This year marked my eighth year participating in Hourly Comic Day, which I was first introduced to by Lucy Bellwood way back in 2016, I believe? (You can read Lucy’s hourlies here: they are gorgeous and emotional and funny and tender and deeply inspiring.)

The ‘goal’ of Hourly Comic Day is to draw a bit of autobiographical comic for every hour you’re awake.  It might be a page, it might be a strip, it might be a single panel. By the end of the day, you have created a full comic of your day. If you’ve been participating for a few years, you end up with a really nice record of what each of your first of Februarys looks like. 

I started mine when Bee was six years old and rereading them lets me watch how she grows in a really unique way. For various Hourly Comic Days, I’ve been in Fribourg, in Berlin, in Basel, with friends, alone, working traditionally or with strange constraints and games I make up for myself, working in ink only, ink and marker, or my favorite – messy happy watercolor. This year was a special treat – I took Bee with me and we wandered around and made comics together all day long! (She quit keeping up with her comic around 5 PM – not bad at all for a first try!)

You can read all of this year’s comic below – along with a page of Bee’s creation! I loved seeing the different ways we interpreted shared moments and I hope she will be up to try again next year. 

If you want to do a little bit of time-travel, you can read all my hourly comics here, except for 2021, which I forgot to scan and might have lost since then?!? Fitting.