Oh, Hannah Hillam, what’s not to love. Weird humour at its absolute best. I think what Hannah Hillam gets so right is conveying a widely-relatable mood or sentiment through quite obscure and extremely silly illustrations. Her choice of subject is usually incredibly odd: personified doughnuts, hostile cacti, cheeky constellations, but the jokes she’s making still hit the mark in a deeper way – they can be extrapolated for social situations or states of mind.

I love her sketchy, rough pencil drawing style and how unafraid she is of harsh marks. I think this all adds to her general tones of intense darkness and mania, which helps to express her own mental states (contributes to that messy, ragged look), but also emphasises the humour – I think Hillam gives great examples of Comedy-Horror.

She also, of course, really gets insomnia, and has produced some of my all time favourite content on the subject.

Finally, I think her treatment of mental illness is really great. She strikes a rare balance between depicting is as it really is: dark, grey, gloomy, excruciatingly dull (she’s often lying on the floor under immense weight, wearing very everyday clothes and presented as unwashed and unpolished) but also brings in some reasonable hope for management and recovery, too. Personally, I don’t find sugar-coating posts pushing unrelenting positivity and strife for a perfect life particularly helpful, so Hillam’s achievement of realistic optimism is really refreshing.