Under the Surface Q&A with Alison McCreesh!
“The Days are Long but the Years are Short.” – A parent whose kids are grown.
After her highly acclaimed graphic memoirs about travelling the north, McCreesh turns her uncompromising lens to the domestic everyday work of parenting three small children. Combining gag humour and individually moving comics McCreesh gives an insiders perspective over seven years. There’s a fair amount of talk about death, as well as love and music and art, there’s heartbreak about family friends moving away, there’s some talk of gender, and there are plenty of those general existential questions that kids ponder so well. More than that though, there’s something deeper that comes from these comics spanning so many years. The kids are simultaneously changing AND remaining themselves, as their personalities develop and become more defined. The family dynamics evolve. They lurch around like the exhausted millennial parents that they are, navigating the simultaneous intense love and extreme annoyance that comes with living with small kids. A good mix of fuzzies, feelings, and laugh-out-loud humour, all of which confirm that these years are indeed short – and very long.
In anticipation of The Short Years spring launch, check out our Q&A with McCreesh below. The Short Years launches spring 2026, and is available for preorder now!
You have covered a lot of ground with parenting and kids in your previous books. But this seems different. The Short Years centres the kids over time, we see them change. How is this book different from your other books?
In my other books, I was always driven by a desire to take the reader somewhere — to get them to visit some part of the North, to get to know a new location and to learn a bit about it. Those books are all non-fiction, and they were all autobiographical, but the focus was on travel and on place. The Short Years, on the other hand, is more intimate. There’s no attention given to the backgrounds or the environments or settings, instead I was interested in exploring facial expressions, body language, dialogue and interaction. It’s all about relationships, family dynamics, and the never-ending humour of this phase of life. It doesn’t matter where these comics are set — they are universal in their portrayal of the tenderness and slight absurdity of life with young children!
These strips are very funny. They read almost like newspaper gags. Were there newspaper strips you read that influenced The Short Years? Are they strips? Comics? Graphic shorts?
My mom didn’t get the paper, so I unfortunately didn’t grow up with a close relationship to newspaper strips and don’t have a specific one to cite as a direct influence. I read them enough though, here and there throughout my formative years, to develop an appreciation for the format. I’ve always found the ability to render a situation and provoke a laugh in 4 panels or less really inspiring. I like working with constraints, so this style of comic writing really appeals to me: having to convey so much with very few words and not much space for elaborate drawings is an exercise that I really enjoy. Especially considering my natural tendency towards maximalism and rambling, there is no doubt that I gain from forcing myself into a ‘less is more’ situation. This being said, I would be remiss not to mention how inspirational Roz Chast has been to me over the years. Her masterful ability to work within a limited space, combining frazzled facial expressions with just the right words, always manages to make me laugh out loud. And, of course, a big shoutout to Lynn Johnston’s “For Better or For Worse Strip,” a pioneer of parenting comics!
These strips were originally published on Instagram. Social media is a direct and immediate way of reaching your fans. How is holding a book collection different?
It’s just better!! On social media, you see the comics as you scroll. They capture your attention for a few seconds, surrounded by a whole lot of other noise and stimulation. You bounce into the world of The Short Years for a few seconds, then you bounce on to the next thing. In book format, you spend time in the world of the comics, you get to know the characters, you become fond of them, you watch them grow and evolve and develop their personalities. Each comic strip is funny individually, but I like to think the sum total leaves the reader with something deeper. In the earliest comics in this compilation, we have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old… and by the end, we have a 10-year-old, a 7-year-old and a 4-year-old. That’s a lot of time passing, and a lot of change happening! Social media is fine for bite sized enjoyment,
but there’s something about the longevity of a book as opposed to the ephemeral nature of an online experience. One thing I love about owning actual books is how they live on as I revisit them time and time again over passing years, with things that I overlooked the first time suddenly becoming differently relatable as my own life experience and lens evolves. Plus I want people to be able to share this collection with new parents (and nostalgic grandparents), and it’s much more fun to gift a book than to share an Instagram page!
This book almost reminds me of a Digest, like the Archie digests we used to read as kids. Was this intentional?
Funny that you ask! I haven’t thought about Archie in forever (and I’m quite confident they must have aged terribly and I would be quite appalled to revisit what I so enjoyed as an 11-year-old), but those digests were in fact really foundational for me. Some of my first comic-related drawings were clumsy renditions of the Riverdale High crew. I moved on from the big eyes and Barbie physiques quite quickly, but Archie definitely played a role in my comics journey. This being said, the Archie Digests were far from my mind as I was working on all my Short Years comics and there’s no deliberate connection… but I like the idea of my book being easy to access and a fun unputdownable read, so I’ll take this as a compliment!
A lot of your work deals with travel. This is very much about the domestic sphere. What do you see as the difference? Is homelife simply more fun?
Haha. I don’t think I’d call home life with a bunch of kids MORE FUN than travel, but it’s definitely a different kind of journey— and one that I probably get more out of. A big part of my comics practice has always been about finding humour in the day-to-day. About trying to capture often mundane-seeming details, knowing that the small things are often the most relatable. I think the shift isn’t so much that I had kids and stopped travelling (we travelled a fair amount with the kids, and now that they are a little older, I’ve had quite a few opportunities to travel without them), rather that the domestic sphere became something where more was happening, and that I was more excited to capture, document and share. With three young kids and two dogs, the fodder for comics was seemingly endless! I also like how much feedback I get from people sharing how whatever I just illustrated directly resonates with what’s happening in their home (much more than when I was making comics about travelling in the High Arctic!). While The Short Years comics are very specifically inspired by my life and my kids, they also mirror the life of so many other people with their kids. It’s good to share a laugh about it all, and to remind ourselves that once we are out of the trenches, we will look back on these years fondly.
