How does make comics when depressed?

I’ve not done much personal blogging for a while. I’ve also not talked much publicly about my depression and anxiety. Those things are linked, for sure, but I’m not exactly sure how. A while back, welljesuschrist, September 2013 in fact, I published the last of my quick and scuzzy webcomic, Suddenly Something Really Interesting, where I’d gotten to the end of therapy for my anxiety, and the utterly non-climatic or euphoric or epiphanic realisation that underlying all my anxiety was a deep depressive state I’d had since I was a kid.

Even my counsellor seemed disheartened that it ended that way – she didn’t get that sense of satisfaction that we’d “broken through” together. Just a kind of sullen resignation between the two of us that, you know, we’d tackled some stuff, and that, well, this realisation was at least that.

A realisation. Something tangible to potentially work on.

It didn’t really work out that way

Well of course it didn’t. Depression doesn’t work like that. You don’t go, okay, now I realise that depression is the underlying problem, I can solve it. You go, shit. Fuck. Depression, that’s a problem. Then you get depressed, and there’s no way you can summon up the energy needed to work on it.

Or anything else.

Since then, I’ve worked on a number of comic projects, and a couple of other bits and pieces. Thing is though, I don’t think I can comic well when I’m depressed. I mean, sure, I can summon up the energy to draw, because I love it. Occasionally I get fortnight-long periods where I’m writing constantly. Rarely, I’ll feel like I’m ready and willing to take on the world and somehow emerge as an actual professional.

But then the shit-storm hits.

Then the black dog wraps its tail around your neck, swivels its dull eyes at you and rudely salivates drool on your shoulder from its gaping maw, and you can’t even find the energy to turn around and look at it. You know it’s there, but you’re too paralysed to acknowledge it properly, let alone tell it to leave.

When that hits, you’re fucked. I’ve missed the chance to work with at least two writers who’ve since hit big in comics because I was in the middle of a long, slow breakdown. I’ve stretched the length of time a project that should have taken from, say, three months, to over a year because I blinked, freaked, gave up, and went back to full time office work because I couldn’t realistically see how I could make it as a freelancer any more.

I’ve gone to cons, at the very nadir of the depression, and left thinking that I never wanted to make a comic again because it was pointless and no one even wanted to look at my work let alone buy it and what was wrong with me that I made such weird comics anyway instead of stuff that people would actually buy and anyway why do I even want to be involved in this world of comics when it’s all a big sham and a fraud even though I feel like the fraud and the interloper who’s been working for seven years to try and convince people that I’m a comic creator when I’m actually just shit and everyone knows it…

Because depression and anxiety are intrinsically linked for me, and many others.

And then the utter, soul-crushing energy-sapping breakdown that comes afterwards, where you have to try and pick up the pieces and change your life while feeling completely embarrassed with yourself and disconnected from the world. And then the anxiety that comes from the realisation of that. And then, and then, and then. An endless cycle of dragging yourself from a low energy state to be catapulted into a high energy state only to crash back into a low energy state, and so on.

Call to Action

Here’s the bit in a blog post where you should put some kind of call to action, if you’re trying to sell a product or service. Here’s the bit in this blog post where I tell you that there is no getting out of this cycle, and all you can do is use what little energy you have when it arrives.

What I’ve done is recognise that, in many ways, I have to start from scratch. There’s a couple of projects I need to finish freelance-wise, and then I have to concentrate on my own stuff. For me to feel any kind of sense of completion or satisfaction in creativity, I have to finish something that’s solely mine.

I embarked on Gonzo Cosmic a while back, and though I’m still in love with the idea behind it, it’s a long, arduous project with no sense of finality and a lot of hubris to overcome. So while it’s still on the go, I need something more satisfying.

That’s why most of my attention is focused on the Dundee Uni Masters course I enrolled on. I need to give myself the ability to focus on learning about and researching comics for the sake of it for a while. I enjoy it, I’m good at it, and it could give me potential career avenues when I complete it, that would complement the creative work I do. I love the medium of comics, and exploring history, sociology, form, all of that, is exciting and is giving me the buzz back.

And, I’m also focused on making AION. It still comes with hubris (I’m calling it my “queer Flex Mentallo”, go figure why anxious and depressed people like to paint these kinds of targets on our heads), but it’s a complete thing, almost entirely written in my head, pages started. It’s a semi-autobiographical work with elements of superheroes, sci-fi and Burroughs-esque fiction in there. I mean, I never really make it easy on myself, but I have to make the work that excites me, the kind of work I’d read.

I’m also exorcising some pretty big demons throughout AION too. I hope that helps me to feel at least a little better about myself. And you know what? In some ways, I’m looking forward to having it completed and putting it out into the world.

I think the biggest thing I’ve learned over the last year or so has been that I need to learn to create without lust for result. AION is mine, and if I put the work in and everyone thinks it sucks, fair enough – but I can’t argue with the fact that it’s exactly what I want to make. And I’m not beholden to anyone, anyone I can let down on deadlines, or fuck up with in some other way. I just have to please me, and right now, that feels like the best I can do.

I’m also writing a novel, which has some very minor elements of autobiography in’t. It’s another thing I think I need to get out in the open – it’s bleak, unremittingly bleak. New Bleak, in fact. It comes from reading ‘Ghosts of my Life’, ‘Conspiracy against the Human Race’, ‘Cyclonopedia’, the ‘Southern Reach Trilogy’ and other stuff that I absorbed over the last year. It’s also my take on queer zombie horror, completely nihilistic, as the zombie genre really should be.

I get moments where I sit and wonder what’s wrong with me that I’m writing something so bleak.

Then I get other moments – mad, raving moments – where I realise that the bleakness is unmitigating anger at the world.

So, that should be fun, for you to read, I mean.

And finally, I’m sitting with this post open, completed, re-reading it and staring at it, wondering what egotistical drive makes me want to write this, thinks I should write it, that I have anything worthwhile to say, that it’s just me feeling sorry for myself, or trying to publicly make excuses, or self-flagellate, or

That’s what it feels like, all the time. In everything I do. Who am I? I’m not good enough to do this. I’m not worthwhile enough to do this. I’m nobody. And so I suppose writing this, and making work, and sharing work, even though it comes with fear, is about trying to prove that I’m not nobody. To try and silence the voice in my head that tells me I’m not good enough. So whatever, here it is, and that’s that.

Feel free to hit me up with your thoughts in the comments box below.

 

 

LGBT History Month Cultural Commission

In 2013, LGBT History Month launched their second Cultural Commission programme, supported by Creative Scotland. I’d gotten to know one of the previous recipients, Lucy Holmes-Elliott, through I AM ART, the visual arts programme I ran through my charity, Cosmic Designs, and she encouraged me to apply when it opened.

The I AM ART project was working with young LGBT people on exploring the theme of identity through art, and we worked with a group of participants who totally excelled through the project, many of them embarking on artistic careers after it was finished, their creative juices flowing after exhibiting their own brand new work during the Glasgay! Festival of that year.

I enjoyed the I AM ART project, although it was difficult to engage with young people who wanted to explore LGBT themes through art. There are many reasons for this – some folk just aren’t artistically minded, there hasn’t really been a history of participative visual community art projects within the LGBT community in Glasgow (although that’s quickly changing) and, I think importantly, there isn’t a huge amount of out LGBT artists who can inspire young folk to get into it.

While I spent the year managing the project, I was aware that my community arts work was also taking up time I could, and perhaps should, be spending on my own practice. So the Cultural Commission was a really inviting proposal. Receiving funding to spend a year working on a new piece of art that was intrinsically connected to the LGBT community felt like the ideal next step for my career.

As a comic book creator of around 6 years, it was tempting to put forward a proposal to do an anthology comic, or to create a comic of my own, but I felt that if was afforded the money, and with it the time, to spend a year exploring my practice, I would be better trying to push myself to try something new. I decided to propose an animation based on interviews with community members across Scotland. I’ve long had a love for animation, but only a very basic experience of making them. The community interaction was important as it felt like bridging a gap between my own community work and my personal practice.

I was overjoyed to be awarded the funding, and embarked on a journey where I met many people who shared their stories with me, learned frame by frame hand drawn animation techniques and software from scratch, and discovered a lot about myself and my relationship with not only the community, but also my own sense of identity.

I’ll post more specifically about that journey soon, as it’s deserving of a post of its own. But for now, I want to concentrate on what the Commission meant to me as a queer artist.

Freelancing in art is a difficult career. Most of your skills development and practice has to take place in your own time, which means that any paid work you do not only has to fund your living costs, but also your time. That time is used to literally practice, to draw, or paint, or write, or whatever, over and over again to get better. To learn things like perspective, anatomy, architecture, composition, colour theory etc.

Clients usually aren’t paying for any of that – they’re paying for a specific finished piece of work, and they genuinely aren’t interested in how you got your skills to the level they want, they just want the product.

On top of that, you’re also running your own business, buying new equipment, keeping accounts, regularly going to meetings to develop your business. Most of that comes out of a fairly meagre wage.

That’s why arts funding is so important.

It mitigates some of the time you need to spending getting better at art. You are, after all, judged only on the quality of work you produce, and you have to continually push yourself to be better, to excel.

Creative Scotland is an important resource for that, and we’re very lucky to have it, despite obvious grumbles with the arts community. Taxpayer money and lottery funding is specifically diverted to ensuring that Scotland’s arts sector can survive, and while there are many debates around how that money is, or should, be allocated, we should be glad that it’s seen as important enough to our cultural and social existence that we have a body specifically tasked with supporting the arts.

It’s equally important that some of that money is funnelled to specific areas. Until LGBT History Month Scotland’s Cultural Commission, there was no specific funding in Scotland for LGBT artists. Of course, there are many organisations and projects that work within the community and receive funding, but this is certainly the first time I’ve been aware of a funding pot specifically for artists who are either LGBT themselves, or are making work specific to the community.

Contributing to the artistic life and career of LGBT artists encourages us to work within our community, to respond to it, and to our relationship with it. It takes visible artistic work to encourage new artists to come forward and use their practice to explore and raise awareness of those lives, issues and experiences that are unique to being LGBT.

The Cultural Commission not only afforded me the money, and therefore the time, to go and learn a new practice, animation, it also gave me the opportunity to travel the country and speak to people who had shared experiences, whose experiences differed due to age, location etc, and whose lives are rich with the kind of detail that “LGBT” doesn’t cover as a label.

That work is now part of the cultural landscape, and will be archived for history, keeping those stories alive for future generations. ‘Out There’, the anthology of LGBT writing edited by Zoe Strachan, which was the other Cultural Commission that year, does a similar job – letting the lives of people, in this case writers, speak for themselves.

So what am I saying with all of this?

LGBT History Month Scotland has announced this year’s Cultural Commission. There’s only one this year, and the funding pot is a bit smaller (that crucial arts funding I talked about earlier gets squeezed, every single year, unfortunately), but it’s there, that chance, that opportunity.

If you’re a queer or LGBT artist based in Scotland, or if you’re an artist who has in mind a piece of work that would talk particularly to our community and history, then there’s no reason not to apply. That funding could give you the time to explore not only a new piece of work, or a new medium, but potentially yourself, and so develop your own practice and career even further.

For more information, head over to the History Month website here, and feel free to get in touch with me directly if you want to ask any questions about my own experience with the commission.

The work itself, a short animation now titled ‘Own Words’, was shown as the SQIFF film event at Summerhall. While the commission is now complete, I’m taking some time to sharpen up some rough edges and improve the sound quality before sending it out to film festivals. That means I can’t put it up online just yet, but it’ll be up very soon!