2025 Resolutions for Comics Lovers
Little resolutions and epic goals for the new year
Happy new year! It’s time for our annual tradition of offering a variety of resolutions about making, reading, and sharing comics. We have some ambitions for 2025, and we want to dive more fully into our own creations while still promoting comics creators and the great literature making its way out into the world. Nora wants to finish a lyric essay about her favorite comic growing up, For Better or For Worse. Amaris is working on a series of comics to share her love of place (well, mostly her obsession with Scotland). If you’re looking to engage with comics in 2025, we have some ideas to get you working with comics all year round:
Little goals and epic goals
We were reading a zine about goals by Andrew Kozlowski recently, and he mentioned that when he started making comics, he decided to challenge himself to make one comic each week–and post them online. Whether or not you share your work with the world, these small efforts add up! Here are some ideas for getting started:
Keep a dream diary in comics form. Play with the surreal, the stressful, the enigmatic elements of your dreams by putting them into panels. You might get some inspiration from Windsor McCay.
Make your own artist residency. Amy Stewart became the self-appointed, unofficial artist-in-residence of Washington Park in Portland, OR. Pick a spot you love, decide on a project or idea you want to explore, and grab your utensils–and don’t forget to tell folks that you are an unofficial artist-in-residence!
Embrace fandom by making comics about your favorite sports team, cuisine, or objects in your house.
Perhaps more epic goals include:
Submitting your comics for publication. If you have nonfiction narrative comics ready to go, Crucial Comix takes submissions year round. Fieldmouse Press is open for submissions at different times throughout the year.
Venues like literary journals are great places to send shorter work. Some we like include: the comics-only anthology Rust Belt Review, Booth, and The Believer.
Getting involved at a comic convention, ‘zine fest, or other literary/comic event. SAW goes over some helpful tips if you want to get involved.
Get experimental this year
Use comics with another medium–we’ve done a lot of exploring of how comics can uniquely intersect with other mediums (Poetry comics! Comics in fine art!) so maybe this is the year to play around with materials.
Try some character studies. Last year we recommended making weekly comics about a current newspaper headline. This year it might feel cathartic to transform characters in the news into comics characters and see what wacky situations you can get them into (and out of?).
Dedicate each month to exploring a new skill or technique–you might try your hand at watercolor, collage, digital coloring, embroidery comics, woodcuts, etc.
Listen to some great podcasts about comics
Aack Cast! by Jamie Loftus is a fun podcast about the newspaper comic strip Cathy.
Nora would like to dive into Archie and Me: An Archie Comics Podcast.
Stealing Superman whisks you away on a sonic adventure to find out who stole Nicolas Cage’s Action Comics #1, featuring the caped crusader’s first appearance.
Bring others into your habits:
Host a monthly “drink and draw” or comics jam session.
Get some friends together for the 24-hour comic day.
Curious about resolutions from yonder years? Here are our thoughts from 2023 and 2024. (We are trying to not repeat the same ideas from each year!)
2025? I want to get my graphic memoir into the hands of people who can help me get it into more people's hands (publisher? agent?); laughing more would be good; I hope I discover what I can bring to the Resistance. And um, maybe lighten up for a minute here and there?