Sarah Graley makes comics.
Actually, Sarah Graley makes awesome comics. Wait, one more try.
Sarah Graley makes awesome comics starring amazing, strong, queer women, including herself.
She’s the artist and writer behind “Rick & Morty: Lil’ Poopy Superstar,” “Pizza Witch,” “RentQuest” and the autobiographical “Our Super Adventure,” which stars Graley and her boyfriend of five years, Stef. The comic documents the sweet and hilarious moments of their relationship and the life they share with their four cats. It doesn’t sound like typical fodder for a comic. And for Graley, that’s kind of the point.
“Before I got into comics, I believed for a really long time that comics were just about really muscular men in capes,” she said over email.
“And that didn’t interest me — I rather write stories with diverse range of exciting characters. (I’m really sorry if anyone reading this is a muscular man in a cape — you are probably a solid okay),” she joked.
She added, “I’m also a bisexual lady — growing up though, I don’t remember any media that featured queer woman, let alone starred? I really wish I had that as a kid! Or as a teen! I just want that all the time to be honest, more media featuring rad queer women. So I make my own!"
Her kickass characters are quirky, romantic, even magical women, and a welcome shift from the norm.
But starring in “Our Super Adventure” means the world gets a front-row seat to her relationship, which can be a little ... awkward.
“I’m a pretty open book, so writing about mine and Stef’s relationship and being honest — it doesn’t feel unnatural or weird until somebody will talk to me about a particular comic strip in-depth in person,” Graley wrote. “Then it’ll be like, oh yeah, I guess I did draw my butt and then publish it in a book.”
Gif of Bryan CRanston being angry via 
Hungry and ready.Photo credit 
The mac and cheese staple presentation.Photo credit 
Pizza ready from the oven.Photo credit 
Friends hover around the barbeque.Photo credit 
Seafood platter on the beach.Photo credit 
Scarecrow watches over a vegetable garden.Photo credit 
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.