Off Haitus

On January 21 of 2020, Tilted Sun went on hiatus - what was going to be a two-week break turned into a year and half where we all went into the dark and narrow tunnel of coronavirus. The tunnel has expanded into a grand cave, full of terrors and sparkling gemstones alike.

In the spring of 2020 I got super into fitness in my yard in the DMV

I’ve recapped a bit of what I’ve been up to on my core blog, but here’s what I’ve been up to on a large scale.

During the spring of 2020 I wasn’t sure what to do with my time, so I poured a lot of energy into exercise and running. Minus DC parties and going out with friends due to covid restrictions, I didn’t think drinking beer in my yard in Maryland-shy-of-DC was fun any more, so I quit drinking around June 1 of 2020.

During the summer of 2020 it became clear that DC wasn’t going to be the place for me, I ended up selling my house and moving back to Boulder, CO, a place I have always loved and the place where I got both my degrees.

Painting plein air in Boulder

Boulder is a great place for me to be, as it’s a place that I already know and have already come back to once before. It’s much better to live here as a 30 something and not as an incredibly poor student, which is what I was when I got my art degree and my master’s in English.

My running took off quite a bit in 2020 and 2021, it was something positive that I could do during COVID and with little danger. I finished the 25 mile Collegiate Peaks Run in Buena Vista Colorado on May 1st of 2021.

I’ve been able to hike around quite a bit and make paintings of the landscape in Boulder. I wasn’t able to do this too much when I lived in Boulder before, I didn’t have a car for a long time and pretty much stayed on campus. After painting for the entire summer of 2021, I still feel that this place is almost too good to be real for a painter.

My Maxim Covergirl page, thanks to everyone who supported the page!! <3

Since I’d been hiking around, running, and staying mentally sane by keeping a physical routine, I ended up getting into modeling a bit. I’ve always modeled for Tilted Sun to get poses right and to do things like Sam’s hands, yet being back in Colorado reminded me of the more fearless spirit I had when I was a bit younger. A long time ago, I took home the Academic Achievement award at Miss Teen of Colorado! in 2021 I was able to go for Maxim Covergirl and was able to get 5th in the quarterfinals. Maxim Covergirl was a win-win-win for me, as my profile was able to raise around $2500 for Wounded Warriors.

During all of this, it’s not that I had no time to make comics. It’s that my brain was soaked into survival, constantly assessing threats or non-threats. If that sounds dramatic, it was, as the seriousness of covid took lives and upended others. It still is serious. At this point I’ve maxed out my threat-assessment credit card. It’s not that I don’t think there are still problems, it’s that I’ve done everything I possibly could to survive, and now it’s time to fully live again in the arms of art, just like I was doing in 2019.

2019 was … kickass. In the spring of 2019 I went to Japan and caught the cherry blossoms, I went to Denver Comicon and also SPX in Maryland, I was living socially in ways I just hadn’t before, and also had been managing to put Tilted Sun pages out every week. I was crushing life in DC, drawing Tilted Sun pages on the metro over the Potomac, on my way to my software boss lady job. I met a lot of cool and interesting people. I’m not sure what they thought of me.

Yours truly at the summit of Mt. Elbert, age 16

It all sounds a little insane in retrospect. So while we can’t have 2019 back, and 2020 was all but completely lost, we can have 2021 and the future in a new way. For me, it won’t look like standing on a metro platform in high heels in the dead of winter anymore. In Colorado, life is going to look more like the wild forest child which - I think - is who I really am.

I used to have vague, combative misgivings when I would casually overhear a non-artist say that trauma was good for artists. It would be like saying trauma is good for a baseball player. Yet, this is a narrative that a lot of artists deal with every day. Artists deserve stability like anyone else, and also, anyone else deserves to voice their trauma and experience in the way that artists do. I maintain that artists are not special - my experience and my pain are no different from that of the person outside my window who is laying bricks. I just choose to express my experience and thoughts in the form of art and comics.

All of this is to say, I missed the world of Sam, the Gray Woman, Jonas, Cross, Bun, Alex, and even War Things guy. Missing a work of art is like missing a person or a place. It isn’t perfect, and we love it anyways.

Welcome back to Titan.