Kids Comics Pitchfest 2025 Showcase

Knots

People make Musafir nervous. Always have. Just the idea of walking up to kids he thought were cool, or asking out a girl he liked, or even just making small talk at the cash register gave him stomach aches. Moving back to Karachi – following an incident at his Toronto high school he doesn’t like to think about – was a chance to reinvent himself: to be more like his effortlessly cool older brother, and less like, well, himself. But swapping hemispheres doesn’t make your problems go away. In fact, they can get so much worse: he doesn’t know how it happened, or why, or if anyone else can even see or hear it, but Musafir’s belly is alive; and people make it nervous.

My Why:

Much like the protagonist in this story, the two constants of my adolescence were stomach aches and social anxiety – leading to a lot of the same self-sabotaging choices Musafir makes over the course of the book.

Reframing those experiences through horror allows me the space to safely explore how it actually felt in the moment, and my hope is that this book will give other kids that same space.