How Baby

Let me tell you, I have had some variation on ‘that’s how’ as a punchline in the hopper for literal years, waiting for the first-day-of-school comic. It’s out there, now. It lives.

The first week of school was… something I’ll need a few comics to talk about, I think, and the break was definitely needed. Like I mentioned, you can focus so much on documenting something, on cutting it in to pithy little comic scripts, that you forget to pay attention. Momo and How Baby occupy very similar spaces in my brain, so it was good to forget one for a bit.

Taking her to school opened the mental junk drawer where I kept all my random memories – like, I’m watching her put her own backpack away, and then I’m hit with this wave of the enormity of the task behind me, all the labour that brought her to this point, ready to be released. It triggered a lot of emotions about the past five years, and how How Baby both documents and serves as a metaphor for the journey we went on together. One of those ‘wow, I never thought we’d get here’ moments that are impossible to imagine when you’re just beginning. I kept putting one foot in front of the other, and now when I look back I see the path stretching away behind me like, oh, of course, that’s how I did it.

How Baby’s been going for a long time, and with the exception of the break I took last week, I’ve only really skipped a comic here and there because I was traveling. That’s a long time for a webcomic, and a track record that I’m really proud of. But I have a confession: for a long time, I’d thought about ending the comic when Momo started school; it is called How Baby, after all.

I made the decision to keep making How Baby for three reasons: the first is, of course, I’m a mouthy broad who undoubtedly is going to have plenty to say about school. But the second is you guys. You’ve watched Momo grow up, just like I have. People come up to me at shows and talk to me like we’re a part of their family, and I think that’s really special. And I want to keep making comics for Momo too, so she can look back and… you know, continue to not listen to me, from across time. 😉

And as for the actual first day of school itself – well, I’m looking forward to untangling all my Emotions over the next few strips. 🙂