One Pill Makes You…

In homage to Lewis Carroll and Grace Slick. And The Fixx

A few years ago, my friend the comics librarian Karen Green asked me to contribute to her sketchbook collecting drawings inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Here’s what I came up with:

I stumbled on my files for this page during my end-of-year review and decided to clean up the art in Photoshop (the above image isn’t even a scan, it’s a cleaned up photo I took with my iPhone).

Like most cartoonists tabling at comics festivals, I am occasionally asked to draw in peoples’ sketchbooks. To be quite honest I usually decline, partly because I don’t think it’s good for cartoonists to make drawings on demand and for free but partly because I tend to suck at off-the-cuff sketches of superheroes and the like.

But Karen is a friend so I decided to oblige in this case. I didn’t feel up to dashing off a John Tenniel-level illustration but I found a way in by listing a bunch of pills and their imaginary qualities, allowing me to draw from Lewis Carroll and any number of other absurdist and ‘pataphysical inspirations.

The other thing I’m not very good at—and I’ve talked about this in recent posts—is working quickly with any level of quality so I was happy to find that this page flowed pretty smoothly in one go. I think I spent about 45 minutes on it, working directly in ink. I wrote down ideas as they came to me, using a vague rhyme scheme to give me additional structure and also to reinforce the homage to Grace Slick’s song.

So, overall I was pretty happy with my solution to the challenge.

I recently shared this page on Instagram and it took off in a way that surprised me. Karen had shared the snapshot above on Facebook in 2022 and at that time I made a little slideshow version of the strip in her comments field and shared the whole thing on my timeline. Not the best strategy for finding readers, I admit, but I was still disappointed at the lack of response. I remember concluding that maybe the page wasn’t as clever as I thought it was and I filed it away in a sub-sub-sub-folder, which is why I only happened to rediscover it now.

As an artist, I don’t write to please or pander to an audience but I do think about that mythical “ideal reader” who will appreciate all the levels I’m working at. When I hit upon something that I believe is particularly good I can’t wait for them to see it.

I’ve also learned that you really can’t predict what’s going to connect with people or not (and I’m not even talking about algorithms and number of followers). Occasionally I’ll do a hesitant share like this one, feeling almost sheepish about it, like I’m adding more noise to the cacophony out there, only to find that people really respond to it.

I don’t really have an actionable lesson to impart here, just the observation that you can never predict what will find an audience and when.

Don’t assume no one’s going to like your work and don’t take it (too) personally when you share something you’re proud of and nobody reacts¹—it might just be the wrong platform or the wrong day…

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This page is not included in my new collection of experimental comics, Six Treasures of the Spiral: Comics Formed Under Pressure, but there’s a lot of great stuff you’ll like in there!!

Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review and called it “an instant classic.” (Read the whole review here.)

1. Ironically, this appears to be the case with this particular post: I’m adding this footnote one week in and it has only inspired 10 likes, whereas it’s up to 173 on Instagram…