"Why did Sam draw that crazy drawing-book?"

And what's in my enormous tote bag? Read on!

Hello again, drawing book readers! I took a break last week, in an attempt to get caught up on my actual work. Well, I didn’t quite succeed, but I did make some progress! So, this week, I’m back with some more comics from the summer of 2000. Last time we looked in the drawing book (a couple of weeks ago), we stopped on a page about the supposed joys of being single. I’ll put that last panel in here again, because the story continues from there.

Yeah, I wasn’t so happy about being single. But on the next page, there’s a change of subject. (This story continued for a bit, but I’ll just include the start of it, here.)

You’ll notice each of these pages starts with a title panel. That’s because I was thinking of these short stories as web comics that might each be viewed on their own - instead of being read by friends of mine who passed around my physical book.

I wrote this next page as a kind of “origin story” for the web comic version of the drawing book. I still like this page!

While I was writing all this, I was working as a flight attendant with Air Canada, and most weeks I flew to Frankfurt (and back). We had a 24-hour layover, and many times I took a train down to the town where I had lived as an exchange student, a decade before. It was a two-hour train ride.

(What is that thing I’m listening to, on the train? A Walkman? A small radio? Didn’t I have headphones? What??? But, at least I can tell you what song I was listening to: Paul Simon and Bob Dylan doing a reggae-inspired live duet of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” which I had heard them sing the previous year, on a trip that I wrote about here in my Bob Dylan comics section. Ok, sorry for the Bob Dylan intrusion. Back to the drawing book!)

I didn’t have a phone, back then. No wonder that bag was so heavy - all those books!

Here’s one more page. On this page, I find myself in Toronto, visiting my Scrabble-playing grandparents. My grandparents were great folks. You can read an old blog post I wrote on my grandfather’s ninety-seventh birthday… featuring a comic strip about him, with a pretty weird story… here.

My grandmother was an excellent Scrabble player - nobody had to let her win at that one, she just won. When I wrote this comic, she would have been eighty-three years old. I have some other good stories about her, but we can save those for another day. For now, I wish you well, whether you’re single, or whether you’re celebrating your 57th wedding anniversary (or maybe you’ve just met your “spiritual partner?”) Most importantly, I hope you have everything you need, in your tote bag!