Redoing a comic about death

(a comic about death that makes me cringe.)

First of all — Trigger warning! This comic talks about cancer and death and also the vulnerability might make you cringe. (It makes me cringe. I’ll get into that.)

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Last year I made a comic called, “Scared One.” I made it while I was taking an online class at SAW (Sequential Artist Workshop) about creating graphic novels. I took the class despite not having any solid ideas that I wanted to turn into a full-length graphic novel, but I love reading memoir comics so I thought I’d start by making a comic about a fraught time in my life, because trials and tribulations are interesting, right?

So I made this comic. I didn’t like drawing a large part of it, I didn’t like how I wrote it, I colored it to look ugly and then I hated that, and every time I got to certain pages, I’d cry because I’d feel so sad again. I feel like the whole thing is kind of embarrassing.

IT WAS ROUGH.

In my class I’d get helpful feedback about it that I’d mostly just ignore, because I didn’t wanna work on it at all. I just wanted to finish it and be done and never look at it again.

Then for some reason this past weekend I decided to re-do it. I mean, not fully. I mostly just traced the old comic and changed some words around. Maybe I wanted to reclaim some power from it? I don’t really know, but I drew it real fast and colored it even faster. It probably took me five or six hours.

That sounds like a lot and might be surprising to you considering how it looks, but comics usually take me a reallly long time to make.

I still don’t really like it. It still makes me cringe and I think I never really nailed down the story or the ending in a satisfying way. But I do like it more now. I feel like the messiness of it fits better.

I also still think it’s a little embarrassing, but I’m gonna share it anyway because I have no shame.

Here it is!

and here’s the original:

Woof.

Okay, that’s it! If you want to tell me which one you like better, that’d be really interesting to me, but no pressure.

Happy Sunday, friends!