The Sad Ghost Club at The Cartoon Museum: Lize Meddings’s Gentle, Groundbreaking Work Finally Gets the Exhibition It Deserves
The Sad Ghost Club: Lize Meddings's exhibition, running at The Cartoon Museum on Wells Street from 6 October to 6 December 2026, is the kind of exhibition that reminds you why the best illustrative work, when it is given the space and care of a proper gallery context, can do something that larger, more celebrated art forms often cannot: make you feel profoundly, unexpectedly less alone. Created over ten years ago by illustrator Lize Meddings, The Sad Ghost Club centres on a sad ghostie learning to better understand themselves and others, while promoting positive mental health awareness. Through comics, zines and other media, Meddings found her work resonating deeply, and now there are over half a million club members on Instagram alone. This showcase arrives at a particular moment: the final instalment of the bestselling international graphic novel series was published in August 2026, bringing five volumes and six years of publishing to a close. As one chapter ends, this exhibition opens another, and it is a fitting, generous and genuinely moving way to mark the occasion.
The exhibition establishes its atmosphere from the very first room. Original pages from Book 1 sit alongside never-before-shared work, and the effect of seeing Meddings’s illustrations at their actual, physical scale in pencil and ink rather than on a screen is quietly startling. The ghostie is small, round, expressive in a way that relies on the simplest possible visual vocabulary, and yet in the original artwork that simplicity reveals itself as a deliberate and hard-won choice. A panel that registers in seconds on a phone screen becomes something different when you stand in front of it: the weight of the line, the particular emptiness of the surrounding white space, the way a single curved eyebrow says everything that needs saying. From here, the exhibition demonstrates a consistent and assured understanding of how the most effective illustrative work achieves its impact not through complexity but through ruthless, compassionate precision.
What works especially well is the way the exhibition positions Meddings’s work within its proper context, not as a social media phenomenon that happened to become a book series, but as a sustained creative project with a clear artistic vision and a genuine sense of purpose. Demonstrating the power of creating community through comics, The Sad Ghost Club lets you know it is okay to feel whatever you are feeling, and the exhibition makes that mission legible as a creative and editorial choice as much as an emotional one. The progression from early zine work through the graphic novel series gives visitors a sense of the work’s development over a decade: how Meddings’s line has evolved, how the ghostie’s emotional vocabulary has expanded, and how a project that began as a personal creative response to feeling bad became something that half a million people turned to when they needed to feel understood.
The never-before-shared work is where the exhibition earns its most devoted attention. Seeing pieces that have not been mediated through publication or social media work in process, earlier versions, material that shows the thinking behind the finished pages gives the show a quality of genuine disclosure that feels like a gift to anyone who has followed Meddings’s work closely. These pieces do not diminish the finished books; they illuminate them, revealing the craft and the intentionality behind what can appear, in its published form, almost effortlessly simple.
One of the exhibition’s greatest strengths is the warmth and accessibility it extends to everyone who walks through the door. The Sad Ghost Club has always been explicitly for people who struggle with anxiety, loneliness, the difficulty of naming and navigating their own feelings, and the exhibition carries that inclusive spirit throughout. Nothing is presented at a distance that intimidates; everything invites engagement. The Cartoon Museum’s intimate Wells Street space is well-suited to this material, creating the feeling of a visit rather than an institution, a conversation rather than a lecture.
There are moments in the exhibition where the pace eases, and a single image is allowed to occupy its wall without competition: a drawing of the ghostie sitting quietly with something unresolved, not fixed, not explained, just present. These are among the most valuable passages of the visit. Meddings has always understood that the most honest thing you can say about difficult feelings is not that they go away but that they are survivable, and that company even the company of a small illustrated ghost on a page can make the surviving considerably less solitary. This exhibition makes that understanding visible, and it is well worth your time.
