Afternoon Snack

It’s another week of our favorite stuff on the internet!


Comics heroes Iron Circus have a new anthology in the works, with submissions opening on February 1! It’s called You Died: An Anthology of the Afterlife and looks like a ton of morbid fun.


The Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts also has an interesting and unusual opportunity for cartoonists: a call for submissions to their Special Exhibit, Origin Stories: Comics and Identity. It’s a juried show, with POME fave Ben Passmore exhibiting as the featured artist. Submissions are due February 3, and their typical application fee has been waived!


Charlie Jane Anders has some really good, counterintuitive writing advice: play to your weaknesses, not your strengths.


Jennifer Hom,  Experience Design Manager of Product Illustration at Airbnb, put out a case study on creating illustration guidelines for a more inclusive visual identity, which is, of course, beautifully illustrated! She’s also a self-described anime nerd, which we can always get behind.


After a white lady prominent in the online knitting community posted a racist and reductive blog post about traveling to India, a huge conversation sparked and POC online strongly confronted the white privilege of many of those in the knitting community. Here’s just one knitter’s take, but there’s so many more and they are all so powerful. We’re really happy to see these marginalized voices being recognized in what many (white women) assumes was a welcoming and inclusive community.

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It has been exhausting. It’s exhausting to consistently have to defend your position as a POC. It is exhausting to fight back on hundreds, thousands of years of wrong-doings and normalizing behavior that is damaging to different groups and groups of people. It is easy for non-POC to say, “I don’t have to worry about this” or “not my problem” and it’s difficult to point out, “yes, yes it is your problem”. Your actions, whether you are aware or not, can either continue or end racism, discrimination, etc. You not being aware is not the end of it. When someone takes the time and courage to point to you how you are perpetuating damaging views, it is that time that you Learn to be aware of how you are continuing these actions instead of ending them. If you don’t want to do anything, well that is honestly your privilege. You have the privilege of living your life perfectly untouched or uninfluenced by these behaviors because you as a non-POC have the option to. A POC does not have that option. They live, on a daily basis, with the color of their skin as a factor in their day to day life. I live in constant fear that someone might throw a racist slur at me or attack me because “I am not from here”. I have been encountered by racist comments and actions to my face and did nothing. Sometimes I’m so in shock that this shit is still happening that I can’t move or respond. But in these moments, it’s really a fight or flight response. I can say something and risk being actually harmed or I let the words be said and ignore them. Both can be devastating. But that’s why it’s important to use your voice in these platforms to get the message across. It’s safer and it can be effective. The people I am scared would actually harm me are people who won’t actually learn or change. I can never reach those people. But the people who want to learn and spread the message, they can make a difference and conversations and dialogue like this can really bring a lot to the light. Thank you for reading and I hope we all continue to learn and grow for a world we can be proud of living in.

A post shared by Tina 謝 “Say” (she/her/她) (@tina.say.knits) on


This additional response by a knitting blogger named Atia is also excellent, and includes a ton of POC creators to follow.

Pomegranate Magazine

Pomegranate Magazine

POMEmag is the internet’s premier pastel, macabre feminist dork publication. Or at least, a very pastel, macabre feminist dork publication that is leaning into that identity pretty hard.
POMEgranate Magazine