My name is George Gant. I am the creator of Beware of Toddler, a comic strip about a Black father trying to survive being a stay-at-home parent to his wild two-year-old daughter.

Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I always wanted to draw cartoons. Instead of going outside with my siblings, I stayed inside reading comic strips and drawing cartoon characters. In elementary school, I drew cartoons every chance I could get. In high school, I drew editorial cartoons for the school’s newspaper, even winning four awards over three years. After high school, I focused on college and work and stepped away from comics and cartoons for a while. That was until I discovered webcomics.

With the rise of online comic strips in the early-to-mid 2000s, it became fairly easy for anyone to create and distribute their comics. While I began my comics journey drawing school newspaper comics, it was here that I began to hone my craft. A lifelong gamer, I used my love for video games as the backdrop for my first webcomic, The Reset Button. Two years later, I created On the Grind, a webcomic that pokes fun at the food service industry loosely based on my experiences working as a barista. On the Grind ran for several years with two book collections published.

A year before I published the first On the Grind collection, I became a father for the first time. As I worked in a chain restaurant and knew we’d spend as much money on daycare as I made in the restaurant, I made a conscious decision to quit my day job and become a stay-at-home parent. I had a couple of freelance projects in the pipeline, so I felt fairly confident. I also began toying with the idea of rebooting The Reset Button. This iteration would be more family-friendly, as my taste in humor shifted a bit after growing a bit older and becoming a parent. The new iteration of Reset ran for a few years, with one book collection published not long after the birth of my second child. Once again, I planned another iteration of The Reset Button, this time as a long-form comic book series. Little did I know, a random game of hide-and-seek with my daughter would change everything.

George Gant

Writing since June 2022 · 1 story contributed