However, candy hearts are far from the only drawing ideas Tommy has — he has a wide repertoire of online comics that drew in more than 83,400 followers on Instagram and another 54,500 on Facebook.

“I hail from Richmond, Virginia. But for the last ten years, I've been based in Brooklyn, New York,” Tommy told Bored Panda in an interview. “I've been a full-time musician for most of my adult life in the band Jukebox the Ghost, so cartooning and comic strips as a serious pursuit are still pretty new for me!”

“I'm self-taught, aside from some drawing lessons in elementary school. I kinda put drawing on hold for a couple of decades while I was focusing on music, but returned to cartooning recently,” Tommy explained about his relationship with art. “My drawing skills increased dramatically in the last couple of years. A few weeks ago, I completed a challenge to draw a comic every day for 500 days! It was… an insane thing to do and incredibly difficult, but it definitely helped me develop a voice and challenged me to become a better artist.”

Tommy also told Bored Panda that his “style swings wildly — I try not to pin myself down. The candy hearts series was part of the 500-day project, so they were interspersed with political cartoons and some totally dumb stuff.”

“When I'm not drawing candy hearts comics, I definitely draw a lot of butts,” he jokes. “So I guess I would describe my current style as "lots of butts and sometimes candy hearts."

“I drew a comic for Valentine's Day with candy hearts on a movie date. I noticed it really seemed to resonate with people and realized that the idea of candy hearts having their inner monologues printed on them was a great setup to try again.”

The artist further elaborated about his cartoons: “Sometimes they're just light and funny, but my favorites are the ones that get at something deeper about human emotions.”

“I don't think of them as being unromantic, personally. I just think it's a good format to draw attention to people's inner lives, which are often in contrast to the way they appear from the outside,” he added about the candy heart comics.

The candy heart cartoons raise a serious issue about how a lot of us shy away from sharing our inner lives and real feelings with others, even the people closest to us. Communication is the cornerstone for building lasting relationships and creating genuine connections with others, so it’s important to do it well.

The Better Health Channel writes that it’s important to communicate clearly in relationships because nobody’s a mind-reader. That’s why we should all find the time to talk without any modern distractions like TV or smartphones, accept responsibility for our feelings, genuinely listen to others without butting in, and avoid the desire to always be right.