Almost every year, I hesitate participating in Inktober due to the commitment required. It’s not easy coming up with a compelling concept for an illustration based on a single-word prompt every day for 31 days straight. But starting with Inktober 2019 and joining in every year, including this year in 2025, I’ve never regretted it.
I usually choose a theme each year or some kind of visual style that carries through the month. Sometimes I will start without a solid theme, but one will emerge and I will pursue that. For example, in 2024, I had Daria and Horsey featured in various travel and adventure vignettes. For me, some kind of storyline, whether loose or strict, compels me to move on to the next installment with enthusiasm and anticipation.
This year, I decided I would try my hand at featuring the titular character from September’s extremely popular Netflix summer blockbuster—no, not the ladies from K-Pop Demon Hunters—I’m referring to Wednesday.
I was inspired after stopping at a Wendy’s restaurant after a shopping trip last weekend. I didn’t want to sit in a restaurant staring at my phone while eating. (I really am trying to cut back on mindless social media consumption these days.) So I brought a sketchbook and a pen and thought I would doodle during dinner. Because Wendy’s was having a cross-promotion with Netflix’s Wednesday, they had branded packaging and other display promos all over the place. Of note was a sleeve for their fries, decorated with purple stripes and a school crest with an initial W on it.
Just the inspiration I needed. Luckily, I’ve been watching Wednesday on Netflix with my daughter, so I’m familiar with the characters and story. I wrote a satirical joke about commercialization and art. Then I appended the line, “I’m in.“ This is totally the character Wednesday’s persona: dry-witted, sarcastic, morbid, deadpan. In fact, the original comic strip by cartoonist Charles Addams, started in the 1930s, uses this trope of Universal Pictures-inspired monsters as fish out of water in modern society as a running gag throughout its run. And it mostly works.
So when it came time to think about this year’s running concept for Inktober, I thought it may be fun to try it out.
Here’s a sneak peek at Day 1’s prompt: mustache.
I felt like this really worked and gave me an incentive to press forward with Wednesday gags, each one based on the Inktober 2025 prompts. To date, I’ve been way ahead of schedule and have already completed several illustrations, some admittedly better than others, but each one done with enthusiasm. And that is the stumbling block for many would-be Inktober participants: getting enough inspiration and having so much fun that this challenge doesn’t become a slog and gets abandoned a week or so in.
I’m not always a fan of fan-art. I do try to avoid it when I can and try to concentrate on original characters and stories. But I occasionally will indulge in some fan service. And though I have mixed feelings about the Netflix series’ take on the Addams Family, I do genuinely like Wednesday as a character. Taking a figure who is stoic and abrasive and managing to make them likable is such an interesting challenge. I think of characters like House and Doc Martin as prime archetypes in this category.
Wednesday’s appearance on my Inktober 2025 series of posts starts Wednesday, October 1. Follow @iluvurmug on Facebook, Instagram, Threads or Cara.
Bluesky too? We’ll see.