Bored Panda reached out to the creative mind and talented artist behind VeryCereals to find out more about his comics, and we are happy to introduce Mayati exclusively from his own words. Although of Moroccan descent, Mayati was born and raised in Germany and is currently studying Computer Science, so we got curious how his relationship with art and comics came about. Spoiler alert: it was a bumpy road.

"Art was and is still not a big thing in my family. But for me, it has become a big part of my life over the last 10 years. I think about it daily, like I did about this crush I had in second grade. Usually, I was the one that was the worst at drawing. I even had to retake 6th grade because I had a 6, which is the worst grade in Germany, on my report card in art. I remember my older brothers drawing characters from anime shows like Goku from Dragonball Z or Pokemon and I was amazed by how good they were. My attempts were rather poor. I guess that was my first encounter with art and the last one for several years."

The artist came back to drawing years later, driven by a simple goal of learning to draw.

"I really liked to learn new skills. The internet was becoming more and more integrated into our daily lives, which gave me the opportunity to pull from a giant pool of information to do so. I started to learn some card tricks, learned pen spinning, and how to solve a Rubik's cube, and stuff like that to an amateurish but still satisfying extent until at some point, I really wanted to learn to draw. There was no particular reason other than to master that skill. So like every kid that wanted to learn to draw, I looked up anime tutorials on YouTube and went from there."

Mayati told us about his ideas and inspirations for comics:

"The topics of my comics vary a lot, and that’s because I don’t follow any strategy when creating them. They are about stuff I find interesting, I have an opinion about, or about just very random situations with a funny, some might call it stupid (I do), twist to them. Sometimes I even think about a character that would be funny or interesting and do a comic about it. For some time, I wanted to have a more strict environment, with recurring characters and maybe a set scope of topics for comics, but so far it hasn’t worked for me. Doing it that way would be beneficial for marketing purposes, but artists don‘t create because of money, am I right?"

"I wanted to keep it simple," Mayati says about his style choice. "In the past, I have tried to accomplish ambitious illustrations, but I could never finish any, which was frustrating. When I started these comics two years ago, I wanted to take the pressure off myself and just have fun without caring too much about the art. Ironically, I feel like I have improved much faster that way."

VeryCereals comics might be about random things in life, but they have one crucial element in common to make them enjoyable, and that is humor.

"Humor has no rules and that means I have the freedom to express anything that I want even if it is controversial or absurd. Humor is something that can release the tension about certain topics and nobody can get mad about that."