Saturday Morning Cartoons: Little Monster

Welcome to Saturday Morning Cartoons, a segment where four artists take turns delighting you with their whimsy, facts and punchlines on Saturday mornings! Our esteemed cartoon critters are Cameron GlavinAnna BongiovanniMegan Praz and Yao Xiao. Today’s cartoon is by Cameron!


Little-Monster

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Cameron

Cameron is an illustrator hailing from Ohio. When she’s not drawing, she’s probably very, very quietly having loud thoughts about: queer things, her eventual shop, what to watch next on Netflix, food, names for her future pets, and tumblr.

Cameron has written 76 articles for us.

51 Comments

  1. You have no idea how much i needed this today…Saturday morning cartoons are always my highlight but this…THIS

  2. I have been having the worst week and this is amazing!

    Just knowing that someone else has a feelings-monster to deal with makes me feel better.

    I’ll put this on the good-things-about-the-internet-when-you’re-sad side of the equation.

  3. This was great! Such a familiar scenario to me.

    It reminded me of this animated video I watched the other day. Sharon Salzberg expands on the two wolves story.

  4. I feel like this is putting my little toddler monster in perspective right now, I needed this. I love Saturday morning cartoons. Thanks.

  5. just wanted to mention this toddler tantrum analogy is also supported by evolutionary biology — our emotions evolved to serve the purpose of over-riding our logical brains and forcing us to pay attention to our feelings. Emotions are a tool for understanding group dynamics, which is life-or-death important in social animals. i read about it in this great book called Animals are What Make us Human by Temple Grandin.

    Anyway, awesome cartoon. Thank you for sharing your art with us!

    • I just checked it out, that book sounds so interesting! And then I watched an interview. This is a super cool insight into an alternative way of thinking about how we think. Thanks for sharing that!

      • even though it’s about animal welfare, that book totally helped me get through a break-up lol by helping me understand that my need to wallow is not pathetic, it’s just how brains are supposed to work. so cool you checked out Grandin’s work and i’m glad you liked it! also just to say again i love all your cartoons here on AS. :^D

  6. thank you for this! my life is already overwhelming trying to figure out how to adult without my depression yelling at me for fucking it up. solidarity <3

  7. I can only echo all the comments above by saying this is excellent and entirely too relevant to my life right now. Thank you, Cameron!

  8. The timing, oh the timing on this is perfect. Sometimes my feelings monster stuffs all my feelings in a bag and hides it so that I don’t feel anything and don’t respond in a way that “feels like me” to emotional stimuli. And then it rips the bag open and dumps it over my head so I feel everything at once.

    I’ve been looking for a way to frame or describe these things and you’ve given me a great tool for doing so. Thanks.

    • Ugh yeah. I feel this more than Cameron’s cartoon because my depression is more likely to present itself as “void” instead of emotions.

  9. Now I know why sometimes when I see a small child having a meltdown, I feel like I wish someone would attend to me like the parents/guardian of the crying child are. It’s because my little depression monster needs to be taken care of too.

  10. This is a great perspective. But what if your depression symptoms are a complete absence of feelings, good or bad? That’s what I experience.

  11. This was really helpful to me, thanks! I really love this comic series.

    I like the visual style better when it is completely hand-written, though. It let’s me to get into the feeling described completely, and makes the panels poetic somehow.

    Thanks for a great comic!

    • Thank you so much!

      I actually love it when artists use handwritten stuff, so that’s something I’ll have to explore more in my own work.

  12. Wow. Yes. This. Depression creature and anxiety beastlings is how I shall try to see them now. Much easier than trying to be kind to myself when I’m not good cause I don’t feel worth being kind to then – I’ll try to be kind to my wee beasties instead.

  13. I love this! I’m in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), where we call the little monster Emotion Mind. Logic Mind is the part of you that “knows better” and fights with the monster, usually unsuccessfully. The goal is to build up your Wise Mind, which is the part that sits down with the monster and validates it and finds a healthy solution. It’s been really hard for me to see my Emotion Mind as valid, so thinking of it as a cute, hurting little monster will help.

  14. YES to the United States of Tara reference!!

    This is how I feel about my anxiety. So much easier to manage as a tiny monster before I let it grow out of control.

  15. oh my goodness this is perfect. This is the very exercise that I hate the most in therapy, but it’s also the most effective.

  16. Oh my goodness, Cameron. You are my hero. I was just having a day like this a couple days ago. One of those days where I’m not so overwhelmed by depression that I can’t use my rational brain. But I can only use my rational brain to see how much my depressed brain is being a little shit. Thank you for this suggestion. My strategy has always been to repress and ignore just like you said even though (as you also say) that just makes my depressed brain get bigger and want to dominate things more. Thank you thank you thank you for helping me see my depression in a funny way. It really helps. More than I can say.

  17. I relate to this so much. I’m so quick to sit with little kids and ask them what’s wrong but I never made this connection before.

    This is just amazing to me.

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