Stushona Iva draws short, four-panel comics about the tiny battles of an ordinary day: the Monday that needs a bucket of coffee, the haircut that goes wrong, the stranger on the metro who takes up two seats. Her heroine is a wide-eyed young woman with long hair who reacts to everything a little too strongly, which is exactly why the strips are funny. Below are eighteen of her comics, grouped by theme, with a note on what each one is poking fun at.
If you came here looking for relatable comics about women's daily life, the short answer is that Iva's work sits in the same family as Sarah Andersen's Sarah's Scribbles or Yehuda Devir's couple comics: one clear situation, a visual exaggeration, and a final panel that flips the expectation. You do not need to share every experience to enjoy them. The jokes rely on feelings almost everyone knows, such as tiredness, impatience, vanity and the urge to escape a problem rather than face it.
Who is Stushona Iva?
Iva is a Russian illustrator from Chelyabinsk, an industrial city on the eastern side of the Ural Mountains. When her work began circulating widely around 2018, profiles described her as a 32-year-old artist who drew in her spare time and liked to travel. She publishes under the name Comicada, and the small logo with a paper plane, a Facebook "f" and an Instagram camera appears on almost every strip. Her portfolio is on Behance, and new comics go to Instagram and Facebook.
Her style is easy to recognise: thick black outlines, flat colour or plain black-and-white, oversized heads and very expressive eyes. Each strip is usually signed "Stushona" in the lower right corner. Most strips have no words at all, or only one speech bubble, which helps them travel across languages on social media.
Coffee as a superpower
Coffee is the most frequent supporting character in Iva's work. In her comics it is not just a drink but a rescue team, an alarm clock and occasionally a swimming pool.
1. The Monday-morning cup
The heroine sighs "Another cup of coffee..." and pours from a small Turkish coffee pot, but the mug keeps growing until she is swimming in it and finally floats on her back in a giant cup. It is a neat visual way to show how bottomless the need for caffeine feels at the start of a working week.
2. Sleepy at the desk
A black-and-white strip titled "Morning": she nods off over her paperwork, and little coffee-bean characters arrive to prop her eyelids open and push a cup towards her. The beans return in later strips as a kind of friendly emergency service.
3. A fairy tale with a caffeine twist
This one parodies Snow White, with dwarfs standing guard and a prince bending down for the famous kiss. Instead of melting with gratitude, the princess sits up, points into the distance and demands coffee. The joke turns the most romantic moment in the story into a very practical morning complaint.
4. The coffee-bean rescue team
She walks happily in a white dress, spills her coffee down the front and screams. The coffee beans solve the problem their own way: they soak the whole dress in coffee, so the stain disappears into an even brown. The original title played on the Disney cartoon Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers.
Clothes, hair and online shopping
Fashion and grooming give Iva plenty of material, mostly about the gap between what we imagine and what actually happens.
5. Who invents these trends?
She buys a strappy, criss-cross swimsuit while dreaming of palm trees, sunbathes in it, and ends up with a tan in the exact lattice pattern of the straps. Anyone who has worn a cut-out swimsuit in strong sun will recognise the result. Dermatologists would add the serious note that any tan is a sign of sun damage, so sunscreen is the better accessory.
6. One click, one week later
Lying bored on her bed, she scrolls her phone, spots a black dress for 99.9 and taps the basket icon. In the last panel, labelled "One week later...", she lies in exactly the same position, now wearing the dress. Online shopping changes the outfit, not the mood.
7. "Just a light trim"
She asks the hairdresser for "just a light trim", the stylist grins and starts cutting, and the last panels show her with very short hair. The stylist shrugs that she heard "cut it all off". The old title joked about a worldwide conspiracy of hairdressers, and many salon customers would probably sign the petition.
8. A small act of rebellion
In a lift, our heroine stands next to a cool woman with a topknot and full tattoo sleeves. She studies the tattoos with admiration and then quietly draws her own on her arm with a marker. It is a gentle joke about wanting to look bold without committing to anything permanent.
Friends, partners and strangers
Some of the sharpest strips are about other people: friends who give honest feedback, partners glued to their phones and strangers who forget they share public space.
9. A fit of cuteness
Wrapped in a huge fluffy blue coat, she sees a man walking a small white dog and asks, "May I pet?" He says yes, so she happily pats the man's head instead of the dog's. The dog's confused look in the last panel makes the joke.
10. Honest friendship
A friend in a tight dress asks, "How do I look?" A tiny angel whispers "Wonderful!" and a tiny devil says "Like a tramp!", so the heroine diplomatically answers "Wonderfully trampy!" It captures the struggle between kindness and honesty that close friends know well.
11. How to get your boyfriend's attention
On a café date her boyfriend stares at his phone. She takes his phone, holds it up in front of her own face, and suddenly he is looking straight at her. The strip makes a light point about "phubbing", the habit of snubbing someone in favour of a phone, which researchers have linked to lower relationship satisfaction.
12. The mirror
At a bar, a friend sympathises: she has been fired and her boyfriend has left. The heroine insists she is fine, because things could be worse and she could look like the woman across the room. The final panel reveals that she is pointing at a mirror. It is a dark little joke about denial and how differently we see ourselves on bad days.
13. Manspreading on the metro
She sits between two men on a train until one of them spreads his knees across half her seat. After an explosion of rage, she copies his posture so that he is the one squeezed. Public transport operators have campaigned against this habit; New York's MTA ran a poster campaign about it in 2014, and Madrid's bus company added signs in 2017.
Small disasters of everyday life
The last group is about little defeats that feel huge in the moment, and the creative ways the heroine avoids dealing with them.
14. The joy of the first car
She hugs her shiny new car surrounded by hearts and sparkles, and then drives off. In the last panel the back seats are full of grey passengers labelled "insurance", "repairs" and "gasoline". Anyone who has budgeted for a first car knows these quiet costs ride along on every trip.
15. Whatever you do, don't fall
Walking proudly with her handbag, she trips on a tiny stone, lands flat on her face, and in the absurd final panel her face has come off and lies on the ground looking up at her. It is the comic version of wanting to disappear after a public stumble.
16. A cat for comfort
She sits at her desk looking miserable. Her cat climbs up and settles on top of her head like a fur hat, and she simply carries on being sad with a cat on her head. Studies on pets and mood are mixed, but most owners would agree the gesture counts.
17. Avoiding a problem, beautifully
A huge grey figure labelled "Problem" looms next to her. She blows a pink bubble-gum bubble that grows until it lifts her into the clouds, far away from it. Psychologists call this avoidance coping; it feels good briefly, but the problem usually waits on the ground.
18. Collapsing after work
She drops onto her bed, flat and limp, then sinks completely into the mattress until only ripples are left on the surface. The strip shows tiredness as a physical force, which is how a long shift can feel.
Why these short comics work so well
Most of the strips use four panels, a format that mirrors Japanese yonkoma comics: an introduction, a development, a twist and a conclusion. That structure suits social media perfectly. It can be read in a few seconds, the twist arrives exactly where the eye expects the end, and the absence of long dialogue means the joke survives translation.
Iva also relies on literal visual metaphors. A need for coffee becomes a swimming pool of coffee, exhaustion becomes sinking into a mattress, avoiding a problem becomes floating away in a bubble. This trick is as old as cartooning, and it works because the reader instantly recognises the feeling behind the image.
Finally, the heroine is never perfect. She is vain, lazy, impatient and occasionally petty, and that is what makes her likeable. Readers tend to share comics that say "this is me" without having to admit it in words. If you enjoy her humour, the best way to support the artist is to follow and share her work from her own pages, with her signature intact.
Sources: Stushona Iva on Behance; Comicada on Instagram; Comicada on Facebook.
Brilliant :-)
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