a cartoon is worth a thousand sensations

My mother recently gave me a folder of drawings she’d kept from when I was little. I am bowled over by my early drawings. They take me back to the multiple personality world of childhood, where I was constantly torn between being good – and being me. I had a religious upbringing and religion shaped my world a lot, although my mother swears that as soon as I was old enough to pronounce “atheist” I declared I was one.

Being good seemed to mean behaving in a “holy” way, e.g. turning the other cheek, honouring my mother and father, having pure thoughts, that kind of thing. Feeling good about myself seemed to depend on my being able to behave holily, and I was only able to keep up holy behaviour for very short intervals before I committed one of the 7 deadly sins (anger, sloth, envy and greed were my favourites). My childhood world was black and white: there were no grey areas, I took everything literally, and believed totally in the supreme rightness of adults: this probably arose from once, when I was about 4 years old, asking my dad if he knew everything – and him saying “yes.”

I remember, when I was 9 years old, the kidnapping of 16-year-old John Paul Getty III , how they chopped his left ear off and sent it with the ransom note. Kidnapping became a big theme with children after that, and I remember thinking that if I was ever kidnapped I’d make sure I did absolutely everything the kidnappers told me to, because that way nothing bad could happen to me: being totally obedient was supposed to ensure order and safety. I would have done absolutely anything my clueless young parents had told me to do, safe in the knowledge that THEY KNEW BEST. I think I expected adulthood to come as a sudden transformation into the super-wise, all-powerful beings I believed my parents to be. I’ve spent my adult life dealing with how conned I feel, that there is no-one in charge, that being pathologically obedient doesn’t stop bad things from happening. I like to think there was a part of me even then that was dealing with my parents rationally, thinking, “You can’t have it both ways: either you give up absolute power over me and let me be me, or I’m going to interpret your expectations of me to the letter and punish you with my mentally deranged view of the world and bonkers behaviour.”

There is evidence of underlying sane mental processes in my early drawings. In fig.1  there is a drawing I did while clearly in “holy mode”; my personality split is such that even my handwriting is totally different from when I’m expressing my default “sinner” settings. See fig.2 for my real experience of friendship. The Helen in question is someone i remember having very ambivalent feelings about: I adored her and envied her, basked in her affection and thought she was a two-faced cow, all at the same time. Although there is no mention of her in fig.2, I’m pretty sure I’m referring to the same friendship.

Fig.3 is probably an earlier work, when the personality split is less pronounced, dating from a different school and different best friend, Christine. Notice the “ugh” I’ve written with an arrow pointing towards my best friend. Pure poetry.

My cartooning style is evolving towards the style of drawing in fig.2 and fig.4, which is “fleshed out stick-men”. When I draw like that I can re-capture a lot of the energy that produced these particular drawings. I love that there’s no nose, not even in profile.