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This past Thanksgiving, the artist Catana Chetwynd was hanging out with her boyfriend, John Freed, when she started chatting about the "mere exposure" effect in psychology – i.e., the natural human tendency to fancy familiar things and familiar people. The more you see, say, a certain young woman, the more you tend to like her.

"That'd make a funny comic," Freed remarked.

So she made one: a sweet, simple line drawing of a big-eyed Catana peeking at and sneaking up on her bearded fella. "Babe," he drily observes in the last panel, "we've been dating for a year."

She didn't want to put her uniformly upbeat and adorable creations online but her boyfriend did.

"I didn't think people would like them, so he posted them for me. Yeah, I was really nervous — but they ended up taking off."

They did indeed: around 2 million views in the first day. Since then, her handiwork has exploded online, racking up 121,000 followers on Instagram and getting shared by the likes of Ashton Kutcher and George Takei.

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