The Drawing Book's identity crisis
Comics about the summer I stopped making comics.
Hello, Drawing Book readers! I’m back with a few pages from my old sketchbook journal series. A couple of newsletters ago, I wrote about a romantic trip to Italy back in 2000, documented in my drawing book. The trip started on a high note and ended on a low note. I drew this next page after the trip was over - before I had really come to terms with the reality that my relationship was not destined to last much longer.
It wasn’t much longer till reality kicked in. My new boyfriend ditched me! My heart was broken, and to my surprise, I couldn’t write about it in the drawing book. Being ditched was a new experience for me, but it was also a new experience from an autobiographical comics perspective. Was I just supposed to write about this… tell the world (well, my friends and family who passed this book around) about my heartbreak? No! I didn’t want them to know, and I didn’t want to believe it myself. So, I didn’t write anything. I shared this picture in last week’s post, but here it is again…
By the way, since I mentioned that my friends and family often read these books, maybe this is a good spot to share this photo of my grandmother (on the right) and her friend Pauline reading this book, back in 2000. I wonder what they thought!!
For a while after my break-up, there was no drawing. Just blank pages, and after a while, an attempt at explaining what was going on:
(The aforementioned “Cartesian Revision” was the term I used to describe an exercise I put myself through in my second year of university, during a time when I tried to take stock of what I actually thought about my beliefs. Here’s a reference to it in an early comic from the drawing book.)
After a few more blank pages, there’s this page. Maybe this is Tibetan? (I thought a lot about Buddhism during this time. I did a lot of meditating! It really helped, actually.)
A few blank pages later, there’s this page. Apparently, the first time I picked up the drawing book, “after nearly four months.” (I’ve already shared this page as part of a newsletter in my Bob Dylan comics section.)
But I was returning to the drawing book with a new and slightly jaded perspective. My old boyfriend had criticized me for writing and drawing about everything that happened to me, instead of just experiencing life. This rankled. Of course, this is an issue for everybody who makes autobiographical comics: you think of everything that happens to you as a potential comics story. But at the time, I wondered: was that really getting in the way of me just living life? Was my drawing book a fake veneer, concealing… emptiness?? Here’s the defiant (and defensive) page I wrote about this.
When I read that now (twenty-five years later), it seems pretty silly. On the other hand, even now I grapple with the best way to balance real life and autobiographical storytelling, so I guess that is just my fate.
(By the way, Bob Dylan fans will note the reference to Dylan’s old tour posters in that last image: the posters always said, “Don’t you dare miss it!”)
One last note: As I looked through these old pages, I thought: “That’s funny… I’m sure I did SOME drawing during the summer of 2000.” I took a look around, and sure enough, I found another, slightly dustier drawing book that I seem to have used to fill the gap in this story. So maybe that’ll be our subject matter next week. Until then, use the time well, everyone! You only get one life!