Here we are, approaching the end of July 2026. Drawing-wise, I feel like I have done very little of note in the past two months. In terms of writing my book, I made a few decent lunges forward in June: I got two chapters sketchily planned out, and did some more research which helped me feel like I was standing on firmer ground. This has been important, because in terms of current and future financial security, I’ve been feeling anxious as hell of late.
I attended the third and final roundtable of the Comics Cultural Impact Collective’s recent industry survey a couple of weeks ago. I did the above drawing of myself while in the zoom. In all honesty, I don’t think it was a very good idea for me to join that evening. I wasn’t in the headspace to be there, and because I was already feeling heavy in my heart, I wasn’t up for joining in on the break out room discussion, so that was a kind of negative feedback loop of: “I don’t want to contribute” & “I am not worth contribution from”. The fact that it was all about income from comics work was painful too. I am soon-to-be in a position to be able to make at-least-part of a living from comics work for the first time in my life, but the scale of the challenge seems enormous at the moment.
It’s been a busy end of term at school, with tonnes of printing and laminating to churn out ahead of the new school year in September. The amount of plastic I burn through at this job weighs pretty heavily on me, like links on old Marley’s chain (that’s A Christmas Carol reference – it’s on the curriculum), dirty landfill accumulates around my shoulders. It has been HOTT too, of course. My energy levels have been pretty low.
Something good and new, however, is that I’ve delivered a couple of comics making workshops to different groups of students as part of the school trust’s literary festival. It was funny to use this as an opportunity to re-brand myself – introducing myself as both Reprographics and Displays Assistant, and Comics Artist. There were three different groups in three different schools:
- Around 30 students in years 7-9 in the school where I work – 2hr long workshop
- A year 6 of about 90 students split into two sets of approx 45 students – 1 hr each
- One group of about 50 students in yr 9 – 1 hr workshop
I took a lot of learning from World Comics India (I did some training with Sharad Sharma and Community Comics Power UK in 2017 which had a huge impact on me but I wasn’t able to carry it forward at the time) and also from the wonderful Lynda Barry. Here’s a sample of some of the slides from my presentation:
I really enjoyed delivering these workshops, and had such a buzz after seeing the students getting involved in a bit of creative storytelling. I’d love to do more in future now I’ve got over the initial fear of my own anxiety problems getting in the way.
Here are my meticulous plans for the timing of the workshops too. I’ve come to understand that I can only really understand timings in this pie-chart style divvying up, so I try to remember to do these little drawings for myself to have on-hand.
I got really good feed back from the staff and students, and I do feel proud of myself for making this progress.
That’s it from me now, I need to go away, eat some lunch, and try to plan out how I’m going to use the school holidays to get loads done on my book. Here are some silly sketches from me & Joe at the pub for you to enjoy. Thanks for reading 🙂
