The Tulpa
A practice Russian-language imageboards picked up from English-language ones around 2012: an imagined companion, grown over months of daily exercises until it answers on its own and becomes visible to the person who made it. The word is taken from Tibetan Buddhism, where it means something quite different; its present sense was given to it by Western occultists in the early twentieth century. The frightening part of the legend is not the practice but its retellings: the tulpa that stopped obeying, the tulpa that refused to go, and the tulpa that was there first.
Cartoon Cat
Henderson drew it in August 2018, days after Siren Head. The creature is done in the visual language of 1930s American animation — rubber-hose limbs, saucer eyes, a permanent grin — but stands two storeys tall and has teeth a cartoon cat should not have. The trick is a single one and it works every time: take an idiom an entire generation associates with safety and childhood, and scale it up until it stops being funny.
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