Comics Were My Guilty Pleasure ...

As I Was Illustrating Children's Books

Fifteen years ago, I was illustrating picture books while harboring a dirty little secret: I wanted to create comics. Discovering them while recovering from breast cancer, I thought they were the most expressive medium I’d ever seen. But I was halfway through the illustrations for a picture book called Liberty Café Is Open, and I’d only just begun my graphic cancer memoir The Story of My Tits; I wasn’t ready to let go of drawing children completely.

Here’s a (gender neutral?) family of squirrels enjoying a marshmallow roast from my portfolio at the time. The style I’d evolved was brutal: painstaking layers of watercolor, gauche, and pen and ink (laid on top!). But my love for these beasties is clear. Creating a world for them, where simplicity and innocence and understanding could take center stage, was my delight.

In the final illustrations for Liberty Café, I see my rebellion begin. I told my editor I should add a small, hardly noticeable comix panel to each spread. It would be a window into the action offstage during the part of the story when the reader is waiting for the main character to arrive. She okayed it and I was thrilled. See image below to see how I snuck it in.

Liberty Cafe came out, and at the end of the year I was ready. I shut down my illustration studio and started work on my breast cancer memoir at home full-time.

But something was missing. I needed to take breaks from the intensity and depth of memory and joined a comix web hub out of Brooklyn called Activate. I created a monthly webstrip for them called Underwire (published later by Top Shelf.) These were the stories about my current life, about myself, my husband, and—yes—my children.

Here’s my son in a panel from Underwire, casually laying some grownup wisdom on me. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but my kids taught me how to be a much better adult.

There is something so clear about a kid, the way they see, the way they take things in. I’d stopped illustrating for children, but they would not let me go.

A decade after I started it, my 352-page breast cancer memoir was published. Here are my offspring in the final chapters. It’s not a simple or easy moment. My 8-year-old daughter is dismayed by my flat post-mastectomy chest and my 11-year-old son is attempting not to notice it. Or me. They are expressing with perfect simplicity the effect my surgery had on them.

My high school art teacher always said I’d be a children’s book illustrator. When I started doing comics, I felt I’d let her down. But the stories I wanted to tell were not for children; they were for adults. Yet we inhabit the same world. We frequently make sense of it together. And it seems that even in comics I just can’t leave them out.

Here’s a panel from a work in progress based on a true story. Gary is stuck on a train in France with a bag of croissants. I’m off camera, imagining him there, and suddenly a kid shows up on the seat next to him. Being a kid, he’s interested in the croissants.

Gary, not being heartless, gives him one. What does this have to do with the story? Nothing. Why don’t I take it out? Because.

Kids make it real.