Darin Shuler’s sweet but sinister zine, created while his newborn baby kept him awake

Darin Shuler’s latest publication wasn’t made in the normal situation fellow cartoonists usually adopt. Rather than in a studio, or at least during day time, Eyes Cream was made in the middle of the night while Darin was kept awake by his newly born daughter, Sunny.

Although this may sound sweet, the cartoonist speaks honestly about the difficulties of the first few months with a newborn. “I wasn’t sleeping and was feeling very lonely,” the cartoonist tells It’s Nice That. “My identity was also stolen at this time and these drawings were made to amuse or distract myself in the middle of the long dark night.”

As a result Darin’s illustrations featured in Eyes Cream are a combination of the sweet and the sinister, like slightly menacing children’s books from your youth. Each character is a wolf-like creature with metamorphosed features depicted in the brightest of colour combinations with a texture resembling watercolours. The ominous facial expressions of his characters could possibly relate to the illustrator feeling as if he “was shrinking away from the world,” but the fluffy creatures developed from “obviously spending too much time with our three cats”.

Part of the overall charm of Eyes Cream, despite Darin admitting he “never thought these drawings would be pulled together into a beautiful zine,” is how they work seamlessly together allowing the reader to pull together an imaginative narrative themselves, as if you’re peeking into a sketchbook of rambling ideas.

Eyes Cream is available via Corners, here.