Melissa Mendes

Freddy 9/10/2025

Alsooooo I'm going to be on my favorite tv show tomorrow, Office Hours Live with Tim Heidecker!!! Aaaaahhhh. It's live on youtube from 1-3 EST tomorrow.

Book launch! And Grandpa Zine!

Hi Buddiessssssss

The book has been birthed and is now in stores. It is a crazy and good feeling. It's real!!

I really hope you all like it. It feels really good to hold, and the paper we chose is really really nice. It has some tooth to it. And it smells good. Sometimes new books don't smell good, but this one does.

I'm working on getting better at allowing the good feelings in. I've never been great at taking compliments and praise, and being this proud of myself is a new...

Freddy 8/20/2025

Directly ganked from this comic strip my niece Hazel did at comics camp (she was my favorite camper obviously). I am kind of obsessed with how obsessed kids are with death. It was in all of their work all of the time!

Also I drew Freddy's drawings with my left hand and it was really hard.

Events and things

Hello my sweet baby angels,

Sorry for the radio silence lately. Camp took a LOT out of me (how the heck do teachers do it? It destroyed me lol) and now I have covid yaaaay :(

BUT here are a few dates and places I will be in September signing The Weight. It's a real book and people are reading it. WTF. I hope to see some of you out there in the world! It's been a long time...

Sept. 4 is the launch party at 2025-08-13 21:09:34 +0000 UTC View Post

Freddy 7/24/2025

I just made this to use in another comics camp next week. I’m thinking of having them all do a 4 panel comic telling a joke.

Jeremy is a duck I drew in the last comics camp. The kids named him Jeremy. He was very popular and also kept getting electrocuted by a big floating eyeball.

Camp is fun, and I also kind of never want to do it again lol

Freddy 7/17/25

I feel insane because I've been running a comics camp this week for six 5/6 year olds and it's 10000 degrees out, so instead of my regular Freddy, here are some camper collabs. In the last one Freddy has wheels for feet. ❤️

Freddy 7/7/2025

This is a true story and has actually been happening to me! There's a chipmunk in the backyard that will come eat sunflower seeds and almonds from my hand. I still can't believe it's real. Originally I named it Lester, then my niece named it Giovanni, and now its full name is Lester Giovanni Roberto Baccalieri (Bobby Bacala is my favorite Sopranos character lol). But we call it Gio. And also Gia, because I think it might be a lady chipmunk, but gender is a social construct so whatever.

...

Freddy 6/29/25

Freddy 6/22/2025

Stay cool, friends!

Freddy 6/11/2025

in other news, I illustrated a story this week for a local independent news site called The Shoestring. I emailed them a few months ago because I really love what they do, and they were psyched to have an illustrator on board! They have great investigative reporting on policing and prisons, the labor movemen...

Freddy 6/4/2025

Hazel is going through a creepy baby phase lol. I got her one at the Brimfield Flea Market that looks like this that she named Florence. I'll try to get a picture next time I see it.

Chuck got me a fountain pen and I'm really loving drawing with it, it's making me do this sort of scratchy style that I like a lot. Not convinced it works for Freddy, but here's a sketchbook page I did with it.

xo

mm

Freddy 5/30/25

True story.

One of you patronis asked if all of the previous Freddy issues were available as PDFs, and I think that's a good idea! So I'm gonna start working on that.

xo

Comics with Kids

Hi Gang,

Sorry I've been quiet on here for a couple weeks! Things have been a little busy, we had family visiting, and then I did a whole day of comics workshops at my niece's school last week. It was really fun, and exhausting, and I'm pretty sure I caught some germs from the little rascals. I've been sick all weekend but I've watched like 5 Red Sox games so it's not all bad. Even though they stink right now 🥲

So here is a photo dump from the day of workshops! My...

Freddy 5/8/2025

I like bugs

Freddy Mini Comic #26

Hi Gang,

Here's the pdf of Freddy #26. All of you $5+ patrons will be getting your copies in the mail soon!

xo

mm

Freddy 4/24/2025

Spooky

Freddy 4/17/25

Based on a true story

Freddy 4/9/2025

Freddy 4/5/2025 + more pencilly things

This week's Freddy was inspired by my trip to the Clark Art museum the other day. Here's the sketchbook page I drew during my time there, I really enjoyed doing studies of the paintings. My two favorites that I saw were Wood Gatherers by George Innes and 2025-04-05 23:39:56 +0000 UTC View Post

Freddy 3/19/25

Got soft serve on the brain

Freddy 3/12/25, and some sketchbook pages and new subscription tiers

EDIT * OHY GOD YOU GUYS I'm sorry it spammed you with like 4000 messages. Something weird happened when I posted it and I thought it got deleted...ugh sorry

Yello friends,

Here's this week's Freddy, plus some sketchbook pages. I was sick for a couple days and I did a lot of drawing while I rewatched The Sopranos. I also did studies of some of Amanda Vähämäki's wor...

Freddy Collection #1!

The first pdf Freddy Collection is live on my Patreon shop!! It has 174 of the Freddy strips that I did for Patreon from 2017-2020.

Patrons can use the discount code FRED27 for 20% off.

Thank you! Happy reading! Love you all!

-mm

Freddy 3/8/25

P.S. I'm working on a pdf collection of Freddy strips from 2017-2020 to sell in the patreon shop! You all will get a discount, obvs. I'll probably be putting it up next week.

Also all the Freddy posts are easier to read in one go for patrons, if you go to the "collections" tab, you should be able to scroll through them all!

Patreon: The Pickling

Hello my little cornichons,

You might not have noticed, but I'm slowly revamping the Patreon a little bit. I'll do a bigger post about it later (none of the changes are super drastic, don't worry!) But I wanted to show you the drawings I did for the new membership tiers because I like the way they came out. The new tiers are "Cornichon", "Gherkin", "Half Sour", "Bread & Butter", and "Big Dill".

So, enjoy your new identity as a pickle! And apologies if you are averse to pick...

Freddy 2/26/2025

Freddy 2/20/25

Little tribute to Peanuts. I love how much they say "RATS". Also I'm so excited for baseballllllll

Freddy 2/13/2025

We went to the Boston Aquarium this week. Watching creatures float around was very soothing. I drew another version of this way back in 2002, for my senior thesis at Hampshire College (where Freddy began!!). That version was huge and involved tons of crosshatching. Unfortunately I don't have any photos of it and I actually also don't know where these drawings are (Mom? Do you know?). Oh well!

Here are some o...

Freddy 2/5/25

I'll be honest, I feel like I've been phoning the Freddy strips in lately. Just rushing through them. But I've been reading some old Peanuts strips and marveling at Sparky's prowess, and that inspired me to try slowing down, taking time, and adding details. I want to do more strips like this, that are more about a place/vibe than a story.

I'm not really cartooning anything else right now, just doing other things like finally printing and mailing the last two issues of The Weight to you...

Freddy 1.31.2025

FrEd Grimley lolololol

Freddy 01.22.2025

Also I updated the post with all of the pdfs of The Weight, so all of the chapters are available now to download!