Lucky number 13

Well, we all witnessed an interesting year. There was good, there was bad, and there was downright ugly. While humanity seems hellbent on collectively speedrunning toward extinction, we see ourselves as the fiddlers on the Titanic. We’ll play our tune as long as we can, ever hopeful that a mighty whale might just surface, right in the nick of time, to save us all and carry us to a better future. Until then, it’s a great time for jokes! It was a great year for comics! May we continue to laugh, as long as we can!

It’s also a good time to celebrate the glimmers of hope! And we cling to them with the intensity of a baby monkey clinging to its mother as she performs death-defying acrobatics through the rainforest canopy.

India has already hit its targets from the Paris agreement (five years early!) Germany’s electricity mix is now 64% renewable and the Greek island of Tilos has gone completely waste-free, recycling 100% of its trash. The Finnish capital Helsinki instituted a new speed limit that resulted in exactly zero fatal traffic accidents for an entire year! And AI, despite eleven billion podcasts predicting otherwise, has destroyed far fewer jobs than feared, which feels like the universe throwing us a bone.

And as if that weren’t enough good news, we can announce that we will be able to continue making comics in 2026. This is a blessing for us, because it remains, against all economic logic, the best job in the world.

This year has been great for us, even if our work-life balance looks like something an HR department would use as a cautionary tale. The highlight reel includes: our trip to Slovenia, the exhibition at the Erika-Fuchs-Haus, and performing with Marc-Uwe Kling and Bernd Kissel in front of 1,700 actual human beings who paid money to be there. We remain full of gratitude for every speech bubble we get to draw, every love letter we slip into mailboxes, and every heart-pounding thrill of clicking “publish” on a new comic strip and launching it to you.

Which is why we’re saying thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Thank you to our loyal readers, newsletter subscribers, and Patreon supporters. To everyone who smiles or laugh-snorts inappropriately in public when reading a new story. And especially to those brave souls who share our comics in their work group chats, without worrying about the consequences.

If you want to double-down on ensuring we can continue this silly endeavor, you can support us via Patreon, where we offer various perks that we promise are worth it, or at least more useful than most things you impulse-bought last year.

Samuli Heimonen, “Huolenkerääjä” (Collector of Worries)