I’m eating the elephant one mouthful at a time….it feels like glacial progress but I have actually got some sort of plan for the entire zine now. It may well all alter over time but it is definite progress to have ideas for every as opposed to a big empty space!
Talks with family have helped me make some sense of that period of our childhood, it is definitely worth revisiting although uncomfortable. I had started to wonder why our Dad made any effort to see us but the penny dropped when it dawned on me that my step mother came back to see her parents, they lived in the same town as my grandparents, so we were an obvious box to tick at the same time. In fact we regularly went to her parents on those meet ups. I liked them, they were always friendly and welcoming to us. (Didn’t like their house though, rammed with dark furniture and everything was dusty and a bit greasy from the deep fat fryer)
It has been a real battle as to how to visually express all these relationships but I’m drawing on my graphic design skills to help, diagrams as much as comic book details.
These are some of my sketches, these are literally my thinking on the page, and when I come back to them they are often unintelligible to me as they they would be to anyone else, but somehow the layout / structure of what I’m doing has become firmer and less elusive, in my head. It was always hard on my course when my tutors complained that I had done sketches to show the progress of ideas, working up to a finished piece. Trouble is my brain does not work in that nice clear, linear, step by step fashion. It is messy, disorganised and all over the place. It is chaotic and jumbled and things go wrong and don’t work. And then something will suddenly fall into place. And I often have no clear idea of what the outcome will be until it is in front of me.
