Some of you may have seen the weekly No Tears: Life With FD comics I create and share on Facebook. FD stands for Familial Dysautonomia, a very rare disease. The guy who writes the scripts for the comics, David Brenner, the FD Foundation's executive director, has worked there for a whole decade! Some people from the foundation reached out to me and we came up with the idea to make him a custom comic as a special honorary gift! They wanted to depict David as a Navy Seal, the most specially trained, technology savvy, and elite fighters of the USA. I definitely listened to the In the Navy song a lot while working on this :) (Can anyone find the Beatles Yellow Submarine "Easter Egg" I placed in there?) I made the comic in a record time of 8 days, along with my teaching job and other duties. I presented the comic at last Sunday's FD Day, their annual conference. Everyone loved it!

Usually I draw custom comics for couples, as you can see from the custom comics section on my site. It's a great way to tell the story of how the couple met, got engaged, and so on! But I think the honorary custom comics are extra special. Sometimes the couples comics are just for 2 people, unless they're displayed at a wedding reception. But the honorary comics can be displayed in the office and seen by everyone! It's kind of like a visual resume - if you're new to the company, or not as familiar with the honoree's day-to-day work, you can tell what a hard worker and amazing role model the person is in the comic!

So I've been creating a weekly comic for the Familial Dysautonomia Foundation (which I haven't posted in awhile here, but they always post it on their facebook). This Sunday is FD Day, a conference for people and families affected by the condition, but it's also open to the public if you're curious! They'll have a lot of NYU doctors talking about new research, treatments, and other stuff. I'll be there sketching for the kids in a room with other fun stuff like a magician and balloon animals.

Here are some FD comics to catch up on - No Tears: Life With FD.

On this comic, the Foundation and I were trying to come up with good places for the group of people to be in - what if the grumpy old man was a bus driver? No, some FD people have difficulty getting on buses. What if he was a barber, or at a movie ticket counter? Those were ok, but I came up with something I encounter regularly: grumpy people at the checkout lane :)

This was one of my personal favorites :) Although the FD community online prefers the really sweet ones vs the LOL ones (this one got only like 2,000 "views" as opposed to the usual over 10,000).

Like this is a really sweet one. People went NUTS over this one!

And people really responded to this one well. Lots of good comments flying around on the web.