The Drawing Book goes north

Comics about my 1998 trip to Baffin Island

Time for a quick look into my old sketchbook journal, The Drawing Book! This episode continues from the story I posted two weeks ago (here), in which I wrote, “In the future, I hope to go North.”

But first, a gag about “A Woman and her Used Car.” I had a car that I loved - an old secondhand Mercedes that my parents had let me drive when I lived in Ontario. I finally bought it from them, and this was the comic strip I wrote about its unknown past. (I think it was a 1988 model.) I really loved that car!

But in 1998, I was still dealing with remnants of a situational depression I’d mostly left behind me when I moved from Ontario to Calgary the year before. I was doing better, but some days gloomy feelings would overwhelm me. Every week, I flew to Frankfurt as a flight attendant with Air Canada, and every week I’d sit in the Mainz Hilton lobby while we waited to get our room keys, and I’d play the same song (a version of Michael Nyman’s amazing soundtrack to the movie, “The Piano.”) It was time for a change. On this next page, I wrote down some private thoughts in Tolkien’s Elvish script (so my Drawing Book readers couldn’t read that part). The last line says, “The summer’s almost over - it’s high time I packed up and went north.”

A few years before, I’d taken a summer road trip with my brother and my cousin, from Calgary to Toronto, with a huge detour up north to Churchill, Manitoba. We drove as far as Thompson, and that’s where the road ended. Then we took an all-night train to Churchill. We stayed for a few days, walking around the town, watching beluga whales in the Hudson’s Bay, and feeling awe-inspired. It was my first time that far north, and somehow the sheer scale of things, the bigness of the open space, thrilled me like nothing else.

A short while after that trip to Churchill, I painted a self-portrait, working with a photograph that my brother had taken of me, during that trip. The painting was painted during my gloomy years, when I felt like the happiest place to be was with my eyes closed and dreaming of a remembered magical ocean coast.

A voyage with my dog

But in 1998, I didn’t have to content myself with just dreaming. Because of my job with Air Canada, it was easy to grab a standby ticket and jump on a plane - several planes, actually. I flew from Calgary to Iqaluit, on Baffin Island! And I took my dog!

(By the way, the page below mentions “The Reader.” A guy called Stuart Cunningham was my imaginary reader. Why? That’s a story for another day.)

That page above mentions my uncle John. He’s travelled to more places than anyone else I know, I think, including the high Arctic. But I digress.

Can you spot Corbu (my dog) chasing a caribou in that picture? I drew Corbu running really fast, while the caribou wasn’t breaking a sweat. Corbu tried to chase caribou for the whole day that we walked around the tundra outside the city, to no avail, of course.

While I was visiting Iqaluit, I met local superhero Polarman, who I mentioned in this long-ago blog about real life civic superheroes.

I met a few new friends, too, some of whom were locals and and some of whom were visitors like me.

Maybe I should explain a little bit about my dog. Back home in Calgary a few years before, my parents had acquired two dogs, Corbu and Hobbes. They were both Samoyeds. Hobbes, named by my brother, was small and perpetually scared. Corbu, named by my dad after his favourite architect Le Corbusier, was a brave and smart adventure dog. When I moved back to Calgary, I kind of inherited the dogs, since my parents were splitting up and the dogs had nowhere to go. I never really clicked with Hobbes, but Corbu became my dear companion until the end of her life in 2006. Our trip to the Arctic cemented the deal. I wrote about it in this comic, which was published in the 2017 Prairie Comics zine.

That was the first time Corbu and I travelled to the Arctic, but it wasn’t the last.

Safe travels, wherever you are!