Developing MyTopia

My latest comic for The New York Times

MyTopia in print, photos by Tony Wolf. The glasses are a nice touch!

Presenting MyTopia – my sixth comic for The New York Times and the first in the Arts & Leisure section. Read on to learn a little bit about my creative process and how I grew this time around.

Roughs on paper

Unplug and sketch without censure.

Everything starts with messy sketches. I don’t try to make beautiful art, I simply jot notes down visually, words and pictures in tandem. My phone is in another room. Sometimes I light a candle. I often have ambient music playing. I am also playing. There are no bad ideas, only interruptive thoughts, which I make a point of shooing away if they try to start pruning the work too soon.

I had already sent an email to the commissioning art director with a couple of short written pitches. She seemed most interested in MyTopia, so my follow-up email had this open-ended but more elaborate visual pitch attached:

Thinking outside the boxy panel

As I familiarized myself with other work that had been published in this section, I came to admire the way cartoonists Haruka Aoki and Vidhya Nagarajan made fluid full-page print artwork that was further customized for the web-scrolling format. Why hadn’t I thought of that? We don’t need to keep our panels boxy in order to slice-n-dice them for the internet. Be creative – in all aspects of production!

Custom artwork for a few stray captions

I ended up making some custom artwork because a couple of captions didn’t have an accompanying graphic for their web panels. It was a pleasure since I loved drawing these adventurous bookworms. Have a look at the web version below:

Related posts from the archives

• One of my earliest entries explains my approach to pitching:

  How to Pitch Comics to Newspapers and Magazines

• Here’s a story I pitched around that never found a publisher. I’m glad to have this Substack so that I can still share pieces that are important to me:

  Bearing Witness

Ear candy

I often assemble a playlist for a project or, at the very least, have a theme song that I crank up to get motivated. I customized the catchy chorus by singing “Muh-muh-muh MY To-PEE-uh” instead of My Sharona. You may never look at it or me the same way again. 🤓