
When I was growing up, my first love was cartooning. As a child, I was bad at spelling but good at drawing Jabberwocks and rabbits. I would stay up late reading Peanuts, Garfield, Asterix, and Calvin & Hobbes. Later, I discovered great comics of the past: Krazy Kat, Lil’ Abner, Little Nemo, Shockheaded Peter, and Oor Wullie. Next, I came across Maus in a bookstore and discovered graphic novels.
One night when I was about 15, I had the most delightful dream: I was standing in a bookstore, in the humour section, scanning the shelves for something cool. And what did I find? A new comic. It looked amazing – had Bill Watterson come out of retirement? No indeed. The comic had been written by me. But now I became aware that I was dreaming. I flipped, page after page through the book of cartoons, willing myself to remember them…
When I woke up I believed I had seen a vision of my future work. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember any of the cartoons. But a sense of what they were stayed with me: they existed – or would exist.
Around that time, I began to draw a lot of comics, including one called The T-Shirt Kid which featured my little sister, and another called 2:45 (the time school gets out) for my high school newspaper. I was an exchange student in northern Germany my senior year of high school, and there I collaborated with a friend on a comic strip about the Waldorf school we attended. Alas, we never finished it.
But then I grew up and put away childish things (like cartoons). I trained as a writer. I travelled and taught, raised a husband and cat. I hardly drew a picture for 20 years. At first I was just too busy to draw, but eventually I began to fear I had forgotten how. I told myself I had moved on to the grown-up world of words. But the idea that I could no longer draw began to haunt me. I didn’t want to prove my thesis either, so I just never drew another picture.
…Until a few years ago, when I started a pastel drawing of my cat with a golden mermaid’s tail:
Had I finished it, I would have called it “Fur-maid.” As it was, the picture was looking surprisingly good, so I abandoned it for fear of ruining it. Apparently, I could still draw, but instead of being carefree and excited about it like I was when I was younger, in the intervening years I had developed a fear of making mistakes. This could be connected to an adult value of ‘not wasting time,’ as opposed to the childhood value of doing something for fun.
“I need a way to draw where if I make a mistake, I can just erase it without ruining my whole drawing,” I told my husband. “That way I’d be free to just experiment.” So my husband bought me an iPad.
Drawing on an iPad was indeed a bit more forgiving. But all the layers and effects and things were a little beyond me (I don’t like to read instructions), so after completing a prototype drawing of my husband for a certain future comic strip, I put the iPad back on my desk and tried to avoid making eye-contact with it.
But during the pandemic, a time that put what really matters into perspective for me, I had an epiphany that I would just make my damn comic already. I would make a website where I would post my drawings and blog about trying to make a comic. I would share my creative process, my fear, my mediocrity, and my joy.
So far, I have drawn a logo featuring my husband and cat and a horror movie sort of font:

and a cartoon version of myself:

I found it more difficult to draw myself – because I wanted it to look cute but also to look like me. I drew everything on paper because I wanted a hand-drawn aesthetic on my website: this forced me to tolerate the distress of possibly messing it all up. Then I discovered that scanned-in hand drawings can be digitally edited anyway! For example, I gave myself RBF on the first attempt and then complained to my husband that what I actually envisioned was for the Marilee drawing to break the third wall and wink at the reader. But I liked her, so we scanned her into the computer, and messed around with the eye until she was winking.
Above are the 3 versions of myself that I made: Blonde – because sometimes I like to imagine I am blonde (you can read a poem I wrote about this fascination here), Dark Hair, and WINK! Best of all, now that I have these first drawings, plus a drawing of the Husband factory itself complete with heart- shaped roller coaster, I can finally launch thehusbandfactory.com 🙂
