Illustrator Creates Stories Where Weird Folktales, Magical Girls, and the Loneliness of Growing Up Meet in Full Color

Isa Hanssen, a Filipino-Mexican-American storyboard artist, comic creator, indie game developer, illustrator, and occasional writer. Her practice blends weird regional folktales, magical-girl energy, cinematic storyboards, introspective comics, and emotionally direct character work.

Hanssen’s visual universe is built around the kinds of stories that make everyday life feel porous: local legends, strange dreams, growing pains, loneliness, tenderness, and girls who meet the impossible with courage. Her personal description is wonderfully concise: a love for “weird local folktales, and magic girls who fight.”

That mix gives her work a specific emotional tone. The drawings can be bright and playful, but they are rarely shallow. Beneath the humor, graphic color, and kinetic staging is an interest in fear, alienation, belief, responsibility, and the private intensity of being young. Her comics include a personal series about unusual dreams, introspection, and the loneliness of spending too much time inside one’s own head.

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