At this time, I was living in a new-to-me rented house in Calgary’s Bridgeland neighbourhood (which, back in 2003, seemed a bit sketchier than it is today!). But, I wasn’t worried about my neighbourhood. I was worried about something else: at the age of twenty-nine, I was worried about getting old.

Reading this now, over twenty years later, it seems a bit silly! But, it’s part of the story, I guess, so here we go.

(At this point, I digressed into some other musings that will have to be a Drawing Book episode of their own. A few pages later, I came back to the question of what was bothering me…)

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Sorry I am not ending this week’s comic on a more uplifting note, but at least I’m ending it with some great tunes and an excellent play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile. You might enjoy Neko Case’s lovely tune, “I wish I was the moon.” It is beautiful, but I have never been able to understand what it’s about (or if it’s even about anything.) And then there is the creepy but great song “Lather” by Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane. It starts out with the line: “Lather was thirty years old today,” which is maybe why I had it on my mind at the time I wrote this comic (I was twenty-nine). Lather asks the question I was wondering about for myself: “Is it true that I’m no longer young?”

The song ends on an ominous note, with the narrator saying: “And I should have told him, ‘No, you’re not old…’” You have to wonder, what did Lather do when he heard this news? Yikes!!

What did I do, with all these philosophical musings about getting older, back in 2003? I just kept making comics, and I kept getting older, too. In fact, I am still doing both of those things today, in 2026. So, if you are twenty-nine and feeling old age creeping up on you, don’t despair! There could still be many sketchbook pages in your future. I hope so!

See you next week for more stories from the drawing book!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been making our way through my early attempt at some web comics, which meant I’d draw pictures, scan them, and publish them on my old website every few weeks. There are still a few more of those. But for now, let’s get back to some sketchbook pages.

When I started drawing the web comics, I stopped keeping a sketchbook. But after a while, I started to feel like I needed a sketchbook again! And so, near the end of 2002, I started a new one. The first page was drawn at my favourite eatery in Mainz.

Every week, I used to pick up delicious food to go from this Lebanese restaurant every week, back when I was a flight attendant on the Frankfurt route. Once, when I was talking with the folks who worked there, it came out that I lived in Canada. They couldn’t believe it. One of them said: “How can you live in Canada? You come here every week!!”

The comic about outer space was the one I wrote for the Project: Telstar anthology. I wrote about it here.

As for the music playing in the truck about a guy who climbed into a box… I don’t know - it sounds like a Tom Waits song, maybe?!

I feel like I have written quite a bit about that old family house - for example, in this previous episode. But when I look at this drawing, I remember one funny thing that happened. Many years before, as we sat on our back deck, someone had dropped a china saucer off the railing. It fell down into the bushes and brambles on the other side of our back yard. We forgot about it - but when it was time to pack everything up, I remembered the saucer! I climbed down to find it, and sure enough, there it was still lying under the snow. I still have it! Here it is in 2026, along with a historic photo of its recovery.

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“The stuff I drew” in that last page, refers to a bunch of comics I drew for the last episode of my web comics, but I think I’ll share those another time. For now, here are the next three pages from the sketchbook.

My dad had a second-hand Mercedes, and when I finished university, I bought it from him. But, in 2003, I couldn’t afford to repair it, so I sold it. I wish I had done a better job maintaining that car, but I didn’t know anything about cars! That’s one thing I would do better, if I had a second chance. Anyway, “now I’m towing my car” is a line from the well-known Crowded House song “Don’t Dream It’s Over.” And “The Angels Took My Racehorse Away” is a weird but great song by Richard Thompson. (And “& I must be from thence” is a line from Macbeth, of course.)

My dog Corbu always got really excited when it was time to get in that car. I always wondered: did she just like driving? Or was there somewhere she was always hoping we’d go? I could never ask her.

I like putting together this online archive of my old comics, just for myself. It is fun to remember all those places and friends. But in the past few days, I talked with a couple of people who told me that they actually read these posts every week, which is just so nice to hear. It makes me happy to share these old stories that have been sitting on my bookshelf for so many years! Thanks for reading!

The story starts with four high school friends. It might be a bit tricky to figure out who is who, because I have taken out the names. Without the names, some of these pages are a bit confusing, but hopefully you get the general idea!

At the time of this story, two of the friends were already married. Now the third friend was getting married, in the summer of 2002. The fourth friend was me!

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At this spot in the web comic, when I posted it online in 2002, I included this page from an earlier drawing book, with the heading, “Flashback to (one of those four friends)’ wedding!” In this picture, I notice I drew myself in a brown suede jacket that my dad bought for me in the early 90s. I just found that jacket in a tub of old clothes in my basement, about half an hour ago! I have not thought of it for years, and now here it is again. Oh well, back to the wedding adventures!

There I am in that last panel wearing a Spider-Man t-shirt that used to belong to my youngest brother. I still have that t-shirt, too, and it isn’t even hidden at the bottom of a tub of old clothes! Maybe I’ll even wear it on June 6th, at the Panel One Comic Arts Festival!

It is funny to me now, that when most of my friends were doing smart things like advancing their careers and getting married, I was hanging around at the Night Gallery (a venue that is so long gone, I can’t even find a link for you). Maybe it’s because, when I was a university student, I spent all my time reading lots of books and being very responsible… so that afterwards, when I was done school, I had to make up for lost time by being very irresponsible. Who knows… but even though I was a bit out of my element, I was so honoured to be part of that special day with my awesome friends, who are still awesome, even after all these years. Thanks for sharing this memory with me!

See you next time!

I’m going to go and visit my mom, so instead of a Drawing Book comic today, here’s a comics page from 2014, when I had a new baby and a five-year-old. To all the multitasking mamas out there (and all the amazing folks who support them), hang in there! You can do it! Get some sleep, if you can!

Sorry I didn’t have time for more today. My kids are bigger now, but the multitasking never ends…!

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P.S. It’s kind of funny, but just as I was about to send this, I realized that this old comic was probably inspired by Helen Craig’s brilliant depiction of an amazing multitasking FATHER, from Margaret Mahy’s delightful children’s book Jam: A True Story.

It seems a bit silly to share a comic about a father on Mother’s Day, but why not. Mahy was a single mom, and I would not be at all surprised to learn that this part of her story was inspired by a dream of having a real-life helper who was as awesome as this guy. I love how illustrator Helen Craig brings each individual task to life, by giving it its own panel. Her emphasis on each little act of care, reinforces how meaningful it is.

For Mother’s Day, I’m hoping you have some great helpers. And if you are one of those helpers: thank you, we appreciate you!

Sorry for the lousy image quality!

Wishing you a happy Mother’s Day, and see you next week!

Because I was a flight attendant with a regular shift on a night flight, I was pretty nocturnal. (And let’s be honest. Before I was a flight attendant, I was already pretty noctural… and even now, all these years later, I’m still a total night owl.) Anyway, here are some comics inspired by my day-to-day (or, more accurately, night-to-night) activities in Calgary, back then.

I still really love owls!! A while back, I wrote about an owl who spent a couple of months in my backyard, a few years ago. You can read that comic in the lovely anthology “Alberta Comics: Home,” published by Renegade Arts Entertainment - along with many other good Alberta stories.

Back to the drawing book, with a spooky page…

Later, I figured out later that my scary Montreal hotel dream might have been an episode of sleep paralysis. Luckily, that never happened to me again. But for a long time afterwards, I avoided Montreal layovers at that hotel. Yikes!!!

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Ah, I remember all those days (nights!), trying to get things done, during hours when nothing was open! Back then, my art really depended a lot on getting photographs developed, and on making photocopies. Now, I have a scanner, and I can work in Photoshop. I haven’t made a photocopy in years.

Back then, nocturnal artists like me depended on West Canadian Graphics, a print shop that was located back then on the corner of 8th Avenue and 10th Street SW. It was open all night! I used to spend HOURS there, drawing, photocopying, adjusting, erasing with liquid paper, photocopying again… doing all the things I do with Photoshop now. (Today, West Canadian Graphics has evolved into West Canadian Digital Imaging Inc., and these days I take my graphic recording posters there for large-scale scanning. Actually, it’s kind of funny, but their scanning team works on a night shift, so they always send me my files in the middle of the night! Some things never change.)

This doesn’t have anything to do with this week’s comic, but maybe since I am writing about making art with a photocopy machine, I can include an example of what that looked like. Here’s a page from an essay I wrote around that same time. I wanted to include pictures in the essay, as well as typed copy. So, I typed the text and printed it on paper. Then I cut out the paper and glued it into the right spots on the page with the drawings. Then I photocopied that page, so it turned out like this:

After taping or gluing bits of paper onto your original page, the photocopy often showed the edges of the section that was glued on. Then you had to go over those edges with liquid paper and make another photocopy. And sometimes you had to adjust the darkness or lightness of the copy so everything looked all right. It sure wasted a lot of paper. But that was the way I did it, back then.

Anyway, back to the drawing book.

Finding delight in trivial, everyday things is still a good practice! I don’t think there is anything else I need to say about that.

Have a good week, and hope you find many trivial, everyday (or everynight) things to delight in!

In the spring of 2002, I moved into a new house in Calgary’s Bridgeland neighbourhood. That summer, I took a holiday. The year before, a German friend had visited me in Calgary. Now, she invited me to come and stay with her and her friends, at her family’s house in Spain.

I flew on standby to Toronto, then to Madrid, then to Malaga, and then took the train to Fuengirola. Then I fell asleep on a towel on the beach and woke up with sunstroke. So that wasn’t the greatest start to my holiday. It got better after that!

The house was up in the hills north of the town. It didn’t even really have an address. It was “near the pig farm,” except that the pig farm actually hadn’t had any pigs on it in years. To find it, you had to be a local.

At night, the sky was full of stars. I remember I sat up late thinking about writing an essay that would compare Margaret Mahy’s teen heroines with the female characters in the fiction of Madeleine L’Engle. That was a fun thing to think about, but maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t write it. I still think Mahy is a genius, but L’Engle’s work has not aged as well for me. Anyway, that’s not what you came here to read about, right?

That trip to Spain was one of the first times I’d been to a place that was experiencing an ongoing water shortage. We tried to use as little as we could.

(The tiny little dress, which belonged to my stylish mom, had been scrunched up in my carry-on.)

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“Spanish Train,” of course, makes me think of the Chris de Burgh song of that name, an “oldie but goodie,” as they say. But that’s not the music I was listening to on this trip home. Instead, I was listening to Neil Finn’s solo album One All (released in 2002). The lyrics are from the album’s first song, “The Climber.” I can’t find the original version online right now, but here’s a (lovely) live version. I know I have written a lot about how much I love Bob Dylan, but I really love Neil Finn, too. I wrote about one of the reasons his band Crowded House is important to me, at the end of this post about why I changed my last name.

“Wherever you are, it’s three A.M. and I’m awake,” (from the song “Wherever You Are”) was a lyric that often seemed appropriate for my lifestyle back in those days. I was always in some different time zone or other!

Around that time, my dad gave me this clock. His idea was that I could set the time zones for Calgary, Toronto and Frankfurt, the three places where I spent the most time. Later, my friend Tom had the hilarious idea of setting them for “Back Then,” “Now,” and “Pretty Soon.”

When I think of all the apps on my phone right now in 2026, this old clock seems kind of funny.

Well, so much for “back then.” Have a good week, and I’ll be back with more comics, “pretty soon!”

We’re making our way through my 2002 web comics, written when I was a Calgary-based flight attendant trying to figure out what I was doing with my life. I had just moved to a new place and adopted two dogs. I was always travelling around somewhere or other. In the middle of all that, I was trying to navigate the dating scene.

I wrote this comic strip on an Edmonton layover, at The Sugarbowl (a coffee shop that is still there today!).

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These random reminiscences were inspired by my layover location, the Sugarbowl. I’d been there before with my then-current boyfriend, who was kind of in the process of breaking up with me at the time I wrote that comic.

I guess I thought I was pretty “old and wise” when I wrote this at the age of 28! Now that I’m actually old (but still maybe not so wise?!), I guess I still agree that coping mechanisms can be helpful. I mean, do whatever gets you through the day!

Here’s hoping we get through the next seven days, and I’ll see you next week with some more Drawing Book comics. Good luck and happy coping!

But first, let me warn you, this episode is full of digressions! Maybe that’s what happens after a week of trying to meet deadlines: when I get here to the drawing book, I can relax and start rambling. Well, thanks in advance for rolling along with me.

This week, we are back to finding our way through my early attempt at a web comic in 2002. The first issue started here. I’d draw in my sketchbook, scan the pages, and a tech-savvy acquaintance would post the pages to my website once a month or so. I don’t love these pages as much as I loved my earlier drawing books! Each page feels kind of like its own mini-episode, which makes it hard to tell a longer story. And I don’t like all the boxy panels, instead of pictures that flow into each other. Oh well… they still provide a little glimpse into my life back in 2002.

Back then, I was usually out of town, working as a flight attendant. A lot of drawing book pages tell the stories of my travels. But today, we have some pages that actually talk about some Calgary stuff. First of all, some drawings of my brother’s friends at the Wildwood Pub on 4th Street SW in Mission, which later became “Wurst,” and now “South Block Barbecue & Brewing.”

Phillippe Dupasquier is indeed a great illustrator! For example, he illustrated Martin Waddell’s story, Going West, published in 1984. I love this book.

The story is great, but the illustrations are just brilliant. There are so many people, wagons, horses and oxen in this story, and it is fun to try and keep track of them all on every page. Not just fun from a “Where’s Waldo?” perspective (although Dupasquier’s work was indeed an inspiration for the Waldo books), but satisfying from the perspective of an illustrator who tries to do justice to the story, with accurate and consistent pictures that reflect even the smallest details in the text. This is something I really appreciate.

Phillippe Dupasquier wrote some books, too, like the wonderful “Dear Daddy,” which he also illustrated (here’s the cover of the French edition). I love the way his work seems to be inspired by his own family, which is kind of the way my work operates, too.

Ok, I know this has nothing to do with my 2002 drawing book story, but when I look up these incredible artists and authors so I can put some links in here for you, I can hardly find anything! Dupasquier, who is 70 years old, does not even seem to have a website! Neither does Martin Waddell, who won the Hans Christian Andersen Award, for goodness’ sake! I feel like I need another Substack newsletter, not about old drawing book comics, but about old children’s book authors and illustrators, so that all this good stuff doesn’t get forgotten.

Ok, sorry about the rant. That was Digression #1! Back to the drawing book, and a page about a Calgary memory:

Back then, I was inclined to think that it wasn’t such a big deal to make a good-humoured joke about the Pope, because, after all, what did the Pope have to do with life in Calgary? Not much. But today, in 2026, I’m surprised to find myself reading messages from the current Pope, that are not only relevant to my own concerns, but also stated in a straightforward way that I really appreciate. On the site formerly known as Twitter, Pope Leo posted yesterday: "Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war! True strength is shown in serving life.” (I can’t link to the tweet, but here’s an article in The Guardian about the Pope’s recent messages.) Maybe these are the kinds of messages we should be printing on t-shirts today. Ok, that was Digression #2, as you can tell.

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Anyway, back to 2002. I drew my brother’s convocation from the University of Calgary…

It is pretty funny to come across that drawing now, since just yesterday I worked at a University of Calgary event in the Jack Simpson gymnasium, the very same space where my brother’s convocation took place in 2002. (Here comes Digression #3!) I drew some pictures to help celebrate UCalgary’s 60th anniversary! (Wow, that number really dates me. During the one year I was a student at the University of Calgary, it was the university’s 25th birthday!) Here’s a picture of the hall filling up at the start of the event yesterday.

And here’s a photo of my work-in-progress while taking notes on a discussion by some incredible Olympians!

But that’s another story. For now, back to 2002. After my brother’s convocation, my family went for a celebratory meal at the River Cafe, a lovely place on Prince’s Island. Even back then, it was already a Calgary institution. I got there before everyone else, which gave me time to sketch.

And now, one page that needs no commentary. And no digressions!

And with that, it was time to leave Calgary again. On the next page, I’m back in Germany. After working on the flight to Frankfurt, I often took the two-hour train ride to the town where I lived, back when I was an exchange student. Taking that train as a 20-something flight attendant felt like a “flashback to my old life.” It is funny to read this now, in 2026, when the entire drawing book has become a flashback to my old life!

Thanks for reading! I wish you many pleasurable digressions as you make your way through the coming week. But, of course, I hope you can meet your deadlines too! And if I can manage to do the same, I’ll see you here again in a week with the next episode of The Drawing Book.

One thing I didn’t draw in that picture of the yard: A beautiful tree. Once, I remember being fast asleep (as I usually was during the daytime, back then) and getting a knock on my door. A shy university student stood there. She said she was studying trees, and she asked if she could take a sample, or a cutting, or something, from the tree in my front yard. She said, “It’s the finest specimen of a Mountain Ash tree I’ve ever seen!” I sleepily said sure.

I remember what she said, because it was the first time I learned that my tree was a Mountain Ash tree. Back then, I didn’t know anything about trees, or about any local stuff. I came home, I slept all day and and painted all night, and then I got on an airplane and hung around in some other places.

You may wonder what happened to my dogs, while I was travelling around? I shared them with my brother, who lived nearby. He was a flight attendant, too, with WestJet! We arranged our schedules around dog care. That was a funny situation.

I missed my old apartment and the 17th Avenue scene. Bridgeland was quiet and lonely. It hadn’t started its gigantic gentrification yet. The General Hospital had been demolished a few years before, but nothing had yet been built in its place. The old hospital site was a giant wasteland where rabbits romped by night. More about the Bridgeland rabbits in later comics.

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This was my house. When I look at this picture, I remember how cold it was. That house did not have much in the way of insulation.

And I remember I had those two blue Ikea couches that had been my dad’s office furniture. I had them for years… I loved them!

That house was demolished in recent years. The mountain ash tree… no more.

Thanks for reading! I hope that wherever you are, and whoever is sharing your space, you get a good night’s sleep.

Epilogue

Many years later (in 2014), I was exhibiting at the Calgary Comics Expo, when someone came up to my table. It was the guy who worked the night shift at the Bridgeland 7-11, back when I Iived across the street! He remembered me!

Back then, I was “live-tweeting” comics about the Expo experience for the Calgary Herald, so I drew this panel about my 7-11 encounter. (I did that Calgary Herald/Expo thing a few times - here are some panels from the previous year, on my old blog. Good times!)

The Calgary Expo will be coming up in April, but I figured out a while ago that it wasn’t really the right scene for me. Instead, I’ll be heading to the Panel One Comic Arts Festival, for the ten-year anniversary of a great event celebrating local independent comics people! That’s not till June 1, 2026. In the meantime, I’ll be here again next week for another episode of The Drawing Book.

My apartment was not the ideal place for two old dogs! It was at the top of a steep outdoor staircase…

And the fate of the dogs was not my only problem.

Indeed, many squirrels lived behind the floorboards, the ceilings, the walls of that house. Once, I opened my kitchen cupboard and a squirrel was inside! That was the last straw. I loved that apartment - the first place I’d really lived on my own. But it was time for a change.

Along with all that, there were yet more worries! Like the worry that I might have to work on the 747! Back then, I was a flight attendant with Air Canada, and my flight to Frankfurt was on the A340. I knew my way around on that airplane. The 747… some of them were configured for five hundred passengers! Yikes.

Ah yes, the classic problem. What would my 2001 self have thought, if she had known I would have exactly the same problem, twenty-five years later in 2026? I’m not even joking. It is EXACTLY the same. Maybe this is just a lifelong balancing act, no matter how old we get.

These days, I have to content myself with mostly-decaf coffee. But otherwise, the solution is about the same, twenty-five years later, too!

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I wrote this next story about the boy I had been cautiously dating for almost a year. After getting a broken heart in 2000, I was being pretty careful not to let things get too serious.

(As I made that banana bread, you can see I was listening to one of Bob Dylan’s greatest tunes ever - definitely one of my top ten - Changing of the Guards. Honestly, kind of a weird choice… it is not exactly a cozy, domestic song. But, it’s still great!)

I wasn’t quite keeping up with my friends when it came to relationship stuff. But I was getting ready for some big responsibilities. I was going to have to find a new place to live.

At this time, I was a twenty-something flight attendant based in Calgary. I lived in an apartment in the Beltline, and I was in the process of inheriting the full-time care of my family’s two dogs. I was also dating someone new, after recovering from a heartbreak in 2000.

I’ve always been a night owl! But back in 2001, I was almost completely nocturnal, thanks to my usual weekly work shift on a Calgary-Frankfurt flight (described in this episode) - a night flight. So here’s a short tale about “a day in the life,” back then - although it would have been more accurate to call it “a night.”

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In the collection of comics pages I put together for this web comic in 2001, there’s one page I forgot to include earlier. I made this page to promote an upcoming event: the book launch for a comics anthology called “9-11 Emergency Relief.” I helped organize a Calgary launch (in the lobby of the Jack Singer Concert Hall!!) for this book, published by Alternative Comics.

In the anthology, comics creators shared their responses to the events of September 11, 2001, in a way that reminds me of the recent #iceoutcomics movement, kickstarted by cartoonist K. Woodman-Maynard. You can read the piece I wrote for “9-11: Emergency Relief,” and find out how I came to be involved in that project, here.

In a recent Drawing Book episode, I shared how I travelled to San Francisco to join a panel discussion about this book. Later, I went to a couple of other book launch events in the US. In the early 2000s, I was hardly ever at home in Calgary. So I’m glad I wrote this little story about what things were like on the occasional nights when I was in town.

Hope you find time to do what you like these days - or nights, as the case may be! Thanks for reading.

But first, I just want to share two pages that I wrote during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These came to mind because of the current invasion of Iran by the United States and Israel. Back in 2003, I drew a comics page about how surreal it felt, to be living in a beautiful place, having a lovely meal, feeling helpless to do anything about the war. I feel like that again, now.

I feel lucky to live in a place where it’s still possible to have perfect breakfasts (even if they are at 5 PM). I don’t think there is much I can do to help the folks in places far away from where I live. But I hope I can do some things to help my own local community. That’s something we can all try to do, wherever we are, and I am inspired by so many people who are indeed doing just that. Keep going!

I’m not an expert on war or politics. I am just a person troubled by the ongoing acts of cruelty and violence that affect human beings everywhere. Back in 2003, I wrote this, a few pages later, and I’ll put it in here now, too.

Bob Dylan’s line from the beautiful and kind of heartbreakingly cynical song “Sweetheart Like You” echoes a quote by British intellectual Samuel Johnson. I didn’t know that, at the time I drew that picture. Interestingly, the other line on that page is a reworking of a famous quote about the “ash heap” or “dustbin” of history, attributed to another British political thinker, Augustine Birrell. I didn’t know about Birrell till just now - I had heard this line attributed to Leon Trotsky. Thanks, internet!

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In troubled times, we need to work to help our communities. But self-care is also important, and sometimes that can mean escaping into a good book. Back in 2001, I re-read The Lord of the Rings and wrote a comic about it. It’s full of LOTR spoilers, but it’s 2026 and everyone knows this story by now, right? It’s kind of long, but this is where we are in our weekly-ish journey retracing the pages of my old drawing books. So, here we go!

Here’s what it says in Elvish characters, in a nod to Tolkien’s message in the opening pages of LOTR:
Herein I set forth the history and adventures of Sam Hester also known as the drawing book.

And the Dwarvish runes: I can’t believe after all these years I get to show off my rune lore. (“I can’t believe after all these years” sounds like a nod to Dylan’s “Idiot Wind”…)

The trip to Paris is the one mentioned in this web comics episode.

That year, Burberry scarves were all the rage! We saw them everywhere in Paris!

This was a long post! Too long? I’d be interested to know what you think. Would you like shorter comics, maybe shared more frequently? Or are you good with waiting a week or two to get long stories like this? Let me know!

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Stay well, everybody. Maybe you can do something that helps your community, or maybe you need to do some self-care, like reading a good book. Posting these comics is my self-care activity for the week: I really love revisiting these old memories (even the bad ones) and sharing them with you. Thanks for reading!

Before we get to my old drawing book comics, just a note about some new comics I worked on for The Sprawl. In the past couple of weeks, I wrote some comics about my memories of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary (you can find them here on The Sprawl’s comics page), and one of them was printed as a risograph-printed zine, by Calgary's Mezzaluna Studio! That’s pretty cool.

And that’s not all! This week there’s another new Curious Calgary zine published by The Sprawl! This one’s about a 1920s Calgary “ski hill” that was built on the site of today’s Stampede grounds. You can find the comic here on the Sprawl website, along with a deep dive into the story of the crazy ski hill (including lots of historical photos) by Sprawl editor Jeremy Klaszus.

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And now… back to the drawing book.

For those who have been following along, this is where I share autobiographical comics from my old sketchbook journal series. Since I started this Substack in 2023, we’ve been making our way through my original four sketchbooks, and a few weeks ago, we reached the end. The next part of the story unfolds in my attempt at an early web comic. I shared the "ex libris” here, and then I jumped into… Episode 2! Why did I totally miss the whole first episode (which is about 25 pages long)??! I have no idea… but the last few weeks have been a bit of a juggling act, and I guess I just mixed things up. I usually write these Substack posts AFTER I have finished my client work and all my household work. They are kind of the last priority, even though I really love writing them. Anyway, I guess some sleep-deprived reasoning caused me to start these web comics with Episode 2, but let’s fix that now. Starting again with Episode 1!

As I wrote in a previous post, the idea was for me to draw a bunch of pages, just as I would usually do in my old sketchbooks, and then about once a month I’d scan them and give them to a web hosting friend who would post them online for me. I tried to make these pages as spontaneous and random as my old sketchbooks, but the format of the boxy panels still felt a bit restrictive. One thing was the same, though: I often found myself drawing in late-night bars… or while trying to kill time in airports.

I’m pretty sure that the reason I was sitting in that early morning airport and feeling really grouchy, was because I had just travelled to Toronto from Calgary on the all-nighter, and now I was standing by for a flight that was supposed to take me to a Bob Dylan show in the States. I feel like it was Chicago, but maybe New York? Somewhere that I didn’t get to. A blizzard cancelled the flights, and I ended up just going back to Calgary. I drew these pictures in late 2001, and Bob’s 2001 tour wrapped up in November… so I’m not sure which show I missed.

By the way, it looks like that “remembered conversation” was at Karma, a long-ago Marda Loop coffeehouse in Calgary that, unfortunately, burned down. It was a nice place!

I couldn’t get to the Dylan show, so I ended up just warning my readers that there might be some Bob Dylan comics in the upcoming pages.

That page references Dylan’s tour posters from back then, which often said, “Don’t you dare miss it!” And of course, the line Bob is singing is from the smorgasbord of jumbled wordplay that is the song “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread.”

There are lots of Bob-Dylan-themed comics in my older drawing books, for those who are interested. However, in spite of this warning, there isn’t much about Bob in the web comics that follow. In fact, the next web comics chapter is about The Lord of the Rings. Hopefully I can share that one with you next week!

Last week, instead of a new Drawing Book comic, I re-posted an Olympic-themed story about the iconic bricks that paved Calgary’s Olympic Plaza, and the City’s mostly-successful efforts to dig them out and return them to their donors last year. But this week, I finally have some new comics for you.

Well, some new/old comics. As we make our way through the mostly-chronological story of my Calgary life, back in my early comics-making days, we’ve gotten to my attempt, in 2002, to make a web comic.

The idea was that I’d write up some comics during the course of a month or two, then scan them all and give them to a web hosting guy who would put them online in one big batch. That would be an “issue.” Hey, I JUST REALIZED that, somehow, I mixed up the order of these issues. The comics I shared last time were actually part of “Issue 2,” and so are the ones I have lined up here today. Argh! How did I somehow skip over the first one??! Oh well, we’ll just do things out of order, and hopefully it will all still make sense

First, a note about the issue’s title page: Hey, that’s me wearing my mom’s old Sun Ice Olympic coat! I wore that coat for YEARS. I finally got rid of it sometime in the last ten years. It was looking pretty dated. But it was really warm!!! Anyway, another example of the lingering effects of the Calgary 88 Olympics.

In April 2002, when I wrote this, I’d lived in Calgary for exactly five years, after moving back from Toronto. I was starting to feel more at home in Calgary, and my old Toronto days had begun to feel as though they’d happened to someone else. These were my reflections on that (with a false start, due to a slip of the pen in my first panel!).

I still hate drawing backgrounds.

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I almost always drew my comics pages with an ink pen, then coloured them with pencil crayons. Those last three pages are coloured with markers, which sure doesn’t look as good to me.

Another thing I didn’t really like: trying to fit these stories into skinny, vertical page layouts. I think I had the idea that viewers could scroll down to read the story a bit at a time on their screens. I didn’t think that small details and small text would be easy to see, so I tried to thicken up my lines. These early attempts at web comics feel much more constrained, and contrived, than my earlier sketchbook journals.

For these next few pages, I went back to a thinner pen. I still don’t love this boxy format, but I like the look of these a lot better than the previous pages.

Those last two pages, “My Hair,” were published later in a short-lived Calgary magazine called “Bemused” - one of my earliest published comics! That’s why the last page was later dated 2004 (the date of the magazine publication). The comic was written in 2002 along with the previous pages.

By the way - yesterday, right after I put this post together, my mom told me I really need a haircut. I guess some things don’t ever change!

The Reader

One thing that is fun for me to see, is the appearance of the guy reading a book in the first panel of “My Hair.” This guy is always my representation of “The Reader” in these early comics. Here he is again, in another Substack comics episode from a couple of years ago.

He was a real guy… a guy I didn’t even know! I’ll save that story for another day. For now, please let me say thanks to YOU, my current (and hopefully much less grouchy) reader! Thanks for joining me as I make my way through all these old stories. See you next time!

Last week, when I was asking myself that question, I remembered this conversation from comic strip written after September 1, 2001. (I’ll share the whole thing another time.)

He was right, and I never forgot that conversation. Art is important, even in terrible times. In fact, the more terrible the times, the more important it is, to make art! So, this week, I’m back to post my next episode. But before you read my old comic, here’s a shout-out to a project that’s using the power of visual stories to share information and create community, in a way that’s much more connected to the current situation.

A couple of weeks ago, cartoonist K. Woodman-Maynard put out a call for cartoonists to write and draw about what’s happening in Minnesota (and elsewhere in the US) right now.

#ICEOutComics

Together with Minnesota cartoonists Jason Walz, and Trung Le Nguyen, as well as the awesome Indiana-based graphic novelist Nate Powell, Woodman-Maynard used the hashtag #iceoutcomics to “call out to cartoonists and artists to make four-panel comics about the personal impact I.C.E. is having on their lives.” I found out about this powerful initiative when I saw a comic on Instagram by Canadian cartoonist Susan MacLeod. Here’s her first panel.

Susan was not the only non-American to contribute. When I looked at the Instagram post calling for cartoonists and artists to share their stories, I saw something pretty amazing: Dozens and dozens of responses from artists around the world, volunteering to illustrate other people’s experiences, offering to use their skills to help tell these stories. That gives me hope, and it reminds me of the power of comics. To find out more, you can read about the project in this article for The Daily Cartoonist by Alan Gardner. You can follow K. Woodman-Maynard’s Substack (I just did!) and read her post about why she wanted to do this: I found it extremely relatable, as well as inspiring. It reminded me that the people who are going to get us through these hard times, are ordinary people like you and like me. We just have to do it.

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American travel comics

After all that, here’s this week’s episode. It was supposed to continue a web comic I started in 2001. It just happens that the first few pages were about travels to America. This story is not about anything important, but I decided to post it anyway. It’s a record of how things used to be, back when it was no big deal (for me, at least) to travel back and forth across the border between Canada and the United States. I think that it’s useful to keep these kinds of records. Things were not always the way they are, now. That’s good to remember, sometimes.

(A little reference to an excellent Bob Dylan song on that last page, “Tell Me That It Isn’t True.”)

Walking around downtown Chicago on my layover, I found “Victoria’s Secret,” a store I’d heard about, but never seen, because it wasn’t in Canada back then. I felt obligated to go in and check it out. Apologies for the scandalous picture!

The next pages tell the story of another American trip: this time, to San Francisco. I invited my then-boyfriend to come along.

Looks like the Adelaide Hostel is still around. I remember I chose it because it was near to Union Square, where our flight crew hotel was located, so I knew my way around that part of town.

Why did I go to San Francisco? For the Alternative Press Expo, which was happening in the Herbst Pavilion (here’s a 2015 article I found about the history of this cool building, right on the waterfront). A few months before, I’d contributed to a comics anthology called 9-11 Emergency Relief, published by Alternative Comics. I went to San Francisco to be part of a panel at APE. I drew some of the other panellists: James Kochalka, Fly, Laurenn McCubbin, and publisher Jeff Mason. I wrote about meeting Jeff Mason at the San Diego Comic Con in this episode a while back.

In a way, that September 11th anthology had a few things in common with the #iceoutcomics initiative mentioned above. All the contributors donated their work. The book was created with the hope that the stories would help the community to get through a challenging situation. The proceeds of the book were donated to the American Red Cross.

I wish I’d stuck around to get to know some of those comics people better! But after the panel, my boyfriend and I left to explore the town.

That night, I had a dream.

Thanks for reading. I hope your dreams are peaceful, and your travels are safe. Most of all, I hope you find stories that help you get through all this. That’s what comics are for!

So, what happens next?

Well, I did continue to write comics in sketchbooks, and I will share them in the weeks ahead. However, in 2001, I also started another project: a web comic.

This was something new! I mean, the web itself was still kind of new! Comics scholars (and comics creators) were all trying to figure out how this format would work online. This was my second attempt at online comics. I’d already tried an experiment the previous year. Some Calgary folks launched a website called “ItsCanadian.com” with the idea of posting local entertainment news, and they asked me to write a comic that would run on their site. I tried creating two-panel comics in a horizontal format, including these ones. The website didn’t really take off, and neither did my attempt at an online comic. (I see that someone still owns the domain for ItsCanadian.com, but there’s nothing there.)

Anyway, in 2001, I tried a new web series - this time, on my OWN brand new website, called (you guessed it), thedrawingbook.com. I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that that website is still around. A lot of the comics that I post in these Substack newsletters, are archived there. But the site is old, clunky, and full of dead links. I built it myself, twenty-five years ago! I really should just take it down! One of these days, I’ll get around to doing that. Meanwhile, if you want to find me online these days, you should look at my current website, the23rdstory.com.

But for now, let’s get back to my attempt at a web comic. Here’s the first one, meant as an introduction to the series. It certainly isn’t designed to be seen on a phone screen. And sorry that the images are a bit blurry. I probably have the original pages somewhere, but I didn’t have time to dig them up and scan them.

Each web comic “episode” had a title page:

After clicking on the title page, you got to the comic.

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This week, I was feeling optimistic about starting up again. I sat down to take a look at where I left off last year (before I got sidetracked by a Christmas card project that interrupted my usual comics posts). When I looked back at my last comics post, I had to laugh.

That’s because I stopped six pages from the end of the last of the four books that make up my original drawing book series. It sounds a bit pretentious to call them “canon,” but that’s kind of how I think of them: they were the original sketchbook journals that started my comics-making career. The first one was started in September 1996 (you can see those first pages here in this November 2023 newsletter)… and the last one ended in the summer of 2001. After that, I started doing freelance work, and experimenting with web comics. I became much more conscious of writing for an audience, and the stories really changed. These first four books are my favourites, because they were just written for myself.

After this, I did continue my sketchbook journal series - so, have no fear, there are still many more comics to share with you in the weeks and months ahead.

Anyway, it feels a bit funny to start 2026 with… the last six pages of the last of my original drawing books. But that’s what we’re doing! Here goes.

On the first page: a visit to Toronto with my then-boyfriend. At this time, I’d been living in Calgary for about three years, but still didn’t feel quite at home there yet. I was still fondly remembering my Toronto years, and a visit back to Future Bakery …

This next drawing (below) ISN’T one of those last six pages in my 2001 sketchbook. It’s one of the first few pages in my very first drawing book (it shows up at the end of my second Substack newsletter). It’s a drawing of Future Bakery, the Toronto coffeehouse mentioned above. I just thought I’d put it in here, to give you an idea about the “undergrad gathering place” mentioned on the page above. It’s kind of neat for me to see that it shows up at the beginning and at the end of this chapter of my life.

Anyway, back to 2001. It was summertime! I went to visit my grandparents at their cottage a couple of hours north of Toronto. It’s funny to me that I observed that “everyone was in a good mood,” as if this was a notable occurrence. Then, in the drawing below, I was back at a Calgary coffee shop.

Here’s a sketch of my then-boyfriend at his roommate’s computer desk in Calgary, with my hand holding the drawing book at the bottom of the page.

And next, a surprise encounter with Jonathan Richman at Lee’s Palace in Toronto. (Wow, this book really shows me how much I went back and forth between Toronto and Calgary, in those days.)

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We’re almost at the end of this sketchbook. But there’s one more story about my flight attendant life. Since being hired by Air Canada in 1997, I’d been working almost exclusively on the Calgary-Frankfurt route. I was hired because I spoke German. (and French too, supposedly. I don’t really speak French, but during the fifteen years I worked for Air Canada, nobody got wise.) Anyway, after four years of working on the same flights back and forth from Germany, the route was cancelled! It turned out this was only temporary, but I didn’t know that at the time, and so I finished my drawing book with this comic strip about the “end of an era.”

Thanks for joining me for the last few pages of the last of my original drawing books! Don’t worry - a new series of drawing books comes after this, and if I get my act together, I’ll be back to share them next week.

A few years before, I’d been an exchange student in Germany, and in the summer of 2001, a German student came to stay with my family. Because I was a flight attendant, it was easy to travel around, so the two of us decided to head north to Whitehorse for a few days. I’d already made a couple of trips to the Arctic (this one, for example), so I felt like I kind of knew what I was doing… but this was a very impromptu camping trip, with borrowed gear and not much planning ahead. Here’s my page about our trip:

Well, when you’re travelling on standby, you have to expect some long waits. But, we made it home eventually!

On the way home, an idle comment about my kerchief led to two whole comics page about my imaginary wedding. Needless to say, there was no real wedding plan in the works. I just had time to draw while waiting for our flight.

Those quotes are from songs by the Doors. The first one, from Queen of the Highway, was said to be Jim Morrison’s own take on relationships. The second one, from Love Street, was mine.

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Freedom ha! indeed.

But, even though I wasn’t getting married, it seemed like the people around me kept doing so! This led to another page of wedding-related foolishness, featuring references to Flash Gordon, Moonstruck, The Mikado, and Dylan’s live version of When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky.

Spoiler alert: I did get married a long time after I drew those pictures. I didn’t wear the Afghanistan dress, which I’d bought for $80 on Bloor Street in 1997, although I still really love that dress. But I did sleep in late, and I did walk down the aisle to the sound of that Dylan tune! That opening guitar riff… there’s nothing like it.

Thanks for joining me in these stories of old travels and old speculations. Hope that your plans, real or imaginary, are inspiring you and maybe even making you giggle. I will look forward to sharing the drawing book with you next time… (“Hope it can continue a little while longer. Come on!”)

I thought I’d share one of those old comics here. This was meant to be a very basic intro to what was involved in voting in the 2013 municipal election. Don’t use this guide for voting in tomorrow’s election - I suspect that some of these links don’t work any more! If you want info about the 2025 election, you can find it at electionscalgary.ca. There’s also lots of information, including videos of candidate debates in all fourteen wards, at sprawlcalgary.com. (And, some comics about the election, drawn by me!)

Hope you enjoy this old VoteKit comic. Some of it might be a bit out of date, but some of these 2013 questions might still be similar to the questions that new voters have today. Hope this might help!

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Sadly, the VoteKit website is no more - but you can find another VoteKit comic, about my own experience as a new voter, here on my old blog.

Now, remember: tomorrow is election day, so if you can vote, please vote! Hooray for democracy!

Last time we looked in the drawing book, we were going through 2001, when I was trying to navigate the Calgary social scene, and working as a flight attendant. This page was drawn during a break on my usual work shift, the flight from Calgary to Frankfurt. On that flight, there were always lots of interesting people and events…

When I wasn’t working on the airplane, I was travelling on my own! The next page was drawn while waiting for a flight to take me to San Francisco in August 2001. Here, I reflected about how much I was enjoying my new last name, which I had legally changed the year before…

Those were the days! It was one month before September 11, 2001, when airport security became a lot more strict. The trip that I was trying to take, on that previous page, turned out to be an important one for me.

Just that summer, I’d gotten a desktop computer for the first time. I looked up “comics” and I learned about the San Diego Comic Con! I had never heard of it before. I had to go! I headed to the airport to stand by for a flight to San Francisco, with a connection to San Diego. But the SFO flight had a delayed departure. I was going to miss my connection! But, at a nearby gate, there was a flight leaving for Los Angeles. I asked the gate agent if I could switch to that flight instead. That was allowed, back then – they could just take your bags off one airplane and put it on another one, after you’d gone through security. I flew to LAX, rented a car, and drove to San Diego that night!

The Comic Con was a great experience! I wrote about that experience, and more about my travel adventures, in this newsletter from last year. For now, back to the drawing book.

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I drew the next page on the way back from that trip. I was remembering my California boyfriend from over a year before – and thinking about the new guy I had started dating, back in Calgary.

The next page doesn’t need much explanation…

Luckily, my scene in 2025 is a lot less smoky! I hope yours is, too!

Sorry again that it took me a couple of weeks to get back to the drawing book. Thanks for your understanding! Looking forward to more comics in the weeks ahead!