Scribbling

I’m a little afraid of drawing because its lines dwell in the same dank cave as my embarrassingly unruly printing and handwriting, which slant the wrong way and slip drunkenly off the tracks of ruled paper into sloppy spirals and shapeless jumbles. They tell stories without permission and they’re unreadable, even by me. When I went to stay with Sue, the foster mother I lived with as an older teen, who remains part of my life today, she inquired at the school I’d attended before I lived with her about my alleged learning disability and was told “She can’t make a straight line with a ruler.”

My friend Jesse introduced me to the work of cartoonist Lynda Barry in the early 1980’s. I was immediately hooked on her achingly raw characters. In 2020, Jesse and I each got a copy of Barry’s book, Making Comics, a handful of black pens, and a composition notebook and got together to do timed exercises with names like, Ten Second Cat, Blind Bones, and Monster Jam. Following Barry’s direction, we held our characters up so they could “see each other” and pondered a question posed in her book, “How old do you have to be to make a bad drawing?”

 I was initially self-conscious about showing the characters that began to emerge in my composition notebook. They are scraggly, scrawny, grossly disproportionate, but I did it anyway. The act of drawing feels like luring feral animals from hiding places, bringing them into the daylight. Revealing sharp teeth, but also tender bellies. If I was going to draw them out, I learned, it was my job to take care of them. It couldn’t be about liking or not liking them. They were neither good nor bad and I wasn’t there to judge them, just to set them free.

From an exercise in Making Comics called Blind Bones where you draw with your eyes closed

From a prompt to draw myself being carried by an alien