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It began when I was probably about eleven- "drawn in the fifth grade", a post-hoc note states on some of them- when I found an index card with the words "HOW I FEEL" written on the top. I decided to draw how I felt at that moment, illustrating my mother (in lipstick), grandmother, and grandfather protecting me from a supposedly dangerous friend, demanding that she "stay away from our poor delicate 11-year-old baby!" The half-crushed self-caricature implores, "Help your suffocating me".
 

I drew a few more, probably at the same time, illustrating problems with my grandmother. Grandma lived near us and watched us when our mom was at work and we weren't in school; she played a parent-like role in our lives. Here, she chastises me for not wanting my baby sister, Liz, to lay her paws on my "My Little Pony" collection. In real life, grandma did often try to instill in me the virtue of total sacrifice to a younger sibling. Failure to adhere to this virtue by resisting Liz's destruction of my things resulted in being called selfish and materialistic. In this cartoon I argue that these labels (literalized as a physical label being stuck to my forehead) are counterproductive. An early recognition of the phenomenon of perceiver-induced constraint.
 

In a similar vein, grandma disapproves of my shedding tears when baby Liz breaks something of mine; her frivolous crying over a sad movie appears hypocritical to the fifth-grade author.
 

The index card comics became a sort of tradition for a few years. I returned to the genre later (the date on this one, 12-89, marks me as twelve.) In a very light blue ink, which didn't scan well, I show a common experience: Liz demanding the opposite of whatever I wanted just for kicks, and getting her way- in this case, whether the radio will be left on in the car, despite my splitting headache.
 

Mom's motives for always granting Liz's wishes were, generally, that she didn't want to listen to Liz throw a tantrum. Footnote: Liz is now 17; mom complains frequently to me of how Liz stays out all night with sketchy guys and runs up hundreds of dollars on mom's credit cards and phone bills. When mom objects, Liz throws a tantrum.
 

In the cartoon below, from the same time, I experimented with diagonally-cut panels while depicting, in an exaggerated way, that pure, innocent 5-year-old Liz was actually capable of inflicting great physical damage. Mom, reading the newspaper, hardly reacts. When I retaliate, however (throwing a Styrofoam ball at Liz,) I am kicked out of the house. Some time after drawing this cartoon, I judged the last panel to be too light-hearted, and added some (somewhat realistic) dialogue.
 

In this next one, grandma makes a reappearance. Here I illustrate her philosophy on gender differences. My protest ends in another incidence of labeling- this time, "lesbian." (Note: her objection to long fingernails was real- this refers to one or two fingernails I used to grow to lengths of about 2 cm., for reasons I no longer understand.)
 

These next ones are a scream. "A Day in the Life of Rat" shows my dissatisfaction with my day-to-day routine at my new school, Mounds Park Academy, which I started attending in the seventh grade.
 

Notes: In the fourth panel of the first page, the school secretary rejects my explanation and marks a late slip "unexcused"- this is true to life; I often was late to school in those days because Liz refused to stop watching television and get dressed. The second page: MPA had a workload that made Swarthmore easy by comparison. "Jean day" refers to a day when, counter to MPA's middle school dress code, we were permitted to wear jeans (with no holes, of course.) I stay after school until 6 pm, waiting for a ride home; dinner was generally at grandma's. Third page: driving home portrayed upside-down for variety. The family dog observes as I try to write my "War and Peace" essay (this is an exaggeration; they did not make us read "War and Peace" in the seventh grade.)
 

In the eighth grade, I returned to the day-in-the-life form.
 

Note the clock radio: waking up at 6:30, up doing homework past 2 am. This was realistic. That year I had two different carpools; on the way to school, idle chatter abruptly ceased when I entered the car. In panel 5, I am disappointed to note that my crush object of the moment is absent from school that day. In panel 7, I again must take an IOU to get lunch, to the irritation of school staff. Panels 9 and 10 show two alternate methods of getting home: another annoying car pool, or pissed-off mom.
 

I also drew this one, which is more or less self-explanatory.
 

There are more, but these are the highlights. Somehow these index card cartoons survived the years, and serve me now as a reminder of a time when this sort of private self-expression was one of few outlets available to deal with frustrations at home and at school. It is also interesting to see continuities of style from then to now. Note that though the early "Rat" caricature lacks glasses (I got glasses around 1990, and didn't have to wear them constantly until a couple of years later,) my basic style of drawing people has been conserved. ^[1]
 

tom: wow. absorbing. thanks! apologies for not having something more insightful to add.... (update) in addition, I love how clear the facial expressions are in the cartoons. On both occasions when your character looks up at the label applied to her forehead, the look on her face is priceless... david_a: I really appreciated that these insights are not added with the benefit of hindsight, that they are contemporaneous. The pain and bewilderment of these little cruelties and subsequent threatened (budding) resigned indifference is traced more surely than if it had been purely retrospective. (I know I just used a lot of big bulky words there, but I'm trying real hard to get my meaning across). Adults, the adult world, treats young people so very poorly. laura: You rock my fuckin' world. General, I know, but clearly felt. j_moody: Hey Michelle, I think you were brilliant to find such a direct outlet for your experiences at a young age. God knows I can empathize with some of your experiences, but the pure individuality and uniqueness of what you went through is preserved so well by your drawings and the preservation of dialogue-- that's admirable. Maybe (like my own escape into a fantasy world) it was a matter of survival, but the result of your practice of drawing things is more direct and timeless than anything I ever did. Your drawing style is very facile and the emotional qualities of the lines say a lot without getting overly busy-- I admire that, too. To second Laura, you definitely rock. alecia: Thanks, Rat, for reminding me that middle school kids have bad days too, that they like to curse at the drop of a hat (and that it'll probably be okay in the long run), and that they understand far more than we give them credit for sometimes. I need to be reminded of these things frequently in my line of work. ;) It's pretty awesome that you managed to hang onto these-- I think I probably burned or threw out 90% of my middle school writing-- and I love seeing the beginnings of your trademark style in them. mwirth: Joel- interesting, I too used to escape into fantasy worlds- everything I read and most of what I wrote and drew at those ages was fantasy/sci-fi.(A common theme in my stories: a female warrior hero, i.e. me, must save male character, i.e. love object, from some nasty evil fate.) Alecia: yes, bad days, but what you have to watch for is when they are having bad years. And note that cursing in these cartoons was me being cursed *at*. Adults who won't let their kids cross the street by themselves often still think "bitch" can be an appropriate word to call those kids. I think the lesson is, be consistent- don't treat them like children in one domain and adults in another. sprice: It's neat that you preserved all this, Rat. I'm curious what you thought about during the years since these drawings, when you'd pull them out of the drawer or shoebox or whatever... why did you save them? Alecia, why did you throw them out? I inherited a substantial packrat-ism (hm, inherited meme?) and hence have a lot of drawings from middle school... mostly stuff from when I began building a world for D&D in about 7th grade (I'm still working on that world). But I think that I still have some "video game plans" from elementary school. I saved them because I could, and because it seemed like it would be funny to go back to them sometime. alecia: This has little to do with the discussion on Rat's piece, but I wanted to reply to Scott here. I'm a natural packrat, too, but there were reasons to toss it. First of all, looking back from the beginning of high school, I decided that if anyone ever found the personal writings, it would give them way too many reasons to commit me (I was not a happy girl then). Second, my mother, observing the four or five large boxes of paper in the back of my room, declared my room a serious fire hazard and made me cull a bunch of it. I still have some select pieces from MS, but there's not much. Sidenote: My mom just sent me a large box with a whole bunch of my pre-school through 3rd grade work... wow. That's interesting stuff, esp. given that I'm teaching grades 1-5 now. Hey, devel people. Whatcha think about a Skein message board for topics like this one? mwirth: I saved everything. I too suffer from congenital packrat-itis. Writings and drawings of mine could and did get me in trouble; would have been practical to burn them, but I couldn't. I even keep less personal stuff like school notebooks (see "Me and my neuroses",) but things like these index cards were particularly important. It was half understanding that they would be interesting to look back on someday, half irrational compulsion. The drive to express self/ be understood is mixed up with a drive to record (personal narrative) in a semi-permanent fashion, to store records.. E.g. I used to journal compulsively. cgroom: Seeing this was really amazing because in lots of ways it's a visual journal. The problem with reading old journals is that it's too easy to not listen to the message because the language is immature, but in this case the visuals refuse that kind of dismissal and so offer a much more direct connection to those feelings and times. For some reason, I felt the most connection with carpoolling. At least they didn't mess with you... Add comment