Important matters
Social media comics and praising muggles.
Welcome to the first ramble of the year!
17 days into 2026, and it seems that we already have enough traumatising world events to justify a whole chapter in future history books. It appears that this has been a building tradition during the last decade… but still, we’re here to swim towards another direction.
I started the year revisiting old, old work. It’s a good exercise, especially considering that I’ve been trying to swim against an increasingly cynical, angry and disappointed state of being. The good news: I’m preparing for a solo exhibition (more on that later!), and since I don’t have time until the opening to reinvent myself completely with a new, fresh and extensive body of work, I’ll have to accommodate with the person that I already am. Every time I’m forced to face my old work, I get trapped re-reading my old daily comics, cartoons and silly comic strips.
This piece of fine graphic literature from 2023 is proof that I actually used to do “funny” cartoons. But then, I decided to “half-quit” Instagram (I’m still using it to doomscroll, but I don’t contribute to the feed anymore, kinda) as a superficial form of “protest” by moving on to this platform instead, where all the smart people rant about social media as if this is not just another sort of social media as well. I thought I would keep doing my cartooning here, but it didn’t really happen. Instead, something else happened. I’m still trying to figure out what the hell is happening.
Anyway, to keep my mind sane, I like to soothe myself with video games, preferably sandbox, open-world simulators, and my current drug is Hogwarts Legacy, a Harry Potter Universe open-world spin-off. I treat myself with it after finishing boring but hard adult tasks, such as the semester reports for my ongoing PhD, or grading students, or anything at all that is slightly bureaucratic, and I don’t fully agree and/or understand.
And so, I went down memory lane (my Toshiba hard drive) and found those comics. Back in 2020, I ended up making four episodes/strips about this one muggle-born boy who wanted to be a normal kid in muggle world, but was forced to attend this weird boarding school where no one plays Magic but uses magic to bully him. See it as a weird take on Monty Python’s Life of Brian premise/formula, but for the millennial generation. I’ll share with you my favourite strip/episode, and I hope you’ll find it amusing and entertaining enough to maybe even replace the standard narrative of the special boy who battles Voldemort and saves the world (boring).
Now, off the screen.
Until next time!
Joana