In February, I was interviewed by local art journalist Katie Clary about my cross-cultural interest and history with graphic novels and manga between the United States and Japan for the Open Studio Newsletter.
I don’t usually have opportunities to talk about my former experiences as an English-Japanese translator and a teen goodwill ambassadorship in Japan, and how it shapes my love of comics. In the article, I talk about how I owe my love of comics to two people, my friend Yoshiko and Keiko, both of whom shared shojo manga with me at a time dominated by bulky DC and Marvel superheroes. It changed my impression of the storytelling capabilities of sequential art at a young age, and for that, I am very grateful.
良子さん、恵子さん、少女漫画を紹介してくれてありがとう。
Read the interview here.
I had the good fortune to be invited to do comics art demonstrations at this year’s ArtTastic event at KidsQuest Children’s Museum in Bellevue, Washington, on February 27, 2026. The mission of the event was to not only encourage kids to create crafts and expand their imaginations, but also to introduce local art craftsmen who excel in various forms of art.
The other featured artists included:
Lamecca Bostwick- multidisciplinary painter
SmallRiniLady- vintage shadow portraits and paper art. @smallrinilady on Social Media
Theatre 33- multilingual non-profit community theater in Bellevue, WA. theatre33wa.org
All the artists were located around the museum. I welcomed families to the second floor in the Connections lounge. For the event, I crafted a mix-and-match set of animals, insects, reptiles, and fantasy creatures that younger kids could move body parts around to create new creatures. For older kids, I worked with them to illustrate their own unique creatures and showed them how to illustrate feathers, scales, claws, and even crab pinsurs! It was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed meeting everyone who came by the Connections area.
It was a delight being a part of ArtTastic and I hope to do more events with Kids’ Quest Children’s Museum in Bellevue!
A few weeks ago, I was honored to do a presentation at Art Common’s Creative Summit in North Bend, Washington. The theme of that night’s creative summit was “art as a catalyst for change,” and there were many speakers from all walks of the creative space discussing how interpret and guide social discourse in our creative lives.
For the talk, I made a zine. Of course I did! The eight-page zine covers a lot of ground in a short amount of time, addressing how when you feel tense and scared, you can use art to express yourself. When those moments and emotions become too big, you can then gather in a community, and how those positive ideas that are fostered in a community can rally into larger movements.
To present the zine, I recreated it on poster-sized Post-it notes which I could flip while reading out loud to the audience. Afterwards, it was put on display for people to read through.
It was a wonderful night, and I met tons of new people, also in the creative spaces on the Eastside of Seattle.
Cheers to art!
Kat
Today is the 250th birthday of Jane Austen, the magnificent writer of so many of the most beloved romance novels of the 19th century. It is a true testament to her observation of personal relationships and personalities that her stories remain so relatable today as they did when they were first written.
Hiya All,
The kids comics classes at the Issaquah Community Center are so popular that there’s a waitlist for November classes, and our December classes have two seats left! We are working on putting together classes for January and February 2026.
If you or someone you know is interested in making comics, please visit https://www.happytimestudio.com/workshopandclassschedule