ISBN 978-1-7383688-8-4
6x8 inches / full colour / flaps / 152 pages / $20
Spring 2026 / North American rights
A raw and rambunctious diary comic about a big breakup, making your first graphic novel, therapy, mental health, and befriending characters from manga, by the author of Quiet Crossings (Conundrum Press).
Vivi Partridge is a queer comics creator working out of Toronto, Ontario. Vivi is a painter, teacher, and graphic arts community enthusiast, who loves to grab a matcha latte at a cafe, and to spend time with their two cats.
vividoodles.ca
"[...] Vivi Partridge's understated storytelling is complimented by their expressive and beautiful cartooning."
-Jade Armstrong (Food School) on Vivi’s debut OGN Quiet Crossings.
From the author -
Vivisect was made out of an impulse to talk to someone. In a time where I didn't feel too comfortable talking to the people around me about how I was feeling and what I was going through. The weight of that emotion manifested itself in an intense period of diary comic making. I began to carry around a really cheap sketchbook that I titled "Shit Book", the pages were annoyingly thin and could only handle pen and water based markers, and the spine got so cracked that it's currently being held together by painter's tape and stickers from my street artist friends. So I let myself write and draw things that I thought at the time were utterly well.. "shit". After about four months of doing that, I had a somewhat solid narrative which I was able to clean up, and to my honest surprise there was a really sentimental heart to what I had been scrawling down. I spent about a year editing and polishing the heart of the story and voila... Vivisect!
Vivisect documents a very vulnerable chapter in my life, transitioning to an independent adulthood, from a rocky relationship end, while ultimately trying to figure out my place as an artist in a big busy city like Toronto. There's a lot of uncertainty, isolation, and finding a balance between oversharing online and sharing what you're going through "artistically". Currently as I wrap up my work on the book, I feel like that specific chapter of my life has trickled to an end. It makes a lot of sense to me to publish this now with Inservice Comics having the 20/20 hindsight vision of everything I was going through at the time.
I hope readers can feel a little less alone. Dealing with mental health struggles while on your own can make you feel like the craziest person on earth, it's nice to find comradery or see yourself reflected in the media around you. One of the bigger overarching themes of Vivisect is loneliness, and one of the things that made me feel much less alone during this period of time was watching lots of biopics about other artists, and reading up on different painters of the past. I truly think that if you're an artist, there's something a little "off" about the way you perceive and move through the world. If even one person reads Vivisect and feels slightly less alone, then I will have felt like I have succeeded with this book.
