All by Myself

a one-page comic I made with a little help from my friends

I’ve been having a slow return to the drawing table this year. In addition to the dismal distractions of the outside world, both of my new (potential) book projects are stuck in a molasses-like middle stage where every line I draw and story decision I make feels like a mistake.

One way I work through these cyclical slumps is to draw quick, semi-improvised comics pages in my sketchbook. Just to remind myself I still know how to draw and have fun with pen and ink.

Recently, through an unexpected turn of events, one of these sketches yielded a complete comic:

Here’s how this one-pager came about.

The page above started started in the middle: I drew two panels of a man in an office using random images from the internet (panel 4 is based on a still of actor Dirk Bogarde). Then I drew the first two panels showing the man walking through a bombed out cityscape:

For a couple of years now, I’ve been meeting with a group of friends to write and share poetry. For our January meeting, my friend Susanne Reece suggested we all try a prompt that she has used in her classes at SVA. Here are the instructions if you want to try it yourself:

For anyone who wants to do the prompt, there are 3 steps. It is one I use with Comics Poetry students, and also used to have my MFA students do as an exercise on not directly illustrating what the text is saying.

1. Choose 6 random images from your phone (they needn’t be the last 6), just a random assortment. Set these aside/put them in a folder.

2. Spend 10 minutes free writing about one of the following topics:

• A time you told a lie

• The last time you cried

• A memory associated with riding in a car

3. Using the 6 images (you may crop them, repeat them if needed, manipulate them in photoshop, draw on them) place lines from your free write, which you may also edit/manipulate/rewrite onto the images in intuitively, in a way that makes sense. You may find that after you have done this, you want to rearrange the images. Or that you want to add some. Which is also ok. Play around with the sequence. What feels right? Avoid having too much text on any one image. Keep cutting and refining until you have no more than about 15 words or so on any one image.

I selected and set aside six images, as instructed—

—and then wrote a 10 minute free-writing text following the “riding in a car” prompt:

The squelching metronome of the windshield wipers is periodically supplemented by the clicking of a turn signal. Together they sound forlorn and lost. It’s nighttime in Manhattan, around 1980. It might be raining. Let’s say it’s raining. I’m in the back seat with my brothers on one side or the other – as the oldest I never had to ride hump. We’re on our way to visit my grandmother and aunt and I dread the musty smell of her apartment building’s hallways. I’m not talking. I’m in my mind, wishing myself elsewhere — back home in the attic, making model airplanes with the little orange black-and-white TV screening a monster movie.

The AM radio is on and the song playing is magnifying my melancholy. The treacly melody insinuates itself as I sing along in my head: “All by myself. Just wanna be/All by myself…” (It’s not until many years later that I realize that the refrain is “don’t wanna be…”)

The family Buick cruises inexorably south on the FDR Parkway.

However, when I compared the text and the six images they seemed beyond disconnected. I imagine if I had more time I might have found a way in but instead it occurred to me that the inking study I was working might be a promising alternative—I even happened to be planning on drawing six panels.

I had been trying to decide how to finish the page and after rejecting a bomber/explosion ending I opted for a telephone closeup followed by a suburban house, an impressionistic non sequitur:

I copy-pasted lines from the text and was pretty pleased with the result. I hand lettered it and assembled the final comic in Photoshop.

I had been planning to push my boundaries a bit on the poetry prompt, maybe try something less comics-y, more of a work of image/text juxtaposition and Susanne gently chided me for not wrestling more with my random images.

But I'm pleased with the final result, and given the sludgy progress of my work right now,¹ I’ll take this as a win—plus I now have a finished page of comics to share with you!

1. Do you ever sit at your desk to work but instead you are overcome by a wave off almost narcoleptic lethargy?