Cover of the Heart & Brain collection, Volume 1, with the iconic cartoon of the titular characters (and best represents them) (fair use)

(17) NICK SELUK (THE AWKWARD YETI) –

HEART & BRAIN (2012 – PRESENT)

Go Heart, go!

Heart and Brain is an ongoing webcomic strip published intermittently by Nick Seluck (a.k.a. Lars the Awkward Yeti), with each strip as a self-contained gag.

Heart and Brain originated within (and spun off from) Seluck’s Awkward Yeti strip, which involved a literal blue-furred yeti living an otherwise human life, except of course for his titular social awkwardness. (Although what yeti wouldn’t be living among humans?). In that strip, he would interact with various organs in his own body, except that they would amusingly appear as anthropomorphic beings outside of his body. Not too anthropomorphic of course – they still had their anatomical appearance – but with their own personalities as well as limbs and faces, usually in the form of eyes and mouths. However, this varies – the eyes are just big eyeballs with limbs, while the brain has no mouth or eyes (yet wears glasses and obviously can see as well as read). Their appearance alone is enough to crack me up.

Of course, Heart and Brain are the foremost organs as essentially the driving forces of human personality) – their spinoff strip is not so much them interacting with the Awkward Yeti, but primarily with each other as well as occasionally other organs. Heart is not so much his role as the muscle in the circulatory system – although he is that – but the more metaphorical sense of heart, the emotional (and child-like) personality within us all. And he is adorable – with his fixation on dressing as Batman and his constant butterfly companion, representing (literally in a sense) his flights of fancy. Of course, Brain is Heart’s counterpart as rational adult personality – although not entirely rational, as he is prone to rumination and stress or, dare I say it, overthinking.

Not surprisingly, Nick Seluck has a bachelor’s degree in psychology – with Heart and Brain representing well-known dichotomies such as extroversion and introversion or emotion and logic (or id and ego/superego in Freudian terms):

“The heart follows its feelings and emotions, chasing down butterflies and getting excited about kittens, while the brain is concerned about adult responsibility. While the heart skips to emotional need, the brain brings in reason and logic for why the heart’s action are ill-advised…Heart and Brain as the internal tennis match we often face between our romantic hearts and our realistic brains.”

As stated, Heart and Brain interact primarily with each other (as natural odd couple), but also on occasion with other body parts. Most of these body parts are good-natured, except my personal favorite after Heart – Tongue, who is the comic’s equivalent of an evil supervillain dedicated to sensory taste experience, and who, amusingly enough, does have the facial characteristics of eyes, mouth and tongue. He also gets bonus points for having, aptly enough, a lisp (as well as being rather…spluttery).