I am not an optimistic person, and tend as a result to see things a bit more clearly than most, and more clearly than is helpful. But I have many blind spots and naturally one of those is my own artwork.
Example - I created a wordless comic memoir about a miscarriage I experienced. I redrew this comic after a couple of magazines expressed interest but rejected it. It was rejected again. I am re-drawing it again, this time quite differently. It’s much better, I see that.
I also see finally after two years that it is too difficult to follow.
How do you draw a doctor offering a woman the choice between a D&C and waiting it out? Especially when many readers won’t even know* what either option even means?
I used to show the woman mulling over an OR theatre door and an hourglass. It looked terrible.
It’s just clunky to rely on tired symbols to get important and intimate topics across. It’s not a humour comic FFS.
So I decided to add text narrative. This of course brings me down. I wanted to produce a successful wordless comic, art that stands on its own! As soon as there is text on the page, it becomes the lode stone, the main event. Argh.
But the piece is not an artistic exercise, it is a memoir and I need to stay true to that. True to telling the story the way it seems to need to be told!
So I’m reviewing the text narration styles in my personal collection. So gorgeous! Let me know if you want book titles.
Clockwise: Alison Bechdel, Barbara Yelin, Birgit Weyhe, Gipi, and Nora Krug in the centre.
*D&C is the removal of the foetus tissues with a special tool by a doctor, especially useful as sometimes the foetus is not intact and it is a health risk if dead tissue remains inside the woman.
Waiting it out just means waiting for your body to expel everything. This can take hours or weeks.
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