Post 5- Connie Sun

"Being able to laugh at yourself is the closest thing I can think of to a superpower in life." 

Connie Sun is an Asian-American cartoonist from California, living in New York City. She "works in higher education by day, and loves all things creative." I follow her on her Blogger, where she posts a new cartoon everyday, generating about 1-10 likes per day from her readers. Her cartoons consist of her daily thoughts and pep talks to herself. I first discovered her when my high school friend introduced me to her work after attending a free comic books event in NYC. I continued to follow Ms.Sun because I found her daily comics to be consistently profound and similar to my own experience as a single Asian girl trying to make something out of myself through academics and art while living in NYC. 

Ms. Sun first got into making comics at the get of 29, after she bought her first graphic novel at a comic book store. Before that, she had been reading newspaper comics such as Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes (1). Seeking a need for a creative outlet for drawing and writing, which she initially distinguished as two different forms of emotional expression, Connie decided to combine the two by making web comics, and has been doing so for about four years. In her own words, "cartoons are an attempt to make sense of what I see and hear and feel at a given time". Besides her desire to understand her own thoughts and behavior in relation to the general human experience, her comics also illustrate her desire to understand animal behaviors since she grew up without pets back in her hometown in Los Angeles. For example, one of the recurring characters in her cartoons is an elephant who gives her pep talks and keeps her company.  

Drawing from personal experiences, Connie's character serves as a reference point, a cue that she is writing from a certain perspective and context. In fact, the theme of all her cartoons, "Single Girl, Asian Daughter", is what makes her works feminist. Although she recognizes and puts out there that she is single, she doesn't devalue herself. Instead, she tracks the source of her thoughts, such as her traditional Asian parents' influence, and self reflects on her environment in order to make sense of why she thinks these things and how she deals with these thoughts. Her work is also feminist in that , even though she claims to be an introvert, she exercises her agency to represent herself through a medium with which she is comfortable receiving criticism from. Connie recognizes that part of the process of being an artist is consistently making deadlines, despite the quality and resulting satisfaction or otherwise, and letting things go in order to move forward. By letting things go, she gives herself the power to continue updating her blog with comics of her latest thoughts, which give people either a new view on life, or the unanticipated realization that we are all the same in major and profound ways. Below, I've compiled a few of her comic strips which pass the Bechdel Test:

Sometimes Connie talks to herself about herself.	Other times, you'll find cartoons of Connie talking to another female. #passesbechdeltest
A typical phone call with her mother. Featured on Angry Asian Man. #passesbechdeltest	But most of the time, you will find cartoons of her talking to her elephant friend. This comic touches upon the issue of climate change.