The Drawing Book, Part 2
"My Life as a Book"
I woke up this morning to troubling headlines from all over the world. In these difficult times, it feels weird to be posting about… comics?! It feels so trivial.
We need activism and advocacy. We really need compassionate leaders to guide us through these times. But I’m hoping we need comics too. Over the past couple of weeks, I started posting the first few pages of my first “Drawing Book,” a comics journal I started back in art school. Going back to this old story has helped me to recapture the optimism of my former self, when a more hope-filled society was something I took for granted.
Looking back on my old drawing book with the weary eyes of 2023, I’m getting re-introduced to the old me - an optimistic and strong (though a bit mixed up) young person. I miss that old me, and I miss some things about the world she lived in. I’m hoping that sharing these old stories might recapture some hope and humour - maybe even inspire you to chronicle your own stories that you can look back on, someday!
A note: This journal was just intended for myself - so it’s full of references to things that no one else would understand. I think you can still enjoy the overall story even if you aren’t privy to all the inside jokes. But maybe it would be fun to include some of the inside information, in the “margins,” as it were? Maybe this time I’ll try writing down some annotations about what appears in the pictures. Here goes.
I drew a lot of this journal during and in between classes at the Ontario College of Art & Design (as it was known back then), but I also drew while I was working at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College Library. I’d had that job since my second year of university and I was able to continue even while I attended OCAD. I worked the evening shift, which went until midnight, and wasn’t too busy, so there was lots of time for drawing. And for being asked out by young male library patrons, apparently.
One other note about the previous page: some of this journal is written in “Elvish,” as you may have noticed! This script was created by J. R. R. Tolkien and adapted for secret note-taking purposes by myself & a high school friend. (The version you see in this journal is not quite the same as what you’ll find in The Lord of the Rings. We called it “Common Elvish,” but Tolkien scholars, I have learned, call it “The mode of Beleriand.”) Anyway, it proved (and still proves) to be pretty handy for writing secret notes! The text on this page is just about an art school project. But that’s another story!
What kind of annotations would be useful for this page? Maybe a link to the Giacometti sculpture I tried to draw here. I took my son to see this long-nosed sculpture at the art museum in Cologne, Germany, in 2017. It was still there! I still love it!
Also, as for that tall blue hat in the last panel: that’s my grandmother (the owner of the stolen car I wrote about a few days ago) wearing a tall, blue, furry, feathery, gigantic hat at one of her children’s weddings. Yes. She actually wore a hat that looked like that. I wish I had a photograph of that to share with you, because it was a remarkable sight!
My Life as a Book
In the pages coming up, there were a lot of “inside” references to people and places and times in my life. Some names have been blurred out and some pictures have just been (digitally) erased. But I wonder if people were actually interested in the stories behind these cryptic pictures and references, if that information would be something I could provide for paid subscribers…??? Let me know what you think!
The story of “My Life as a Book” catches up to the time I was writing the journal in 1997, while living on Wales Avenue in Toronto’s Kensington Market and attending OCAD.
Future Bakery was my favourite place to hang out in Toronto (it was open till late at night, which suited me very well). Good memories of good times and good coffee!
And good memories of hopeful, adventurous times when a chase after my own identity felt like the biggest problem I faced. That’s what I wish for the young people of 2023: that they have no bigger problems than discovering their own identities, and that they are able to create the identities they need to navigate today’s challenges. And, of course, I hope that they make comics, too!
To be continued…