I Applied for a Job???

Ok, remember how I was all "I don't know what to do now that my career plan seems to be stalled/de-railed"? Well. My hometown of Seattle, Washington put out a call for Pacific Northwest cartoonists to create comics about its public transit for good pay.

Each short-form graphic novel should illuminate community stories and histories, convey a strong sense of place, and inspire transit riders to engage more deeply with the unique identities of the areas they travel through.

Uh.

Like.

Am I crazy or was this job made specifically with me in mind???

I've spent the last month working on my application for their job, which needed a resume, work samples, and a 500 word Artist Statement. It doesn't sound like that should take a month to assemble, but, well, they had specifications for everything and also I haven't made a resume in like, twenty years???? So this all took a while to collect and customize to their requirements.

Fortuitously, I already have a ton of comic samples that take place on the bus. Like, please hire me, I'm already drawing bus comics for free! I actually had way more bus-centric comic pages in my portfolio than I could fit in their submission space.

They emphasized that they're looking to work together collaboratively and that diverse representation is important in the comics, so I made sure to mention that specifically in my Artist Statement:

As a Seattle native, a cartoonist and a public transit rider, it feels like this project was custom-made for me.

My love of riding the bus started as a teenager in Seattle and runs deep, both for practical reasons (I hate driving) and because I genuinely enjoy riding with my community. My husband regularly asks me "Did you make any new friends on the bus today?" and more often than not, the answer is "Yes!" I've become actual friends with a number of people I first met as a passenger. Whenever I can, I sneak in cameos of Portland's TriMet public transit into my professional comics work, as you'll see in my samples (I have more than could fit in the space allowed!).

Professionally, I'm a Portland cartoonist with over 25 years of experience in the comics industry. The genre of story that I gravitate towards is one that focuses on people being people, in all their ridiculousness and heart. The comics I am best known for are my autobiographical stories about being a queer woman navigating the absurdities of life and the sex education work that I make with my partner, which is used in college campus queer/health resource centers and medical offices (including Planned Parenthood!) around the country. Because it is one of the top ten most banned books in the country, John Oliver featured and praised "Let's Talk About It" (the sex education graphic novel that I co-created with Matthew Nolan) on his TV show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

Because of my decades of work on creating educational comics about sex, sexuality, gender, and anatomy, I know how to take complex topics and break them down into fun, friendly, digestible comics that people enjoy reading.

My work and my working method are very community-based. I fill my comic pages with diverse people because not only is it so important for readers to see some element of their own identity on the page, but also because it's just fun to illustrate a wide variety of human beings with their unique features and styles. And as a worker, I love to collaborate with others! My best comics have been the result of joining forces with others and incorporating their perspectives and feedback into the finished product. When I work with a team, it makes me come up with ideas and solutions that never would have occurred to me by myself.

I love riding the bus. I love making stories about real people. I love making the environment (like the bus!) in a story its own character that the reader invests in. I love making comics that help open up the world to the reader and show them how to access the knowledge and resources that are already around them.

I was made for this project! This project was made for me ♥︎

I have a resume now??? Drawing dicks on the internet for a living doesn't require proof of an employment history, so I was starting from scratch on this one and it was the most labor-intensive of the whole application process, for sure. Fortunately my friend Clare has a lot of experience judging resumes, so she helped beat my jumbled info dump into readable(ish) shape.

As of this moment, I'm still feeling adrift in my career- Space Camp is in publisher-stasis and I haven't progressed on either of my next possible book pitches- but submitting this application today gives me a small sense of control and productivity.

Who knows what I'll be working on in 2026? Maybe it'll be this.