Back to the Drawing Board

Over the last few years, I’ve had a series of unfortunate events that created some big changes in my life. My wife came out, we divorced, and I was laid off — those are just the highlights.

Understandably, I was in an existential slump.

An old friend of mine suggested I get back into drawing. For as long as I can remember I have doodled all over anything I could. Before getting into poetry, I wanted to be an animator or a cartoonist.

The “funnies” were my favorite section of the newspaper. I read them daily, especially on Sunday. I often doodled characters and comics when I should have been paying attention in class.

In high school, I began to write poetry. My poems were often accompanied by doodles. My interest and skill in art led me to a career in graphic design and marketing. As the years went by, drawing for fun faded away.

Now that I was in a moment of crisis, my friend’s words called me back to the pencil and paper I had left behind.

Years before the divorce, I had signed up for an art school online, the School of Visual Storytelling. I had started classes but life caught up to me. I decided to go back to it to help jump-start my journey back to myself.

Going back to the basics helped get my brain reconnected to my hand, a connection I was not aware was severed. It felt good drawing shapes over and over. A task I hated in college. Shapes turned to objects, and objects became characters. One day I realized I was drawing the same two characters. One was a scruffy-looking muppet character, the other was a blocky Cyclops.

After some sketching and writing, I made my first comic.

I used Eddy the Yeti and Cy the Cyclops to explore the levity and somberness of spirituality. In some ways it allowed me to explore my own balance of the two. Apparently, I don’t have two wolves, I have two cryptids inside me.

Giving myself that room to explore helped me unpack that part of my interior life while learning to accept it.