Bear with me here...
(buy my book buy my book buy my book ufffffff)
Generally, I love being able to self-publish the comics I make, whether online for free, as printed minicomics, or both! I understand that the work I make is rather niche and I enjoy feeling like I have the freedom to follow my own whims on topic, style, approach, and final form of the things I create. (I am also extremely grateful to all of you online who have followed along with me, despite my work containing rather more Chaucer than you might have expected… or less Chaucer, for my scholarly colleagues who have ended up here.)
One of the downsides of self-publishing is the need to do your own advertising — to flog your wares in an already-full market. I choose this phrase deliberately because it highlights why this particular aspect of self-publishing is so difficult: the overwhelmingly negative connotations of self-advertisement. It’s uncomfortable to demand people attend to what you’ve made and even more so to suggest they might give you money for it.
Yet, that’s exactly what I’m about to do here today.
Late last year, having freshly turned in my dissertation and craving a return to comics, I applied to take part in an online comics fair with a particular interest in autobiographical comics. I had an extremely difficult time making comics in the final six or so months of dissertation revision and, despite having my defense and a semester of teaching lurking in my future, I desperately wanted to start making comics again and felt like an external deadline might do me good. And it did: despite the fatigue of post-dissertation brain, the anxiety of defense and teaching, and the added factor of a new part-time job to learn, I still managed to make a new autobio comic that I remain extremely proud of:
This 22-page book represents my first concerted attempt to step back and really look at the whole dissertation process and what it was like to do this work as a middle-aged mother of a teenager who also happened to be a cartoonist. The book includes new comics (more memoirish than diary) as well as a few pages from my diary during this time which more accurately capture specific moments in the process. It was such a difficult comic to make in terms of digging back into some upsetting moments and feelings and also figuring out how to organize them to be interesting to a reader. It also gave me the opportunity to wish a more concrete “thank you” by way of dedication to my extraordinary advisor, mentor, and friend Mary for her willingness to take a chance on me as a graduate student and her unfailing support throughout.
I’ve attempted to reflect on this experience with honestly and humor and in a way that I hope might speak to others even if they haven’t spent entirely too long (blissfully) in school, as I have! If you are curious about this book, I am going to end this post with a few passages that I particularly enjoyed crafting. And if those further pique your interest or if you’ve enjoyed my comics in the past and are looking for a way to support my work, you can buy a digital copy here, only through the end of July! No postage, no waiting for mail delivery, just a single transaction for 3.50GBP ($4.70ish) and you can instantly download my comic.
Yay, got it!