I Feel Great!

Okay no, definitely not. I am still recovering from going to a certain mouse-inspired theme park over the past weekend. About which, more next week. This week's newsletter is more abbreviated than usual, more focused on visuals than text (perhaps as it should always be?).

For now I offer you a new installment of Cat Person. This particular edition gave me a way to work through my feelings about making art, or maybe just being alive.

That concludes Cat Person...for now. There will be more shenanigans from this crazy crew!

Another reason I am a bit depleted this week is that I really pushed to get a few more pages done of Study Hall. I have a goal of trying to draw at least one page every weekday—and this month I've barely drawn one page a week. Below, I have the next installment, but before I get to that, here are three things that kept me going this week:

This powerful obituary for trans activist, actress, and writer Cecilia Gentili, who died on February 6th, and was honored with a spectacular funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral the day after Valentine's Day—which was beautifully captured by Ryan McGinley in the photographs accompanying the obit. Kudos to Shane O'Neill of The Washington Post who covered Gentili's passing with sensitivity and grace in his "Style Memo" newsletter.
Nicole Holofcener may not be everyone's cup of tea, but whenever she comes out with a new movie I watch it. I very much enjoyed You Hurt My Feelings, a sweet little film about being a creative person who craves validation and can never get enough positive reinforcement. That doesn't sound familiar at ALL.
I have some reservations about mentioning this but, honestly, Blue Eye Samurai is possibly the most gorgeously animated cartoon I have ever seen. If you cringe watching cartoon characters having sex or graphically eviscerating one another then this may not be the show for you (I often look away during these scenes). But the shots of medieval Japan are simply exquisite. And while the story is pure fantasy some of the visuals appear to be historically accurate, so I can pretend to watch for educational reasons.

And now, the next installment of Study Hall.

This is the third installment of "Study Hall," a longer form comic I'm posting every other week for paid subscribers. "Study Hall" is about the year I tutored at MCI-Concord, a medium-security prison just outside Boston. The main reason for the paywall is that the content may be sensitive. The first installment is free. If you're interested in seeing more, I hope you consider becoming a paid subscriber for as little as a dollar a month and help me keep making this work.