Looking back, last year this time I was on the cusp of doing things that are in longer form than I had previously been able to imagine. As a visual person, visualizing the finishing line has great power. But sometimes not being able to visualize the end prevents me from believing that it could happen. I think this year it is the first time I just did one small thing a day and watched it grows in volume by itself. I had less stress from anticipating failure or success.

It is the week before the New York Marathon, and here are some of my comics about running!

The first time I drew running in my comics was last year around this time. I have been doing diary comics for over a month. I was running to get exercise, and running for 5 minutes on the treadmill felt like a great accomplishment. I felt like my heart was going to jump out of my chest. 5 minutes a week was my “one page a day”…it’s the minimum and maximum of what I can do without putting myself in pain or guilt.

I always thought of myself as someone who didn’t do any physical activities. Mostly what I have been doing in my life is sitting down. I think being an artist has taught me to not feel bad about trying something that sounded a bit ridiculous. Just because I could only run 5 minutes, I didn’t talk myself down or anything, which in hindsight was really great!

Slowly I could run 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes without stopping. One day, I felt like I just wanted to keep running, and I ran for 40 minutes. On my birthday this year I wanted to run in Central Park. The last time I did it was 10 years ago. This started my outdoor running journey for the rest of the year; the rest of how this evolved was sort of beyond my wildest imagination...

Like that! 🥹

I have never moved so fast and far before, and this distance is just beyond me. Like when I suddenly had 5 books of comics and didn’t know what to do with them. I had so many thoughts about this connection between running and the artistic practices I do: drawing, comics, writing. Maybe the similarity is being solitary, long distance, flow, mental stimulation…and my process of doing something short form for the long haul. When it’s gets exhausting and I want to give up, I actually let myself go a little slower, so I can keep going. Was my comic practice the zone 2 of drawing?!

Doing page layout has always been intimidating, I’ll admit! How many panels should be on a page, exactly? How do artists decide on those dynamic grid systems?

I didn’t start the daily comics practice to learn comic techniques, but I realized it was the best comic training I can get.

In the beginning, to keep things simple, I opted for a 6-panel grid.

And no gutter/space between the panels! This way I don’t get caught up in thinking about a page design. It is just a simple grid that gives me six equal, square spaces.

Since I keep the comic to 20 minutes per day so it doesn’t become a burden, this was all I have time for!

On the basis of the 6-panel grid, I varied the layout.

I wrote about doing a cyanotype workshop in Brooklyn with my friend Jinghong. It was a really beautiful day.

Then I was reading Lynda Barry’s How To Make Comics, and tried her exercise of a one-panel comic. This was me sitting at my bagel place, looking out of the window.

Then I followed her directions to try silent 4-panel comics for a while.

Getting ready to vend at an outdoor market, and then getting rained on:

Which I really liked! I loved drawing fabric, patterns, and not having to think about text.

In the diary comics, I write about anything. They are not something I have a particular audience for. Depends on how I’m feeling, I draw shapes that feels true to that moment. Sometimes it’s not a grid or a story.

Around this time last year, I felt like I was stuck in a loop and wasn’t able to catch up.

I really liked this one where it was just all chaotic:

(Can you read it?)

When I went to Japan to teach my study abroad manga class, the lectures given by manga professors in Japan were really enlightening. I learned why manga has such dynamic layouts, and why a zig-zag layout is often favored over a evenly divided grid. Japanese language reads vertically. So if the grid is evenly divided, a reader might be confused about whether they should read vertically or horizontally.

So then I started doing the zig-zag panels in my daily pages.

Fighting for the bill in Asia was not my forte!

With each day of drawing from the same person’s same life, I also need to keep myself entertained. This is a rule of thumb for interesting layout: if I’m bored doing it, the reader will feel the same. I experienced so much repetition and the strategic avoidance of boredom during this long exercise. And I realized this daily practice is the best training in comics I can get: face the same page every day, try to divide up the same space, and make it interesting enough for myself.

That’s it for today! I’m glad I can write about this aspect of my comics, and share some more daily comics pages with you.

If you like reading my Substack and have the means to support it financially, I am asking for support during this time of the year! I really appreciate the paid subscribers who are keeping this publication alive and active. If you are able, chip in what you can, it will go towards supporting my work writing this Substack. Thank you so much!

This post break this down in 2 parts:

• What are the obstacles to keeping going?

• What did I do to work through these obstacles?

First, what are some obstacles that I ran into in a long-term, daily comic practice?

Obstacles are not bad. Like an obstacle course, they are like puzzles that require some thinking. A lot of them are intelligent, thoughtful, reasonable responses, and many are familiar to anyone who enjoys a ton of introspection! But when I try to keep a consistent, simple, daily habit, they stand in the way of moving forward.

Obstacle #1: Why am I doing this?

I started drawing before thinking about why, because in a way I always have to outrun asking why. It is an intelligent question, and it looks for meaning of something beyond the mere act of doing it. It is not a bad idea to ask why. BUT in this case, there is also this subtext:

Why am I doing this = If you don’t do this, no one will ask why.

In the beginning of doing daily comics, I found that I was more inclined to do things because I could write about it later. Which was so great! I had no problem with that.

Obstacle #2: Will anyone read this?

About a few days in I started thinking about who would read this.

If someone WILL read it, I would worry about whether what I am writing will offend them, bore them, entertain them.

If someone will NOT read it, is it wise to pour time into something that will never be read?

In September last year, a friend did an art show with the stuff they stored in temporary storage when they had to go back to China during COVID. On the same day, I attended the online vigil of an artist friend who passed away suddenly. I was working on a memoir, and the question of whether a non-famous person’s life is interesting enough.

Obstacle #3: My days are not interesting.

There were some amazing days with beautiful weather. There were emotional days with news about my grandparents’ health. But for many days, there was no drama, no big event. Yes, most days are not interesting…

Since my goal was to do comics everyday for a year, I chose to not engage with these signals and distractions that basically says “stop, solve me before you can keep going!” For the most part, I just answered: I’ll think about it later! and moved on. After a year I did finish my 365 comics. Now I can look back at them and think about how they affected me.

Here’s what I did with each question:

1. Why am I doing this?

When I was in my creative writing workshop, I wrote memoir essays about the lush textures of the past, in my memories about living in China. I often was asked why I didn’t include more of my present life. And I knew it was hard for me to do it, for some reason.

So instead of asking why I am writing about my life, I ask myself why I’m not writing about my life?

I don’t know the answer, which is why I am doing a daily practice to find out.

Maybe I will know, maybe I still won’t know. But I will find out something.

2. Will anyone read this?

Who will read the diary of a _________ (insert whatever doubtful self definition I have that day)?

Time is precious. If I spend a half hour everyday dedicating myself to a consistent practice, shouldn’t I really consider it before going all in?

For this, I chose to create a set of rules:

1. Write with the idea that no one will read it.

2. But rest assured that in the future, someone will read some of it.

3. The thought of social media is banned from the room when you are creating. 🚫

This helped breaking the binary bind of everyone will read it vs. no one will read it. Again, my goal was to make comic for a year to find out something I don’t know yet, so sharing should not be there to stress me out.

3. My days are not interesting.

For this thought, I made several comics, like this one:

So maybe the answer to all of these questions is: you just live your life! 🌈

…which I can always tell myself more often. A lot of times, these questions were doubts or worries that something we are excited about won’t go well, or will leave us in the cold for some reason. So we reason ourselves out of something new: is it wise? Is it necessary? What’s the downside? But I think if keep going is the goal, then keep going is the only thing I’m concerned about. :)

Happy drawing!

I saw some questions about the process, and that inspired me to do a post about some of my ritual & rules when it comes to making diary comics everyday.

Here’s one from last year around this time, when I had just done them for a month:

First of all, I want to share my routine:

I do these daily at night, before I go to sleep.

I’ve heard of morning pages and have practiced them, but for the comics I wanted them to be a “closure” for the day, like a net that captures what the day has given me.

I don’t set a timer, but I let each one take roughly 20-30 minutes.

I am usually eager to go to sleep, so it doesn’t take that long.

(I don’t have a lot of drawings of myself drawing this comic for reasons I explain next. But I draw it on the couch!)

Some rules I made up that works for me in service to longevity of the practice:

1. Don’t do “meta” comics about making the comic.

   I break this all the time when I talk about how many I have done, such as drawing them for a month, drawing them for half a year, drawing them for a full year.

   But the kind of “meta” comic I am avoiding is the ones that starts with “I don’t know what to write today” or “I’m drawing this comic again.”

   Not sure why this is a hard no for me — I think when I start to rake my brain about what to write for the comic and have to make meta-commentary about having to do it, it has become a chore, and I’m no longer excited about doing them.

2. Stick to it every day, not skipping when traveling, seeing family, being super busy, etc.

   A lot of times these make really interesting pages. Especially traveling and seeing family. I find that for me, starting to skip would break the routine and it’s hard to get back to it. So I decided at the beginning that I would do them everyday for a year.

3. Use a pen, draw the comic in one pass, no penciling and no coloring.

   Keeping the process simple is key for me — there is no “homework” that piles up and create guilt & stress. I want no guilt and no stress!! If I don’t have time that day, I would draw a simpler page.

   

4. Allow characters and styles to evolve by themselves.

   I don’t try to stick to a “style guide” or anything. If the way the art looks start to change, I let it run its natural course! If I get bored, I will give up, so it’s all about whatever makes me not get bored.

   

For a while I had a rule that if I didn’t feel like writing my own thoughts, I’ll draw myself as a dog. 😂 Then it turned into drawing myself as a cat, or a bagel…

Other fun facts:

There has only been a few times when I didn’t do the comics for a few days. When I came back from Japan, days passed in a blur:

I draw an hourly comic when I am on a international flight to Asia that spans 10 pages, because I can’t figure out what day it is:

Sometimes I add another routine to the comic, like when I was in Japan I started doing a face mask while I draw the comic.

Did it again when I was in China:

It has been a joyful affair, but I also learned that doing something creative everyday can be a very emotional experience. Had I not left a window open for emotions to be released, I can imagine some days would have gone by quickly, and I would have had no memories of them. Reflecting on internal and external life so closely was an intense experience. Being open for 20 minutes everyday had this amazing compounding effect of being more observant, seeing more than I had seen before.

At the end of this post I want to say, if you decide to start a daily practice, try keeping these three things in mind: keep yourself entertained while doing them; don’t give yourself guilt and stress; and if it has become a chore, make changes or it’s time to move on.

Thank you for reading! If there’s more aspects of this daily practice you would like to know about, leave me a comment and I will think about it for next time!

The composition book filled up, then I bought another one from the bookstore across the street. Then it filled up again. Before I realize how much this practice has evolved, I had 2 books full of comics, about 80 pages. During the time I was drawing these, my style evolved, and I changed pens. By November it was morphing into something I liked a lot.

I wrote about anything in here. I didn’t think it would get read. I thought it might, but I didn’t write them for an audience.

(I started a few hobbies in this time, stargazing was one of them!)

I printed some to put in a zine and brought it to MICE, Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo. They got picked super quickly on day 1! I was encouraged to keep making it.

Here’s me going to MICE:

You might notice that these are so nicely scanned, some of them are cleaned, even! So, this all happened in the “future,” which is now — a year from the first comic. During this time, there was so much that happened that only these pages saw first hand, and I processed my emotions by drawing, then moved on. In a way it felt like the most conscious year of my life. In a way, it went by so much faster than other years, because I was so aware of everything I did.

I went to Japan, for example:

I went to China:

I watched Heated Rivalry:

There are pages that are such an emotional gold mine that I am still going through them. The experience taught me this: the sheer volume of work that comes out of a daily practice can become an event itself. It was something that came into being by a small act everyday. I am still in awe in the ability for comics to grow like this, like fruit on a vine.

Now, There are 5 albums and 365+ pages.

It was a year out of many, but the best documented yet. I learned that time can contrast and expand when you open up more windows to see it through. It can be many thick albums, photos on a phone, recordings sent back and forth in a chat app. Time can become stories, and it may be the best kind of thing to receive from time.

What should I do with them? Print them as minis? Print one big book? Put them here? I have never faced the problem of having too many pages. But if you have any ideas, let me know!!

I am going to table at MICE, Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo this weekend, December 6-7.

In preparation for this con, I printed a debut comic I’ve never showed in public before!

Told from the perspective of my 20-year-old self, this 27-page memoir comic explores life as a young first-generation immigrant, often living in a state of isolation, transition, and independence, a side of coming of age rarely represented in American comics. It’s about going on a bus trip across the United States.

I worked on this comic all summer, as a part of a long effort to develop a memoir. It has been a rewarding, intimidating, emotional experience, and I feel like I’ve just started…

I also will be bringing a new collection of comics, selected from my daily comics practice. I share them on Instagram and here on and off, but they really are just the tip of the iceberg. I learned how many comics one can quickly accumulate and be at a loss for what to do with all of them, and that makes me less precious about my work!

This year, I felt that a lot of my questions has been sorted for me by life itself. Diary comics didn’t quite work for me before, when I felt like they needed to be made for other people to read, and it has been a mammoth job to explain my life — somehow, that ability to write about complex things works really well now everyone’s life is a little more complicated in middle age.

If you are in the Boston area, I would love to see you and say hi!

When: December 6 - 7, 2025

Hours: Saturday 11am - 6pm | Sunday 11am - 5pm ( on Sunday will be leaving a bit early to come back to NYC depending on the traffic)

Where: Fuller Building at Boston University

As someone who (despite the output) is constantly feeling a lack of material or things to write and draw about, this has been a dream. Everyday there is life that happens, and so there is something to put on the page.

I held off on posting on Substack or Instagram at first, because there’s something really special about the period when something is just at the beginning. I have experienced it enough to decide to do a minimum amount of things that could disturb it. I’m still not in the habit of regularly posting. A month or two is really short to consider something regular practice.

But I do want to share some of my favorites, and things I love about this practice.

It’s weird say that even though most of my narrative work is memoir and personal, I have not previously connected well with diary comics. I think the difference between “autobiographical” and memoir, to me, is that autobiographical work has a certain confidence in the retelling of a personal story, and I often don’t feel like I have.

I write a lot about the experiences of living in a different country from the one where I was born, about being an outsider everywhere I go, and the sense of loneliness or sweetness that comes from these reflections. But it is often quite hard for me to portray my daily life. I am shy about it, and for a long time I just can’t see it as something worth telling other people about.

Sending applications and teaching, sitting in my studio working on stuff — is it really that interesting? But the more I did these daily pages, my thinking shifted. I didn’t think my day had to be interesting for me to be able to live it. So why do I need life to be interesting to draw it?

What I learned from drawing these comics for 50, 60 days is that I get a closer look at life this way. I recognize the patterns, textures, things that look and feel like life. And it is beneficial to me not just as an artist but as a person. I think that’s enough to keep going.

Have you tried diary comics? How did it go? Where do you share it and does sharing change it? Tell me!!

It’s another installment of Baopu. Thank you for reading along!

September was the busiest month for me. I had a solo art show, started my college course back up, and I was making exciting progress on a long term book project. So there’s been a lot going on! At the end of September when the weather is becoming more perfect by the day, I’m getting some much needed rest!

Thankfully, it hasn’t been hard to for me to create, and every time I am able to sit down to draw, it is the biggest source of freedom and satisfaction. I have been reading poetry, the source for inspiration for my process, and I started doing a diary comic everyday. I love my peer group at the Sequential Artist Workshop, who have all been so supportive and inspiring.

I am craving more books and articles to read, for information and enrichment, please let me know your suggestions!

P.S. It is the last week of my art show, Searching For Wonder, at ArtBean Coffee in New York! Go see it before Sunday. <3

Artbean Coffee Roaster

19 Doyers St, New York, NY 10013

Open 8am-5:30 daily

Till next time!

I’ve been away this summer, traveling in China and then working on a comic and a show when I came back to New York. The shifting timezones broke my newsletter sequence a bit, so I thought I’d do an actual newsletter about what I’m up to, rather than waiting to sort things into neat categories. After all, it is so nice to just connect over this letter.

I travelled a lot in China, taking a road trip to Shanxi province to visit my grandfather, where he lives in a hospice home. The home is full of senior citizens who were also from nearby villages, so even though the set up a bit jarring at first, it sounded and felt like the village we used to visit every summer.

This is my grandfather. He has an oxygen machine that he needs to be using most times. I got him an I Love NY T-shirt and he put it on right away. I drew this while my other hand held his hand that went off the page.

Shanxi is an amazing place that is way underrated, but maybe it’s good that way so it remains a secret. :) The weather was amazing and we sat outside watching young people playing basketball at night.

We made a trip to Datong where my cousin lived. Her husband is a Datong local and he showed us around two big temples in the city. The statues were from Tang, Liao, and Jin Dynasty, and we had some time to sketch before the temples closed, which was a treat!

I think their faces are amazing!

And then we took another road trip to visit some of China’s oldest remaining wooden structures. While staying the night at a tiny town, we followed music heard in the distance and sat in on a country wedding. The music was some of the best performances I’ve ever seen. But the locals were a tough audience, they watched nonchalantly and didn’t clap when the guy almost went out of his breath playing a song.

Then there were the beautiful mountains surrounding us everywhere while we drove:

That was the trip in Shanxi — I’m starting to sketch more and more while there, and I look forward to do this again next time. We then went to Beijing, where all the city folks are…

Where cocktails were pretty much the same price as New York City, and young women discussed the philosophical ethics of dating rich and not wanting to work.

Then everything sort of dissolves into millions of people moving about doing everything in every way.

So my August was a bit breathless. I had a show at Artbean Coffee in Chinatown, which was amazing! The show is up till October 3rd, and you can see photos from it on my Instagram.

I’ve been working on a secret project which I will be exhibiting at the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo.

Some work in progress:

Lastly, I’ll be teaching a cyanotype and writing workshop at Land To Sea in Brooklyn. You heard from me first! Tickets and sign up here. We only have 12 spots, do it quick!

That was a lot to catch up on, and I’m so glad to tell you about all of it. Thank you for supporting my work. Till next time!

At that time, I was 29 years old. For most of my adult life I was trying to get my visa paperwork finished so I could settle into some version of my own life. Even though I was fully living, and accomplishing so many things like making album covers for Katy Perry or illustrating a very successful children’s book, I still felt like what I had was temporary. In 2019 I got my green card. The assurance it offered helped me decide to explore the way I drew.

I painted this, along with watercolors of the ocean in plein air, and they became a starting point of some sort. I wanted to draw freer, looser pieces. I wanted to know I could fail. I wanted to know there is room for openness.

These two paintings are from this trip — I had them framed and put next to my desk at my studio. A reminder of the direction I wanted to take.

Quickly, I found myself in 2020. Meeting my new found freedom by surprise was the pandemic lockdown in New York City. Luckily, in paintings, I kept finding where I needed to go.

Slowly, I developed a relationship with watercolor. As a medium, I am still not using it for projects where I knew I would do a lot of revisions. But as a medium for my comics, I felt nourished by its fluidity and the life it seems to have on its own.

And breathe. It is what the pages did for me, when I felt like many of us were losing the grasp on the feeling of breathing freely. It was a beautiful release to paint these comics. I learned that I was not a careful painter. The colors bled out of the outlines all the time. I was not sure if it’s profitable, or sellable, but at the moment of painting, it felt perfect.

Making these pages more and more physical made me feel freer. Using the big brushes made me feel freer. I started to think that maybe a part of storytelling is to feel freedom on the page.

Which is why I am always thinking about these painted pages when I have a space to show art. When I got the framed art back from the frame shop, the shop owner and I became friends. I have been going to him for years but we have not connected this much before. Can comics really be a connective tissue? I think so.

Which brings me to the exciting part of this post — this Saturday, August 23rd, 2025, all the comics in this post, plus more original pages, will be on view in this first show I’ve ever had of my original comic pages, at Artbean Coffee in Chinatown.

🤩🤩🤩!!!

When I framed them I felt proud of having drawn them, and the hundreds of pages of comics I’ve made, while every page is working out a doubt, a question, a feeling that didn’t have a container yet.

If you are a reader of my Substack, a friend on the internet, if you are in New York, please please drop by and say hi!

We will have original art on the wall, really good coffee, new and old friends having conversations, and maybe some books you want to take home. It’s a cozy space on one of the most vibrant streets I’ve ever seen. You’ll have so many places to search for wonder when you leave the show.

See you there! 🥰🥰🥰

Searching For Wonder

The Art of Yao Xiao

Artist Meet & Greet August 23rd 1-4pm

Artbean Coffee 19 Doyers Street, New York NY 10013

On the trip from New York to Tianjin, I drew a 24-hour comic. The idea came up during the flight: I have taken this trip for most of my life for 20 years, and it’s a place and time I know well. It is an ambiguous place that lasts for seemingly eternity, a dark tunnel that connects me from an old home to a new one. Unlike buses and trains, plane travel feels surreal. It could be a dream, something that moves too fast to be true. On each side of the flight, most people don’t know anything about the other side, yet it is just a day away.

Recording the experience in a 24-hour comic, I drew a panel every hour. The experience gave this ambiguity a structure. It records what my body goes through, the people in the brief community for 24 hours, the “day” that disappears. The day that no one talks about, yet so familiar to anyone who takes annual international trips like this. I noticed especially my body tension in the beginning and how relaxed I was at the end.

Could it be a new tradition? Would anyone like to try it during your trip? Maybe in comics, we could record these lost days, where the scenery slowly change as our identities transition, all in 24 hours.

24 HOUR COMIC 7.1-7.2.2025 (All times EST!)

This comic is special to me because, you can probably tell, it is made from my sketchbook pages!

I am very excited about this new mode of making comics—like a collage, but also a drawing. When I travel, I make a ton of sketches and often forget about them. This is a quick project for myself to quite literally, tell their story.

I am about to travel this month to China again, and I will be drawing a lot in my sketchbook. I will be slower to update and give myself a vacation to draw more, and working on an important personal project.

I know the economy has been tough on many of us, and most of the folks that follow my Substack are fellow creative people. So this is no way any pressure — but if you CAN, please consider chipping in for a monthly donation through subscriptions. It will help me create more work that is authentic and experimental, and not giving in to the polished AI machine.

Hope you are taking care, wherever you are in the world!

I did another comic about the art-making process. It is a bit of a reflection on my own process, and my feelings around it.

I like to work on a huge first draft, and it is often a wild and gigantic thing — really dense writing, a lot of lists, drawings, and ideas.

Then I do the edit — trimming things away, rearranging things, constructing something out of the “raw material.” In that process, I insert something like “professionalism,” and have a goal in mind for what I’m envisioning the finish to be.

In the actual finish, I try to capture the freshness of teh original draft. Do I express what I want to express?

It is a solid process that works. I’m able to make a LOT of things using this process. When I made this comic, I do wish that I can let it come out a bit more naturally and organically. Do I feel like the material should sustain some “damage” in order to become refined? Do I think that I need to judge them somewhat coldly, at first?

So, I think even the “process” can be refined and changed over time.

What’s happening in YOUR process?

The idea for the comic came from my intensive work this month on a graphic memoir.

When I thumbnailed this comic, I wrote the prompt:

Memories are locked behind doors.

Inside, the room is overgrown.

I step inside and gets lost.

To come out, I left a body-shaped tunnel, a negative image.

A lot of my Baopu comics are inspired by a feeling that sustains over a long time, or an image that won’t let go. This one is about the inevitable change to the memory itself when I explore it again and shape it into art. Especially the memories that don’t get visited often, stories that don’t get retold often. They felt like wild backyards when the resident has moved out long ago.

Even to revisit a memory is to reshape it in many ways. So why am I working on a memoir now? Perhaps it is the desire to open the doors, and to make an open space instead of the carefully closed rooms.

In other news:

This month, I am reading a lot of great graphic novels published in the past few years.

One of them is Bunt! Striking Out On Financial Aid by Ngozi Ukazu and Mad Rupert. It is a super fun read about going to art school and playing softball with a team of friends, and it reminds me of my first year trying to figure out how to finance college.

I was there on the opening day of the new Michael C. Rockefeller wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the new wing that features the art of Africa, Ancient Americas, and Oceania (Asian Pacific Islands). I discovered that ancient Peruvian animal shaped jars are the best!! I also went back another time to do some sketches in the Greek garden! Now I have more free time in the summer, it is so nice to go to the Met regularly.

In the studio, there has been a lot of writing, drawing, and organizing, and I hope to share some of it at some point in the future. :) Right now, I enjoy having all the momentum to make new things.

Thank you for reading Baopu, till next time!

San-san sneaks out of the apartment and waits at the train station at midnight. Something is supposed to happen so she can see her grandma again. Meteors show up with no forecast and nobody else seems to know about it! The story goes on…

Annnd, till next time. 👻

So excited to share Daruma pages again! Every time I get to work on this story, I feel warm and fuzzy and giddy like a little kid. I feel like I am sneaking out into an adventure myself. This is a personal project I started while I taught and studied manga in Japan earlier this year. I am working on it with traditional techniques, getting away from the computer and “efficiency.”

It has given me so much joy! During hours of penciling, inking, cutting and applying screentones, I feel like I am leveling up on some important cartooning skills that can only be learned in the process.

Here is a step-by-step documentation of one of the pages:

First, perspective drawing and underdrawings:

Tight pencil:

Inking:

Adding texture and screentone.

The pages take a long time, sometimes over weeks to make, between other projects. I’m growing it like a delicate flower. 🌸

Thank you for reading and see you soon!

Another “Cartoon Hour” creation taken from a sketch I made two years ago. I was in grad school for creative writing, and my classmate Rosalind talked about “creative stalling.” It may be better than a creative block, and it could be just a roundabout way to get to the actual work that needs to be done. Accepting the flaws in the work while seeing a better version of it creates that physical barrier to even open the document. It is so personal. It may never work. Life is so much easier without having to solve this problem.

Writing my own book tests every limit of discipline, vulnerability, and ego. I could be more humble, more grounded, more professional, meditate more and eat less sugar, being infinitely more fit for this task perhaps…but somehow, as long as it works, it works. ☕️ (even when it is possessed.)

Another sketchbook filled up in the month between March and April. There are clues to time slowly moving from day to day. people shedding winter coats and embracing shorts and other creative solutions. Mostly still the same New Yorkers, looking tired, annoyed, in their own world yet still keenly aware of what’s going on.

As I draw, sometimes I think to myself “What am I doing?” Am I making portraits of people? Is there always a figure on every page, in the same spot, at the same angle?

So I made attempts to use the pages differently, and put some emphasis on the sense of space.

Some more successful than others.

And there are always people that are fun to draw.

“Is there a middle-class of artists? Somewhere between a starving artist and like, Spielberg?” On Saturday morning a middle-class dad wonders out loud on the B train. I’m sure everyone has some ideas but the question hangs in the air. Is there a middle-class of artists? Definitely. Should we strive to be it? Anyone who has spent time being an artists knows, the answer to selling out or making pure art is not a simple yes or no. It’s better use of our time to think about the project at hand.

Dancers rehearsing in a class at Alvin Ailey.

Someone using a hand-written planner. She has a roller bag and a broom.

Using less lines vs more lines.

That’s it for now. Try go sketching with a book!

Till next time. <3

What could be “outside” infinity?

When I feel tangled up in frustrating day-to-day tasks and feel impatient about things that remain unclear and unfinished, it helps me to remember that a day or even a year passing in my life is less a second passing in the universe’s life.

This comic is inspired by 4th century BCE philosopher Zhuangzi. In his work he contemplates the idea of “wuji （无极）”(no-limitness) and writes that “outside infinity, there’s still more infinity (无极之外，复无极也）.”

Drawing, making work feels like approaching this sense of expansive space. The more things I make, the more space there is to find new things. The world opens up slowly in that process.

I really enjoyed making this comic, which was all done in traditional pen & ink and watercolor. Scanning and adjusting colors is a new skill I’m still learning, but I really like how much time I don’t need to spend in front of a screen pushing buttons.

Baopu comics are updated every month here on my Substack. Till next time!

In other news:

In May I had two events: one was to sign books at Escape Pod Comics in Huntington, Long Island for Free Comic Books Sunday.

The other one was not really an event, but I took down my show at Land To Sea after a successful run for 2 months.

Books and art I’m excited about:

My friend Makee recently published a graphic memoir Call Me Emma. It is a bold and candid graphic retelling of the story of her life, immigrating to the United States from China with her parents, when she was 16. I was immediately drawn to how accurately she captures the dynamics of how teenagers talk and act. In the many graphic novels I read about the new-to-America experience, Makee’s depiction feels real, in the way that the real world does not often conform to our imagination.

I had a similar experience when I was in high school, so reading this book felt like something I had experienced had been spoken into a story. I think that’s the impact of making our work — they make the deep connection that casual conversations can’t.

I’m reading The Creative Act. I find it very helpful while I am actively working knee-deep in a project. If I didn’t have a project, the writing can seem nebulous and sounds like you could produce art by simply living and thinking about it, but when I am working on a book, the essays in this book are actually very specific to each step of the process!

At the end of the spring season of the Metropolitan Opera, I saw the new production of Salome, opera by Richard Strauss based on the play by Oscar Wilde. When I was in college, I tried to do a illustration series adaptation of the play/opera, which was both a capstone and the hill I almost died on. :) That was more than 12 years ago. Seeing a new production in person feels like closing a chapter and appreciating what I know now.

So in a way, this month felt like a reaching back to the past and finding how much distance and time has passed. I’ve been really enjoying sharing work on here, and it has helped me build a new momentum. Thank you for your support every week!

I actually could not recall being fearful of a monster, but there were a few monsters often used in my parents’ stories to pacify us kids. And that was when I remembered the familiar monster of Laomahou, her name so associated with childhood that I have never talked about her ever since. Laomahou is disguised as your grandma, who sleeps over when your parents are curiously “away.” The rest I can only describe in comics…

The four sisters in the story sneak out of the house, catches Laomahou with a trap. My friend Christina told me it was similar to a story she heard in her childhood. Is it a Northern Chinese tale? A Southern Chinese tale? What kind of tree did the sisters climb on, and what kind of house were they living in? I drew a country house in the dry plains in Northern Chinese inland, but I also used to imagine them climbing out of a three-story apartment building in the city I grew up in. Truly, Laomahou could visit any children, regardless where they were living.

This Sunday, May 4th, I will be tabling at my friend Menachem’s comic shop by the same name, Escape Pod Comics. If you visit their website, you may recognize the characters in this comic featured on their home page:

I did this poster for Escape Pod Comics in 2012, 13 years ago when I was still a student at SVA. I had the idea of the astronaut in an escape pod, but I didn’t know how to create more pages from it yet. I’m so excited to return to this story and bring the scene to life using the skills and experience I accumulated over the years.

This comic was published in Pacific Review’s graphic issue. (on sale here.) It was printed in color beautifully. Here I am happy to share the original comic in full.