Process & Digressions

Chapter 2 and "Noted"

I’ve been reformatting and redrawing the pages I first drafted of Manic, back in the aughts. Yes, y’all, two decades ago. My cartooning skills have grown over the decades (thank goodness) and those early pages need serious reworking.

I always love to see other cartoonist’s and artist’s process, why not share some of mine?

I have a hunch that back then I must’ve just read Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”, and thought it was cool that instead of caption boxes, he drew himself at his drawing table as the narrator. Well, putting himself in his book, the only human character where everyone else was either a mouse or a cat or a pig, was brilliant. However, my memoir is populated with a multidude of human characters (it took a village). Having two Lynn characters (the narrator, and the one living the experience back then) was not such a good idea.

First is the early version of the opening page where you can see that the Lynn on the left of the top panel is one me, and the one on the bottom panel breaking the 4th wall, is older, wearing glasses and not the same at all.

Even if the me who is narrating looked like the me who is in the narration, how confusing would that get? The other problem is real estate. A talking narrator requires at least an entire panel, where a caption requires only a few lines. What was I thinking?

In addtion to editing out my talking head, the early pages are drawn on bristol board in ink at a different page ratio than would work for publication. Drawing digitally using Procreate on an iPad, makes reformatting and revising a lot faster than the old days.

While beavering away at Manic, Paul English, the editor of The Park Slope Reader, a local quarterly pubication, reached out to me about doing a cartoon page. He said he wanted to feature more social, political writing and asked if I had any ideas for political cartoons. Thing is, quarterly publications get ready a month or two ahead and are on the stands for 3 months after publication. In these times, events change hourly, and what was in the news this week is a non-issue and forgotten by the next. I am a huge fan of political satire and political cartoons, but making them? I have a hard enough time reading the headlines. Having to digest the news to find something (with a shelf life) to satire, and bringing it to life at my drawing board is not how I want to spend my time.

Instead, I pitched the idea of doing a page on the resistance, featuring local people who are involved in upholding community values, people and organizations that are defending our institutions, something upbeat and proactive. It could be both informative and reassuring for readers to know that there are groups of people in the neighborhood who are actively resisting. Doing it as comic reportage also offers the option of anonymity to people who do not want to be identified. Photographs are very specific to the people photographed, the iconography of comics allows the reader to identify with the characters. And perhaps inspire them to get involved.

My first piece features Margaret Neill, an artist that I know. It was published in the spring 2026 issue.

I’ve got another article in the works. And a few pages of revised Manic to ink and get ready for posting.

Until next time!