Throughout history, people have sometimes gotten their best ideas from dreams.    For me, my dreams were never transferable to the real world, but I just woke up from one that could be.

Back in my early 20s, I drew cartoon panels of a young woman who was a kind of depiction of myself.   I put her into exaggerated real life situations, sort of humorous “graphic novels.”   I gave the main character my initials at the time “S.K.” a/k/a “The Loser.”  (I had such great self esteem, didn’t I?)  A couple of years ago I dug the cartoons up and  actually thought they were quite good, if a little dated (they were drawn in 1981).

Here are the links to the two posts that show both “graphic novels.”   There are only two of them.  For some reason, this was a hobby I never pursued but perhaps I should have.

The individual pictures can be clicked on to make them larger so you can read them.

Adventures of S.K. “The Loser”: A Cartoon Diary of Myself at Age 22 (1 of 2)

Adventures of S.K. “The Loser”: A Cartoon Diary of Myself at Age 22 (2 of 2)

On occasion, even on this blog, when I couldn’t find an appropriate image, I have made my own drawings.   In fact, I did this a few blog posts ago on a post called Big Changes.   I didn’t work too hard on that cartoon, and I’m certainly no Charles M. Schultz, but I think it still works well on the post.

I’ve always been in awe of certain cartoonists.  Schultz is one.  I’ve been a Peanuts fan since childhood (I was shocked when I learned that Schultz never really intended his cartoons to be for children, and the kids seem unusually “adult” in their interactions, thinking, and reactions to things).

Back in the late 1980s and 1990s, I became a huge Roz Chast fan.   I bought all her books and scoured copies of The New Yorker in waiting rooms to find her cartoons.  They were seemingly deliberately badly drawn, which made them funnier.   I loved their randomness and sometimes straight up absurdity,  but they always seemed to home in on some great truth about life in a hilarious or absurd way.    I read an article about Chast and found out she was close to my age (just a few years older), but in many ways her life seemed to parallel mine.  I imagined that Chast was me without all the baggage and low self esteem that kept me from ever really pursuing any of my dreams — or even knowing what those dreams were.

A couple of  one-panel Roz Chast cartoons:

I have been losing views, and maybe adding more of my own line drawings and cartoons might bring new life to this blog.  What do you think?