Aminder Dhaliwal once had a pilot sit in development purgatory for four years before ultimately being scrapped. She describes the experience as quietly disheartening. “I’ve learned to find happiness in a really fast ‘no,’” she says, wryly.
Feeling disappointed and robbed of her time, she resolved to make art that was guaranteed to at least see the light of day. She started posting comics on Instagram, and she says, “I was as shocked as anyone when I started getting this large following. I [resolved to] self-publish a book now that I had a base that would probably buy it.”
But instead of self-publishing, she cold-called publisher Drawn & Quarterly and sent over a copy of Woman World, her first graphic novel imagining a future where men are extinct. They replied a week later with an offer to publish it.
Next came this year’s Cyclopedia Exotica, an allegory about microaggressions from the perspective of the mythological, one-eyed creature Cyclopes. “I wanted to play with the idea of the daily comic strip,” says Dhaliwal of the book’s format. “Daily strips are not only a really easy way to offer bite-sized chunks into a new world, but it’s also a nice way of layering on a theme.” Each comic works individually, but when they are read as something larger in a book, she says it shows how “those microaggressions add up daily. The weight of them is so different than when you experience a one-off. What I find fun about these traumatizing events is the humor you can find in them, or those little pockets of joy when other people [can relate].”
Before Dhaliwal came to appreciate the comic strip form, her interest was in animation—an interest born out of a fascination for DVD bonus features and storytelling. The avid reader pictured stories in motion in her head. “There was something really enticing to me about seeing pictures move and how differently comedy works in animation,” she says.
“I feel like that’s such a cliché, but it really is something to have all these moving lines come together that can express emotion and have an effect on people,” she adds. “I like that animation has this accessibility to it, maybe because it’s been softened with its association to children or family content: You’re willing to watch it with an openness that you don’t with other genres. I feel like you can backdoor some good messages that way.”
Dhaliwal received her bachelor’s degree for animation from Canada’s Sheridan College. After graduating in 2011, she landed an internship at Nickelodeon and was later hired on, working as a revisionist on Robot and Monster and The Fairly OddParents, and as a storyboard artist and storyboard director on Sanjay and Craig. She also served stints at Cartoon Network, Disney TV, Sony, and Netflix, most recently working as a writer on the latter’s series Centaurworld and story artist on a Sony feature in development.
When Dhaliwal finally made the jump from her Instagram comics to publishing, she encountered new challenges. But she feels that dealing with the business end of animation prepared her for them. “As soon as show meets business, I think it’s always a struggle for any artist,” she says. She thinks she stayed at certain companies longer than she needed to out of a reverence for their history, “but it probably would’ve been beneficial to my mental health and creative ambition to have left earlier.”
Today, Dhaliwal is thankful to have found an outlet that allows her to be in charge of her creativity. At the same time, she also appreciates the lessons she’s learned from her 10 years so far in the industry. “Rejection can dictate our identity where you think you’re something and everyone tells you you’re not that thing that you thought you were,” she says.
Instead of fighting rejection, she embraces it. She’s also learned how to have confidence in her own voice and to set reasonable career goals, which she feels should not be confused with hopes. “I try to think of goals that are completely in my control because that way if I do fail, I at least know it was in my control,” she says. “A goal could be to write a book, but to hope to be on The New York Times’ bestseller list is completely out of your control. That’s been an important dichotomy for me to learn.”
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