Aria Heller, the quiet creator of Boggle Loves You, (a wonderful web-comic tumblr featuring a concerned owl who doles out encouraging advice to questions about trauma, depression, and various other Big Bad Life Things), has done an interview with the Comics Alliance, Boggle The Owl Loves You And Wants You To Be Happy:
And so I decided to draw them a worried owl. It just seemed like the thing to do! Everybody likes owls. You can’t distrust an owl’s motivations. An owl isn’t going to lie to you. If an owl says you’re a decent person who is allowed to make mistakes, you believe that owl. I dashed the image off in about fifteen minutes, because I wanted to post it before any of my friends went offline. I expected it to be passed around my little group of friends, maybe get ten or eleven notes.
I think it had about forty thousand by the time I went to bed that night. I was getting messages all evening, from complete strangers, saying things like, “I was going to cut today, but then I saw Boggle and I burst into tears and put down the razor. Thank you.” I think I started crying about four times. There were so many people out there who desperately needed a friendly face, someone who would ask them to just please not be so hard on themselves. I got a message about a week later from a girl who said that she had been planning to commit suicide that night, and then she saw Boggle and called her mother instead, and her mother had taken her to the hospital! And I just kept thinking: I drew this owl in fifteen minutes! I mean, the original post had a typo! And it made such a big difference to so many people. I also received a lot of requests for Boggle to have his own blog, and after that kind of a response, I felt like I couldn’t say no. I didn’t know if a blog about Boggle would last, but I didn’t think it mattered. Even if only a few people wrote in, maybe I could help those people. It felt like the least I could do.
