So I came home from North Carolina. We’d been there during Hurricane Helene, up in the mountains about 20 miles from Asheville. We were fine—worried, irritated, fine. Trees down, but not on the family house. Power outages, water outages, road damage—”our” road was okay. So it was stressful, but not devastating…to us. For this I am grateful.

Looking for water (baby nieces needed it for formula), we saw lots of mud and washouts, roads out and mudslides, trees and power lines down, many out-of-gas cars… BUT we also saw people passing supplies to people, and staff at Ingles (a grocery store) give perishables to people so help each other out. We saw people help clear spaces in large parking lots for helicopters. I saw later on YouTube plenty of misinformation about unhelpful behavior, and I saw lots more on Facebook about helpful people. (Funny thing, those algorithms. The YouTube suggestions are drawing on Someone Else’s watch history, not mine. They have my pity; the world is not as dark as they see.)

That, and being frustrated at me not helping more, led to me breaking free (maybe) of a LONG dry undrawing stretch. And here is this sketch.

 This has not been a year of drawing for me, for reasons. And those reasons are still ongoing (that’s why the billing pauses, one of which I scheduled a while ago and another I just turned on—I can’t charge for what I’m not doing). I did have a few bursts, which is why you got stretches of scheduled sketch-a-week here and there.

All that said: I find the idea in this sketch hopeful. It’s the world I live in.