Badly Drawn Girl: My First Comic

The MOOC had an assignment that I was not expecting or prepared for:

“Create a comic based on a story regarding gender you or a close friend/family member has experienced.”

My initial thought was that I had no idea what to write, and even if I did, how was I going to draw it? I have not gotten good at drawing yet! And I wasn’t sure that I had anything interesting to say. Then I thought about when I was 14.

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2008/02/sporkphelia.html

Actually, I started to see this narrative of how everything connects, from what happened on the playground when I was six to the dream that led to me buying a bass a few weeks ago, and what I am trying to do now, and everything that goes along with that. I saw it in pictures and words. Unfortunately, that’s probably a fifty page thing, and it was due Friday night.

So, I did something small, and I will do something bigger later. It has as little commercial potential as the other comic, but will be a lot shorter with less characters, so there’s that. Regardless, I have now gone beyond writing a script, and imagining, and I have actually drawn and posted a comic. Much like the author, it is flawed.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/emkfvesrpw6onlb/14-41.pdf

The instructions stressed that stick figures were okay, and I warmed up to that. In the first part, for the main incident, all of the characters are sticks, differing only by hair, plus a little bit with height, which is accurate. They also don’t have faces. Identity is kind of transient during adolescence.

I do this transition with my character as she moves into adulthood where she takes on some width. Actually, she kind of looks like a Lego fig at that point, except there is still no face, and no gripping ability with the hands. That would just be too much self-actualization.

In the very last panel, I have fingers and am looking in a mirror. That is more significant than is obvious, because a big part of all of my dysfunction was not wanting to look at myself or take pictures or weigh, or think, or do anything to have to face how ugly and horrible I was. Doing so would probably have been really helpful in seeing that it was a lie, but I couldn’t. It would have been kind of cool to show a face starting to take shape, but that would have been hard to convey, and honestly, I drew her too close to the mirror.

Planning was an issue on multiple levels. I meant to write out a script in Word, then draw it, maybe outlining some, but it didn’t feel right. I had to just take up the tablet and draw. I don’t think I will always do it that way. Storytelling via sequential art is new to me (I believed I would never draw the Danger Days one right up until the end of writing it), and this was very emotional content, and that was where my instinct led me. I do believe I will write out the script for the 50 page version before drawing it, but for this I just couldn’t.

Perhaps that helped me capture the sentiment better in some ways, but it led to another complication in that I also did not plan out the spacing at all, and I exceeded the margins of the scan. My scanner was not working, so my sister Julie took it to work and sent me the file through email, and yes, parts were cut off.

Actually, I can now see the value in having bits of text and picture missing, to add a feeling of things being fractured, or that the entire story is not and cannot be known, but taking true advantage of that would require planning. If this particular comic is better in some way because of the margin issues, it’s a happy accident. As it is, you do still get the gist.

While the stick figures were a more deliberate choice based on lack of skill. I like how they worked out. The knee to the groin depiction is woefully inadequate, but I am amazed at how some of the emotion came through. The arms really helped in two of the panels, which was odd because usually they just looked weird. I think now maybe I should have only drawn arms when they were doing something.

So, I have mixed feelings. There are things that I wish had gone better (the picture where I’m trying to convey that there is a hole does not look right, plus margins), but also I am kind of proud of it, and I learned something again. Let me see if I can explain it right.

I am a character in this. As I am analyzing it and working it out, my mind switches back and forth between first and third person, because drawing her and writing about her puts this distance there, even though she is definitely me.

I was writing recently about the healing power of fiction, because we provide solutions to obstacles, but what I hadn’t realized at the time was how helpful that distance is. So many of these Twitter friends can be kind to anyone but themselves; what if becoming their own characters could get them around that?

It was the guitar dream again. It started to grow and take form beyond the dream. Someday there may be a story or a comic or a movie about kids with rough home lives who start a band, though there are probably a few of those already out there.

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/04/my-dream-guitar-story-in-three-parts.html

She was an alternate version of me, in events that did not happen in reality. That may have made getting the different perspective easier. I could clearly see that she would resist getting the guitar fixed, because she would feel like she didn’t deserve it. If that could happen, if it could be broken like that before she even had a chance to play it, clearly she had never deserved it. It was a mistake to think she could have it.

What I could also clearly see was that she really needed the guitar. She was blaming herself for things that weren’t her fault, and taking that ache inside as her due. I had a solution for her though, because she had friends who could go behind her back and get it fixed. For me, I just bought it. Maybe it was good that I didn’t find my dream guitar the first time I searched, because a week later I was more ready to have it.

I knew I was going to blog about this, and post the link to the comic, but I ended up tweeting the link Monday, by itself, because so many people were saying things echoing it. Creating it helped me, maybe it could help someone else.

Yesterday I had written a draft of this, and later in the day someone posted about getting an autobiography assignment, and not having anything to write, and not understanding the point of these assignments. I wrote back that I would post on that the next day, but for now I linked to the comic.

The reply was encouraging: “that's That's amazing”

The next tweet was even better: “Now I want to write something I wow”

I could be missing some context, but I am going to go ahead and call that Best. Compliment. Ever.

So yeah, I still want everyone writing and drawing and reading and playing, and healing, and I’ve got my own work to do there. Next week will be about being a messed up kid.