🌫️ Numb
He told himself it wasn’t that bad. He took two more.
📖 Behind the Story
Some pain announces itself. It walks in the front door, knocks over the furniture, and makes you call someone. That’s not the pain I wanted to draw.
The pain I wanted to draw is the kind that gets quiet. The kind that fits between your ribs, that lets you keep driving, that makes you say things like “I’m fine” and almost believe it. The kind that comes wrapped in two pills and a steering wheel and a voice on the other end of the phone you can’t quite hear.
Marcus isn’t a stranger.
He’s the cousin you texted last week. The coworker who started laughing too easily. The person you might have been once, when something hard happened, and the easiest thing was to just keep moving.
When I heard Noah Kahan’s “Growing Sideways” for the first time, what hit me wasn’t the metaphor itself. It was how casual it sounded. How he sings about therapy and meds and panic and disappearing, all in this loose, almost cheerful melody.
That’s what depression looks like in a lot of us, isn’t it? Not crying on the floor. Just driving sideways.
What I wanted to capture in this piece is the moment before someone breaks. The moment they choose, very quietly, not to. Not because they don’t want to feel. But because they don’t trust themselves to survive it.
On the Visual Process
The cover opens on two pills, golden and lit from within, the only warmth in the entire piece.
By the final panel, they’ve gone grey.
That shift was the first visual decision and the most deliberate. What looks like relief at the start looks like something else entirely by the end.
Marcus moves between concealment and exposure. The early panels keep him hunched, face buried. Then there’s a full panel: eyes forward, rain streaking the glass, nowhere to hide.
That’s where the zine asks its hardest question.
Later, he appears only in the rearview mirror, watching himself drive away from the moment.
The text panels break the sequence like a held breath. Cracked and shattered textures behind the words, because some things can only be said on a surface that’s already broken.
The phone call is the hinge. Someone reaches out. He answers. He says “it’s okay.” He drives on.
And the road blurs behind him.
💭 A Question for You
What’s a song you put on when you can’t quite say what you’re feeling?