PART 1: NICK PYLE AND THE COMICS

The end of my mothers life in 2022 was the most difficult thing that i’ve had to deal with personally. It was complicated and difficult, stressful etc. Not at all what I expected- but I think in the American midwest you aren’t really properly prepared for this kind of thing anymore. It’s just a horrible chute that you march towards unknowingly - and then all of a sudden you’re in it, moving fast towards a natural conclusion. It happens to almost everyone of course, and even under the best circumstances it’s so sad and painful. A really personal pain. Sorry to be a bummer - just setting the scene.

In 2022 and 2023, before my depression and anxiety had gotten so bad that I sought help, my way of managing all of these complex emotions was to drink alcohol, and to make lots and lots of art. Every minute that wasn’t spent at my day job I was laying on our couch drawing. Hundreds of illustrations, artwork for rock bands, t-shirt designs, and of course my main interest, comics.

The Comics

I grew up in a medium sized town in northern Illinois in the 80s and 90s. At this time my parents had their own problems to worry about - so I gravitated towards the few places in society where kids were allowed to enter unattended: the arcade, the video rental store, and the comic book shop. When I was 12, around the time my parents got divorced, a comic book store opened up near my house (Dreamland comics in Libertyville, IL - still open). The owner/manager guy with the big round head was a huge prick, unfortunately but since options were limited I started going in there. It was 1994.

I became obsessed with comics and comic art. I was already working at that age (captured by capitalism), either at my dads small family printing business, and also delivering copies of the local Pennysaver - so that’s what i started spending my money on. My collection and my interest grew to the point to where I decided what I wanted to do with my life was to draw and make comics. I started drawing all of the time. My interest in cartooning and art exploded - through elementary school, junior high and into the early part of high school.

In high school, I began to develop severe depressive moods (genetic) and I fell in with a druggy drinky crowd. The interest in comics began to wane - I got more into weed and drinking to dull the pain from a difficult family life and emotions that I couldn’t control. Got taken out of school briefly, then my mom asked me to move out, I had a nervous breakdown and wound up in getting hospitalized. After I was able to return to high school, I got linked up with a different group of friends (jazz band kids, and punksters) and got into making music and being in rock bands.

After high school I moved to Chicago and found comics again. Mainstream weekly comics at that time were terrible and the art had degraded to a point where it just didn’t interest me anymore. It was around then that a friend took me to Chicago Comics on Clark Street and I began to get into indie and “alternative” comics by the heavy hitters of that era - Ivan Brunetti, Adrian Tomine, Jaime Hernandez, Julie Doucet. In my mind I knew that I would love making comics, but still wasn’t quite up to it. My emotions and depressive tendencies were starting to become a problem again and the artists of these comics actually talked about this kind of thing! An incredible realization at that age that If I was going to be depressed, at least it could have a byproduct. After a while, being an extremely poor Chicagoan, I had to make the hard choice between making sure my second-hand bass had new strings or functioning gear - and my comics habit. I really loved being in bands at that time so comics were out again.

After that I landed in my current profession (title abstractor) and the better pay rate allowed me to get my own apartment, buy used books, go out drinking once or twice a week - things were better. I met and started dating a working artist. We lived together for about a year, I began to doodle a little bit here and there because I was with someone who did the same thing. She had a strong work ethic and it had an effect on me. I started doodling more and the doodling got better and better. It started slow, but over time I began to spend my free time drawing - the results were very obvious to track. If your mind is open, and you actually like drawing, you just build on your knowledge base slowly. It’s beautiful. The relationship with the artist ended, but I walked out of it loving the act of drawing. It was 2012 - enter Instagram.

The Curse of The Algorithm

I had been on Livejournal, Myspace, Friendster, Facebook, and then when I finally got a smartphone, someone told me about IG - it was just pictures. I started an account and used it normally (unfunny jokes, grainy photos, bad filters) - I followed some people on there that were using their camera phone to post pictures of their art, so I decided to start doing the same. You can actually scroll back to the beginning of my IG feed and see this progression yourself. Bit by bit, year by year, it was all I did on there, and bit by bit, year by year, my focus shifted from making music back to art until finally it was all I did.

A few years of doodling and my personal drawing style was really tightening up - I had developed an aesthetic. I was just doing it because it was pleasurable to do. One day, I had watched some sci-fi movie on my gigantic, burning-hot laptop and made the first of my futuristic art pieces. That drawing satisfied me immensely! an enormous squirt of serotonin! I loved sci-fi tropes, and rendering metal/chrome textures with my cheap art supplies - I now had a direction to head in. The path that I am still on, for the time being. I picked up that thread and began following it. Again starting simple, and building on my acquired knowledge I began to develop this new thing.

A couple of years later I met someone wonderful, someone who I would later call my wife - Alexis. A really supportive and caring partner - she was there the whole time that I worked on this futuristic stuff. Not exactly her style, but having someone there urging you to keep going and filling the air with love and happiness was what I needed to dive back into this world. We moved in together and my art career began to pick up. I was happy as hell, and it was reflected in my creative output. You don’t have to be miserable to make good art.

At some point the IG algorithm got ahold of me. I posted something new at least once a day if not multiple new drawings a day (manic energy), and I used the dumb fuckin’ hashtags. I guess I liked the idea of being known as an artist so I played the social media game- my following grew, my art tightened up even more, it all fed into me working harder. Two IG accounts with high follower numbers (thank you Craig Gleason and Paul Rentler) shared my work and it was at that time the algorithm began to take hold. My follower count started going up and up.

I was drawing and posting, drawing and posting. I was working a full time job, and a part-time job at that time as well (working at bars, a whole other story) I decided to quit bars to spend more time with my girlfriend, and more time making art. Opportunities started arriving. I was being paid more and more to make things for people, bigger bands, bigger brands. I considered resigning from my job. Drawing and posting, drawing and posting. I stopped playing music as well. Drawing and posting, drawing and posting.

The Return of The Comics

I was at Myopic Books in Chicago, looking at some used art books - I meandered into the comics section. It was as simple as that. I thought that I was just making art that suggested 1980s movie character designs, but wasn’t really telling any story - as I flipped through graphic novels I made a connection then and there that was I was possibly preparing myself to make comics. I bought a few that day. I began to read comics again, not just from an enjoyment perspective - I was trying to reverse engineer how they were made. How do you do it?

Covid hits, city hall closes, my office shuts down and we move our computers into our homes etc. That went on for a while, until a wonderful human being named Aubrey Sitterson contacted me about an opportunity to work together for a comics anthology. With his enthusiasm and support, he walked me through the process of how to do it. It takes months of work and me second-guessing myself, but eventually we do it - I made a comic story. It was clanky, awkward, overworked, duct-taped together, but I did it. A dream since I was a kid was rekindled, and then with the help of others, realized. I now wanted to make comics. I owe a lot to Aubrey for his help.

I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of the time I had with my mother during Covid, but as I stated earlier it was tough stuff. On top of the pandemic and being so busy at my day job, I was trying to help my mother manage her transition from independent living to assisted living - this combination of three different totally miserable instances filled me stupendous amounts of nervous energy to burn off. Whatever energy I didn’t drown with alcohol, I now spent working on my first story FEND.

To be continued.

PART 2: THE STORY OF FEND

FEND started with this drawing.

My memory of the last few years is extremely foggy, despite so much happening. In order to write this post, I had to go through my emails, google a bunch of dates, ask my wife a lot of questions, in order to piece things together. It seems like this fogginess is pretty common for people going through a traumatic event - the brain does you a solid and makes it harder to hang on to the painful specifics. I wish that I kept a diary of some sort, I guess my Instagram account counts as one - but anything that happened outside of there is a bowl of sad mush. According to my emails I was in contact with doctors, lawyers, aunts, uncles, and many of my mothers friends - also there are many emails from my poor mom. Some I answered, some I didn’t. I’m glad that I don’t remember, but also sad that I don’t either. This is a dialectical thought. Two opposing ideas existing in the same place. Both completely opposite, but both completely true.

In 2021 after finishing my first comic with my spirit guide Aubrey Sitterson, I made the drawing above. I don’t recall what I was thinking about when I made it, but this is where the idea for FEND began. I was in a period of my art making where I was spending a lot of time making fake comic pages - that is art that looked like it was one page of a whole story, but there is no story, there are no other pages - I was workshopping my drawing style, trying to transform it into a viable storytelling machine. My style is very busy, noisy, detailed, lots of zapping and twinkling. In order to tell a comic story, you need to communicate with the reader visually - and when there is a lot of “noise”, the story can get lost in that noise, and that can result in beautiful comics that cannot effectively communicate a story. Which I’m sorry - clear communication is the whole point of comics to me. Some comics don’t need to do quite exactly that, but for the ones I wanted to make my main personal requirement was to keep it as uncluttered as I could. Pretty hard to pull off when your brain is a mess. I did my best.

Character Design

The figure in the background of the drawing above, later named Arkin, was wearing a wide-brimmed Stetson hat because I was watching a lot of westerns. Specifically the Italian made so-called “spaghetti westerns” of the 1960s. Filmed with wide anamorphic lenses - big beautiful films made in Europe (mostly southern Italy and Spain). Their backgrounds contained the rolling, dusty hills that looked just enough like the American Southwest to make it work for half the price. I used that aesthetic of big skies, voluminous clouds, distant hills, and orange dusty terrain to help clarify the action. I set my busy, complicatedly rendered characters on a simple palette of three colors. Problem one: solved.

The old man character Tober Helm was next. A big fella, heavy armor, long Gandalf beard - tough and world weary but with kind eyes. I love this kind of guy. I had already drawn many versions of tough old robot wizard SOB’s, but now with Arkin materializing I knew I started making hundreds of preparatory drawings and If you look in the back of FEND I added some there. A big fella that wouldn’t ever start a fight, but had the steel to end one - should it come to that. I spent several months getting him in to shape.

This was happening during peak Covid, and peak work stress. I was very lucky to still have my day job - many lost theirs, I don’t want to seem callous about that issue. The upside was I still had an income and insurance (that I never used), the downside was through all of the terrible news, and death tolls, grinding anxiety, I still had to deliver at work. I don’t remember doing any of that either but holy shit it was so busy and crazy. Thank God those got memory-holed. Even after nervously researching all day, I still had so much energy to burn off.

The Story

As I look through my story notebooks, I really did try to plan this thing out at first. I thumbnailed the pages extensively (see below). But I just couldn’t get my brain to materialize a complete story. The specifics failed me - I read many “how-to” comics manuals, watched interviews with comic makers, read a zillion comics and mostly came out with more questions to be answered! I had an absolute mountain of anxious energy to blow on this thing, but with no clear path forward I was beginning to stall, and stalling at that time was really going to be hard to deal with.

I can’t recall how I landed on a way to move forward - honestly I’m pretty sure that I didn’t land anywhere, I got antsy and impulsively started the story. I didn’t have a plot, or even an antagonist - I think I told myself that If something didn’t work I would just start the page over and try something else - a story might materialize out of the middle part of my brain as I worked panel to panel. I had already made two unfinished attempts at comics in this way (see the stories ROAM F/X and VEER elsewhere on this site). But now I realized that I should just make my proper comic that way. I had an idea of the first few pages but after that, I was just going to see what happened myself. And that became the fun part of this book. I was very curious to see what would happen to these two guys out in the desert!

My daily schedule was to get up at 8AM, work my day job nine or ten hours, then spend another six hours lying on our sofa working on FEND, after that it was three or four double vodka sodas and pass out in bed. Vodka is not an antidepressant. It is the opposite of that, baby. It only makes things worse, it only makes things harder. If you’re using alcohol as an antidepressant, you’re not going to like what happens to your life with that kind of treatment routine. You’ll find things get out of control quite quickly. I got really lucky and had a health event that knocked me off that course. If I hadn’t, I don’t know where I’d be - actually, I kind of do know.

I spent ten months making the main story of FEND completely. A fully colored 40 page comic. No digital coloring, only minor digital placement of some items - but it’s all on the page. If you look at them in real life, they are exactly what got printed. I am really proud of that. My drawing tools (alcohol markers, Japanese art pens, water-based paint pens) are all quick-drying and that has always been a feature of my art. I work really fast and if some bad drawing happens, I would correct the whole page with paint markers and most of the time never had to re-draw any pages. I don’t have of these bad pages extant in my files, so I’m pretty sure there aren’t any. I would just fix things as I went. All a blur.

FEND Gets Published

Not to condense things too much, but that is pretty much the story of making FEND from what I can recall. The company that prints and sells my merch Deathwish Inc. has a small book publishing arm and when I presented them the idea of this book they jumped on it. I scanned it up and presented it to them, they did the rest. Absolutely beyond lucky that I got hooked up with them! I owe Jacob Bannon and everyone at Deathwish a lot for helping me make this thing a reality.

There was a long period after FEND was finished and off with the publisher. It’s painful to admit, but even despite doing this big thing I didn’t feel any relief, or pride, or anything. I was unable to feel either of those emotions, or any emotions aside from sadness or anger. Even as I got updates about the book - it was done being prepped for printing, then it went to the printer, and finally it came back. When I received my personal copies in the mail, I still didn’t feel anything. When it got reviewed in The Comics Journal (a pretty good review as far as TCJ goes) I didn’t feel anything, when people started buying it and telling me they liked it, I’m so sorry to say I didn’t feel anything. I couldn’t muster anything beyond a general awareness that I had completed something.

I was so sad and tired, but also ambitious and wired. Another dialectic. I immediately started another comic. One that I never finished called KA! about a giant killer bird (see below).

KA! made it about 30 pages in before it stalled out, and it’s still up on my shelf staring at me. I would like to finish it someday, but for some reason then - it didn’t click. it was early 2022.

With no new project to focus on, I sank further into depression for that early part of the year and it lasted a long time. That March I doodled a little drawing of a spaceman and a dog in a big fishbowl helmet. After a year of violent, action-filled art, I found that I enjoyed the cuteness of this little character. It was easy to draw and despite it’s simple nature I could put a lot of emotion into it. This little drawing became simple little three or four page comic that I posted on my IG - it started very cute and no-frills, but it’s me of after all, so it pretty quickly got dark. Another glimpse into the middle of my brain. I’m telling you guys, I was losing my shit really badly by this point. Enter Carrier Bag.

To be continued.

PART 3: THE STORY OF CARRIER BAG

On top of a shelf in my office, there are six large portfolios that contain over 500 pages of CARRIER BAG.

Listen - this stage of my life was pretty gnarly. I’ll try to keep it brief, and as undetailed as I can.

CW: suicidal ideation, medical trauma

Maurine Pyle, my mother

She Had To Go

In May I finally got Covid. My mother had entered hospice care the week before and it was looking like the conclusion was coming up fast. I had driven down to see her from Chicago to Terre Haute, IN back and forth 3 times in the last two months, and it was looking now like I would not have another chance to do so. My Covid was not a big deal, I quarantined with the thought that I maybe I could drive down and sit with her one more time before she had to go - but a few days into my quarantine period she died with only a local friend at her side. I had to call about 50 or 60 people that day to let them know. I started working on the legal side of things when someone dies. I only know this because of my records. The month before she died I had started my new Instagram comic, CARRIER BAG.

It started as a cute doodle, and pretty quickly turned into my next project. A little space traveler and their faithful quadruped crash-land on a barren, easily drawn planet. They begin to encounter strange things in the desert, they meet a friend, something happens, I didn’t know what. Like FEND, I just designed the main characters and started immediately with no prep. I had seen people make really effective comics using the multipage swiping function. Perfect little page turning mechanism. And If I drew simply, and worked small, I could probably do a weekly comic. I decided to size down to 5x7 image size - FEND was 11x14, so this was not unchallenging, but pretty quickly I found a rhythm with it.

I found that working smaller freed me from many things that can slow your average comic down. Can’t get too detailed, can’t spend too much time on one panel, if a page looks like shit, just start it over - it’s only 5x7 and I can fill that space very quickly. I rarely started over - I was really in the habit to stick with mediocre drawing and make it work - but a few times it was pretty bad and I did redo pages. I also made a 5x7 panel border stencil out of paperboard so iI didn’t have to rule any panel borders out.

A couple of weeks later - sleeping poorly, drinking heavily, working long hours, immune system brought low by Covid - I developed Shingles on my face ha ha, Good lord. If you don’t know what that - Shingles is a viral infection that lies dormant in your body after you have childhood chickenpox. It normally never activates, but I was physically weakened to the point where it was able to flourish. A painful burning-hot stripe of blisters crawled from the top of my head, across my brow and into my left eye, damaging my vision in that eye permanently. For nearly two months my head pulsated with a toe-curling nerve pain, radiating from pole to pole all day across my face. Like someone pushing a sharp pencil into your forehead with the flat of their hand in several spots at once. I was unable to work, could hardly sleep or eat. but of course - I was still drawing.

Making Art in Hell

an excerpt from the last issue of CARRIER BAG

I can never fully thank my wife Alexis for taking care of me during that period. Couldn’t have been fun to be around lol! a large sweaty man in her apartment shouting “ow my face!” “aghh! fuck!” every 17 seconds. I didn’t leave the house for a few weeks, I think. There is no treatment for Shingles - you just have to learn about pain management, and you hope it’s brief. Mine wasn’t brief, but after a week or two passed and the pain was not subsiding, I started drawing again. During this period of CARRIER BAG - I look at it now and honestly I don’t know what the fuck is going on.

CARRIER BAG had started out cute, but much like all of my other projects pretty quickly I found it was my new favorite way of processing some of the unpleasant things that I was going through. It’s loaded with personal references, artistic references, some visual metaphors but at a certain point when I was laid up in bed in a lot of pain - I don’t have any idea what I was trying to communicate. The egg and the bird? The woman in the casket? what was I trying to say in regards to those paintings in that Louvre-esque hallway? I can only guess! as I was coming out on the other side of the Shingles attack, the story begins to slow down and decompress a great deal. The action becomes more moment to moment and the story begins to make a bit more sense (to me).

After weeks of working on the story and trying to get it to slowly bend towards a conclusion of some kind, I managed to land on a satisfactory ending. My face healed, my eye didn’t, my life had to continue so I went back to work. The Shingles, of course, had been ultimately a good thing - this is deep deep retrospect - but the event, however traumatic, severed my connection to alcohol and cigarettes. I have no choice but to view it all as a 50/50 trade off. I don’t know how I would have stopped otherwise, but I was smart enough to know when to knock it off with the self medicating. But as I stopped self-medicating, I realized that it was probably time to start regular-medicating.

It was around this time that I took a chance on letting professionals treat my mental health. I got a psychiatrist and a therapist and I started doing what they suggested I do. Having now been in regular therapy sessions for over a year, I don’t know how I lived without it. Horrible thoughts don’t just sit in my brain anymore - they’re dealt with and discarded. Do you have insurance? are you unhappy? heed my advice! Complicated situations are untangled, most of everything you’ve been so upset about is probably not your fault as it turns out. In those early weeks of intense therapy sessions, I started another instagram swipe-comic called KRUX. A little mountaineer character hanging on to rocks and ropes by their fingertips. This series went nowhere fast. KRUX was definitely me, living life on a rocky ledge over a long, dark fall.

My journey finding a proper medication for what had finally been diagnosed as clinical major depression, PTSD, anxiety etc. There are a whole galaxy of options. I was cycled on and off of a lot of different depression and anxiety medications over a short time. Slight improvements but I would continue to slide down. Not sure why I reacted so badly to most medications that I tried- the human brain is still a mystery to all who inspect it - either it was my anxiety and depressing spiraling out of control, or it was a bad chemical interaction, there was no straight answer. I started having panic attacks at work, so I had to stop working again. A pit in my stomach materialized - it felt like a ball of ice was revolving in my abdomen. I could not shake it. I was having the thoughts. You know the ones I mean. How long can you live with this feeling? it had only been a couple of weeks of true spiraling. I could not eat or sleep or leave my house. I started having nightmares that would shake me awake directly into a full, sweaty, panic attack. My girlfriend, my therapist, my psychiatrist all said it was time do the next thing. I was deeply terrified of the next thing.

Compass
This part is about luck - at the time I wouldn’t have characterized it that way, but I got extremely lucky. I had been in contact with a friend, we met up for bad pizza and he gave me some life changing advice. It’s not finding-five-bucks-on-the-ground type of luck, it’s the luck of talking to the right person at the right time, my friend Eliya.

Eliya had been dealing with some very difficult mental health problems himself and had found a course of treatment that was administered at a local Chicago mental health facility called Compass Mental Health Center not too far from my apartment. He described what they were experiencing there in some detail. It was a notion that I had not considered - a partial hospitalization. You go in in the morning for classes and treatment - and leave around noon. Not like a mental ward that some of you may mentally picture - but a daily visit to a classroom-like program with breaks to meet with individual therapists. I took this idea home to my girlfriend, and then to my therapist. My decline was progressing and I really couldn’t afford to let it go much further. I talked to these people about the program, checked with my insurance company, and decided that this option was better than dying. Perhaps the most powerful realization of my life? I was so down and out i’m surprised that i was able to be convinced to do this program - but it was a new lifeline and I grabbed it with both hands. I will forever be grateful that Eliya reached out to me for that dinner and explained what the program would be like. I hope that if there’s someone reading this needs this realization that it’s not a scary place. It’s a pretty warm place.

I called Compass and began the onboarding process. They confirmed that I could benefit from their treatment program - insurance approved and it would begin in a week. My employers were very understanding and I was allowed the time off to complete this process. The week leading up to it was the worst week of my life. I had my usual anxieties, but now it seemed like the fear that lived in me felt some of it’s own existential dread and really ratcheted up its protective measures. Nightmares, panic attacks, uncontrollable tears, anger, frustration, starvation, suicidal ideation. With support from my girlfriend I was able to finish out that week of work (which felt like 1000 years) and began my work at Compass.

The Program

Compass is in an office building on a quiet street near a bowling alley and a soccer field. The exterior is beige and unassuming - it was winter and cold as hell as I walked in. The whole operation there is just a lunch room, 4 or 5 small classrooms, and a row of offices. I learned the first day what it was going to be like: a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy classwork, art therapy, group therapy, individual therapy sessions and weekly psychiatric consultations. My therapists all consulted with each other on my situation and approached my issues holistically. They were all kind and thoughtful, they respected everyone and seemed to be trained to do so. Friendly, mellow vibes that I really appreciated.

One of the best aspects of Compass was the group therapy sessions. I talked with other people going through similar situations. I heard their stories (or parts of them, details are not really allowed) and I told mine. I met all kinds of different people as well. Heard how common this struggle is. Felt less alone as we talked and had lunch together in the cafeteria. I surprised myself by speaking up and sharing - i was there to get through this and tried to be as present and involved as I possibly could. I listened to my therapist and psychiatrist and tried to follow their advice. I was honest about myself for what felt like the first time in my life. Some really bad things had happened to me and as I listened I learned that they weren’t my fault - I was victimized in some cases. I was a child in some cases, an adult in others. I learned to not listen to the terrible advice that I gave myself - advice that I would NEVER give to a friend. I wanted to be a friend to myself and I learned that I wanted to LIVE.

The program was 10 weeks. Week by week I worked and began to improve. My psychiatrist slowly and carefully cycled me off of the old medication that seemed to be exacerbating my symptoms, and after consulting a gene test for medical side effects, I was put on an antidepressant and an anti-anxiety med that within a few weeks began to kick in. By the middle of the program I was back to exercising and eating and sleeping. Smiling and laughing. Enjoying food. The ball of ice in my belly slowly melted. I wanted to get married to my girlfriend and start a life with her, but now I could feel myself feeling like I could live long enough to do so. Her help through this process made it all so much easier. I had goals, finally.

I completed their program, and a 12 week zoom meeting so-called “bridge program” afterwards. I started working again. I asked my girlfriend to marry me at Horner Park near our apartment - our favorite place to hang out. I couldn’t have done it without the help from Eliya and my therapist, but also I did it myself. The sense of accomplishment, the sense that I had changed my course using my faulty willpower was a pretty incredible feeling. I was sober, smiling, happy. It was an incredible time of my life.

Back To Work

After that fresh and shiny-new feeling, life continued. I got back to work at my job with new skills to handle the stress that goes along with working in the research sector. I won’t and can’t say that my troubles were over - they will unfortunately never be over. I need to keep track of how i’m feeling and use these skills to manage what issues that the medication cannot. I refer to the printed materials from these classes often when the occasional wave of depression hits me. I have new language that I can use to describe how i’m feeling. I have my memories of the stories I heard from others and I remember the look in their eyes. I want to keep this experience close to me forever.

I wish I could say that my artistic energy came back with after I had finished the program - It really hasn’t. I took most of 2023 off from drawing except for a few pieces, and a couple of paying jobs. My new goals are to have scheduled drawing times to chip away at my ideas. My next comic is about the future of christianity. I am an atheist, but I love the idea of Jesus, and I enjoy the history of christianity. I grew up with my mothers interest in Christian mysticism. Her friends were a motley crew of psychic nuns, christian communists, tarot card readers, seers, people who saw visions and swore that they spoke with the man himself - it’s an interest that runs deeply and I want to dig into with it. I don’t want to force this project out, I’ll just let it go where it wants, like usual. The only difference is now I value seeing friends, spending time with my wife, reading, sleeping, cooking, looking at art, more than I need to anxiously spin out piles and piles of drawings. I think that this new life will lead to better art in the future, but for now I like where I am.

Thanks for reading.

11/15/23 Blue Ridge Mountains in the early evening - Asheville, NC