» Failing Beautifully by Ami Bogin: Pole dance taught me to embrace myself—even what I'd seen as my failures.

» Figuring it Out by Nabeel Rooshan: Falling in love with figure drawing in Pakistan.

» Mama Is… by Katia Wish: A sweet reflection on all the roles a mother plays.

✨ Special discount code just for newsletter readers: This weekend only, get 10% off all Crucial classes and workshops! Use the discount code ICANREAD. This discount expires Dec. 1st so… get on it!

• Portland - Design and Bind Your Own 2026 Planner: For our first-ever in-person workshop, amateur book-binder and professional list-maker Audra McNamee will walk you through designing and binding a custom planner. You’ll leave with the tools and know-how to bind your own books in the future. This workshop will be held at Portland’s new Northwest Museum of Cartoon Arts. Three meetings over December 2025, details here.

• Facing the Blank Page - Creating Comics When You’re Afraid of Drawing: Are you interested in comics but think you could never draw your own? Join the club! This extremely encouraging, low-stakes class starts with drawing blobs to help you face anxiety around drawing. January 24 – March 14, on Saturdays from 10am-12pm PST/1pm-3pm EST.

• Making Memoir Comics: This seven-session memoir comics class will focus on telling real-life stories about your life, identity, and family. Artist Shay Mirk guides participants through writing and draw a 20-panel personal story, and everyone also creates many shorter comics to practice different techniques and find their visual voice. February 10 – March 24th, on Tuesdays from 5pm-7pmPST/8pm-10pm EST.

• Telling Trans Stories: Let’s make trans comics! In this two-hour workshop, artist Al Benbow will talk about some of their favorite trans comics and cartoonists, discuss trans character-building, and different ways of exploring trans identity and experiences in comics. Thursday, February 26, 2026 from 4-6pm PST/7-9pm EST.

• Draw Your Feelings: Whether it’s impostor syndrome, creative anxiety, or wider worries about the world, comics are a great way to face and move through big emotions. Artist Cassy Lee leads this two-hour workshop about illustrating your feelings as a tool for emotional regulation. Saturday, March 21st, 10:30am-12:30pm PST (1:30pm-3:30pm EST).

Ben Passmore has made a big impact on readers with his punchy, anarchist political comics and Ignatz Award-winning comic collection Your Black Friend: and Other Strangers. His new book, Black Arms to Hold You Up, is a graphic history of Black armed resistance in the United States. In the book, Ben falls backward through time to New Orleans in 1900, where he witnesses Black resistance to a racist police force, and tumbles forward, talking to activists over the next 100 years. I talked with Ben, who now lives in Philadelphia, about what kept him going during his years of working on the book.  

This book deals with really difficult and violent histories. What sustained you while writing it? I mean that both mentally (how did you stay focused on your goal?) and physically (what snacks kept you alive?). 

It’s maybe very edgy to say this, but I think the difficult parts to read in the book were not the hardest part for me personally. I think a fortunate thing for me, if you can use the word “fortunate,” is that political violence and the general contradictions of Black liberation struggle was a part of my life long before I took the book on. I sort of talk about that towards the end of Black Arms when I describe reading Black Power books (Look Out Whitey by Julius Lester, for example) at a troubled teen school I was probated to as a kid. I’ve just been in this stuff for a minute, for better or worse. One of the big drives from me when I was pitching a book on the subject of Black liberation was that I needed to find some direction after experiencing a mix of frustration and hope during the 2020 rebellion. I came home bloody and full of questions, you know?

The actual hardest part of making this work was just the physicality of it. I’ve never made something this ambitious in my whole ass life and my entire body started to give out while making it. I was having serious back problems, the screen on my drawing tablet started the burn the skin off my hand, and my drawing arm developed all these crazy pains. I was fortunate though that I had already been very locked in on training Muay Thai, which is a kind of kickboxing from Thailand. I’d go to the gym four or five days a week and do regular runs, so my body was strong enough to manage the physical torment of drawing the book. The rhythm of going to the gym also gave me this air to process what I was working on too. I’d sit on the train with a copy of As Black As Resistance or some study on anti-lynching movements and just mull over stuff. Being a boxer really rubs hard against the normal vision of cartoonists, but I’d probably be bedridden if I didn’t take care of my body this whole time. 

I did eat a lot of pretzels though. I live in Philly, you gotta hit the pretzels.

• Anyone looking to publish a graphic novel: Fieldmouse Press is now open for submissions! This nonprofit comics publisher prints a small selection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry comic books each year. Submissions are open until Nov. 30.

• People who love drawing plants and animals: The Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District in Oregon is looking for an illustrator to create original work portraying native habitat and rural land conservation practices for a publication called the Rural Living. The budget is $5,000 and applications are due December 10th. Download the full request for proposals here and feel free to email [email protected] for more info.

• Are you working on a sci-fi comic? The Otherwise Fellowship offers two $500 grants to support “creators from communities that have been historically underrepresented in the science fiction and fantasy genre and those who are working in media other than traditional fiction.” The deadline to apply is December 15.

💚 Love this newsletter? Support us on Patreon to help Crucial publish more comics!

Crucial Comix is supported by the Sequential Artists Workshop. Thanks friends!

This newsletter is written by Shay Mirk. If you have comics or opportunities you think we should feature, email Shay at [email protected]. 💌