Travel Comics

I’ve been participating in the Friday Night Comics workshops offered by the “Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW)” for some time, though I’ve missed the past few. Tonight we were invited to make a page of a travel comic, led by Corinne Newbegin. I chose my recent trip to the East Coast to visit my now 92-year-old mother and spend a couple of days with my birding friend Linda. I have missed spring migration on the east coast for many of my trips there, and this was a great opportunity to address that.

Wistful, though. Would I ever see mum again? I hope so. I’m going back on Tuesday, leaving Numenius in charge of the cats.

Drawing the Erasure of Memory

History is, famously, written by the victors. When the victors are long-lived autocrats, the omissions scream across the generations: the state apparatus of information control and terror silence any dissent. In the case of Spain, the horrors of a prolonged civil war on the very eve of World War II made the suffering worse, because powers that might have been prevailed upon to help at least with food aid were already concerned with fighting a determined aggressor and protecting their own populations.

I grew up just to the north of Madrid in the 1960s and 1970s, a mere 5 miles away from Franco’s palace in El Pardo. His motorcade was a familiar traffic inconvenience. As foreigners we were unaware of the questioning and torture of prisoners in the now-infamous cuarteles of the Guardia Civil. See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. Silence.

I tried to capture some of this in a six-page comic that was published in an anthology last year. I’m grateful for the work of Hillary Chute, author of Disaster Drawn, for giving me the idea for this comic. As we were reminded by the recent viewing of Good Night, and Good Luck and are reminded daily by an administration slouching towards tyranny, the time for the courage to speak up is NOW.

Looking Forward to Monday Lunch

Writing an Epitaph

Invisibility

The World Isn't Fair

Shifting into Comics

I can’t remember when I started exploring comics as a medium — probably in 2021? — but very quickly I discovered the Sequential Artists Workshop. Based in Gainesville, Florida, but with a Mighty online presence, it has been a tremendous resource and source of inspiration and community.

I have a piece on Franco’s suppression of memory in Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War due to appear in a SAW anthology called Troubled Histories next month. I will publish it here once it’s been printed, but for now, here are some of the comics I made to support my pitch for this submission.

Searching for My Shadow

Confession Time

Are Children Born Moral?