When cartoonist and illustrator Gemma Correll was working to manage her anxiety and depression as a young adult in England, she had trouble finding books about mental health that spoke to her. So, she drew her own. “I wanted to make something that I would have wanted to have as a young person,” Correll says, “about how anxiety affects not just the mind but the body as well. I wanted to make a book that I could have read and felt less alone.”
In Anxietyland—out in April from Gallery Books—Correll deploys the comedy chops she’s honed as a viral cartoonist to share her battle with anxiety and depression with both humor and honesty. PW’s review called the book “one of the funniest and most affable mental health memoirs to come along in a while.”
The book opens with Correll checking herself into an ER during an extreme panic attack. From there, she flashes back through a lifetime of struggles with anxiety and depression that started in early childhood. “Gemma is often very tearful,” an elementary school teacher notes. As an adult, Gemma experiences periods of agoraphobia, panic attacks, and dissociation, and self-medicates with alcohol. In the book, she depicts these experiences as a trip through Anxietyland, an amusement park with attractions like the House of No Fun, the Control Freak Show, and the Tunnel of Ugh, OK, Fine.
“The worst times, when I was severely agoraphobic and basically couldn’t leave the house, were not fun,” Correll recalls. “But I honestly believe that there is humor in absolutely everything.” While working on Anxietyland, she enjoyed the challenge of drawing odd moments like peeing into a cup at the hospital or struggling to put on a turtleneck during an attack of claustrophobia. “It wasn’t funny at the time,” she adds, “but now, looking back, there were some pretty funny and strange incidents.”
Born in East Anglia to an English mother and an American father, Correll grew up reading British kids’ comics magazines like Beano. “I studied illustration at college, but I’d always drawn little comics in my free time,” she says. At the Norwich School of Art and Design, from which she graduated in 2006, she set out to train for a career in traditional illustration, but discovering indie cartoonists like Lynda Barry and Tom Gauld opened her up to the possibilities of comics. “My professor saw the comics that I was making on the side in my sketchbooks,” she says, “and was like, this is what you should be doing, not the terrible paintings that you’re trying to do.”
Starting in the 2000s, Correll self-published minicomics and posted short autobiographical comics online. She was an early adopter of Instagram. “At first it was just for myself, to have a chronicle of the things that I was making,” she says. “Then I discovered that people were into them. I was making a lot of comics about my personal stories and mental health, and people were actually responding to them.”
In 2014, Correll became a regular contributor to the online comics magazine the Nib. Her work there was an eclectic mix of the personal (“Office Gossip, from My Home Office” reports on workplace drama between her pets and plants), the political (a menu of White House cocktails includes a Dark ’n’ Stormy Daniels and an Old Fashioned Misogyny), and the just plain funny (“Less Historical Monuments of London” directs tourists to the Royal Arch of Over Politeness and Just a Manky Pigeon on a Chicken Shop Box).
Around this time, Correll and her future husband, Anthony Zinonos, moved to the United States, settling in Southern California. “It was a very hopeful time when we moved here,” she recalls. “Obama was president. California felt so hopeful and exciting, and there were lots of work opportunities for both of us.”
It was also in the U.S. that Correll discovered pugs, and they quickly became her favorite dog breed and a source of cartooning inspiration. “They’re just little clowns,” she says. “Their faces are so perfect for turning into cartoons.” Since then, she and her husband have always kept pugs, which provide Correll with creative material as well as mental health support. “They remind me not to take everything too seriously, to look after myself, get outside, feed myself, take my medication. Basically, the things I do for them, I have to remember to do for myself as well.”
Correll’s first books—A Cat’s Life (2012) and A Dog’s Life (2013) from teNeues, and A Pug’s Guide to Etiquette (2013) from Dog n Bone—showed off her talent for drawing funny animals. The 2015 collection A Worrier’s Guide to Life from Andrews McMeel compiled some of her most popular online cartoons. By this time, her work had found a large following on social media. A 2020 Forbes interview called her “The Cartoonist That Captures Our Times,” noting that her comics—relatable, personal, and timely—were eminently shareable, especially among people looking for comic relief during the pandemic. In 2021, the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco featured her in its Emerging Artist Showcase.
Throughout these projects, Correll often returned to the subject of mental health. One of her early comics for the Nib imagines “Depression Land,” a concept eventually expanded into the theme park metaphor in Anxietyland. For Correll, these visuals are the best way to explain the experience of mental illness. “I personally find it helpful to be able to see an image and point at it and say, this is how I feel,” she says. “Hopefully, a lot of people will be able to relate to that.”
While Anxietyland expands on material Correll has touched on in her shorter comics, the book also reveals that she was motivated to work on her mental health so she could cope with her aerophobia and move to the United States. “I’ve had some really bad anxiety recently when traveling,” she says, “but because I’ve learned to lean into it and allow it to happen, I feel way better than I did when I was trying to fight it.”
Though Correll has published collections of her comics and provided illustrations for other writers’ books—including the Pugly series by Scottish author Pamela Butchart—Anxietyland is her first long-form graphic narrative. “I’m used to the short form, and I work in a pretty stream of consciousness kind of way where I have an idea, and then I just draw it without any real forward planning,” she says, “whereas this involved a lot of planning and structure.” Correll experimented with approaches to scripting before hitting on a system of sketching pages and pinning them to her walls. “Hundreds of pages of drawings were stuck to my walls, just to plan everything out. I needed to see it visually, you know?”
While she continues to write short comics, Correll is already thinking about her next long-form project. “Now that I’ve gotten over the hurdle of doing one long book,” she says, “I realize that I can actually do it, even though it was difficult to work on at the time. There’s more that I’d like to say. I would like to speak about being creative as somebody with mental illness.”
In the meantime, Correll hopes that Anxietyland speaks to people with anxiety and depression. “I would like to tell them it’s something very common that people don’t necessarily talk about,” she says. “And it’s not something you should expect to get rid of or get over—which doesn’t sound great, obviously, but I’ve found that learning to live with it is so much more effective than trying to push it away.”
Shaenon K. Garrity is a frequent PW comics contributor. Her forthcoming graphic novel, Steam (S&S/McElderry), publishes in February.
Read more from our spring 2026 comics & graphic novels preview feature.
