Over the weekend, I made a series of witchy comic strips, the sort where I drop the witch into all the petty little situations making ordinary life feel like a test of spiritual endurance. It felt deliciously cathartic. Not wholesome, nor elevated, and never “rise above it” energy. More like letting the dark little imp in my psyche finally get a speaking role. So if someone bumps the queue with the smug confidence of a person who thinks manners are for other people, she doesn’t just roll her eyes and let it go. No, she sends them straight into the realm of hell. If the delivery driver claims he knocked when I was sitting three feet from the door the entire time, phone in hand, receiving a maddening little “delivery attempted” notification while hearing no knock at all, then the witch quietly hands him over to doom. There is another one for the neighbor who reports every trivial thing to the local council, and another for the neighbor who watches every move like a nosy little gargoyle in human form. In these strips, all of them meet grim and ridiculous endings, and I will admit there is deep satisfaction in it. I take all the low-grade fury, the tiny humiliations, the daily absurdities we are asked to swallow with a smile, and turn them into art with claws. I let the witch do what I don’t do in real life. She avenges the microscopic insults, the needling invasions.
It all feels terribly Scorpio, Pluto, 8th-house in spirit, which is probably why I love it so much. There is the same underworld flavor to it, the same attraction to shadow, revenge fantasy, taboo emotion, and the gleeful intimacy of watching irritation rip off its cardigan and reveal its fangs. The humor comes from exaggeration, of course, yet the pleasure runs deeper. These little comics let me play in the territory of rage, justice, punishment, and hidden desire without pretending I am made only of light and gracious understanding. Frankly, some days gracious understanding needs a nap.
Medusa, Lamia, the Furies, banshees, revenants, and other creatures or women associated with the underworld, vengeance, death, taboo, and exile often stir sympathy in Plutonian people. They are never just monsters. They are usually the exiled, the misunderstood, the demonized, the women and beings onto whom everyone else has dumped fear, suspicion, and fascination. They carry the energy of power and it unsettles people. They live at the edge of what society calls acceptable, and there is honesty in this edge. I feel compassion for them, even when they are monstrous, perhaps especially then. There is pain under the curse, loneliness under the terror, and a long history of being turned into a warning rather than being understood as a soul.
So these comics are funny, though they are also an odd little ritual of release. The witch does what we all too civilized to do. She does what I am too law-abiding to do. She turns frustration into myth, triviality into drama, and petty grievance into operatic damnation. Honestly, there is healing somewhere in here. It won’t be the angelic kind with white light and forgiveness floating through the curtains. The more satisfying kind, where the underworld gets a sketchbook and finally tells its side of the story.
There is swearing in these comics, so if it isn’t your thing, consider this your little warning to glide past them with your innocence intact. Although, amusingly, I apparently have a fairly specific tolerance for swearing myself. I watched part of Ricky Gervais’s cat programme on Netflix and found the amount of swearing a bit much for my liking, while my seventy-year-old mother absolutely loved it and happily watched the whole thing. So clearly we all have very different thresholds for what feels funny, excessive, or cathartic.
My mother thinks I am far too emotionally precious about these things, which I find hilarious considering I am also the person making comic strips where mildly irritating strangers are being hurled into hell by an enraged witch. Give me occult revenge fantasies, doomed delivery drivers, cursed queue-jumpers, and psychologically unhinged witches and I am perfectly comfortable. Give me too much swearing in a comedy special and suddenly I am clutching my pearls. We all have our own emotional volume controls, and they are rarely consistent. What one person finds cathartic, another finds too much. My mother will happily sit through language making me wince, while I will happily create a witch condemning a nosy neighbor to an elaborate supernatural punishment and call it therapeutic.
So yes, there is swearing in the comics. There is also darkness, petty rage, ridiculous over-the-top punishment for the crime itself, Scorpio-Pluto-8th-house energy, and probably a few moments where the witch behaves exactly as badly as we secretly wish we could when someone tests the limits of our patience. If you are sensitive to swearing, skip them. If you are not, welcome to the underworld.
