LET ME BE FRANK

I wrote a comic for The Pantograph Punch! Here is the second page; you have to go here to read the whole thing. It’s quite long – a whole 9 pages – but you can download the PDF if you’re reading on a tablet.

Also, a big shout out to the wonderful people who have supported me on Patreon – I’ve now broken the $100 a month threshold!

And, if you need any holiday gift suggestions, there’s always this….

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately – where has my intensity of feeling towards art gone? It’s still there; art makes me think, constantly, mulling over how I experience the world as opposed to how the protagonist in a book, or the artist, experiences it. But I don’t experience it in that ecstatic, almost orgasmic way that I did when I was young. (Ok, there was that time at the Morrissey concert in 2012, but I was channelling my younger self, and there was nostalgia thrown in to amp up my emotions.)

I just went to see the Cindy Sherman exhibition at the City Gallery, and I marvelled at all her different guises, all the people that she turns herself into, borrowing their grief and joy, annihilating herself in the process. Talking about her early work, the film stills, she described the facial blankness that she was after in the photos – the time before or the time after something huge happens, and you haven’t quite yet processed your emotions. Sometimes I wonder if I am always on the slow burn. Then, I remind myself that I do experience joy and anguish, I do feel bone-shaking anxiety and anger. But these emotions don’t appear at the appropriate time, they just erupt out of me randomly.

In my random trawling of the internet, I came across this article, (NSFW), written by someone about to give a workshop in Wellington. It talked about our cultural obsession with orgasms, which, paradoxically, makes them harder to attain. I was wondering if there were some kind parallel in writing and art and live performance – we want to be cracked open, we want to have some kind of blissful union with the book we’re reading or the band we’re watching, feeling it in our body. But perhaps we’re expecting too much. Perhaps we need to relax, and open ourselves up to all sorts of experiences, redefine what is pleasure and how much we need to be moved.

Anyway, you should read this book by Sabahattin Ali! It’s really good! Filled with pathos and joy, and excellent writing. The crazy thing is that it’s been around in Turkey since the 1940s (it was published as Anon) but has recently become a bestseller – Turkey’s most beloved love story – and it’s only just been translated into English.

Another political comic! It’s times like these that encourage me to reverse my mantra, and turn the political personal rather than the other way round. Of course, my hope is that Bill English will fail to endear himself to the NZ public and there will be a Labour/Greens government by this time next year!

I think I get stuff done by deliberately ignoring the disorder in my life. Perhaps we all do. I can only finish a comic in a day by being singleminded. I live in my little bubble, not looking into the rooms full of severed heads, ignoring the side of the house that is crumbling down the bank. My friend Emma was explaining the yellow car game to me – how her daughter always saw yellow cars, but she never did, preferring the life inside her mind. In order that she could play the game, she trained herself to notice yellow cars, and now she sees them all the time. But she hates yellow cars. She wishes she’d never invited them to intrude on her thoughts.

My mother has amazing powers of observation, but they come without a filter – all the faults are in just as sharp relief as all the positive things. She did admire my salads, and my new gauzy white blouse, and told me I looked very nice when I was off to a party in a pink dress. She notices every new addition to my wardrobe, even though we only see each other every 6 weeks or so. Still, sometimes I wish my parents could play along, and we could all pretend that nothing is broken in my house, and the dust bunnies just add to its shabby chic charm.

Here are some more pages from my journal/first draft, this time taken from Mansfield’s journals and letters in early 1918. If you want to read the originals (my handwriting is a bit illegible in places) you can start here.

In exciting news, I got a celebrity endorsement today! The super-glamorous Gilda from Real Housewives of Auckland  picked my book, along with Witi Ihimaera’s Māori Boy and Dylan Horrocks’ Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen, as her favourite summer read. You can watch her endorsement here.

Also, remember my Patreon page! I am still working towards $100 a month to keep me regularly producing new comics. And thank you so much to the people who have already supported me – new comics coming soon.

Thank you so much to the people who have already donated to my Patreon page – you are stars!!! I am planning on tweaking the rewards and the video to make it all a little more enticing, and then boring everyone silly on social media. Or perhaps I will just trust that my Patreon supporters will organically grow, without me having to make a secret YouTube channel where I give you tutorials on how to draw as messily as I do. I have ideas for a serialised comic as well as my usual sporadic one, drawn in response to whatever is going around in my head at the same time as I get out the paper and ink. Let’s just see how I get on! Oh, and if anyone has any ideas as to what I should be doing next, please leave suggestions in the comments.

So I decided to give Patreon a go because I figured that I could get paid to blog. As you may know, I share these comics because I really like to receive some kind of response to my work, and I like to have a forum where I can think/draw out loud. I don’t get paid to do so. I also thought that if I could get people to financially support my work, I would have to post every week, rather than my on-again, off-again relationship I have with my blog. Let Me Be Frank would become legit, one of the real things that I do, rather than the thing I fit around paid work and big projects.

Please don’t feel obliged – you will still be able to see my comics whether or not you pay. It just would be nice, and a way of telling me that you value what I do. There are rewards if you pay me loads of money, but $1 a month is gratefully received. Also, if you check out my Patreon page you’ll be able to see the dorky video I made (although maybe you don’t really want to know what I’m like IRL!)