How Are You Feeling? New Comics Anthology Brings Together Stories of Periods, Loss, and Mental Health

How are you feeling? It is a question we ask every day, often out of politeness without expecting an honest reply. But what if it were asked in earnest, as an invitation to share the difficult truths we often keep to ourselves?

That is the heart of How Are You Feeling? A Comics Anthology, the latest release from Singapore-based comics publisher Difference Engine. Officially launched on 15 August 2025, the collection brings together three titles from the publisher’s DE Shorts imprint:

• A Drip. A Drop. A Deluge: A Period Tragicomedy by Andeasyand

• Bearing Witness by Vinita Ramani and Griselda Gabriele

• Worlds Apart: A Conversation about Mental Health by Wayne Rée and Nurjannah Suhaimi

Through deeply personal storytelling, these comics shine a light on experiences often shrouded in silence, from the awkward realities of menstruation to the grief of pregnancy loss to candid conversations about mental health.

Stories Stitched from Lived Experience

In A Drip. A Drop. A Deluge, Andeasyand captures the humour, frustration and tenderness of menstruation through whimsical yet unflinchingly honest vignettes. Bearing Witness follows Uma, a woman navigating the grief of losing her baby at 42, capturing the emotional and spiritual weight of miscarriage. Meanwhile, Worlds Apart invites readers into a coffee table chat with a friend who opens up about her mental health diagnosis, challenging stigma and sparking empathy.

Read together, these three stories resonate in powerful ways. They explore unseen struggles, the weight of language and the gaps between medical discourse and lived reality. A foreword by comics scholar Nicolas Verstappen underscores this, describing the anthology as “a powerful contribution to the field of graphic medicine, offering Southeast Asian perspectives that further weave and diversify the threads connecting personal experiences and global discourses on mental and physical health.”

A Milestone for DE Shorts

For Difference Engine, the anthology marks an important chapter in the evolution of its DE Shorts imprint.

“This anthology is a huge milestone for the DE Shorts imprint, which began during the COVID-19 pandemic,” says Felicia Low-Jimenez, Publisher and Co-Founder of Difference Engine. “In a time of isolation and yearning for human connection, we wanted to show how even the most challenging journeys are not taken alone.”

What Is Next from Difference Engine

The DE Shorts series continues to expand. Earlier this year, To the Last Gram by Shreya Davies and Vanessa Wong was released, and fans can look forward to Xocolatl: Language in an Alien Spacetime by Adan Jimenez and Josephine Tan in 2026.

How Are You Feeling? A Comics Anthology is now available for purchase at $22.90 SGD (before GST) through Difference Engine’s webstore.