A Comic About Mold, Motherhood, and Making Art Anyway.

What Holy Mold is and isn’t.

This story isn’t clean. It isn’t sterile or shiny, and it doesn’t follow a linear, “get your life together” arc. Instead, it follows the mess. The mold becomes a teacher. It shows the protagonist the tension she holds between motherhood and creativity, and then reveals that they are actually one and in the same sacred force. The more I write, the more I realize that this comic is a reflection of the sacred rot I’ve had to sit with. Putting off my creative work, delaying milestones of my own motherhood journey, and the loyalty I gave away too freely in professional work and social environments. There’s an identity I had shaped to survive. Holy Mold isn’t just about a mom or artist but about anyone who has had to compost an old self in order to grow.

There’s a fridge, and there’s a spore. There’s the mother muse and then there’s artist muse. There’s the tension between being needed and being invisible. And there’s the quiet, persistent truth that softness is not weakness. It’s a signal to answer. In this comic, mold behaves as a holy interruption; it asks hard questions and shows inconvenient truths. It pauses the regular routine until the protagonist has no choice but to witness herself. And remember what was left behind. …it’s about me. It’s about you. It’s about our convictions and actions budding heads through our transformative stages of life.

Holy Mold is tender and strange and deeply personal. But I think it’s also universal. Many of us are walking around with expired expectations and unopened dreams in the back of our emotional refrigerators. This comic is my way of opening the door to air out the smell, and to find something sacred in the spoiled.

What sparked the inspiration for this comic?

I opened a pouch from the fridge for my toddler. I nurse nearly around the clock, and this time I didn’t want to sit for an hour and comfort nurse. Those squeeze pouches that kids like really come in handy. I even eat them sometimes to refuel. What sparked Holy Mold wasn’t the exact moment when I opened an already opened (and saved for later) pouch and mold flung out with a crackle and pop like a mini firecracker (true story) but what happened two weeks after scrubbing the walls and floors of the kitchen. I thought I had gotten rid of that spore, but then my son got a respiratory sickness. He was miserable. I was miserable. But I wasn’t sick. Turns out after our urgent care trip, he had the flu. Thankfully it wasn’t the mold spore. But I still wondered what would happen if it was? That’s when I started to imagine all the symptoms of mold exposure, and instead of a grim picture of respiratory infections and poison control knocking at the door, I imagined an ancient, wise visitor. One that came to remind me of what’s been forgotten and rotting in the back of my mind while I worried about going back to work, debating the importance of stay-at-home mom life (which should honestly be renamed to work-at-home mom life because it is work), and feeling left behind in the art world because I haven’t been producing art, just producing doubt and imposters of myself.

Like any human who may be going through the inbetween stages of life, I felt lost or at least not confident in what I was doing. Making a character out of the mold, I started to unravel the questions that this ancient spore began to reveal to me. Holy Mold is a mirror, an interrogation, and a witness to my creative process. I’m not doing this alone, but I’m observing and questioning and exploring the ebbs and flows of daily life in real time. It helps me connect with the moment and name it, understand it, and document it.

A shift in my creative process

My own belief that I couldn’t make a comic with the main character being myself is what I had to let go of. If I was going to tell this story from my point of view, with very little time for outside references, then I had to suck it up and pose in front of the camera as soon as an idea came to mind. And then I had to draw myself. Who has all the time in the world to draw and redraw a hairstyle until it’s perfect when you have a toddler on a tight nap schedule who could wake up at any second? So I had to get to it. No time to pick an elaborate outfit for the character. She’s in her sleep clothes and bed hair, in all her holy glory. .

I want others to feel permission to unravel their own beliefs and expectations, to hold them up to a mirror and then break that mirror because there’s probably mold inside it. There’s probably an old belief, maybe even one that felt true just five years ago, that doesn’t serve you anymore. Maybe it was survival then, but now it’s just noise. Holy Mold is about honoring what once protected us while also making room for who we’re becoming. It’s about looking at the mess without rushing to clean it up. Sitting with it. Listening. Asking what it wants to show us.

That’s why I draw the main character in her bed hair and sleep clothes. It’s me. I didn’t have time to design some aspirational version of myself. I’m making this comic in real life, in real time, during nap windows and late nights, while juggling snacks and body aches and the kind of exhaustion that makes you forget what day it is. If an idea hits, I grab my phone, pose in front of the camera, and get the sketch down. There’s no glamor here. No polished, Pinterest-ready protagonist. Just me, showing up as I am, because the story doesn’t need perfection. It needs my truth.

So if you’re holding onto something expired, or some belief that no longer fits, maybe you don’t need to toss it right away. Maybe you can study it, let it speak, and let it show you what else is growing beneath the surface.

Holy Mold is still in the works, but if you’d like to follow along with the process or be the first to know when it’s released, visit Artdealerchicc.com or find me on Instagram @ instagram.com/artdealerchicc. You can also email me @ kayholloway614@gmail.com Thank you for holding space for this tender, strange story. .