Planet Waves
An outer space comic, full of Dylan references!
Happy Bob Dylan’s birthday! (Well, it was yesterday, May 24th.) Here at The Drawing Book, I post comics from my old sketchbook journal series. In honour of Bob’s birthday, I wanted to share something a bit different: a 2003 comic that was actually published. Although it isn’t really a Bob Dylan comic, it’s full of Dylan references that I thought fans might enjoy.
In 2001, I wrote a comic about September 11th that was published in the anthology “9-11: Emergency Relief.” Graphic designer Chris Pitzer, who worked on “9-11,” asked me to write something for a new anthology he was putting together for his new publishing company, AdHouse Books. It was called Project: Telstar. He told me that the stories should be about “robots and outer space.” He was in Virginia, I was in Calgary, and I can’t remember if we even talked on the phone, or whether this plan was made over email (which was still kind of a new thing). Long story short, I wrote an outer-space story that, unfortunately, didn’t include robots. I always feel bad that this story probably wasn’t what Chris P. had been envisioning. He invited me, not realizing that I was a 20-something scatterbrained flight attendant who hadn’t really done something like this before. (And who didn’t know anything about robots.)
Anyway, the book was beautiful! The cover art was by Dave Cooper:
The interior pages of the book were black and white, with metallic blue highlights. In 2002, this meant me drawing the pages on paper, and then putting tracing paper over those pages and filling in the spots where the blue highlights should go. Then scanning the tracing paper and sending it to Chris, who had to try to piece it all together. As you’ll see, my tracing paper highlights didn’t line up perfectly. I did most of the work on layovers between flights to Frankfurt! So, my story definitely is not perfect, but the other contributors to this book were amazing! There were 27 contributors, and one of them was TOM GAULD! Wow!
Here’s the story, with some annotations after each page.
Planet Waves is, of course, the name of Bob Dylan’s 1973 album.
Gravityman: a superhero invented by my then-boyfriend’s roommate, and modeled after him.
High school me: that “M” was on my real high school t-shirt.
My friend Tom helpfully supplied the name “Zeblor.”
Lutz, the East German beaurocrat redistributing East German property after the fall of the wall, was based on a guy I knew who did that kind of work for real, back then.
I did actually go on a student exchange to Germany, which included some trips to the coast of the North Sea, but I did not really inherit an island.
The last panel is my homage to Herge’s “The Black Island.” But the island in my picture is a inspired by an island in a painting by Lyonel Feininger, called “Coast of Nevermore.”
If you don’t know about Feininger, you can find out more about him in my Telstar comic - read on! I mentioned him in the very first couple of pages of the drawing book, and I wrote about how his work inspires me, here in an old blog post.
The picture of Gravityman on his planet owes a bit to “The Little Prince.”
Tycho Brahe and the island of Uraniburg were real!
Kepler’s “Music of the Spheres” ideas were real, too! So is the text I copied onto this page.
Max Klapra was not real. At least, not as far as I could find out. In 1990, an Ouija board told me that a ghost called Max Klapra, the descendant of a Hanseatic sea merchant, had a message for me. When I needed a medieval North Sea character for this story, I thought of him.
Oh, and I forgot that Gravityman found me on my old website, thedrawingbook.com! Please don’t go there to find me in 2025. That website is still up - because I don’t know how to take it down! I haven’t updated it in ten years. It’s full of dead links. But that’s a problem for another day.
My space ship is based on Feininger’s 1930 painting “The Market Church at Halle.” It is not really hanging in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, but my friend and I really did go there, while I was writing this comic.
At the University of Toronto, I did not really study music and quasi-physics. And I didn’t put “Chance favours the prepared mind” up on my wall, until I read it in a Margaret Mahy novel in the late 1990s.
It’s true that, in 1996 while living on Walmer Road in Toronto, I realized that Bob Dylan music was the most potent substance in the universe! It’s also true that my friend Phil kindly sent me many bootlegged live performances. They were on tapes and CDs back then. These days, you can find them on sites like the excellent bobserve.com.
I was stumped for a solution for a way to travel instantaneously between my space ship and my home on earth, so my friend Tom suggested, “a renegade Harkonnen selling SPICE out of his trunk.” This sure added a layer to my already-ridiculous story, but I thought it was pretty funny and I loved “Dune”… and I didn’t have a better idea… so that’s how that part got in there.
The music playing during the ship’s launch, “When the night comes falling from the sky” (the live version with the E Street Band), is an incredible song that I think really could power a space ship!
In 2003, I was not actually spending time on a secret space ship. I was writing an essay about Margaret Mahy. It was published in this anthology of essays. (Maybe I should have stuck to essay anthologies, instead of comics anthologies!) That’s why “Tycho Potter rules” is taped above my desk. He’s a character in Mahy’s novel “The Catalogue of the Universe.” He was named after Tycho Brahe, the man with the golden nose - and he was a Potter long before Harry.
”Hazel” is one of the tracks on “Planet Waves.” I guess I thought was appropriate for space travel since it mentions “Moon dust in yer eye.” It’s funny (to me) that I also included the lyrics, “Yer tall and…” from some live version I can’t find now, where Bob seems to be at a loss for compliments to Hazel, and just mumbles that she’s “tall and...” Well, I thought it was funny.
I really did have a dog (I wrote about her in this Drawing Book episode), whom I often wished I could bring along on my flights and layovers. I really was a flight attendant who went to Frankfurt about once a week.
The books on the top shelf are all attributed to friends of mine, some of whom wrote real books! And on the bottom shelf, there’s Mahy, along with “Sport” by Louise Fitzhugh, and “Apple Bough” by Noel Streatfeild. They were both important books for me, growing up. I wrote about Apple Bough here, a long time ago.
I think Gravityman says “Ola” because the real-life guy who inspired his character, was learning Spanish. “Don’t fall apart on me tonight,” is a Bob Dylan song, of course.
There you have it - a silly, and way too complicated, story. But a fun one, I hope!
I like that this comic was drawn on paper. I still have the original pages somewhere in my basement. I don’t have digital files of these images. To share them here, I opened up the book and scanned the pages.
“Project: Telstar” is out of print, although I still have a couple of copies. If you can find it, it’s worth reading for Tom Gauld’s story, alone - the saddest robot story you’ll ever read. I was going to include the first couple of panels in here (along with a few other pictures), but Substack is telling me that I’ve reached my limit.
Speaking of reaching my limit, I want to mention that I might start posting comics every second week, instead of weekly, for a while. I love doing this, but it’s getting hard to justify spending time on unpaid work when I have clients who are waiting for me to finish my real work! You see, for the past year, I have had long covid, and unfortunately, things are getting worse instead of better, health-wise. Maybe I’ll write about that sometime - but for now, my productive work time is quite limited, so I have to use it carefully.
I really appreciate the folks who have chipped in! If you like these stories, you are welcome to sign up for free, share with others, and/or make a one-time or an ongoing donation! It sure helps. I will look forward to getting back to The Drawing Book after a short break!
Bon voyage!
