On July 26, 2025, I had to evacuate a plane that caught fire just before takeoff. You might have seen it on the news back then? that one flight at the Denver airport?
I’ve had the idea for this comic pretty much since “the incident” itself, but it took me so long to get it done…I really wanted this to look right, so I reworked the layouts over and over until I managed to get something that looked like the idea I had in my head.
This is part of a series of short comics that I’m making about this whole thing, because of course that’s how a cartoonist processes things! So, look forward to that…?
(no, today is not my birthday…it’s actually in October! but these take me some time to make.)
This is the second on my “birthday comic series”—you can find the first one here. It was quite a year, but all’s well that ends well, right? right…???
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)
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.
