’t even within the realm of possibility.

As I got into high school, I focused most of my energy on hating myself and art fell to the wayside.

In college, I bounced around and ended up an English major. Raised by two journalists, writing came naturally to me, although I didn’t know what I’d do with it. In my junior year, I took my first-ever art class just to fulfill a requirement. While being introduced to certain art supplies changed my life, I didn’t like anything I made for the class and got a B. Making art for an assignment felt arbitrary, and seeing everyone’s near-identical looking work felt deeply uninspiring.

But my creative practice took on a life of its own outside of class. I realized there were human artists behind all the books I loved growing up. I discovered graphic novels and learned that comics were an art form that went far beyond Garfield. I set out to become fluent in a new language, one that combined words and images.

Now, after more than decade of making art professionally and becoming an author myself, my foray into teaching has me reflecting on the books that have shaped my creative life. I want to write about them here, to express my love and appreciation for them, and to highlight the ways they’ve shaped my life and work.

Today I’ll start with the big kahuna.

What It Is by Lynda Barry

I was 19 or 20, sitting in the café at Powell’s in Portland, Oregon. I’d grabbed What It Is randomly, intrigued by the cover. What was inside astonished me and I read the book in one sitting.

What It Is was unlike anything I’d read before. Part memoir, part existential meditation on creativity, part pep-talk, the entire thing was written, painted, collaged, handwritten, typed, taped, and glued on yellow legal paper. There aren’t panels, formal paragraphs or cleanly delineated sections. The words are often sideways or upside down, so you must occasionally rotate the book to read it.

Time slows as your eyes wander across the rich, intricate pages, weighing words and images, synthesizing meaning with feeling. Her art was powerful beyond what I’d known was possible. In What It Is, Lynda Barry essentially argues, with lavishly illustrated poetry, that you should consider making lavishly illustrated poetry.

I was a creative writing major at the time, but I didn’t feel creative. I felt ambivalent about everything I wrote. I could never tell if my stories were any good, never felt like I knew why I was writing them to begin with. My writing felt like it could exist or not, and either way it wouldn’t matter to anyone, possibly even me.

Something shifted after I read that book. I began to acknowledge my own creativity as valid and worthy of expression.

At school, I started to submit illustrations with my fiction and poetry assignments. When I drew, I let go of logic long enough to allow other, more mysterious instincts to dictate the pen’s movement across the page. I gravitated towards certain colors, certain shapes, and the preference was often so strong I couldn’t question its validity. It was such a relief after years of doubt-plagued writing.

Through the rest of college, I drew constantly. I’d spread art supplies out on my bedroom floor, turn down the lights, put music on and disappear to a realm of intense focus and play. Then I’d come back to earth to check out what had shown up on the page. Lynda Barry helped me understand that perfection wasn’t the goal, and that thinking about art as “good” and “bad” was entirely missing the point.

Art showed me a pathway to my inner self, one I had frequented in childhood but abandoned in my transition to adulthood. Art was something to do with my hands. Art was a powerful communication tool. Art was a fun activity. Art made me feel alive. Art gave me a purpose, an identity, and a lens through which to view the world.

Some people thought my art was good. Some people definitely thought my art was bad, or at least weird. I’d get the occasional raised eyebrow, puzzled look, or backwards compliment. I still remember how scared most people looked when they’d ask me what my plans were after graduation and I said I wanted to make art.

I get it. I was terrified, too. I had no formal art education, and I’d only been pursuing art for a couple years. Yet I was telling people, with a straight face, that I wanted to pursue art after graduation.

Looking back now, I’m amazed. How was I able to muster such conviction?

Well, for one thing, I read What It Is.

Thanks for being here,

❤️ Hal

PS: Want to learn from an artist with no formal art education? There are still spots available in the micro-memoir I’m teaching with and this fall!

Come write and draw with us!

Notes:

• What It Is (get two copies, you’ll want to give it to everyone you know.)

• Follow Lynda Barry on Instagram

• Shop Lynda Barry’s other books

• Shop my books

• Shop my prints, gifts etc on Buy Olympia.

• A nice thing to do: adopt an NPR station.

Thanks for being here,

❤️ Hal

Notes:

• Want to learn more about the art of journal comics? I’m teaching a micro-memoir retreat in Spain this fall, along with award-winning writers and . There are still some spots left! Get all the deets here!

• This was drawn a month or two ago, and Nora has successfully weaned from her binoculars! We took the final step when they slept over at my mom’s house and she simply didn’t have any binkies. She cried for like 10 minutes, then went to sleep, and has been happily weaned ever since. I’m so proud of her!

• Max still asks for ‘hep’ a lot and Nora does it now, too.

• Shop my prints, cards, etc. at Buy Olympia.

• A nice thing to do: Buy a tee shirt, support Gaza aid and other important causes. Jack has this beautiful free palestine shirt.

Greetings from the longest February! The other day I spied these little daffodils reaching up through the icy ground and it’s helping me cling to hope that March is indeed coming. We’ve been sick – so so sick! – so this newsletter will just be a bit of a mish-mash of what I’ve been up to and into lately.

New Comic for Cup of Jo

Adult Diapers, a Love Story

I made a comic about some recent health drama for Cup of Jo. I drew this just two days after it happened, and published it right after I sent it to her, leaving zero time for me to accrue any shame about the situation, which was amazing. I’m pleased to announce that I’m no longer in diapers, but I still have them just in case.

In my sketchbook

For Christmas we got Max and Nora little shopping carts. Maxy has been home sick from school so I sketched him while he played with his shopping cart in the back yard the other day. While I drew, he plopped himself in my lap, watched me for a moment, then grabbed the pencil himself. I turned the page and we made a drawing together.

Micro-Memoir Retreat in Spain!

Learn More!

As I shared the other week, I’m hosting a micro-memoir retreat in Spain with the wonderful writers and . I’m so, so excited for this. If you’re curious to learn more, visit the UpTrek page for pricing, details and photos of the gorgeous villa you’d be staying in, and listen to our podcast where we chat about our plans for the retreat. We go deep on our love of micro-memoir forms, talk about how to fall back in love with your work after a season of doubt, and why going on creative retreats is a worthy and important ingredient each of our creative practice.

Discovering Helen Oxenbury

The rabbit hole started like this: For several years I was trying to remember the name of this picture book I loved as a kid. All I knew was it featured a scruffy old grey dog.

Finally I stumbled across it online! Courtney by John Burningham.

It’s funny to revisit books I loved as a kid. Back then, I wasn’t a professional illustrator and didn’t know or care who made the book. But now, age 36, I am thrilled to learn the name John Burningham and want learn more about who this wonderful scruffy-dog-drawing man is. Or was. Turns out he was a beloved award-winning British picture book author who passed away at age 82 in 2019.

I learned he is survived by his wife, who is an illustrator, too. Also beloved, also award-winning. Her name is Helen Oxenbury and she’s now 87 years old with a storied career as a picture book illustrator and, oh my gosh, her work just blew me away. I was completely smitten. I read this lovely interview with her and ordered this wonderful book.

Perhaps her most well-known book is called We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. It’s based on a traditional campfire folk song/chant. The author, Michael Rosen, said he pictured something completely different – a king and his men hunting in the woods. When he saw Helen’s illustrations of a family plunging through fields and forests looking for a bear, he was puzzled at first. But everyone at the publisher knew they were incredible. And of course, eventually he got on board.

She made the story into something completely new, and it’s a breathtakingly beautiful book. Below are images from that and a couple of her other books, with links in case you want to get a copy for yourself and join me in adoring her work.

We're Going on a Bear Hunt

Say Goodnight

So Much!

For years I’ve been using watered-down gouache as watercolor. After discovering Helen’s work and her incredible use of watercolor, I went ahead and bought some actual watercolor and am loving playing with it. (The sketchbook page above, of Max and his shopping cart, is painted with watercolor.)

That’s all! Thanks for being here!

❤️ Hallie

• Sign up to make comics and write with me in Spain this fall.

• Shop my prints, gifts, etc. at Buy Olympia

• Buy tee shirts in support of Gaza aid and other important causes.

Interested in making your own journal comics? I’m teaching a micro-memoir retreat in Spain this fall, along with award-winning authors and ! Read all about it here and sign up here.

Tiny True Stories

Now, on to my hourlies:

Thanks for being here,

❤️ Hal

Notes:

• Tiny True Stories: A Micro Memoir Retreat and my newsletter about the retreat.

• My hourly comics were drawn with the Kuretake Bimoji Brush Pen - Fine

• Best Lowly Worm Book Ever - Max & Nora are obsessed and chant Lowleh! Lowleh! at bedtime every night.

• The Epstein Files Book Club podcast by Elise Hu and Jena Freidman. I love both these women and this pod is a good way to dip in and stay informed without being swallowed by a rabbit hole of darkness.

• A nice thing to do: Call your representatives and beg them to stop one of the many, many evil things the government is doing.

• Read hourly comics from: Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, Debi Gliori, Emily Fishman, Marnie Galloway, Claire Keane, ND Stevenson, Vera Brogsol and Lucy Knisely

It was an inspiring and magical experience and I’m so glad I did it. I very seriously entertained the idea of keeping it going for a full year. I made a pro/con list that was heavy in the pro category, but then I remembered I’m trying to finish a novel and have picture books in motion. I knew doing a year of daily comics would be a handy excuse to let those projects fall to the wayside, especially the novel, which I’m a bit paralyzed on lately. Beware the shiny new project and its immense appeal when you’re deep in the dregs of a current one!

Rather than continuing to make journal comics every day, I am carrying lessons from this 30-day project back to my other work. There are a lot of takeaways from my month, but today I’ll just share the biggest one:

Let the image be your guide.

Sometimes I’d sit down to draw with a moment in mind – something funny or notable that someone said or did. A little story my writer brain latched onto. Other times, I was just fishing around in my memory, and I suppose my illustrator brain clicked on because I’d close my eyes and look for images from the day.

It was often quiet moments that my mind’s eye had clung to. Like, I was in my mom’s hot tub in her back yard when a flock of geese flew over. I remember how seeing them filled me with awe and brought me into the present moment. Drawing it, hours later, felt pleasant and tingly – I got to remain in that moment of awe for a little longer.

Now, when I look at the drawing of the geese, I can still feel a fragment of that original awe. I allowed myself to simply honor the image’s resonance in my brain rather than continue searching for a comic ‘idea’, something with a story or a punchline.

Later, when I was working on a picture book draft, I found myself doing the same thing. Instead of asking my writer self what happens next?, I closed my eyes to see what image was in my mind’s eye. The image I saw was beautiful and surprising, if a bit nonsensical. Rather than denying the image – but that doesn’t make sense! – I trusted it. Then I wrote and re-wrote until I understood why and how the image fit into the story. Now it’s one of my favorite parts.

It feels silly to describe this as an epiphany because I know people do this! I remember reading somewhere that David Lynch would start a film with just an image, something mysterious he glimpsed in a dream, and the story would unfold from there.

Plus, I’m deep into a career where I literally write with images, but I swear I haven’t had this approach, at least not consciously! And to apply it consciously feels like a revelation. To allow myself to trust the image, to be guided by it and to write in service of it, feels like a revelation and a deepening of trust between the artist and writer sides of myself.

When I described this to Jack exuberantly – you see an image, and it leads you into a story! – he was very happy for me but was also like… so you discovered imagination?

Maybe!!!

Here are my comics from the last few days of Journuary.

Two PSAs:

1. Hourly Comics Day is February 8th! It’s an event where people around the world draw a comic panel or page for every hour they are awake. I hope, no matter your level of artistic experience, you will consider joining in this year. It’s a silly, thrilling creative exercise that gets my juices flowing in the same way Journuary did. Here are my hourly comics from last year, to give you a sense of it! Also Lucy Knisely’s are always incredible.

2. Valentine’s Day is coming up! I’ve got some cards and prints on Buy Olympia that would make wonderful gifts for someone you love! Some, like this one, are definitely for a romantic partner. But as someone who was single until the age of 27 and felt like shit every single Valentine’s Day, I ask you to consider buying a card or little gift for your platonic buds! A lot of my cards & prints would be great for that ❤️

   

shop my work

Thanks for being here,

❤️ Hal

• Journuary, week 1

• Journuary, week 2

• Journuary, week 3

• Journuary, week 4

• Re: the mention of my mom’s surgery, she’s okay! It’s something she needs to have done but isn’t an emergency or anything.

• This is a free newsletter, and I have no plans to charge although some of you have pledged recently which means a lot. The best way you can support is by commenting, like, sharing on Substack, or forwarding it in your email to someone you think would enjoy it!

• We need public media more than ever and it’s under threat. Adopt an NPR station. I adopted one in Alaska!

How are you holding up? I’ve been sick all week & heartbroken about the events taking place in Minnesota and around the country. I hope you’re calling your senators, checking on your neighbors and doing what you can to stay sane and healthy amid the day wallops of horror and tragedy. I highly recommend setting aside some dedicated time to talk / think / feel about what’s happening. It sounds scary but actually helps.

Sending love & comics.

Thanks for being here,

❤️ Hal

Notes:

• Journuary, week 1

• Journuary, week 2

• Journuary, week 3

• The essay I wrote about my eating disorder.

Thanks for being here,

❤️ Hal

Notes:

• Journuary, week 1

• Journuary, week 2

• The essay I wrote about my eating disorder.

The same night this photo was taken, I sat alone in a Manhattan Starbucks and ate six nuts. That was my dinner.

It began a year earlier when I was 25, living in Brooklyn, and hating my body with the same fiery intensity I had my whole life. I went on my first diet at age 12. In college I tried jamming my finger down my throat but couldn’t throw up, tried starving myself but couldn’t stick with it.

Nothing worked until I downloaded a calorie-counting app called MyFitnessPal. With the app’s help, I finally developed an eating disorder. (The app still exists and has over 200 million users. It should be called MyEatingDisorderPal.)

MyFitnessPal told me how many calories a day I could eat to reach my goal weight. It was something like 1,250 calories, far below the 2,000 calories that health organizations recommend for adult women.

In the app, I recorded every scrap of food I consumed and every bit of exercise I did. And as I lost weight, I became obsessed with losing more.

A calorie ticker tape ran in the back of my mind constantly. I weighed myself every morning, naked. I worked out at a gym two hours a day, every day. I skipped dinners with friends because I feared eating restaurant food would slow my weight loss.

I began to binge-eat, which happens when you starve yourself. Deep shame and more intense restriction quickly followed. I went vegan. I felt my bones press into my bed at night. I was in a new relationship and thought he must like me because I was thin.

The more extreme, compulsive and ritualistic I became about food and exercise, the more weight I lost. I was swiftly rewarded with the approval I’d craved my whole life, and it felt like a drug. I was hit on, looked at, praised for my body. When people asked what I was doing, I’d just shrug: “Got a gym membership.”

“Are you a model?”

I was in Manhattan when a woman stopped me on the street. She was painfully thin, with dark circles under her eyes and dyed jet-black hair tied in a ponytail. She looked like a well-dressed heroin addict.

“No,” I said, “I’m a cartoonist.”

“I’m a model,” she said. “And I can tell you could be a model.” She gave me her agent’s card and told me to email him. I wrote to him the moment I got home.

If approval was a drug, this was the motherlode, and I was clamoring for it. My whole life I had been at war with my body. When I was a young child, far too young, I’d blow out birthday candles wishing only to be thin. And now I was thin. And I was going to be a model.

The agent asked for my measurements and photos. I sent them immediately.

I got coffee with the model, who was maybe 22. She showed me photos of her 14-year-old self in Vogue and other big fashion magazines. She was stunning, a work of art.

I couldn’t believe it was the same person I was sitting next to now, childlike and frightfully frail, pecking at an enormous cookie. As people walked into the cafe, she’d say whether or not they could be a model. He could be a model… she couldn’t…

She told me about her difficult male-model boyfriend. She taught me how to catwalk in a Pret A Manger. She told me that at 26 I was old but could just lie about my age.

The modeling agent wrote back. He told me I needed to lose two to three inches off my waist.

I responded as if we were talking about a business deal and not my flesh: “That won’t be a problem.”

I immediately set a new goal on my app, to reach a weight I hadn’t seen since 6th grade. I ate hardly anything and exercised fanatically for weeks, until the day I did hot yoga on an empty stomach and collapsed. I was sick for a week, barely able to leave my bed.

Unable to shrink further, I felt like a failure. I didn’t contact the agent again.

At the same time, I was falling in love with my now-husband Jack, and despite my secret eating disorder, our relationship had legs. I decided to move across the country, from New York to L.A., to date him and live with my best friend.

In Brooklyn I’d fostered my obsessive tendencies in private. I’d had friends but no romantic relationships, nobody close enough to interfere. I kept my life rigid and ritualized, as any break from routine would slow progress toward my goal: getting thinner, no matter how thin I already was, no matter how sick it was making me.

I couldn’t maintain my intense workouts and eating habits in L.A., where I was around loved ones all the time. It was a wonderful, lucky time in my life. I was so happy, but I was still sick, and struggling to remain as thin as I’d been in New York. I started to gain weight, and with it came debilitating shame, self-hatred, and chronic stomach pain.

Finally, when I was devastated that I couldn’t fit into some very tiny pants, I shared a bit about my body issues with Jack. He was so loving, kind and understanding. I started to consider maybe, possibly, getting better.

One night I was at a dinner party thrown by a friend’s parents. A woman at the table kept making comments about food, weight and people’s eating habits. I could tell that, like me, she hated her body and thought about food constantly. She was in her mid-60s.

I realized that if I didn’t get better from this illness, there would be no end. I could go through my whole entire life with zero reprieve from this hell, zero light at the end of the tunnel.

In the depths of my sickness, I followed a legion of fitness influencers and envied their tiny waists and six packs. In 2017, I began seeking out body positivity influencers of all sizes, envying their freedom, honesty and radical self-acceptance.

But the real turning point came when I read Megan Jayne Crabbe’s book, Body Positive Power, a memoir about the author’s eating disorder and recovery. It’s full of research explaining why dieting doesn’t work long-term and how eating disorders develop.

She cited the 1944 Minnesota Starvation Experiment, in which a group of men were deprived of calories over a period of months. Soon all they thought about was food, and as their lives began to revolve entirely around mealtimes, their mental and physical health collapsed.

I realized that’s what had happened to me.

Body Positive Power features a practical, step-by-step guide to recovery that I followed. I purged my social media feeds of any triggering accounts. I deleted MyFitnessPal, threw away my scales, stopped exercising and ate whatever I wanted. It was terrifying to release control, but the book helped me understand I’d had an eating disorder, and I was ready for recovery.

While I found therapy and support from loved ones helpful, this book was the single biggest turning point for me, and I’m so grateful to have found it.

My body returned to its set-point, the size I’ve always been when I’m healthy. I got bigger clothes. My chronic stomach pain went away. A vast ocean of space opened up in my brain where the self-hatred and food thoughts had once lived. I found a body-neutral Pilates instructor and learned to move my body without any intention to shrink it.

I told some of my story to loved ones, and alluded to it online. When weight came up in conversation, I learned to say, Please don’t comment about my body, and I’d prefer not to discuss weight loss. Anytime I felt embarrassed about setting boundaries, I remembered it’s a matter of life and death.

From The National Eating Disorders Association:

• Eating disorders have the second highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness behind opiate addiction.

• Every 52 minutes 1 person dies as a direct consequence of an eating disorder.

• 9% of the US population, or 30 million Americans, will have an eating disorder in their lifetime

  ---

Two years ago, I gave birth to twins and faced an intense health crisis immediately afterward. My body deserved only awe and care, but as time passed and my body remained bigger, negative thoughts returned along with that same despair over tiny pants.

My recovery had been stable when my body was stable, and when my body changed, my recovery faltered. I didn’t fully slip back into old behaviors, but my brain slipped back into some of that tortured thinking.

The past decade has seen a frightening pendulum swing. In 2017, I felt buoyed in my recovery by a culture that began to embrace body acceptance and seriously reckon with its history of fatphobia.

Today the pendulum has swung back. Thinness is something anyone, even those with no health-related reason for doing so, can inject in the form of GLP-1s. In podcast ads, in conversation, on billboards, on every screen, thinness is being sold, displayed, worshipped. Many of the influencers who led the body positivity movement have lost weight using GLP-1s. The weight loss industry, worth an estimated $66 billion in 2017, is now valued at $160 billion.

In the two years since I gave birth, my recovery has largely stabilized. I remind myself my body will continue to change my whole life. That’s what bodies do. And while old negative thoughts rise up from time to time, I refuse to let them draw me back into an eating disorder.

That said, I’m triggered as fuck. It’s rare that I go through a single day without hearing weight loss mentioned in every forum imaginable.

My heart goes out to anyone also trying to maintain their recovery right now. My heart breaks for those who are currently suffering under an eating disorder, or teetering on the brink of one.

Body positivity was an escape rope, one that delivered me safely to the other side of an awful eating disorder. Now I worry that rope has been pulled up, and my kids will grow up in a world as thin-obsessed as the one I grew up in, or worse.

It doesn’t look like the pendulum is swinging back anytime soon, so what are we waiting for? Can we give it a push? I don’t know how to do that, exactly, but I know sharing our stories is a start.

Thanks for being here, more comics coming on Tuesday.

❤️ Hal

• Please tag folks in the comments who are still doing the important work of talking about body acceptance.

• Share the names of books / newsletters/ films that have helped you in your body acceptance journey.

• I welcome you to share your story.

• If you need help, please visit www.nationaleatingdisorders.org, call 1-800-931-2237 or text NEDA to 741741.

I used a few different pens but enjoyed drawing with my nib pen the most. After linework I painted with this water-soluble graphite. It looks a lot like an ink wash but is tidier to use than ink, just add water and make it as light or dark as you please.

I got a new apron this week, replacing an old linen one I wore to shreds. (I don’t recommend linen for an art apron!) I put my apron on every time I sit down to draw or paint. It’s about protecting my clothes, but now it’s also about the ritual of it. When I don my paint-splattered apron, I am telling myself I’m fully in the art zone, and it’s time to create, make a mess, and be open.

I took a calligraphy class in college. The professor, Zaixin Hong, taught us that preparation is a vital part of the artmaking process. Don’t rush, he instructed. Set up your space with intention and care. Arrange your tools, lay out your paper, grind your ink, gather your brushes and fill your water cup. As you perform these tasks, you are leaving the chaos of the outside world behind and entering a creative mindset. When you sit and make your first brushstrokes, they are confident, bold, showing no hesitation.

I have my own special version of this process. It’s not zen.

I run. I actually run around the house, frantically washing brushes, rinsing out paint trays, desperate to begin drawing. I discover my desk is still grubby from yesterday’s art sesh, littered with ink jars and scraps of paper. I curse under my breath as I start to clear it, why didn’t I fucking clean up after myself yesterday when I finished drawing at 12:30AM??

Gradually, my manic energy fizzles down. I give myself over to the task of cleaning. I scrub my desk thoroughly with bleach and a rough sponge, toss the papers, put away the ink jars. As I perform these tasks, I’m percolating on my ideas, letting them bubble and stew, gathering the energy to make them real. It’s like I’m winding myself up, like a toy. When I finally sit down to draw, all I have to do is let go.

Here are this week’s comics:

Thanks for being here,

❤️ Hal

PS: This is a free newsletter and I currently have no plans to put it behind a paywall. You can support my work by liking, commenting and sharing it. Thank you 🥰

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Notes:

• Part 1 of Journuary

• These were drawn mostly with my nib pen. January 6 was drawn with the Kuretake ZIG pen. January 9th was drawn with my Ellington Fountain Pen.

• Have been doing these in my sketchbook but switched to bristol board for the last two. It looks so much sharper! But I also like the grainy informality of the sketchbook.

• My new apron. I really like it so far! I bought the natural color. The first things I allowed to dirty it were Max and Nora’s blueberry-stained hands.

• Buy my prints and cards, including the brand new, very specific “I’m sorry my child got you sick” card!

• A good thing to do: call your reps and ask them to stop funding ICE.

I’ve always said if I ever taught a class, it’d just be this: we’re making single panel journal comics, one per day for a month. It’s something I’ve been doing it for over a decade and it never ceases to inspire me, get me in my flow, and most importantly, switch on my antennae for story.

Once I decide on a chunk of time, I commit. Every day, no matter how tired I am, no matter how seemingly uneventful the day was, I draw a comic. Sometimes I know in the moment, this is my comic for today! Other times, I sit down at the end of the day and ask myself: What happened today that’s worth jotting down? What image from the day lingers in my consciousness? What happened that was funny, moving, or memorable? How can I portray it in a comic?

A month of journal comics. That’s how my husband and I fell in love. In 2015, we made a split zine together as friends living on opposite coasts. His day and my day, printed on opposing pages. We called it Same Day Different Shit. While promoting the first volume at a comics festival, we realized we had feelings for each other. We made four volumes total. The last one was given out as a gift at our wedding.

I can’t promise doing a month of journal comics will connect you to the love of your life, but I can promise that it will help you love your life. The memories that are preserved because I put them into a Same Day comic are vivid, even ten years later. Making art about everyday life is a gesture of love. It’s how I celebrate the miracle of my existence, of our collective existence. The ritual of recording each day elevates my experience, makes it sacred. It brings to mind this page from my book Directions:

I could talk about this forever. The point is, I’m making journal comics for all of January. I’m craving some structure and a more direct channel with my art, and this is a great way to do that. Here are my comics from the first week of January.

This was part 1. Each Tuesday for the rest of Journuary I’ll be sharing my comics from the previous week.

Thanks for being here,

❤️ Hal

Notes:

• Drawn mostly with my nib pen.

• Order my book Directions.

• I’ve been doing pilates with body-neutral instructor for 5 years! My chronic back pain went away after a couple months, and I’ve never looked back. Try a class! She offers a 10 day free trial.

• REMINDER: February 1st is hourly comics day.

• Intimidated at the prospect of making daily comics for 30 days? Just remember James Kochalka did it for 14 years, compiled in his series American Elf. I should probably do a whole round-up of great autobiographical comics artists!

• Buy my prints and cards, including the brand new, very specific “I’m sorry my child got you sick” card!

• A nice thing to do: Buy a tee shirt, support Gaza aid.