Bob Dylan Comics: Love Sick!!

How Bob Dylan helped me survive a broken heart.

In my last “Bob Dylan Comics,” I shared the story of my 1998 trip to see Dylan in Hamburg. When I look through my old drawing book, the next few mentions of Bob are in quite another context. I didn’t see any shows for awhile. Instead, I was spending my time pining away after a man! I’d fallen for this guy, and he was giving me very mixed messages. Did he love me, or didn’t he? Sometimes I thought he did, and sometimes I was sure that there was a pretty little girl in Cornersville he loved far better than me. I was pretty messed up.

Dylan’s album Time Out Of Mind had been released a few months before. I remember driving along Centre Street in Calgary, listening to the first track, "Love Sick,” during this time. Bob sounded old, jaded, yearning, desperate… messed up. He sounded like I felt. I loved it.

Yeah, that pretty much described my situation. (By the way, don’t you think “Sometimes I want to take to the road and plunder” is a forced rhyme? He just needed something to rhyme with “wonder.” I mean, who “takes to the road and plunders,” much less dreams about doing that… whatever that even means? Unless that’s how Bob thinks of the Neverending Tour, of course. He certainly takes to the road, and I guess we fans are willingly plundered along the way. Ok, anyway. That line always bugs me.)

But it wasn’t just “Love Sick.” I felt like every song I heard, was about me and my broken heart.

Of course, you don’t need me to tell you this, but that one about “I’m a-walking down the highway,” is Bob Dylan’s 1962 song about the girl who left him (“Down the Highway”). That Sinead O’Connor song, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” is another song about someone who’s longing for a person they’ve lost. And… well, I’m not sure why I put the Blues Brothers in there, but I guess they were singing about the same kind of thing in their own fabulous way.

Since this was back in the days when I was having fun illustrating Bob Dylan songs (like I did with Canadee-I-O, shared here in an earlier episode of Bob Dylan Comics), I drew some pictures for another song that was on my mind: Dylan’s cover of the traditional ballad “Love Henry.” Of course, any resemblance that these characters have, to real people in my life at the time, was purely coincidental…

Yeah, so that’s kind of morbid. No, I didn’t kill that guy who broke my heart, although I felt I could relate to the girl in the song, as she wrestled with jealousy, love and hate. I finally got over that sad affair, and made peace with the fact that he would never be mine.

Bob Dylan, on the other hand…

But the whole experience of falling in love with someone who was stringing me along, had been emotionally exhausting. It changed me, and I think it changed how I listened to those songs I had heard before, as I listened now with the world-weary wisdom of someone who had been such a fool.

These comics and drawings are all taken from my old drawing book about my life in the late 90s, which I’ve started publishing on this Substack. You can check that out here, or you can watch this space for new comics about Bob Dylan, which I’ll keep posting once a week or so. The next episode of “Bob Dylan Comics” takes us back on the road, following Dylan’s tour in the fall of 1998! Stay tuned for more and thanks for reading!