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5:10pm November 9, 2013
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/92647909/TheScarf.pdf The Scarf – an autobiographical comic about delirium and its aftermath (during a month-long hospitalization for pneumonia and gastroparesis).  You can get to the comic by clicking on the above link or the picture itself. So I took a class and one of the projects was to make a minicomic.  I’ve never done this before.  I honestly didn’t think I could do it.  I didn’t think I’d either have the self-discipline or the drawing ability.  But I did it.  It took me a week to finish it, and then a few days to troubleshoot tiny problems I hadn’t noticed.   This is a huge accomplishment for me.  I know there are people who churn out comics like this on a weekly basis, but I’m not a cartoonist and this is my first so it means a lot to me.  I’m ridiculously excited and proud of myself.  I worked my ass off and I think I did a fairly good job. For the story itself, I intertwined elements of my real-life experiences in the hospital last fall for gastroparesis and pneumonia, and the story I wrote soon after I got out of the hospital.  I did that because the story conveyed more of the flavor of my experiences than writing down each literal experience would.  Even some of the “literal” experiences are written in a condensed, stylized shorthand, in order to convey things without reams of text or pages and pages of unnecessary images.  This has really taught me how to condense things down to the most minimal form necessary to get the idea across, nothing more – I have a real problem doing that with my prose writing, which tends to ramble on endlessly. It’s under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license. That means you can copy it but you can’t use it for commercial use, you can’t make derivative works, and you have to attribute it to me.  Follow the link for more specific details. Something that weirded me out:  I did minimal, if any, planning for the pages.  Yet each page seemed to come together as a whole.  And each two pages (1 and 2, 3 and 4, 5 and 6) came together as if they were supposed to be side by side, as they would be seen in a printed comic book where 1 were on the left and 2 were on the right, and so on.  I can’t explain how that happened, maybe I got lucky. Also this is not from the hospitalization where I got my feeding tube.  This is September 2012.  The feeding tube is mentioned in the comic but that came a lot later.  (One example of what I mean by really condensing things.)  Also, this is about delirium the actual medical thing, not delirium the metaphor for everything under the sun from love to confusion.  The real thing is much more nightmarish, although there are sometimes oases of goodness hidden inside it. This is part of my ongoing efforts to deal with what happened last year, but I hope it will be useful, or at least interesting, to a lot more people than just me.  I didn’t write it just for myself, even though that was part of it.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/92647909/TheScarf.pdf

The Scarf – an autobiographical comic about delirium and its aftermath (during a month-long hospitalization for pneumonia and gastroparesis).  You can get to the comic by clicking on the above link or the picture itself.

So I took a class and one of the projects was to make a minicomic.  I’ve never done this before.  I honestly didn’t think I could do it.  I didn’t think I’d either have the self-discipline or the drawing ability.  But I did it.  It took me a week to finish it, and then a few days to troubleshoot tiny problems I hadn’t noticed.  

This is a huge accomplishment for me.  I know there are people who churn out comics like this on a weekly basis, but I’m not a cartoonist and this is my first so it means a lot to me.  I’m ridiculously excited and proud of myself.  I worked my ass off and I think I did a fairly good job.

For the story itself, I intertwined elements of my real-life experiences in the hospital last fall for gastroparesis and pneumonia, and the story I wrote soon after I got out of the hospital.  I did that because the story conveyed more of the flavor of my experiences than writing down each literal experience would.  Even some of the “literal” experiences are written in a condensed, stylized shorthand, in order to convey things without reams of text or pages and pages of unnecessary images.  This has really taught me how to condense things down to the most minimal form necessary to get the idea across, nothing more – I have a real problem doing that with my prose writing, which tends to ramble on endlessly.

It’s under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license. That means you can copy it but you can’t use it for commercial use, you can’t make derivative works, and you have to attribute it to me.  Follow the link for more specific details.

Something that weirded me out:  I did minimal, if any, planning for the pages.  Yet each page seemed to come together as a whole.  And each two pages (1 and 2, 3 and 4, 5 and 6) came together as if they were supposed to be side by side, as they would be seen in a printed comic book where 1 were on the left and 2 were on the right, and so on.  I can’t explain how that happened, maybe I got lucky.

Also this is not from the hospitalization where I got my feeding tube.  This is September 2012.  The feeding tube is mentioned in the comic but that came a lot later.  (One example of what I mean by really condensing things.)  Also, this is about delirium the actual medical thing, not delirium the metaphor for everything under the sun from love to confusion.  The real thing is much more nightmarish, although there are sometimes oases of goodness hidden inside it.

This is part of my ongoing efforts to deal with what happened last year, but I hope it will be useful, or at least interesting, to a lot more people than just me.  I didn’t write it just for myself, even though that was part of it.