I had a SUPER BUSY end-of-year season at work, so this is up a little later that I would like, but!! here it is!! THE YEARLY HOBONICHI POST…!!!!
(note: I’m posting this in 2026, but I started writing this in late 2025 so every time I say “this year” or any variations of it, that’s 2025! okay you get it!!)
This is my fourth year in a row using the Hobonichi Weeks as my main planner, and I honestly don’t see that changing anytime soon. This year I even went a step further and got a second Weeks that I use for my job—let me tell you how that went!
This year, Hourly Comics Day got moved a week to February 8th—which happened to be the very last day of my week-long vacation. Overall it was a good day, with lots of stay-at-home adventures!
I’m really enjoying how this is turning into a series…a really slow one, where I draw an average of one comic per year, but a series nonetheless. It gives me a lot of time to let ideas simmer before I commit to them—I must have written about 10 different variations of the text on this, until I found one that clicked.
(last updated on February 6, 2026—edited the background to make it look less busy)
On July 22nd I broke my arm after falling out of a car, just as I arrived to Boulder, CO for a planetarium conference. Yikes! First time breaking a bone, first time going to the hospital in another country…
(yes, I had travel insurance. NEVER EVER EVER travel without insurance! this could have gone very badly!!)
Despite this being a serious fracture, I got pretty lucky—I didn’t need to go through surgery, andit was my non-dominant arm. Silver linings, right?
After getting back home I found myself with a lot of time and not much to do, so I naturally gravitated towards my sketchbook…it felt relatively easy to do with one hand (except for the part where I can’t use a ruler), and it just felt good to draw for fun, you know? it’s like “oh yeah, I LIKE doing this!”, who knew!!
The bones painting was done in acrylic gouache, using a 3D model of my CT scan as a reference—you can see it’s horribly broken, but all the pieces are in place! I went into this painting with absolutely no expectations, and then it turned out surprisingly good… am I a bones person now??? (probably not)
Anyway, I still have MONTHS of rest and physical therapy before I make a full recovery, but I’m making good progress! It’s all time and patience now… 😌💦
I’ve been thinking of doing some kind of yearly self-portrait for a while now, mostly inspired by illustrator Rebecca Green. I just really like the idea of having some kind of register of where you are at a certain time, both in terms of your own work and your perception of yourself.
But then I had this feeling that seems to be common among comics people: making an illustration that is not a comic is so hard! It took me a while to figure this out, even though it sounds really obvious—I’m a cartoonist! Of coursemy self-portrait has to be a comic! And so, as I turned thirty-two in October 2024, I started writing this. The layout/script didn’t really come together until January, and then… I just slowly, slowly chipped away at it until it was finished, closer to my 33rd birthday than to my previous one.
It’s funny to look at myself back in October, thinking I was going to do ✨ all of these things ✨ after the book was finished, without knowing that it would take me ten months just to finish this 4-page comic. Partly because a lot of things have happened, but also because the post-book burnout hit harder than I expected it to. But, it’s finished now! And I can feel myself slowly coming back to comics, which is a big relief.
Hopefully the next comic in this series won’t take me so long to make! We’ll see how that goes.
