Skein Home
Author's Works
View 14 comments
 

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.