Comic Book Artists on Parenthood, Creativity, and Cry-Barfing
Having a kid doesn’t extinguish inspiration. Three cartoonists share how becoming parents radically transformed their art—and everything else. …
It’s weird, I note, while many parents fear “the mommy wars,” I’ve personally found parenting social media to be one of the last safe spaces on the internet. “Most parents are so kind and generous with their time. It’s been really lovely,” Knisley says. “Of course, there’s always the odd weird person who is going to tell you weird things about your parenting. Most of the people that tell me weird things about my parenting aren’t actual parents, anyway.”
Sylvia Nickerson is a comics writer and illustrator based in Hamilton, a Canadian rust belt city just outside of Toronto. Her 2019 graphic novel, Creation, is a dreamy, sprawling, meditative work. In softly watercolored panels thick with detail, she muses on raising a small child, visiting a sick parent, and being an artist, all while living in a slowly gentrifying city.
While having a child might be an excuse for profound self-absorption, Nickerson’s gaze turns outward. Her faceless, boneless figure nurses her son in her crowded art studio and holds her mother’s hands in a cancer ward. A lullaby drifts out of an open window and through run-down streets. She finds a homeless person sleeping in a dumpster and picks garbage out of the flower beds in front of her house. This is the city her son lives in, she muses, and it has a lot of problems that need fixing.
“After having a child you live in the world more, especially as a creative person,” Nickerson says. “Becoming a parent tears down boundaries that you might’ve developed between yourself and the world. It’s not just yourself anymore—you see how messy everything is. It doesn’t feel safe at all.”
Creation was drawn from notes and illustrations that Nickerson did while her son was very young, so it may surprise new readers to know that he is now 10. It all feels very immediate and familiar to this particular parent of young children. I also live in a gentrifying city, and am also hyperaware that the people around me who might provide parenting advice are also someone else’s daughters and sons.
In small ways, Nickerson tries to answer the question: How do you make decisions that will better your community, the world, and your kids? “I do think having a kid is the death of your own childhood,” Nickerson says. “You have to become the adult … I think that was good for me. I was going to own the consequences of my actions. I couldn’t blame anyone else anymore.”
Emily Flake is a New York–based cartoonist and stand-up performer (and sometimes both, at the same time). Her work is acutely observed, acerbic, and occasionally heart-wrenching, particularly her 2015 parenting memoir Mama Tried and her column in The New Yorker, “Parent as a Verb.”
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