Connor McCann is not your typical comic artist. His pages are dense with strange forms, melting faces, and grotesque contortions of the human body. His characters laugh, suffer, decay, and regenerate across scenes that feel less like narratives and more like visual fever dreams. Yet what seems chaotic on the surface is a disciplined, cathartic practice rooted in survival. For McCann, grotesque comics are not just art—they are a personal language for navigating the absurdity of life.
McCann’s journey began far from the cultural capitals often associated with avant-garde art. Raised in the Midwest, he grew up in a setting that was stable on the outside but brimming with existential confusion underneath. Early on, he noticed a disconnect between the emotional chaos he felt internally and the expectations of a tidy, polite suburban world. He didn’t know how to express that dissonance in words. What he did have was paper and pens—and a burning need to draw.
He was drawn to underground comics, outsider art, and horror illustrations that embraced the grotesque. These visual influences didn’t shy away from discomfort. They leaned into it, often celebrating the raw, the strange, and the unfiltered. For a young artist trying to understand himself and the world, this was more than inspiring—it was affirming.
Finding Voice Through the Grotesque
At first, McCann didn’t intend to create grotesque comics. The style emerged naturally as a result of trying to represent emotions that couldn’t be cleanly drawn. When you’re depicting grief or anxiety or alienation, traditional visual grammar doesn’t always cut it. A screaming mouth might need to take up half the page. A character’s body might need to dissolve entirely to show how they feel inside. The grotesque gave McCann the freedom to tell emotional truths without being limited by realism.
There is a long tradition of using the grotesque in art to challenge societal norms or confront mortality. McCann fits into this lineage, but his focus is deeply personal. His comics are not abstract political statements; they are rooted in his lived experience. Every warped face or melting limb is a piece of emotional autobiography. The distortions are not just for shock—they are metaphors for psychological states, physical trauma, or moments of disconnection from the world.
In one of his early mini-comics, McCann drew a character who physically disassembles himself piece by piece while talking to a friend about feeling numb. The friend never notices. It’s a simple visual gag with enormous emotional weight. This is McCann’s genius: he uses absurdity to point directly at emotional truth.
From Catharsis to Craft
Drawing became a daily practice for McCann, a form of meditation, a coping mechanism, and eventually, a craft. He would sketch obsessively, filling page after page with grotesque figures, bizarre interactions, and unsettling scenes. Over time, his style solidified into something distinctly his own—densely detailed ink work, surreal character design, and an unflinching focus on the awkwardness of being human.
The more he drew, the more McCann realized how deeply therapeutic the process was. While others might talk about their feelings, he turned them into ink. For McCann, drawing was not just communication; it was survival. It grounded him in his body and gave shape to emotions he couldn’t otherwise articulate. The grotesque became a form of self-rescue. It allowed him to pull things out of himself and give them form, where they could be examined, understood, and even laughed at.
This process-oriented approach is visible in his finished work. McCann’s comics often seem like they were drawn in one feverish sitting. The textures are rough, the lines waver, and the panels can feel like a stream of consciousness. Yet there’s a surprising clarity underneath the chaos. His narratives—while unconventional—always return to core emotional truths. This is not randomness for the sake of style. It’s deliberate and emotionally precise.
Humor as a Lifeline
Despite the body horror and surreal dismemberments, McCann’s work is often hilarious. His characters might be in the middle of falling apart, but they’ll deliver a deadpan punchline or a wry observation as they do. This marriage of humor and grotesque is central to his voice. It reflects the absurdity of human experience—the way sadness and laughter can exist simultaneously, sometimes in the same breath.
McCann has said that absurdity is not a way to escape pain, but a way to live with it. When life feels too heavy to carry seriously, absurdity becomes the only honest response. His comics don’t try to solve problems. They name them, laugh at them, and invite others to do the same. In this way, humor becomes part of his survival strategy. It disrupts despair and creates space for shared recognition.
One of his more popular comic strips involves a character trying to write a to-do list while their body turns into a jellyfish. It’s absurd, gross, and deeply relatable. The list includes things like “feel normal” and “figure out how to exist.” The character fails, of course, but somehow the failure feels triumphant. This is the paradox at the heart of McCann’s work: that acknowledging dysfunction can itself be a functional act.
Drawing Pain into the Light
A significant part of McCann’s process involves drawing what most people try to hide. This includes mental illness, intrusive thoughts, social anxiety, and bodily discomfort. He doesn’t depict these things clinically or educationally. He draws them as lived experiences—strange, specific, and often hard to explain. The grotesque gives him the tools to show how these internal states feel, in all their irrational, shifting intensity.
Rather than relying on metaphor or abstraction, McCann literalizes these sensations. A character having a panic attack might grow twenty arms. Someone struggling with isolation might shrink to the size of a bug. The distortions are not symbolic—they are direct translations of emotional states into visual form.
This honesty is part of why his work resonates with so many readers. People see themselves in the mess, in the confusion, in the comic panels that don’t try to clean up what it means to be alive. There’s comfort in that recognition. It tells readers that they’re not alone in their weirdness or discomfort.
Rejecting Perfection in Favor of Truth
In an age of highly curated social media and polished digital art, McCann’s hand-drawn, ink-heavy comics feel almost rebellious. There is no gloss or digital perfection in his work. Mistakes are visible. Lines wobble. Characters repeat. Pages smudge. This aesthetic isn’t a gimmick—it’s an extension of his philosophy.
McCann doesn’t believe in pretending. The world is already full of noise telling people to clean up, to be neat, to smile through discomfort. His comics offer a counterpoint. They say: here’s the mess, the pain, the confusion. It’s not pretty, but it’s real. And that realness, that unvarnished truth, has become a rare and valuable currency in contemporary art.
This rejection of Polish also connects with the DIY spirit that defined much of the underground comics movement. McCann prints many of his works himself, folds zines by hand, and sells them at small fairs and online. There is something intimate about the physicality of his comics. You don’t just read them—you handle them, unfold them, live with them. The grotesque becomes tactile.
The Power of Vulnerability
At its core, McCann’s work is about vulnerability. It’s about showing the parts of the self that usually get hidden or ignored. This vulnerability isn’t always comfortable for the reader. Some panels are difficult to look at. Some scenes are emotionally overwhelming. But this is what makes the work resonate. It doesn’t flinch.
By placing vulnerability at the center of his practice, McCann invites others to do the same. His comics say that it’s okay to be scared, to be confused, to fall apart sometimes. The grotesque isn’t something to fear—it’s something to understand. And by understanding it, we get a little closer to understanding ourselves.
This approach has made McCann a cult favorite among readers who don’t see themselves represented in mainstream narratives. People struggling with mental illness, chronic pain, gender dysphoria, or just the everyday chaos of existing often find solace in his work. Not because it offers solutions, but because it offers honesty.
When Strange Feels Familiar
Connor McCann’s grotesque comics may at first seem isolating, as though made for an audience of one. The warped faces, splitting torsos, and dismembered limbs don’t exactly suggest mass appeal. Yet readers across cities, subcultures, and generations have found unexpected comfort in his work. What initially feels alien quickly becomes familiar. Through the distorted and absurd, people recognize parts of themselves they don’t often get to see reflected elsewhere.
This response isn’t accidental. McCann’s comics are deeply personal but never solipsistic. His pages feel like confessions spoken aloud, not in search of pity or performance, but in search of connection. And that’s exactly what they often spark: a shared recognition among readers who are also navigating complicated inner worlds.
For many, encountering McCann’s work is less like discovering a new artist and more like finding a strange kind of friend. Someone who doesn’t clean up their feelings. Someone who lets things unravel. Someone who admits, page after page, that being alive is often bizarre and uncomfortable.
The Reader as Co-Survivor
McCann has spoken about how his comics aren’t just about expression—they’re also about endurance. The process of drawing helps him stay tethered to reality during episodes of dissociation, depression, or overwhelming anxiety. In this way, his comics function as emotional landmarks, records of survival from one day to the next.
What surprises McCann is how often readers echo that language. People don’t just appreciate his work aesthetically. They describe it as something that helps them through the day. Some read and reread his zines like emotional weather reports. Others say they discovered his comics during personal crises and clung to them like life jackets.
This dynamic turns the reading experience into something communal. The grotesque visuals, which might be off-putting in another context, become tools of emotional identification. The discomfort they provoke is not isolating—it’s binding. It says: I’ve been there too.
When McCann draws a body breaking down, it’s not for spectacle. It’s an invitation. He’s saying, in effect, “Here’s what it felt like. Does it feel like that for you, too?” And the answer, more often than not, is yes.
Zines, Tabs, and the Power of Small Press
Much of McCann’s work circulates through zines, self-published books, and small-run anthologies. He rarely works with major publishers. This choice is deliberate. It allows him to maintain total creative control over his voice and aesthetic. But it also shapes the kind of relationship he has with his readers.
At a zine fest or small press expo, McCann’s comics are not behind glass or curated by gallerists. They’re on the table in front of him, printed in black-and-white, often stapled by hand. Readers don’t just consume the work—they hold it, flip through it, sometimes talk with McCann directly. The exchange is intimate. Personal. Grounded.
In an era dominated by digital distribution and influencer culture, this physical, DIY ethos feels quietly radical. It fosters an alternative kind of community. One that values vulnerability over polish, conversation over platform, and incerity over spectacle.
People who pick up a Connor McCann comic aren’t just looking for a story. They’re looking for permission—to feel strange, to be honest, to laugh at something dark without apology. And that kind of permission is rarely granted in mainstream media.
Comics as a Mirror for the Mentally Ill and Marginalized
One of the most profound aspects of McCann’s work is how it resonates with people dealing with mental illness, neurodivergence, and other forms of marginalization. These are not just characters in his comics—they are readers, community members, and collaborators. The grotesque, in this context, becomes more than an aesthetic. It becomes a survival tactic.
Many of McCann’s most loyal readers describe feeling alienated by traditional depictions of illness or struggle. Clinical narratives flatten their experiences. Inspirational ones feel dishonest. But McCann’s visual language captures the chaos, the absurdity, the physicality of living with a mind or body that refuses to cooperate.
In his comics, anxiety isn’t a thought—it’s a creature crawling out of someone’s mouth. Depression doesn’t sit quietly—it liquefies identity. These exaggerated depictions may seem surreal to some, but to those who’ve lived with these states, they often feel more accurate than realism.
This fidelity to lived emotional texture allows McCann’s work to function as a mirror, not a flattering one, but a truthful one. For people who often feel unseen, it’s powerful to encounter art that doesn’t just acknowledge their experience but reflects it with clarity and compassion.
Cultivating Safe Discomfort
The term “safe space” is often misunderstood to mean environments without discomfort. But in McCann’s world, discomfort is welcome—it just isn’t weaponized. His comics aren’t trying to provoke for provocation’s sake. They explore fear, sadness, and grotesque transformation in a way that feels held, not exposed.
There’s a strange kind of safety in knowing that someone else has drawn the monster you were too afraid to describe. It doesn’t make the monster go away, but it does make it smaller. Less powerful. Less private. That’s the emotional alchemy McCann achieves through his work. He doesn’t eliminate discomfort—he shares it.
Readers have reported bringing hierophanies into therapy sessions, using them to describe feelings they couldn’t otherwise name. Others have used specific panels as prompts for writing, journaling, or making their art. McCann has unwittingly created a visual vocabulary for the unspoken. And in doing so, he’s helped people speak.
The Absurd as Common Ground
Though rooted in personal struggle, McCann’s comics also tap into broader cultural feelings. We live in an age of ecological dread, social fragmentation, and near-constant digital overload. Underneath it all, there’s a widespread sense that reality itself has become unstable. In this context, the grotesque doesn’t feel niche. It feels accurate.
McCann’s absurdity is not escapist. It’s diagnostic. It reflects the surreal condition of being alive in a time where normalcy often feels performative. His stories of characters falling apart—physically, emotionally, or conceptually—mirror the sense of breakdown many feel daily, even if they can’t articulate it.
Rather than trying to restore order, McCann shows how to live inside chaos. Not with resignation, but with creativity. With irreverence. With black humor. The grotesque becomes a philosophy—a way of being honest about how weird things are, and how weird we are too.
And through this shared weirdness, McCann’s audience doesn’t just feel seen—they feel less alone.
Online Engagement Without Performance
While much of his work circulates in physical form, McCann has also cultivated a digital presence. But unlike many contemporary artists who build personal brands, his online engagement is refreshingly quiet. He posts drawings. He shares process shots. He posts uncaptioned panels. There are no glossy behind-the-scenes videos, no endless self-promotion.
This stripped-down approach creates a different kind of relationship with his audience. It’s not about spectacle. It’s about substance. Readers don’t follow him for lifestyle inspiration. They follow him for the raw, weird, honest drawings that make them feel something.
In comment sections and message threads, fans often respond not just with praise but with stories. They talk about their depression, their weird bodies, and their monstrous feelings. McCann doesn’t just post content—he hosts connections.
The grotesque might not be glossy, but it builds trust. And in a media landscape dominated by illusion, trust is revolutionary.
A Community of the Uncomfortable
There is no official name for McCann’s audience. No fandom tag. No stylized merch. But the sense of community is unmistakable. It exists in zine fair booths, in late-night Tumblr reblogs, in shared glances between readers who’ve both seen the same comic panel and felt a jolt of recognition.
This community doesn’t require perfection or stability. It welcomes fragmentation, contradiction, and awkwardness. It doesn’t ask its members to explain their pain, only to share it. And in doing so, it becomes something rare—a space where the grotesque isn’t a sign of being broken, but of being real.
McCann never set out to build a community. He just needed to draw. But by being honest about his discomfort, he permitted others to do the same. And slowly, one awkward panel at a time, something that looked like survival turned into something that felt like belonging.
Toward Something Shared
In the end, what sets Connor McCann apart isn’t just his visual style or his willingness to be raw. It’s the way his work creates space— or feeling, for reflection, for connection. His grotesque comics don’t provide answers. They provide mirrors, tools, and above all, company.
When a reader picks up a McCann comic, they’re not just encountering one person’s perspective. They’re joining a conversation—a messy, funny, vulnerable conversation about what it means to stay alive when everything feels like it’s falling apart.
That conversation doesn’t end when the comic does. It lives on in the readers who write, draw, talk, and feel differently because of it. It lives on in the people who now know it’s okay to be uncomfortable, to be absurd, to be grotesque—and to be real.
A Ritual of Repetition
Connor McCann draws every day. Not because he’s chasing productivity, but because drawing is how he processes reality. His comics are not a side project or a structured career path—they’re a daily ritual. He treats artmaking less like an aesthetic pursuit and more like a grounding practice, one that keeps him tethered to his body and his mind when things feel unstable.
He does not wait for inspiration. Drawing is what happens when he’s confused, tired, angry, anxious, or uncertain. The practice itself becomes the mechanism for clarity. Often, the first marks on the page are directionless, just lines or fragments of faces. Then, slowly, a form emerges. A figure collapses. A face peels open. A body turns into smoke. The grotesque reveals itself not as a performance, but as a reaction—an involuntary exhale of feeling too much all at once.
McCann’s daily repetition builds muscle memory, not just in his hands, but in his emotional responses. Over time, the act of drawing becomes a kind of emotional reflex. He doesn’t have to plan what to draw—he just draws what it feels like to be alive that day.
Analog Tools and Physical Mistakes
McCann works almost entirely with traditional materials. His preferred tools are black ink, fine-liner pens, brushes, white-out, tape, and paper. These materials are unforgiving. There is no "undo" button, no easy way to erase or correct. That’s part of what draws him to them.
The physical limitations of ink and paper create constraints that mirror the emotional messiness of his subject matter. Smudges, corrections, stains—these become part of the final artwork. Mistakes are not hidden; they are integrated. The process becomes visible, even in the finished page.
This physicality is essential to his aesthetic. A drawing with perfect symmetry or slick digital rendering would feel dishonest. The grotesque in McCann’s work is not just in the content—it’s in the form. Uneven lines, inconsistent textures, awkward proportions—these all contribute to a visual language that feels organic, unstable, and fully human.
There is a trust that develops when an artist lets the reader see the page as it is, flaws and all. It invites a different kind of engagement. You’re not just looking at a comic—you’re looking at the process of someone trying to understand themselves in real time.
From Scribble to Structure
Though his comics often appear chaotic, there is structure beneath the surface. McCann starts with sketchbooks filled with stream-of-consciousness drawings and short text fragments. These are not thumbnails or drafts in the traditional sense. They are unfiltered thoughts, half-scenes, and gestures. From this loose material, he begins assembling longer works.
When he feels a theme emerging—whether it’s a recurring visual motif or a repeating emotional beat—he begins arranging drawings into sequences. He’ll photocopy pages, cut them up, tape panels into different orders, add dialogue, and remove it again. His desk often looks like a collage experiment in progress.
The key for McCann is not planning a story but discovering it through iteration. He builds his comics the same way someone might construct a dream journal—disjointed, symbolic, nonlinear. Yet by the time a piece is finished, there is always an arc. Even if the story resists traditional narrative logic, the emotional trajectory is clear. Something falls apart. Something is revealed. Something is endured.
This method reflects how emotions unfold in real life, not as clean stories, but as fragmented, looping impressions. The grotesque allows him to translate those impressions into something visible, shareable, and unexpectedly coherent.
Drawing Bodies as Emotion
In McCann’s work, the human body is never still. It bends, expands, decays, and reforms. It is treated not as an object, but as a reflection of interior states. A person experiencing guilt might carry fifty mouths. Someone dealing with anxiety might dissolve into puddles, unable to hold their shape. Pain, confusion, or joy are drawn not as abstract symbols but as physical distortions.
This approach draws from a long tradition of using the grotesque to express psychological truths. But McCann pushes it further by refusing to separate body from mind. In his comics, emotions are not invisible—they are worn on the outside. The body becomes a canvas for inner noise.
This is especially powerful for readers who experience mental illness or neurodivergence in ways that feel intensely physical. McCann’s drawings speak to that intersection. He shows what it’s like when your skin can’t contain your thoughts, when your shape doesn’t match your feelings, when your body becomes the site of conflict rather than stability.
This fusion of physicality and emotion is what makes the grotesque in his work feel less like horror and more like truth.
Dialogue Without Explanation
McCann’s characters rarely explain themselves. They speak in fragments, mutter declarations, and ask impossible questions. The dialogue is sparse, but pointed. Often, a comic will move through several pages with no speech at all, letting the images carry the emotional weight.
When dialogue appears, it functions more like an overheard internal monologue than a structured conversation. It creates a rhythm of thought, not a plot. Characters might say things like “I don’t know how to be here” or “What if this is the real shape of me?” The words don’t resolve tension—they reveal it.
This restraint is intentional. McCann is not interested in over-explaining the grotesque. He trusts the reader to meet the work on emotional terms. Instead of guiding the viewer through a story, he creates a space where confusion is allowed. Where things don’t need to be decoded to be felt.
By giving readers room to sit in ambiguity, McCann builds trust. He signals that the grotesque isn’t a puzzle to be solved—it’s a sensation to be experienced. You don’t need to understand everything to feel everything.
Tension Between Chaos and Control
A constant tension runs through McCann’s process: between control and release, precision and spontaneity. On one hand, his drawings are detailed and labor-intensive, requiring long hours of close concentration. On the other hand, the subject matter is wild, irrational, and chaotic.
McCann doesn’t resolve this tension—he lives in it. It’s what gives his work its energy. The tighter the cross-hatching, the more unstable the image feels. The more intricate the figure, the more vulnerable it becomes. The process of carefully drawing something grotesque turns the chaos into care.
This paradox sits at the heart of McCann’s practice. He is constantly trying to render the unrenderable. To take an emotional fog and give it weight. To draw not what something looks like, but what it feels like inside your chest at 3 a.m.
The result is work that feels intimate even when it’s disturbing. It reminds readers that fear and beauty are not opposites—that sometimes they live in the same image, waiting to be seen.
Ritual Objects and Repetition
McCann often draws recurring figures—characters that seem to appear across comics, altered but familiar. There is the worm-bodied figure with the sad eyes. The one-legged woman made of dripping ink. The mask-wearer is the one who speaks in broken phrases. These are not consistent characters, but rather visual ghosts. They reappear like themes in a dream.
He does not name these figures or assign them backstories. Their power lies in repetition. They become ritual objects, visual mantras. Each time they return, they carry more emotional weight. They are memory-made ink.
For McCann, these recurring figures are like emotional companions. He draws them not to invent new stories, but to revisit ongoing ones. The grotesque becomes a loop, a spiral, rather than a straight line. And in that looping process, healing happens—slowly, inconsistently, but unmistakably.
Finding Structure in the Absurd
Over time, McCann has developed a loose structural framework for his comics. Not in terms of plot, but in emotional progression. Many of his pieces begin with a moment of rupture—something breaking, something being lost. The middle moves into absurdity—bodies contorting, language breaking down. And then, almost quietly, there is resolution—not of the event, but of the feeling.
This arc does not promise a happy ending. But it does offer something rare in grotesque art: gentleness. Even when the final panel shows a character in pieces, there is a softness to it. A kind of quiet acceptance. The world didn’t get fixed. But it got seen. And that, in McCann’s language, is enough.
His process reflects this structure. He starts messy, builds chaos, and then listens for where the quiet lands. The grotesque, for him, is not a wall—it’s a passage. You go through it. You come out changed.
Staying With the Strange
Connor McCann never set out to build a career in comics. What began as a personal outlet has slowly grown into something larger: a sustained art practice, a recognizable voice, and a community of readers who see their discomfort mirrored in his work. But as his audience grows and his work becomes more visible, McCann finds himself at a crossroads—how do you stay true to something that came from pain when it begins to feel like a job?
For McCann, the answer isn’t to sanitize or professionalize the grotesque. It’s to stay with it—to keep letting the work be as raw, awkward, and strange as it needs to be. He resists the temptation to smooth out the edges. His commitment remains not to polish but to presence. His goal is not mass appeal—it’s fidelity to emotional truth.
As he looks ahead, McCann is less interested in scaling up than in going deeper. He wants to stay close to the thing that first saved him: the act of drawing honestly, even when it feels like unraveling.
Making Art That Doesn't Perform
The internet encourages artists to turn vulnerability into content. Mental illness becomes branding. Sadness becomes style. Struggle is flattened into a marketable narrative. McCann is wary of this. His work is personal, but it resists the performance of pain. He doesn’t draw for pity, likes, or audience empathy. He draws because he has to.
He is careful about how much of his life he shares. While his comics are emotionally revealing, they are never biographical in the traditional sense. There are no confessions, no clearly labeled characters, no easy lines between creator and creation. The work is open, but not exposed. It invites connection, but it maintains boundaries.
This choice allows McCann to keep control of his vulnerability. The grotesque gives him room to express what’s real without making it literal. It becomes a shield as much as a mirror. He doesn’t need to tell readers exactly what happened to him. He just needs to draw how it felt.
This approach protects both him and the reader. It keeps the work from becoming voyeuristic. It keeps the emotional exchange mutual, not exploitative. And it makes space for everyone to bring their own story to the page.
Turning Survival Into Practice
McCann often describes his earlier comics as a form of survival. He wasn’t thinking about audience, publication, or style. He was just trying to stay alive. Drawing was a way to externalize things that felt unspeakable—anxiety, grief, self-loathing, fear of disappearing. The grotesque gave him a structure to express what language couldn’t.
But as time passes and his relationship to mental illness changes, McCann is learning how to make art from a different place. Not just from crisis, but from curiosity. Not just from breakdown, but from process. He doesn’t want to only draw from suffering—he wants to draw from observation, connection, even play.
This doesn’t mean the grotesque is going away. It means it’s evolving. McCann is exploring what it means to use the grotesque not only as a survival tactic but as a language. A way of thinking. A way of seeing the world that remains honest even when the feelings aren’t sharp or unbearable.
By turning survival into practice, McCann is building a long-term relationship with art—one that doesn’t require constant pain to stay relevant.
Building Without Escaping
A question that haunts many artists who draw from discomfort is: What happens if things get better? Will the art disappear? Will healing ruin the edge? McCann has considered this. But he doesn’t see recovery and creativity as opposites. He sees them as intertwined.
The grotesque in his work isn’t just about depicting suffering—it’s about depicting how absurd and complex it is to live at all. That doesn’t go away with therapy or time. The tension between body and mind, self and world, control and collapse—these continue. They just shift shape.
McCann is not trying to escape the grotesque. He’s trying to understand it more deeply. He wants to explore not just breakdown, but integration. Not just rupture, but repair. He wants to ask: What does it look like to build a life with the parts that don’t fit? What happens when you stop hiding the strange and start organizing around it?
These are the questions guiding his future work—not answers, but open doors.
Collaborations, Fragments, and New Forms
As his practice expands, McCann is experimenting with collaboration. He has started working with other artists, writers, and musicians to explore how the grotesque can move across media. Some of these projects are visual, like collaborative comics and zines. Others are sound-based or performative, exploring how to embody emotional disintegration through other forms.
These collaborations help him break out of his patterns. They introduce friction, new energy, and unfamiliar rhythms. They require trust and dialogue skills that don’t always come easily to someone used to drawing alone. But for McCann, the challenge is welcome. It forces him to see the grotesque not just as internal collapse, but as something shared, social, even playful.
He is also working more with fragments—short comics, wordless sequences, single panels that operate like visual poems. These pieces don’t build toward a narrative. They float. They hint. They pulse with emotion but don’t land in resolution. McCann is interested in how these fragments can be arranged into larger works without losing their rawness.
This fragmentation mirrors how memory and feeling work. Disjointed. Repeating. Incomplete. The grotesque, in this light, becomes a method of collage—of holding contradictions in the same space.
Remaining Intimate in a Growing World
As more people discover his work, McCann is thinking about how to keep his artistic process intimate. He doesn’t want a studio empire or a massive social following. He wants to keep drawing in his room, stapling zines by hand, showing up to small-press fairs with a backpack full of photocopies.
That smallness is part of the work’s power. It allows McCann to stay connected to his audience, not through scale, but through honesty. He values direct interaction, quiet conversations, passing his comics to someone across a table, and seeing their reaction in real time.
He’s also thinking about mentorship—about how to support younger artists who are exploring the grotesque as a form of healing and truth-telling. He wants to create spaces where weird, raw, emotional work is not just tolerated, but encouraged. Where imperfection isn’t seen as failure but as form.
Staying small doesn’t mean staying stagnant. It means staying close. To the work. To the readers. To the thing that matters most: making space for the difficult, the strange, and the real.
A Future for the Grotesque
In a world increasingly obsessed with clarity, wellness, and aesthetic perfection, grotesque comics offer something vital. They make room for mess. For contradiction. For bodies and minds that don’t behave. They remind us that life isn’t always neat—and that art doesn’t have to be, either.
Connor McCann’s future work will continue to live in that space. He doesn’t know exactly what it will look like. But he knows it will still be strange. Still be honest. Still be his.
He wants to make comics that people return to, not because they offer escape, but because they tell the truth. He wants readers to feel less alone, not through inspiration, but through recognition. And he wants to keep asking the hardest, most beautiful question that the grotesque makes possible: What if this broken thing is worth drawing anyway?
Final Thoughts
Connor McCann’s comics are not easy, polished, or market-driven. They are raw, unsettling, intimate reflections of a person trying to understand what it means to exist in a body and a world that often feel misaligned. Through grotesque imagery, fractured narratives, and emotional honesty, McCann offers readers not answers, but companionship—evidence that confusion, instability, and strangeness are not signs of failure, but part of the human condition.
His work reminds us that art does not need to be beautiful to be necessary, that the grotesque is not something to be feared or hidden, but something to be honored as a language for what we cannot easily say. McCann does not want to impress, but to survive. Not to escape reality, but to face it head-on, distorted, leaking, mutating, and still worth rendering.
As the series explored, his journey is not linear, and his process is not perfect. But that’s the point. By embracing discomfort, leaning into ambiguity, and drawing without apology, McCann has carved out a space for himself and others to feel seen in all their mess and complexity.
In a culture that often demands coherence and perfection, McCann's work dares to be unresolved. And in that refusal to smooth things out, it becomes more than art—it becomes a lifeline.