I started drawing diary comics in 2016, at the suggestion of my therapist.

She recommended I create a simple-to-draw character that would allow me to focus on externalizing my feelings through art without getting too hung up on making sure every line was perfect.

Incidentally, Windsor & Newton had just bought the Promarker/Brushmarker line of products from Letraset, so my local art store was selling off the markers with the old branding for pennies on the dollar. This is important because up until this point, my main method for producing art was to draw it in graphite, then scan it so that I could color it digitally. It was a time consuming method, and didn’t lend itself well to quick, organic expression.

I sat myself down on the couch with my handful of new markers to design my new persona. I considered several options—a deer, a cat, a skeleton, even a triangle—before settling on a corvid, inspired by the huge flocks I regularly saw walking home from work.

At the time, I left the species intentionally vague, as I didn’t yet know how to tell crows and ravens apart. Now that I do know, and know that the birds I was seeing on my walks were indeed American crows rather than common ravens, I have retroactively decided that my corvid is a crow as well. As I hadn’t bought a black or gray marker, I decided to color the feathers purple, which was and is my favorite color; I made the eyes red, my second favorite.

The first comic I ever drew with the Corvid looks pretty different from how my strips looks now. I hadn’t figured out what liners played well with alcohol-based markers yet, so the Micron pen I’d used smeared badly. I colored in the speech bubbles pale yellow, a stylistic choice I would drop later on when I realized that I went through pastel colored markers at an astonishing rate and needed to conserve them whenever possible. The design of the Corvid himself hadn’t quite settled; I wasn’t used to drawing him yet. Finally, the Corvid indicates that his name is Dave which, at the time, made sense; they were comics about me and my life. Only later did I realize that I wanted a bit of distance between my persona and my actual self. Just as I’d retroactively decided that the Corvid was a crow, I decided that I would avoid using names in my comics. I started referring to the character just as ‘the Corvid.’

I’d been consistently posting my drawings (mostly fan-art) to my Tumblr account for about four years, so I started uploading my comics, not expecting them to get more than a handful of notes.

However, about a week after I posted my second strip, a larger account reblogged it. It started circulating widely, and people started following my blog because of it. My comic strips were suddenly getting hundreds of likes and reblogs.

As the comic continued past the first few strips, I started adding new characters.

The very first additions were the Internal Dialogue Corvids, a pair of crows that looked like my Corvid, but were red and blue rather than purple. They represent internal conflicts and debates. The Red Corvid is passionate, impulsive, and easy to anger; the Blue Corvid is rational, depressive, and easily discouraged. Unlike the “Shoulder Angel/Shoulder Devil” trope they’re based off of, neither one is consistently in the right about every issue.

Next to be added was the Squirrel, based on my partner, Aidan. At the time, we lived in a house that had two black squirrels who would scamper around the yard. Aidan adored them, and asked to be portrayed as a black squirrel as well, with eyes the same color as the Corvid, to show how much the Squirrel loved him (aw). Towards the beginning of my comic making adventure, I often asked friends to write scripts about their own emotions that I could illustrate as practice; Aidan has written many scripts for my comics over the years.

In an attempt to avoid confusion about why animal characters would keep other animals as pets, I decided that any pet, regardless of what species it is in real life, would be represented by a generic-looking bug. I think this has ultimately caused just as much confusion as I was trying to avoid, since I seem like the type of person to have pet bugs, and people are startled to learn that the “bugs” in the comic are reptiles in real life.

My friends have made their way into my comics on occasion. I feel very strongly about always portraying others in a way that they’re ok with when I draw my comics, so each is asked beforehand and allowed to choose their own animal that will represent them.

In the past four years I’ve drawn over 850 diary comics. I’ve drawn them about anxiety and depression, love and personal triumphs, gender and sexuality, insomnia and body image and skin picking. I’ve posted each of them online, and each one has found its way to others who are going through the same things I am, as we all try to live our lives one day at a time.