Hi,
Here are some cartoons for you lovely email readers.
And: if there are Substack newsletters you love (including your own, you dogs), can you nominate them in a comment here? I’m curating a feature called Substack Reads in a couple weeks. (Secret: I’ve actually never read a single newsletter 0-: - and maybe I never will!!!!).
Finally, for paid subscribers, some more She Devil, the serial comic I’m tentatively starting to work on and post. Since it’s always nice to feel situated, let me tell you a little more about She Devil and why I’m making it. It’s a story that’s been rolling around in my mind for the past few years. It’s told from the point of the devil—AKA, a kind of weird-looking, horned, wingless angel who fell from Heaven. She currently lives on earth and will soon meet and marry an angel she knew from home, who is on earth for reasons she doesn’t know and is afraid to ask. I’m using She Devil to work out some things I don’t have words for, and other things I do have words for but can’t write about in a more autobiographical way. Heaven = the Jewish community I grew up in. Heaven also = home in general. God = the patriarchy. (In my story, the devil also has a mother. I love my culture/religion too much to not insert female deities into it whenever I can. I’m so excited to flesh out this part of the story!). Devil = not fitting in. As I explain it, my main character isn’t necessarily a bad person, she’s just bad at being a person. I identify (gah, SOMETIMES) as a little autistic, and sometimes comfort myself by researching this in order to understand better why I can’t make eye contact, had no friends as a kid, hate having fun, etc etc, and am putting some of that research into my story, without the flattening definitions. Marriage = marriage.
Last week’s page was about a low point I had in my teens, when I started really suffering from being different, and tried so hard to be like everyone else that I lost myself. In my case, this involved giving up drawing and the other things I did weirdly intensely (loving rocks, loving animals) and, in an attempt to look the way girls were supposed to in the 90’s, throwing myself into an eating disorder. It’s interesting to revisit those times now because I’m feeling a little echo of them as I️ try to get back to the way things were - social life, career - after a pandemic, a marriage, a baby, and lots of earth hurtling through space and time faster and faster, and find myself kind of stepping off into a void. This week’s two-page installment, below, is about finding myself again in my mid-twenties by starting to draw again.
Liana
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