“A Death in the family” (working title)
Today is new comics day, but it is also bagel day at Solly’s bakery down at 8th and Yukon. I go down there every other week or so to get my dozen bagels for $6.25,. You have to get there “early” (mark you early for me is early in the afternoon) to get the best selection. I remember when I was young my sister Elizabeth accused me of anti-Semitism because I liked my bagels with bacon and eggs for breakfast. She wasn’t being serious, she was just looking for something to argue about, which is what life was like in my family, a constant battle of intellectual needling and sibling rivalry. But this is the sort of memories I have to pick and choose from as I compose my graphic novel which covers years of my life and that of my family, the accident that led to the death of my sister Elisabeth 2 ½ years later. Which anecdotes to keep, which to discard as I try to explain my family to the world without creating the wrong impression… I mean, I know and understand my family in a way that someone reading my work doesn’t, I don’t want to use my work as some sort of payback. So, it’s tricky, to be as honest and truthful as possible while hopefully not causing my living family members pain and the not to malign the dead whom cannot answer back…
It’s also some of the fastest and best writing I’ve done.
I feel strongly about it, I’ve doubted the wisdom of doing this at all, but so far it feels right in a way that’s so impossible to explain sometimes. When deliberation is essentially meaningless, when something just appears on the page from somewhere that is instinctive.
Still, it’s going to be a long time finishing, I have more than forty pages written and roughed out, many more written. I have no idea how long it’s going to be. I’m looking through my diary minicomics from the time, trying to figure out what to leave in and what to leave out. Sometimes I think of comics as diagrams , a simplified rendering that explains reality clearly and concisely . I’m hoping the story will do the same and not just be a mass of disconnected anecdotes… wish me luck!
Oh, I also went to my comic shop, R/X comics on Main at Broadway but there were no comics for me this week, just Robin DB busting my balls… I had to cut back on my spending on graphic novels. Then I go next door and buy “A Clash of Fundementalism” by Tariq Ali at Pulp Fiction! Ahhhh!