tara booth compiles 100 hilarious comics that have been getting her through it

We last covered comic artist Tara Booth in 2019 when she released her book Cabin In the Woods, exploring the difficulties of city dwelling, and the possibilities of her going totally nomad and living out in the wilderness. Five years later, we’ve caught up with Tara following the release of her latest collection of comics, Processing: 100 comics that got me through it. “I am still single, still wishing I lived in the woods and still carrying all of my big messy feelings around wherever I go,” she tells It’s Nice That.

Known for her unreserved vulnerability and brilliantly raw sense of humour, the artist has been putting her comics out into the online world pretty regularly over the past decade. This latest book, however, is a “big fat collection of work I’ve made the last eight years or so”, says Tara. Compiling comics from as early as 2016, it took the artist up to two years to get all of her illustrations in order and find new narratives that would loosely weave them together. Whilst some of the stories in the publication were made with a brief in mind, most of the comics, Tara says, were a way to process a whole host of emotions in amongst the personal ups and downs of own her life — things that all of us can relate to: “a break up, a big move, depression, body stuff, attachment issues etc. Making comics is like journaling for me,” she says.

As expected, Tara is definitely the main character in the book — “aside from my dogs and a few ex-boyfriends here and there”, she adds. With such an autobiographical narrative, it was naturally quite important to keep the focus on herself, of course. “I don’t wanna throw anyone under the bus, I tend to feel most comfortable making my character the butt of the joke,” she explains.

Covering everything from sobriety to dating and the ‘healing’ process, the terrifically self-aware collection holds relatable and reassuring accounts of the everyday trials and tribulations of life, and the larger things that make it so hard to get through it. Genuine and fearless, Tara’s colourful, painted comics bear witness to the realities of our more honest thoughts and feelings, without forgetting to be relentlessly funny. “The more emotional comics are helpful for me because I’m able to take my “out of control” feelings and use painting and storytelling to wrangle and reformat my thoughts into more manageable, contained little packages,” Tara says. “My biggest hope is that if I’m good enough at synthesising anxieties and thought patterns into digestible comics, then other people can see themselves in my work and maybe get some of that peace by reading.”

So far the collection has been a huge success, a marker of which might have been a glowing review from the The New York Times — “an article that opened by quoting one of my comics from the book about licking buttholes… (sigh)” Tara says. “Not exactly the review I was hoping to forward to my parents.” Alongside this, many of the artist’s readers have reached out to thank her personally for making the book, “saying that they felt very seen by it [...] I couldn’t ask for more than that,” she says. “I feel like my comics are serving the purpose that I always wanted, to make people feel less alone.”

Processing: 100 comics that got me through it is out now, published by Drawn and Quarterly.