In today’s newsletter, I write about spending half of a flight to Honolulu drawing a comic while freeze-framing Tim Burton’s Batman:

Planes are excellent places to work, but they’re also excellent places to zone out and to play or do “comfort work” — what I’m calling the creative work we return to when we don’t know what else to do.

Drawing Batman, it turns out, is a great comfort to me!

A reader commented that they’d love to sit across from me on a plane, and it suddenly occurred to me that I left out a huge inspiration from the newsletter: I was sitting on the plane diagonally from a kid drawing, which is what made me get out my diary in the first place!

Here are a few blind contour drawings I made of the kid:

And what I wrote in my diary underneath:

there’s a little kid across the aisle from me who has the most chaotic little marker box and I love it. just scribbling little drawings w/ what looks like EXPO markers and crayons and all kinds of random stuff…

Since the letter takes a turn into kids and the aliveness in the lines that they draw, I can’t believe I left out this detail. But that’s what’s so great about putting work in front of people — the minute you do, you remember everything you left out.

Read the whole letter here: “The comfort of drawing Batman”