The Orthodontist Who Stopped Drawing

SAVE THE DATE! DMA#49 next Tuesday @ 12:30pm I'm talking to Grant Snider about his new book!

There are very few people in the cartooning world who can make you feel slightly existential with just a few lines of colored pencil and a handful of perfectly chosen words...

Grant Snider is one of those people.

I’ve been a fan of Grant’s work for a long time. If you aren’t already following his Substack, Incidental Comics, you are missing out on one of the most thoughtful, consistent, and visually poetic corners of the internet. You should rectify that immediately.

Who is this guy?

For the uninitiated, Grant occupies a very specific niche in the creative ecosystem. He is a prolific illustrator and author whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and The Kansas City Star.

But here is the “glitch in the simulation” part of his backstory: Grant is also a practising orthodontist.

By day, he is literalising the mechanics of human smiles in Kansas; by night (and early morning), he is dissecting the mechanics of the creative soul. He lives in the tension between a highly technical medical career and a life of deep, artistic inquiry… I like it a lot.

Grant is about to release a brand new book titled The Year I Stopped Drawing, and you can (and should) pre-order it right now.

It’s a graphic memoir about a creative identity crisis. It follows a year where he stepped away from his usual routines to figure out what actually matters when the “making” stops. As someone who currently spends 90% of my waking life hunched over a drawing board, the premise of this book both gives me hives and a profound sense of curiosity.

I’ve wanted to sit down with Grant for a long time to talk about the “double life” of an artist and how he manages to be so prolific while keeping people’s braces in check.

Save the Date:

We are going live next week for a deep-dive conversation and a live drawing session::

• WHEN: 12:30pm EDT, next Tuesday, 19th May.

• WHERE: Right here on Substack Live.

• ACCESS: The live stream is FREE for everyone to tune in and join the chat.

• THE REPLAY: As always, the full video replay and the deep-dive recap essay will be paywalled for premium subscribers only.

If you want to watch two cartoonists talk shop about the creative process (and see if I can convince him to give me a discount on some Invisalign), mark your calendars…

See you there.

Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.