Author Archives: littledragonblue

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About littledragonblue

Dreamer, Writer, Artist, Lover

Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

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I’m counting on you, my flesh and blood, to somehow read my mind.

This is the central story of the book, of course, and the one that stayed with me the longest. When I think of this book, I think of this story, and when I first thought of starting this project, this is the story that came to mind. So I’ve been thinking about how I would portray it for a long time. Still, it always changes once I start working.

Originally I thought the middle aged daughter would appear in the background, along with the house, and the memories would be small elements, but the memories sort of loom larger and larger; this woman only has the past. And then I didn’t draw the middle aged daughter at all, because the mother hardly sees her. I mean, she feels her anger, she watches her, but she doesn’t see her child. She’s busy justifying herself.

 

Blood Work, 1999

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So much imagery, so little time.

This comic was a lot of fun to draw, although after I drew it, I realized that Marika should have been wearing a lab coat, not scrubs. But that’s a minor point and I don’t think it detracts from the overall theme. Here’s another character who just loves too much, just like yesterday’s comic, except that Marika is (apparently) a virgin who’s never had  real relationship, so she pours her love into people and places and things that don’t even know her. It’s a sad story to me. At least the protagonist in “Somewhere Warm” has a her ungrateful daughter back in the end, and a military son, and a tabula rasa grandbaby. Marika, it seems to me, is going to end up with a pink slip. Her awakening is unlikely to make up for whatever would happen in panel 7 if the story kept going.

I love how the burned boy came out, and the window with the cardboard sign. Panel 5 has to be my favorite, even though every time I have to cut an idea for space, I get a little sad, and even in that panel I ended up leaving a lot of the material out. If you haven’t read the book, the crazy homeless guy is referred to as the Lightning Man, having been, as far as anyone can tell, hit by lightning preceding what seems to have been his first visit to the hospital. When human being are hit by lightning, they can exhibit Lichtenberg scars, fractal-shaped burn marks created by electricity. Lichtenberg figures are observed most commonly inside insulation materials, but they can form in solids, liquids, or gases, so it’s not strange that electricity etches upon human flesh. The background of panel 5 mimics the shape of a Lichtenberg scar.

Being obsessed with lightning, I’ve always thought this would be a wicked tattoo.

Somewhere Warm

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In Dad’s defense, I also fled Kalamazoo for the southwest. Those winters were killing me. 

Believe it or not, this comic took longer to draw that any of the others. I must have drawn the girl’s face in panel 3 about 50 times. Same with panel 5, and the mom never came out quite the way I wanted. Panels 2 and 4 are perfect, though. That’s my biggest obstacle drawing comics. I can usually draw one character the way I want them to look 1 time. But drawing the same character over and over, with different expressions and postures, from different angles, and make them still appear to be the same character feels impossible. I need a life drawing class. Or a bunch of live models.

I left the clothes and skin intentionally blank so as not to detract from the girls’ freckles.

It’s kind of a sad story. The mom just starts to thrive on being alone when the kid comes back, and the kid coming back is going to be a massive burden on her. The mom doesn’t exactly change as a character, although she does grow. It’s sort of like she’s choosing to stay the course, even though she never gets the outcomes she expects, but the growth is in her understanding that some people are just awful. At least, in the future, she’ll understand that she’s pouring her love into an open sewer. I mean, I guess the baby can be seen as a chance at redemption, like maybe this time, if she just loves enough, the baby won’t grow up and leave her. But personally, I sort of think she’s going to keep getting the same outcome. The fact of the matter is, if she ever met a man who she didn’t drive away with her creepy, cloying talk, he would suck her dry.

Star Scallop Mandala

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A little bit feathery, a little bit pointy. 

Productive weekend! Got a really nice comic finished for tomorrow, which is helpful, because tomorrow is the day I go to the Fox’s house and we sit and silence and write for 2 hours, and also the day that I volunteer at the elementary school, and I have another engagement as well, so that doesn’t leave a lot of time to make comics. Also got a good chunk of the next day’s comic started, which is helpful.

Also, I got a new phone, because my giant ZMAX died an ignominious death after an entire week of not really letting me play Pokemon Go. Sadly, they don’t make this kind of phablet anymore. The Man found one on Craig’s List but someone else got there first, so he bought me an LG, which will probably be OK, once I get everything arranged the way I like it. How anyone can not organize their icons by alphabetical order is beyond me.

This is a really pretty mandala, only slightly askew.

And that’s Labor Day weekend. There goes summer, once again. The autumn always gets me a little bit down, and it’s hard not to compare the year to my life, i.e. if my life were a meteorological year beginning in the spring, it would now also be the beginning of autumn. On the other hand, The Man and I went to the last late night of the season at the Desert Museum on Saturday, and in the weird fluorescent light of the bathroom, I thought I’d found my first gray hair. But it was just the lighting. So maybe it’s still the 4th of July.

My Sister Is in Pain

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I’m afraid some people will find panel 3’s realistic depiction of a sink full of disgusting dishes perhaps a little bit triggering. 

This is rather a personal subject for me, but Bonnie Jo keeps referring to these comics as literary criticism, and, the human brain being what it is, it’s impossible for a critic to not inject themselves into their interpretation. So I drew my own sister in panel 1, and myself in panel 6. That’s the real reason I didn’t draw this one last night: it’s not a comfortable subject to dwell on. A sighted person can never understand what it’s like to be blind, and a person without chronic pain can never understand what it’s like to live with chronic pain.

And I guess a person with chronic pain can never understand what it’s like for their loved ones to cope with their chronic pain. But this story explains it pretty well.

This is probably the most detailed BJC comic so far, illustration-wise. Everyone’s hair is on point. I went insane withe those dirty dishes. It helped that I started early and didn’t stress out. A couple hours in, the Bear called me up and he ended up coming over to hang out. I can’t think of how many nights I spent at his place watching him work, so he didn’t mind watching me, and he was very helpful in taking the source photo for the last panel. Usually I spent 15 minutes setting up the shot–a lot of time spent finding the right height for the camera, and a thing to hold it at that height–and then have to take a dozen photos to get the picture. But his help eliminated the setup, and he got the shot on the second picture. Artists helping artists.

Dragon Comics 141

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I got so distracted I forgot I was too distracted to work.

What’s really funny about this is that The Man could no more ride a unicycle or juggle clubs than I could program a CMM machine or pass the real estate exam. However, he is excellent at providing distractions, and he was very distracting today.

The comics I’ve been drawing for the last 2 weeks have taken about 6 hours each, not counting rereading the stories and writing the first draft of the script, and I didn’t even start thinking that I might draw a comic today until 11 pm. And I definitely wasn’t feeling particularly serious. And the story that I was thinking about illustrating was personally serious.

Tomorrow I’ll be more focused. I actually don’t need a distraction.

Children of Transylvania, 1983

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Poor children in Communist Romania were crazy for Bazooka Joe. Who knew?

“Children of Transylvania, 1983” is one of the richest stories in this book. So many strange and beautiful images had to be excised to fit the format, and so much of the plot. Admittedly, when I first read this story, I was kind of impatient with the protagonist’s unfortunate decision-making skills, but taking the piece apart to do this comic, I fell in love with her journey on a more complex level.

But I had to leave so much out! All the details about her encounters with the various Romanians she meets. The part where all the girls ask her for birth control. The food, the water, the milk. Every reference to Count Dracula. Still, it came out much better than I thought it would.

You know what’s hard to find? A source image for a Communist era statue of Nicolae Ceausescu. Right away, I realized why: unlike the rest of the Communist revolutions that happened in 1989, Romania’s was violent and bloody. People died, they gave Ceausescu a 1-hour trial in a kangaroo court, and then they took him out back and shot him. And then they went and smashed the ever loving essence out of all the Communist statues. Both tourism and cameras were limited in Romania at the time, ergo: people have not made a priority of uploading photos of Ceausescu statues to the internet. Almost every picture is of his statue planted face first on the ground, after the people toppled it over.

That’s a pretty cool skull and crossbones spray painted over a sports bra bursting with ripe plums in panel 5, I must say.

The Greatest Show on Earth, 1982: What There Was

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Today I learned that pregnant women can’t sell cotton candy at the circus.

Another of my favorite stories in this book: “The Greatest Show on Earth, 1982: What There Was.” Stripping out all the circus background leaves a core that I can’t help but compare to “Hills Like White Elephants” if Hemingway wrote race and class issues into the story. In “Hills Like White Elephants,” I think the characters are only victims of their own desire to keep having a good time, to keep drinking new drinks, and making clever but meaningless observations, whereas Buckeye and Black Mike in “The Greatest Show on Earth, 1982: What There Was” have this avalanche of societal pressures, combined with their substance issues, holding them back.  Their obstacles seem insurmountable.

The people in Hemingway’s story seem like they’re most interested in maintaining the status quo: having fun. They could easily go the other way; they just don’t want to. In Campbell’s story, the characters would love the luxury of settling down with a baby, and living mundane, healthy lives but they don’t have the resources to change. It’s not even an option for them. They know that, even in a 2-parent family, their child would be worse off than they had been as children of single mothers.

I like the circus car in the last panel, and I didn’t want to excise the circus theme entirely, but I’m afraid it takes too much focus off Buckeye, sitting on the ground, feeling her own pain, and Mike’s too. But that’s what I believe she’s doing.

Purple Classic Mandala

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Around and around and around it goes, and where it stops, nobody knows.

If I focus only on the good stuff, it’s hard not to be optimistic. Not only did I manage to convert 1/4 of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters into comic format in a single week, the comics were well-received in literary circles. Two professors told me that they intend to teach the comics with the book in the upcoming year, and Bonnie Jo is already talking to a printer about having the comic printed and bound as a comic book, to take on her paperback tour this fall. There are some other good things that could materialize from this, too.

Plus, just on the strength of the story of how I came to create these comics, another author who I greatly admire has stated that she wants to work with me to create a couple graphic versions of her stories for her next book. (Maybe I can name names when the project has a little more behind it than a single conversation, but it seems fairly likely that it will go forward. I suggested the writer scrutinize my work more closely to ensure that my style would jibe with theirs, and was told, “I feel this in my body,” i.e., she didn’t care what they looked like, she just knew she wanted to work with me.) There was a lot of synchronicity going on that day.

I had to tell the Rabbit that she was correct; putting The Hermit into the Kindle store was the right idea. In the fall, there will be  dead tree version, and it will most likely have quotes from several well-known and successful authors on the back cover.

Tell Yourself

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I think we’d all jump off a bridge if Amber dared us to. Am I right?

This comic seems a little graphically threadbare to me, compared to the previous ones, and I think it’s because “Tell Yourself” just doesn’t have as much definitive imagery as some of the other stories in Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. “Playhouse,” yesterday, for example, has the peonies and the playhouse and the alcohol and everyone’s hair and the rabbits and the fruit stickers and the Tasmanian devil tattoo. The central visual feature in “Tell Yourself has got to be Mary’s clothes, and frankly, I also find the idea of a barely-adolescent girl wearing low rise jeans and a crop top with a pair of cupcakes over her cupcakes slightly discomfiting. I didn’t want to spend too much time focusing on her “darling new breasts.”

My mother would have done anything to persuade me to dress in a more feminine fashion when I was in 8th grade, but she never in a million years would have let me out of the house in that outfit, even when I was in high school. She would have been highly critical if she saw me dressed that way when I was in college. But I see little kids dressed like that all the time. The supply seems equal to the demand.

After the outfit, the only big visual symbol is the rocking chair, because I couldn’t figure out how to work in the gum-cracking or the terrible baby perfume. For the first time in this project, I was really at a loss for how to illustrate the final panel. I settled on the potatoes; it locates the narrator in this role she has created for herself: being a mother comes first, even though Mary’s already gone. But she did change her shirt. And I’ve left mom with the knife. She’s not wholly defenseless.