Be Everything at Once: Tales of a Cartoonist Lady Person

by Dami Lee

The first comic I ever drew happened because I was out of options. Id always been interested in art, so in college, I ambitiously applied to be a design editor at my school newspaper and was called in to do a layout test. I was in charge of designing our high school yearbook, so I was confident that my skills in punching up pages with made-up quotes like “Marching band is the best thing that ever happened to me!—Rebecca Yue, Grade 10” would translate well into university-level journalism. I was given one hour to look at the front page of the newspaper and recreate it in InDesign. I knew immediately that I wasn’t going to pass, but I still took the entire hour to fail elaborately, and left the office drenched in humiliation sweat. A couple of months later, I had the reckless nerve to reapply to the paper, this time for an artist position. The assignment was to draw one editorial illustration to accompany an article, and one cartoon. If I can be completely honest here, “illustrator” generally sounds like a way cooler job than “cartoonist.” “Illustrator” evokes images of a brilliant artsy-type who just has a natural gift for layering clothes in an effortlessly chic way, whereas a “cartoonist” is someone who you have to pull aside privately to let them know they are wearing their shorts backwards. Fueled by my fantasy of becoming the former, I tried to focus more on the illustration part of the assignment than the cartooning part, but despite my best efforts, the editors saw m...

The last part tho...