Category: Comics & Zines

Before this summer, I didn’t know much about rowing at all. I’d never seen it in person, at most maybe saw a few clips of it in the Olympics on TV. None of my schools had rowing so it was completely off my radar. Back in summer 2023 I listened to the Lessons in Chemistry audiobook during my long commutes into DC for my internship and the main character (also named Elizabeth lol) learns to row in it. I think that planted a seed in my head.

When I moved to Albany I did look up rowing out of curiosity and saw that there was a rowing club. It took me two years to look it up again, and then have the guts to sign up. The page you sign up on warns that you need to pass a swim test certification (and you had to find a lifeguard on your own to administer it) and that you should be capable of lifting 25-30 pounds overhead, since an 8 person boat can weigh 200 pounds.

Upper-body strength is not my strong (ha) suit and in general I was pretty nervous about applying myself in an athletic situation. I would not use the words sporty or athletic to describe myself. I am a former marching band nerd, recreationally ride my bike on preferably flat surfaces, and my most recent group physical activity has been tap dancing. So I am perhaps “active”, but I have never gone to the gym.

However my love of boats (mostly kayaks and ferries up until this point) overrode all that. So I signed up, slightly comforted by the “no experience required” messaging.

I drew a doodle diary on a sticky note following each practice. Pardon the typos! I know how to spell sculling now. Here they are:

For no reason in particular I thought that it was a “do learn to row 1 this summer and then advance to learn to row 2 next summer” situation. Somehow that got in my brain, but that was false! So I signed up for Learn t0 Row 2. Due to vacation, I had to miss 2 weeks and they graciously let me make them up… in the morning.

I had a fun time, boats are cool, I learned a lot, and I liked being active after sitting at work all day. If you’re reading this you should try rowing, I just think it’s neat.

The most surprising thing I learned is that the shoes you put your feet in are bolted inside the boat and it’s the seat that moves! And it is not an “arm” sport. The description of “hanging off the oars” or seeing the oars as a weight you are lifting (lift with your legs! wrists flat!) helped me grasp the correct motion.

At any rate, thanks for reading. Last weekend I had a good time riding around at the regatta in a launch boat (despite the persistent rain) and am still scouring facebook marketplace.

Back when I first learned how to LiDAR scan in the summer of 2022, I noticed how creepy the resulting hole was after cutting out people in the point cloud, as well as the trace of movement if it caught a person walking by. They looked like ghosts! In August 2022 I wrote down the idea of ghost hunters who use historic documentation as a guise to get access to haunted properties.

In July 2024 I caved to my brother’s pressure and started playing Phasmophobia with him and some other friends. I do not regularly partake in the horror genre in any form, but investigating ghosts (not fighting them) turned out to be pretty fun once we got to know all the ghost behaviors. And we got to mess around with all the ghost investigation equipment. The idea was still rattling around in my brain, so in a way it was research!

Things felt kind of full circle in October 2024 when I found that National Park After Dark did an episode featuring Antietam’s Piper Farm, the farmhouse I documented in summer 2022. The building is (supposedly) haunted, it is part of the site of the “bloodiest day in American history” after all. I have to report that I experienced no paranormal activity during my week there. I was oftentimes sitting alone in rooms on the floor with a clipboard, but also rarely past 5pm… so maybe not peak ghost activity time.

Asking someone if they believe in ghosts always feels like a round about way of asking if they believe in the afterlife. Personally I am pretty ghost-agnostic. I mean, it’d be interesting if they were real. If they do exist, let’s not mess with them and be respectful, right? Dark Tourism and the ethics of capitalizing on a place’s supposed haunted-ness was a topic of discussion in my Curating Culture class for my museums minor in college. Context and how the information is conveyed is really important. Whose ghosts are we telling the stories of? Are we exploiting their deaths, playing it up for drama? Should we convey their life stories in a different way? I think that is something to keep in mind.

A building’s history is interwoven with the history of the people who lived (and died) there. Living humans are intrinsically linked to their built environments, so of course the dead ones are too. Heck, even in Beetlejuice the ghosts can’t leave the house they haunt, unless they feel like being eaten by a sandworm. If ghosts are real, they would be stewards of the building they inhabit just by nature of being there, observing the changes around them over time.

In 2025 I started doodling more to expand on my ideas, and shifted it to instead be people documenting a house who stumble upon a ghost through the use of a LiDAR scanner. They realize the ghost can be a primary source who can help unravel the history of the house for their Historic Structure Report, and enlist the help of someone more in tune with spirits to communicate more effectively with it. Enter Louise, Andy, and Neil.

In April 2026 I debuted the first version of Haunted Structure Report at Kingston Independent Comic Expo. I am trying to do the “make it exist first and then make it perfect” and “fail faster” type of approach. I have lots of ideas in my head and sometimes you just have to get something out and see where it lands, and know that you can improve upon it later. So this 16-page version is in no way the definitive final form of this idea, but a first foray into a comic that is a bit more fictional/elaborate than other things I have made recently.

Eventually (maybe for spooky season?) I will post Haunted Structure Report as it exists now online, but in the meantime I hope you have enjoyed this little peek behind the scenes of the idea.

I used to draw a doodle diary everyday from 2017 til early 2020 (I can bet you can guess what caused me to stop lol). I’d draw it on my surface laptop and post it on my tumblr blog.

At the end of December, I came across Sophie Yanow’s gentle comic habit via Lisa Hanawalt and figured I would give it a shot. It would bring me back to drawing everyday with a bit of a different structure. I wouldn’t necessarily be documenting what I did each day, and I wanted to draw on paper instead. I altered the rule to add a minute everyday you draw (which would end the year with drawing for 6 hours if you were rigidly sticking true to form) to be instead “the day of the month= how many minutes to spend drawing”. I was largely drawing during my lunch break and I didn’t want to ever go over 31 minutes. And speaking of time limit, I decided later in the month that the minutes would moreso be a cap than a strict “must draw for all twenty-plus minutes”- if I have a quick idea, I am not gonna stretch it out. Which might be against the point, but at least for now, I care more about doing something consistently than building a ton of stamina.

I did miss drawing January 19 & 20, but can you blame me? I caught up on the 21st.