The Drawing Book: Time for a new sketchbook
The story started with an art school sketchbook.
It’s Friday evening here in Calgary! Time to put aside my work and dig up some old comics to share with you. (For readers of Bob Dylan comics, it’ll be a few more days until I post the next Dylan comics installment!)
So what’s the story behind these old comics? A long time ago, I finished university, and then I went to art school for just one year. During that year at OCAD University (just OCAD, back then), one instructor gave me the assignment of keeping a drawing journal. It turned into a years-long habit of writing/drawing autobiographical comics. There’s a straight line between these early sketchbooks and the comics I write today.
This long-ago series became known as “The Drawing Book.” I’m not really sure why I loved it, and still love it, so much. Maybe it’s because I was just telling the story for myself, without any inhibitions or concerns about the audience. The drawing books were passed around by my friends, but they were never published. Until now!
I’ll just start at the beginning and post a few pages at a time. And I’ll add a few notes at the end to explain any confusing bits.
The year was 1996…
To be continued…
Notes about this chapter:
You can find out more about Gilbert & Sullivan, writer & composer of some hilarious and witty (and racist & misogynistic) comic operas, here.
And you can find out more about Lyonel Feininger, my favourite painter, here. I first saw one of his paintings (this one) in a high school art class in Germany, and it changed the way I looked at art forever.
It wasn’t till a long time later that I found out Feininger was just as famous for writing comics, too!
I even made Feininger into a character in a comic I wrote a long time later - but that’s another story.
I copied that picture of the “Bloody Hand of the O’Neills” with three drops of blood dripping from it, from a window at my grandparents’ house. They actually had a stained glass window of a blood-dripping hand beside their front door! (My grandmother’s maiden name was O’Neill.) Is that cool, or is that just weird?
And that script you can’t read is Tolkien’s “Elvish” Tengwar script… yes, I was a Lord of the Rings fan before it was cool!
As for the reference to Bob Dylan: I started writing this drawing book at around the same time I started following Bob Dylan’s “Neverending Tour” around. I’ll put those Bob Dylan comics into a separate section of this Substack (here), but once in a while there might be a little bit of overlap.
What do you think? Is anyone going to be interested in these comics? I guess we’ll see.