Hello, drawing book readers!
Before we get to my old drawing book comics, just a note about some new comics I worked on for The Sprawl. In the past couple of weeks, I wrote some comics about my memories of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary (you can find them here on The Sprawl’s comics page), and one of them was printed as a risograph-printed zine, by Calgary's Mezzaluna Studio! That’s pretty cool.
And that’s not all! This week there’s another new Curious Calgary zine published by The Sprawl! This one’s about a 1920s Calgary “ski hill” that was built on the site of today’s Stampede grounds. You can find the comic here on the Sprawl website, along with a deep dive into the story of the crazy ski hill (including lots of historical photos) by Sprawl editor Jeremy Klaszus.
And now… back to the drawing book.
For those who have been following along, this is where I share autobiographical comics from my old sketchbook journal series. Since I started this Substack in 2023, we’ve been making our way through my original four sketchbooks, and a few weeks ago, we reached the end. The next part of the story unfolds in my attempt at an early web comic. I shared the "ex libris” here, and then I jumped into… Episode 2! Why did I totally miss the whole first episode (which is about 25 pages long)??! I have no idea… but the last few weeks have been a bit of a juggling act, and I guess I just mixed things up. I usually write these Substack posts AFTER I have finished my client work and all my household work. They are kind of the last priority, even though I really love writing them. Anyway, I guess some sleep-deprived reasoning caused me to start these web comics with Episode 2, but let’s fix that now. Starting again with Episode 1!
As I wrote in a previous post, the idea was for me to draw a bunch of pages, just as I would usually do in my old sketchbooks, and then about once a month I’d scan them and give them to a web hosting friend who would post them online for me. I tried to make these pages as spontaneous and random as my old sketchbooks, but the format of the boxy panels still felt a bit restrictive. One thing was the same, though: I often found myself drawing in late-night bars… or while trying to kill time in airports.
I’m pretty sure that the reason I was sitting in that early morning airport and feeling really grouchy, was because I had just travelled to Toronto from Calgary on the all-nighter, and now I was standing by for a flight that was supposed to take me to a Bob Dylan show in the States. I feel like it was Chicago, but maybe New York? Somewhere that I didn’t get to. A blizzard cancelled the flights, and I ended up just going back to Calgary. I drew these pictures in late 2001, and Bob’s 2001 tour wrapped up in November… so I’m not sure which show I missed.
By the way, it looks like that “remembered conversation” was at Karma, a long-ago Marda Loop coffeehouse in Calgary that, unfortunately, burned down. It was a nice place!
I couldn’t get to the Dylan show, so I ended up just warning my readers that there might be some Bob Dylan comics in the upcoming pages.
That page references Dylan’s tour posters from back then, which often said, “Don’t you dare miss it!” And of course, the line Bob is singing is from the smorgasbord of jumbled wordplay that is the song “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread.”
There are lots of Bob-Dylan-themed comics in my older drawing books, for those who are interested. However, in spite of this warning, there isn’t much about Bob in the web comics that follow. In fact, the next web comics chapter is about The Lord of the Rings. Hopefully I can share that one with you next week!