Where is everybody?

Trying to make sense of my new life in Calgary.

I’m working my way through the old drawing book I started in the late 1990s, when I moved back to my old hometown of Calgary. When I look at this week’s sketches, I see drawings of a lot of people. I’d lived in Toronto for a few years, and now I was trying to figure out my new Calgary social scene. I was also inspired to make up a superhero character based on a local business with a funny name…

“Where is everybody?” I wondered. By “everybody,” I meant my immediate family: my parents and my three younger brothers. The last time I’d lived in Calgary, they’d all been living together in our family home. But things had changed. One brother had moved to Vancouver, and the others were off travelling. And my mom was in Edmonton - more about her, in a moment.

I sketched Princess Diana on the night she was killed in a car crash, after hearing the news from my roommate’s boyfriend when I came home from working on a flight.

My mom, the “Power Frau”

During the time I’d lived away from Calgary, my mom had become an MLA - a Member of the province’s Legislative Assembly! She was a politician! I didn’t know what to think about this for a long time. (I didn’t really agree with her politics.) A long time later, I wrote a comic about coming to terms with my mom’s political career, for Calgary-based journalism outlet The Sprawl. Here’s one page from that comic:

You can read the rest of that comic here. For now, back to the drawing book. The next page shows my mom making a speech at an event I participated in. The Elvish writing says that I brought up the subject of gay rights… something that took a lot of nerve for me to do, in front of my Catholic mom and a bunch of conservative Albertans.

Old friends and new friends

Now that I was back in Calgary, I was reunited with high school friends like the so-called “Brill Alternatives.” One of those friends (the one pictured above with the sparkly ring on her finger) got married that fall. I travelled out for her wedding in Ottawa, and I drew her siblings and her parents at the wedding rehearsal.

Back in Calgary, I was also getting to know my family’s two dogs. For reasons I couldn’t understand, my family had acquired these two big dogs, even though my parents and brothers were hardly ever at home to look after them. Now that I was back, I started being the dogs’ looker-after more and more. You’ll see them more in some upcoming comics.

Along with finding a social scene in Calgary, I was also trying to make friends in my new work community at Air Canada. But mostly, I was using my free time to jump on airplanes and go to see Bob Dylan concerts with my Bob Dylan friends. This next page shows a picture that I’ve already posted in a Bob Dylan comics newsletter.

But underneath the group of Bob Dylan friends, I drew the way I was feeling. I’d been spending my days surrounded by new people, and I was travelling to new places, and it was exciting - but I was still feeling really uprooted. I hadn’t settled in to my new life yet. I was glad to have my new job, but at the same time, it didn’t exactly feel like the place I wanted to be. In my mind, I sat on a rainy ocean coast, waiting out all the ups and downs, and dreaming of being… somewhere or something that I hadn’t figured out yet.

Come along for the next chapter of the drawing book and a new voyage of discovery for my 24-year-old self! But first, I’ll probably post some more Bob Dylan comics, of course. Thanks for joining me!