A Canadian winter takes its toll
Winter begins with good intentions - baking, flower arranging classes, and trips to the farmers market to keep fresh produce in the house. Despite these considerable efforts, something inside of Cole seems to go rotten every winter and stays that way until spring begins to peek up through the snow.
It Really Is is an auto-fiction comic based on the phenomenon of the winter slump, documenting the slow descent into a full-on winter induced depression with humour, sensitivity, and talking geese.

Cole Degenstein's profile page

Hailing from the prairies and based in Montreal, Cole Degenstein is an artist whose work takes form in illustration, comics, and bookmaking. Tenderness is at the core of his work, which centres itself in storytelling about intimacy, rural life, gay history, and domesticity.

"Degenstein’s distinct mark-making, his manner of moving from abstraction to realism, and his ability to communicate expansively with spare words, result in works that sit in their own realm of illustration, graphic novel, and poetry – stories that oscillate between tender depictions of intimacy, rural life, queerness, and domesticity." —Montreal Review of Books