The Tale of the Visiting Bugs, and other stories

A grab bag of old sketchbook pages.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another week of old comics from my old sketchbook journal series, The Drawing Book! I’ve been working my way through my series of journals that started in 1996, and we’ve gotten as far as the end of 1999. However, there were a few 1999 pages that didn’t make it into a newsletter, so I thought I’d just put them here today, in no particular order. There isn’t any rhyme or reason to this story!

This week’s grab bag of comics starts with me visiting a bridal salon, where my friend was trying on wedding dresses!

No wedding dresses for me! Instead, a couple of friends and I had some drinks at a Mexican bar on a layover in Mainz, Germany, and talked (and wrote poetry) about how single we were!

Here’s another friend telling me about enneagrams. This was the first time I heard about this, but all these years later, I still really like the enneagram! (I’ve always thought I was a “4,” but the older I get, the more I suspect that I might be just as much a “3.”)

Well, I did go through some periods of not drawing much, but don’t worry, they didn’t last. Instead, I went on to draw this page, one of my favourite pages in the old drawing books: the Tale of the Visiting Bugs.

Oh, those bugs!! Little did I know back then, that these bugs were a fixture of Calgary life.

Actually, I even drew these bugs in another comic, a couple of years later: my story about September 11, 2001. (It was published in 2002, but just last month, I found some copies of this anthology at Comic-Kazi here in Calgary! That was a fun and funny surprise.)

Anyway, since then, I have learned about these bugs. They’re box elder bugs. In fact, many Calgarians have also gotten to know them better, because during the past couple of years, there sure seemed to be a lot more of them than usual (Here’s a CBC News story about that). Last summer, a few of them even came in the back door of my house (there is a box elder tree pretty close to the door). And even now, in January, I occasionally find a box elder bug who has got the idea that it’s come to stay. Nope. I am no longer so understanding as I was back in the days of the drawing book. At least not when it comes to visiting bugs.

I think that’s it! Have a good week, and if you have visitors, I hope they will not be unwelcome!