45 Days Of CCS, #26: Anna Sellheim

Anyone who follows Anna Sellheim on Instagram knows that her sketchbook drawings are wildly entertaining and show the breadth and depth of her talent. The Birth Of A Sketchbook Zine covers 2002-24 and sees Sellheim mostly concentrating on what she does best: drawing the female form. That extends to her ability to draw clothing and exaggerate gesture and expressions. The cover story, featuring a pair of sketchbooks getting into a tryst that leads to some unexpected consequences, is hilarious. When Sellheim commits to a particular style and lets her art do most of the talking, her drawings are particularly effective. Sellheim's use of color strongly balances decorative and expressive elements, and I especially like the way she uses deep, rich reds and purples. 

That's a reflection of Sellheim's aggressive style that tends to get in the reader's face. So many of her drawings are seething with emotion--anger, attitude, desire, and many more. While her naturalistic drawings show off her skill, her real virtues shine when she draws in an exaggerated fashion. Her 2023 Inktober Zine took that month of drawing prompts in order to learn how to draw directly from ink without other underdrawing. The results are mixed as Sellheim tries a variety of line weights and styles. Some attempts at adding more detail are muddled, but more clear-line approaches are more effective. There's also a hilarious bit where she came up with a potential story with a pair of young, gay teenaged boys and her boyfriend roasts her as one of many women her age interested in stories like this. Sellheim's nude drawings pack a lot of expressive power and I love the way she spots blacks. I really like it when she uses a thick, chunky and sketchy line, but her thinner line is every bit as expressive. At this point, Sellheim just needs to pick the right style for the right project and stick with it.

45 Days Of CCS, #42: Issy Manley, Anna Sellheim

Issy Manley's No One Wants To Work Anymore is a series of comics essays addressing labor and one's role in global capitalism from a personal perspective. Their tone widely varies, given the venues these stories originally appeared. Manley is at her best when she's able to truly craft a narrative that focuses on character over information. For example, "To All The Bosses I've Begged For A Job" and "Not Working" cover a lot of the same territory, but the former is funny and biting while the latter feels didactic and is way too text-heavy. 

The opening story, "How Things Are Done," smoothly highlights Manley's skill as a cartoonist and smartly employs her experience of losing her job as a server at the start of COVID. Starting with the personal and then applying it to a wider swath of society is a clever way of helping a reader understand a complex issue, especially if it's one where they might have preconceived notions. Like many who work or worked in the service industry, the exploitative nature of the business, especially in the US, was something that was understood as just the way things functioned as a natural part of the system. The willingness to put such workers at high risk with no additional reward during the pandemic was a splash of cold water that massively put the lie not only to exploitation by big chain restaurants but also (and often especially) locally-owned businesses. Manley's clear line and thoughtful use of spot color help lead the eye around the page and emphasize important details.

"To All The Bosses..." is the real standout of the collection, in large part due to its structure and sardonic sense of humor. Manley confronts head-on the demeaning quality of looking for a job that's looking for you to want to do it for any other reason than making money. The more dehumanizing the actual job or business (like anything in baking, consulting, or investment), the more they play up their "values" and demand that employees play along. Manley uses an array of clever visual tricks to keep the reader engaged with both her own narrative (badly needing a job) and the critique of what jobs are. The only slightly dissonant tone was the digression into imagining a job that's just and fulfilling in a corporate structure. I understand the yearning and even admire her hoping this is possible, but critiques that introduce fantasy utopian scenarios without a bridge to how they might be possible tend to fall flat. 

Much better in that regard is the titular essay, "No One Wants To Work Anymore." It's another COVID-era essay that this time turns the narratives of others she interviewed into anecdotes, where each person is drawn as an anthropomorphic flower. The story addresses the heart of the labor conflict in the US: the clash between the so-called "Protestant Work Ethic" with the concept of a life devoted to something other than just labor. This was brought into sharp relief during the pandemic when the government provided small amounts of money to every citizen, suspended student loan repayments, and forestalled rent. For low-income workers, this offered up a level of freedom that was unprecedented for them, and the narratives showed how much happiness this brought. While some stayed inside and read for pleasure, others took the time to volunteer or otherwise stay active. Moreover, when the quarantines ended and businesses started to open up, it led to many not wanting the same old shitty jobs anymore. Manley hits on this collective wake-up call for one part of the population and a gross sense of entitlement for those who expected the others to simply fall back in line. Here, Manley's digression into anti-work fantasies and a different world makes a lot more sense. Manley definitely has that Dan Nott style of using a gentle visual style to approach difficult problems, and I'd be curious to see her really sink her teeth into something long-form.

Anna Sellheim didn't have a traditional comics entry this year. Instead, she presented a couple of zines she made for the Refugee Youth Project After School & Summer School Programming from Baltimore City Community College. Sellheim's Promo Zine is exactly what it sounds like: a comic describing her experience as an art/comics teacher for young refugees from a variety of countries. Sellheim's anecdotes are funny, blunt, and optimistic without overstating things. Her own past dealing with not just trauma, but somatic trauma responses deeply informs how she interacts with the students, even if their trauma experiences are completely different. Sellheim also gets into how the cultural shock for refugees coming to the US is much deeper than it might seem at first while also providing the basics of how the program works. It's an ideal promotional tool for the RYP as it's from an insider who genuinely believes in the beneficial qualities of the program. RYP Zine consists mostly of art from Sellheim's students, as well as poetry and other writing. Sellheim lets the contributors' work speak for itself while adding some highly supportive notes in the bio section. This is applied cartooning at its best, as it encourages each student to develop and express their own voice as they work to adjust to American culture. 

31 Days Of CCS, #29: Anna Sellheim

Anna Sellheim is best known for her raw and open autobiographical work, but the work she submitted for this year's CCS review is varied in terms of genres and approaches. In the DC Zinefest Covid-19 Zine, she had a one-page autobio piece done in Sellheim's usual style. She draws herself in a hoodie, her face obscured, which has always been an interesting part of her stylistic choices that make her work so distinctive. Many of Sellheim's comics are about her deeply-ingrained anxiety order, but this comic about the pandemic is funny because she revealed that when a real crisis comes along, she can handle it. It's her life the rest of the time that gives her problems! At the same time, she shares her brittle bone disease diagnosis that affects her hands, and how having to take off the gloves and repeatedly wash them is literally painful. It concludes with her tiny dogs not caring in the least that her hands are in pain, because they need walking, and dealing with that need is clearly centering.

Sellheim is an excellent letterer and makes that part of her style. She knows how to balance image and word balloons even in a particularly wordy strip. Her lettering is clear and the various kinds of word balloons she uses feel as much a part of the gestalt of the image as the actual characters. Everything about her drawing is very slightly wobbly, from the freehand panel composition to the actual drawing itself, and this raw, expressive style is well-suited for the kinds of stories she tells. 

My Lifelines is a painted mini meant for a mini-comics vending machine at a book festival. Seeing Sellheim slather on color, in comparison to their crisp line, is an interesting change of pace. The comic is about her two dogs and how they are helping her through the isolation she has to go through since she had to quarantine herself for possible coronavirus. The way she draws her dogs is adorable and some of her best character design; the tiny dogs' personalities come through in the shapes she used to build them. This is less a story and more of an experiment designed to have a strong visual impact. 

The Intern is an interesting departure for Sellheim, although she's done horror comics before. Co-written by Leah Weightman, it's a cleverly-constructed horror piece with a number of swerves. Its main character is Katie, a summer intern in Washington, DC. Right away, the reader is informed that there's been a rash of interns disappearing, with her mother asking after her safety. There are a lot of subtle character touches, like Katie talking about wishing she was talking to her grandmother, that don't seem significant at the time but play a role later. There's a swerve regarding who the murderer might be, then another swerve regarding Katie's fate with regard to the murderer. There's a series of panels where the murderer thinks they have easy prey in their kindly disguise, until Katie calmly explains that's not fooled in the least and the creature removes her arm from around Katie and starts to shake. This comic is in black and white, and Sellheim doesn't quite pull off the atmosphere needed in the story with her backgrounds, which are frequently cluttered with extra lines that detract from the narrative. This is a story that cried out for a simpler line approach and color.

#saveTucaandBertie is a tremendous short story that starts with something relatively trivial that ultimately reveals a deep, simmering rage. When the Lisa Hanawalt-created show Tuca And Bertie was canceled after a single season, Sellheim first reflected on not being a big fan of it at first. Then she enjoyed it not because of its humor (which wasn't her style) but because of the way it portrayed female friendships and how boundaries are often tromped upon. When she learned it was canceled, a slow-building rant built up and exploded in a conversation with her mom, as she decried the sexism that was inherent in the cancellation, then it morphed into a rant about oppression in general. Two things stood out: Sellheim's open-page layout with a clever use of spot color (in part to evoke the imagery from the show) and how Sellheim often depicts her emotions exploding because of how difficult she finds it to connect to them. 

Dreamzine is a blender's worth of Sellheim's comics. It's a comic inspired by dreams, and Sellheim noted that she only wanted to use positive or funny dreams--no nightmares. The logic in the strips is wonderful; in the first story, an anthropomorphic cat (with four fully-exposed teats) does a brief stand-up routine before she introduced an artist whose brilliant new installation was...the burrito. Hilariously, he didn't accept questions about his art, but he did invite questions about the night he ate the delicious burrito that inspired him. Sellheim's use of spotting blacks and color contrasts is especially sharp here, something that was no always present in her work. 

A dream about encountering Jesus in the Antarctic, only she's the comic strip character Cathy, was absolutely hilarious. That particular reveal is done to heighten its comedic punch, and the entire strip is very much in character, even as Jesus asks her to become a Christian. Sellheim uses spot color, loose sketches, pencil-heavy images, and an array of different techniques that somehow all flow within the comic. Sellheim closes the comic in a remarkable way; a dream comic that she had drawn about being a lawyer for a family of murderers that included the comic strip character Nancy was found in the hospital she was visiting because of surgery for her mother. The mention of murder triggered an intervention by the hospital's administration and nearly landed her in a psych ward! That particular true story was far weirder than anything else in the comic. It's a reflection of willingness to go deep and talk about whatever is bothering her through her comics, as though that's the way she best communicates with those feelings and ideas. 

31 Days Of CCS #4: Anna Sellheim

In her autobio work, Anna Sellheim can't help but spill some ink on every single page, metaphorically speaking. In her latest collection, Everything's Fine: Let's See Where This Goes, Sellheim expressed some anxiety that a comic about her growth as a person and happiness with her boyfriend might seem boring or precious. In the hands of a different artist, that may well be true. For Sellheim, as her therapist noted, even positive change and growth is stressful, and if there's one thing this artist is good at depicting, it's how she reacts to stress. Sellheim is not so much an oversharer as she is a compulsive truth-teller; she can't help but get at the root of what's wrong with her as bluntly as possible. That includes trying to correct herself when she feels anxious about things for no reason.

There's a hilarious scene where she discusses the difference between having a meltdown and a freak-out with her boyfriend; the former is due to depression and the latter is due to anxiety. In either case, Sellheim has to balance the weight of guilt for dealing with mental illness while being in her first romantic relationship. Dealing with being loved and accepted no matter what is a scary thing unto itself, especially because Sellheim clearly doesn't feel like she deserves love and acceptance. And yet, as her therapist pointed out, she's doing the hard work of therapy, she's not sabotaging her relationship, she's maintaining total & open honesty, and she has a support system for herself as well. In moments of panic or sadness, it's hard to see progress, but that's what therapy, and to a certain extent, this comic is for. The comic is personal, sweet, intimate, funny, and an inspiring example all at once. Sellheim's quirky character design (wherein she reduces figures to essential and sometimes symbolic elements), her frantic lettering, and her bright use of colored pencils give the visuals of her storytelling their own unique rhythm that works in concert with her personal anecdotes.

Three Terrible Dogs sees Sellheim writing about something much cuter: her three awfully behaved dogs. No one can point out the ways in which having dogs is awful like an actual dog owner, because that behavior is always forgiven because of their emotional importance. This comic is interesting because Sellheim uses a more naturalistic style in drawing people, in part because she wanted to draw the dogs as naturalistically as possible too.  #saveTucaAndBertie originally appeared online but was redrawn and expanded upon. It ties into a running theme in Sellheim's life: there are times that she becomes upset about something because it's symbolic of a number of deeper issues she's been angry or afraid about but was unable to express them.

In this case, it was Lisa Hanawalt's Netflix show Tuca & Bertie getting canceled. Sellheim came to enjoy the show after being uncertain early on, but its cancelation triggered an avalanche of emotion surrounding sexism, misogyny, racism, and virtually every other injustice. It's about coming to grips with one's own experiences facing injustice but also having empathy for others and their experiences. Once again, there's a liveliness to Sellheim's line that stands out in her simply-drawn figures, especially with the red, blue, and green in her comic callbacks from the Tuca and Bertie show. Everything may not be fine in Sellheim's world, but she's working on it with her relentless exploration of art.

Thirty One Days Of CCS #20: Anna Sellheim and Matthew New

Art Model, by Mathew New. This webcomic is a fascinating mix of media in an autobio context. Using the cartoonish style he's best known for, New discusses his career as a nude art model, telling a story both about the process of the experience as well as the way he relates it to his feelings about his own body. New really spills some ink here, talking about a lifetime of negative body image that was only compounded when the only thing he liked (his thinness) started to manifest as an eating disorder. The story is interspersed with different friends of his and their drawings/paintings of him, done in a myriad of styles. New talks about how becoming an art model both required and helped him gain self-confidence. The essential point he makes is that the things one might hate most about themselves are the things that are most interesting to draw, which is a fascinating way of turning self-hatred into not just utility, but the potential for art.

Mindfulness and meditation are often discussed as important therapeutic tools, and New discusses how the reality of being a model means long periods of time where you have to find ways to do nothing but sit or stand there. That means being alone with one's own thoughts and learning how to be still with one's own naked body in that space. New also discusses some of the smaller steps that allowed him to take this big step to become comfortable in his own skin, the thought he puts into particular poses and how it might help artists, and other related information. Being an artist who's worked with live models also instructed his approach and allows him to understand both sides of the equation. That's why the many different artists whose takes on him he reproduced here are so important, because it's active proof of how he was able to inspire each of them to draw something interesting. It's not just the form an artist is drawing, but also a way of approaching a different visual problem and figuring out ways to solve it. It's an active way for artists to develop new ways of thinking, even if their actual work is abstract, cartoonish or otherwise not directly related to figure drawing. New's own hard-won sense of self-validation allowed him to gain further validation in the way his job inspires others.

Moments and various short stories by Anna Sellheim. Sellheim quickly became one of my favorite CCS cartoonists on the strength of the rawness of her work. Her autobio material in particular is no-holds-barred with regard to her own feelings and experiences, and I love the jagged, jarring quality of her line and her self-caricature. Sellheim shared a number of her stories from anthologies. First off are stories from a few volumes of the Square City Comics anthology, which she helped start. "The Best Laid Plans", in volume 1, is a work of slice-of-life fiction. It's a romance story, about a bartender who refuses to date her customers falling for a woman who's part of a group of friends who are regulars at the bar. What makes the story work so well is the way Sellheim makes the reader feel the desperation of Ivy the bartender in keeping her life on track as a recovering addict and how hard she clings to this rigidity. In the end, when her life plan goes off track, she realizes that losing control of this rigidity can be a good thing. Sellheim keeps the grid and the art simple, playing up her use of gesture and characters relating in space. This does everything to sell the emotion on the page.

"Expanding My Horizons" in volume 2 is an autobio story that focuses on her newfound love of superhero comics. There's an almost frantic energy in virtually everything Sellheim does or thinks about, and this history of her relationship with comics is no different. Starting with manga as a ten year old, segueing into art comics in high school and finally trying to find something more lighthearted after the death of her father, she started to become interested in some superhero work. The comic explains what she liked and didn't like and why. Two things stand out here: first, the grotesque quality of her art (her self-caricature here is intentionally self-deprecating) and the sheer importance of her pursuit. Comics matter to her as a way of experiencing the world and focusing her attention and emotions, and it was obvious that finding the right titles at the right time was the most profound of pursuits.

Moments is a profound departure for Sellheim. This mini features her working in color, using a four-color grid to not just depict quiet, quotidian moments in the lives of ordinary people, but to show small but profound changes in expression. In the examples above, we see a person end a phone call, pause and put their head up to their temple. Sellheim here goes after the small moments and the beats between moments, as the pose here went from contemplative to despondent. The scene with the woman on the subway is even subtler, as she's so absorbed in her book that she barely notices the world going by around her. Sellheim here uses color to reinforce line and push the reader's attention to the figure. Color framed that, considering that most of her figures themselves are not colored, drawing the reader to the line art. For an artist who usually depends so heavily on dialogue, it was an interesting and useful exercise.

The same is true for her entry in Square City Comics volume 4, "Rame". That's a word that means "chaotic and joyful", and it's entirely silent. It's about a woman attending a house party/concert. She's timid at first as she negotiates the chaos of so many people and their intense energy, including the unwelcome event of someone flirting with her. There's a panic attack as a result, which leads to her fleeing to another room, but the sheer, raw energy of the band not only helps with that, it encourages her to get right up front and mosh. The character design reminds me a little of Liz Suburbia here; there were points where it seemed like Sellheim struggled a bit in coming up with a large number of different character types, but her tight focus on the main character helped with that problem.

Finally, there are two autobio comics in Sellheim's more typical style, though the second one uses regular figures instead of her stripped-down image. One was in a comics newspaper called Magic Bullet, and it's a funny strip that makes great use of its full-page layout by using a great deal of negative space. It's about her trying to meditate for the first time, with her caricature mostly being white space juxtaposed against the gray scale shading containing every negative thought imaginable about herself. The punchline is both funny and bracing, as the last thing she's achieved is a "new sense of calm" after dealing with those relentless feelings. The second is a strip about how hard depression hit her, to the point where she didn't feel like she was living her life until the age of 25. It gets at the heart of depression: the mental pain that comes with it, and the desire for the pain to just go away. The jagged quality of her line once again serves to give the comic a certain uncomfortable quality, which is a hallmark of her comics. More than any other cartoonist I can think of, Sellheim is figuring out what she wants to do with comics in parallel with what she wants to be as a person. The struggles she feels seem to be working in concert with each other in terms of both life and art, as do the solutions. That she chooses to share both with her readers is our privilege.

Thirty Days of CCS #17: Rainer Kannenstine, Anna Sellheim

An upcoming grad (Class of 2018), Rainer Kannenstine’s work is sort of gleefully nihilistic. This Sucks is a story that demonstrates his pitch-black sense of humor, as an extremely hung over young woman is chosen by Death to work out an old philosophical problem with a creature who’s the representative of another world/universe. Our planet and their planet were on a collision course that would destroy both of them…but if one person chose to destroy the other planet, it would save their own. The alien talked about the over-the-top idyllic circumstances in its universe, and when asked about her universe, she could only muster “It kinda sucks.” Of course, one reason why it sucks is you just can’t trust people, which leads to the eventual, darkly hilarious outcome. To say that this is not a polished comic is an understatement. It’s a whole lot of expressive scribbling that works pretty well, though the many spelling errors were a distraction. Still, the so-over-it facial expressions of the protagonist and black void of death’s form brightened only by a permanent, cheesy grin helped give this comic a great deal of energy.

Lasers is a far stranger little comic with the following admonition: “Don’t go to the playground. The pelicans are made of lasers.” That statement is repeated, each word filling up part of a panel. The pelicans do indeed to strange things on the playground, and when repeated, we zero in on a molecular level so as to see just what’s going on in that bill of theirs. This is a sort of children’s nursery rhyme comic, only far more unsettling. Far more polished is He Comes To The Club At 6:00 AM, which shows us fragments of the handsomest bear to ever grace a dance club, and how if you’re lucky, you might go home with him. It’s image after image flashed at the reader, like they were fever dream memories from hours later. There’s a beautiful crispness in the use of grayscaling here, as Rainer is careful to let each image wash over the reader and also use great care and precision with the all-lower case lettering. 

Anna Sellheim submitted a couple of short stories for 30 Days of CCS this year, one of which appeared in Comics 4 Choice, the pro-choice comics anthology. That was "My Mother's Story", a comic in the form of an interview about her mother's experiences with not just abortion, but also childbirth. Sellheim here uses her more naturalistic line (as opposed to the slightly more abstract figurework she uses for much of her own autobio material) and plays it straight with a nine panel grid. The comic is text-heavy, yet Sellheim is able to apply a few visual flourishes here and there. The narrative is one of the best I've read with regard to abortions, because it demonstrates that the decision to have the procedure can vary with age, circumstances or any number of other choices. There were points where she was adamant about having a baby the next time she got pregnant, and other circumstances where she was apart from her partner and knew it wasn't the right time to bring a child into the world. The point of the story is that in every instance, it was her choice, and the state had no business interfering with it. 

"Safe" is a story about a gay couple named Carl and Kamon, the latter of whom was from Thailand and had a history of abuse at the hands of his father. It’s a sweet story that gauges the concept of safety for a gay couple in the wake of Trump’s election. There’s a scene where Kamon gets a dirty look for speaking in Thai in public from a guy in a MAGA hat. The story is as much about negotiating the unwritten rules of relationships as it is coping with a frightening new reality, as Carl bristles somewhat at being told that he has a bad singing voice. Later, Kamon reveals that Carl may have a bad voice, but he loves to hear him singing, because it makes him feel safe to know that Carl is happy in that moment. There’s more of Sellheim’s slightly cartoony naturalism here, which is a nice match with the impressive verisimilitude she shows in the story’s dialogue and relationship dynamic.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #15: Anna Sellheim, Tillie Walden

Anna Sellheim is an example of a cartoonist whose versatility and willingness to explore different kinds of stylization make allow her to modulate the emotional content of her comics. Her comics are also powerfully intimate, even those that are genre or fiction. For example, Malai is a story about a space explorer writing a letter to a close friend. When Sellheim is drawing the astronaut dictating her letter, it's in crisp black & white. When she talks about the planets that she visited, it's in glorious, melting color. The key sequence is when she visited a planet where one's emotions take physical form when you are on the planet's surface. For some, they felt wonder and joy, and they had a great time. For the explorer, she was gripped by fear, which brought on pain, despair and panic as physical forms that tried to snuff her out. Sellheim then takes a narrative left turn as thinking about that experience made her realize that what she was really feeling hurt about was the friendship she felt disintegrating, and that experienced forced her to speak plainly about her feelings. It's as good a metaphor for anxiety as I've ever read, as well as a prescription for boldly living. It was that contrast of styles that made the metaphor really come to life.

Fractured is a first-person slice-of-life comic about a woman with overwhelming social anxiety who has just left a party. Whether or not this is Sellheim's actual experience is not relevant, because what she captures on the page is so remarkably true-to-life. Essentially, it's about a horrendous anxiety attack that has a painful, somatic component. In the throes of pain and confusion, all she wishes for is her death, the gift of simply not existing. What helps her resist acting on that feeling is a sort of sense of pride and of wanting to control her own narrative. Killing herself would end her narrative in an unsatisfying way, so the only choice she has is to wait for the feeling to pass and hope things get better. In this comic, Sellheim mostly uses a naturalistic style with heavy black and white contrasts on each page after the party, which is intentionally bright and airy. Like Malai, Sellheim sets up a single point related to the possibility of human connection and brings it home hard after a small bit of narrative misdirection.

There For Us was originally a webcomic done in collaboration with Tillie Walden. It's about each of their experiences visiting Planned Parenthood; Sellheim to check out a lump under her breast and Walden to address debilitating menstrual cramps. Using a more naturalistic style, Sellheim uses a very thin line weight and makes extensive use of black & white contrasts to explore her understanding of Planned Parenthood as a child and how friendly and welcoming the experience was for her as an adult. Walden's contribution is in her typical thin, long line that veers from sharply detailed to ghostly and sketchy--especially her character designs. Growing up in Texas, she had been fed negative propaganda regarding PP, and she was delighted to get a doctor who listened to her concerns, felt empathy for her and then worked out a solution. It is astounding how rare that can be sometimes, especially with regard to issues related to women's health. The mini was done in support of Planned Parenthood after Congress was threatening to defund it.

While these were all solid comics, the real meat of Sellheim's work is her highly stylized autobio work, and Everything's Fine: And On And On is a perfect example. Her avatar for these comics is a figure in a red hoodie with a face made of interwoven fibers and no human features. All of her friends get their own brand of stylization as well, but Sellheim's avatar is a shorthand for the defenses she puts up against the world. These comics are all about Sellheim trying to figure herself out and how best to deal with life considering that she struggles with mental illness. Beyond the vivid use of color and unusual character design, what sets these comics apart is Sellheim's pitch-black sense of humor. She also manages to adapt instances of intensely awkward interactions into painfully awkward humor, like one strip where she talks about not wanting to date a particular guy because he's a terrible writer. When pressed, she sticks her foot in mouth and states she doesn't want to date any artists, period because they are "over-sensitive entitled babies". Of course, she said this to a carload full of artists and added a weak "um...no offense". Sellheim ponders her own sexuality and wonders if she may be asexual while being bombarded by love songs on the radio and also relates a couple of examples of dating-related interactions that remind her why she hates it so much. When the prospective guy says "I really like Dilbert, Frank Miller & Frank Cho" and she responds "...I see.", I laughed out loud. The comic closes on a therapeutic technique that actually works, which further demonstrates the flexibility of this approach. Sellheim can veer from the darkly comedic to the sincere, and the stylization allows for both.

Finally, Sellheim's short story "You Were Beautiful" is an interesting departure, as she uses a grey wash and fairly naturalistic drawing in this depiction of a woman talking about her life after a relationship that slowly went south, but it was one she tolerated because she was so attracted to him. Sellheim really gets into anatomy here: noses, lips, torsos, backs, and more. It's a depiction of a kind of romanticized objectification that allowed her to ignore his less pleasant tendencies. It's a bitter little vignette, where the protagonist delivers that bitterness mostly to herself.