My girlfriend (Poppy) and I (Chia) met about 8 years ago through a dating app! It was interesting because my profile was all jokes (I remember writing that my favorite place was "over there *points in arbitrary direction*") and my now-girlfriend-then-interest's profile was basically like she copy and pasted her LinkedIn into the dating app, detailing her roles and accomplishments. We both thought the other person was potentially a fake account, but both liked something on each of our profiles enough to try to connect.

We had been texting back and forth for a week before finally meeting in person and we ended up spending 5 hours just talking on the first date. We found out that we had a lot of similar interests and were both excited to read one of our favorite comedian's books, which actually resulted in us buying each other the exact same gift for each other later on (here's a comic about that). It felt like we were meant to be and, so many years later, those feelings have only magnified. I also created a comic about how we met here.

We like to say that we're same-same, but different, which is partially what inspired the name of our comic, Sesame But Different (here's a comic about that). In other words, we have a lot of overlap (we like the same foods, activities, books, etc.), but we're also quite different. I'm very organized and an early bird, but Poppy is a night owl… who likes to leave her socks everywhere . In terms of our love language, it's tied between quality time, touch, and words of affirmation, followed by acts of service and then gifts. Poppy is more mature despite being younger than me by a few years, but she still finds it amusing when I try to summon her attention with animal noises randomly throughout the day, so it all works out.

When Poppy and I were both younger, we rarely saw any depictions of happy and healthy LGBT relationships, which often made us feel alone and uncertain about our futures when we were growing up. We feel so lucky that we ended up together and thought that creating a comic about our relationship would be our way of sharing with others like us that it truly can get better. It's been so rewarding to get messages from readers around the world who can relate to silly or even mundane moments that we've captured.

As far as my arts background, I've always loved drawing and anything involving visual arts. I would always doodle in the margins of my notes during class back when I was in school and even though my current desk job is not a creative role, I still try to sneak in artwork here and there. Creating art is one of my delights that I pursue whenever I have time.

The comic has been running for about 3.5 years now, and we're still going strong! We've expanded into creating greeting cards as well as other merch, and I've also recently started to create short animations of Sesame But Different moments on TikTok and Instagram!