Hi again.
Took an extra week to complete these pages. I hope you'll find the wait worthwhile!
When we left Diana and Jenny, they (we) were motoring back from Curt's trial in Madison. Please join us for the aftermath.
That concludes this chapter.
It was such a humbling experience to have the people who survived all this with me, the women who put up with this nonsense, beside me at its culmination. Like Pete Townshend said in Somebody Saved Me, all I know is I've been making it- there have been times I didn't deserve to. I really don't know if I believe in ritual power or not. But whether we were invoking outside forces or giving me a healing moment of catharsis, it worked. And I'm sure his dying shortly after the ritual, 250 miles away and unknown to me for 10 years, was coincidence. Really, pure coincidence. You can't prove a thing. You got nothing on me, coppers!
I'm tempted to include a section on repercussions, to talk about how these effects scarred me in unexpected ways over the years. But I have other things to say before the book is done, and some of that will present itself in the coda.
My original outline, based on the ten chapters in my 64 page draft edition, was to deal with this as a small part of my life. This chapter comprised 10 pages of the outline. Turns out I had more to say about it than about some other parts. Ultimately, the book is about three things: trans stuff, class issues (to a small degree), and surviving in general, with surviving abuse as a specific aspect of that. One of the original ten chapters is gone. It's a good story, but not for this book. The remaining chapters will cover my mother (6 - 10 pages), my father (about the same), sex and sexuality coupled with gender concerns (another 12 pages as now planned), and the coda, which ran 12 pages in a recent rewrite. About 50 pages, give or take.
Then it's done, aside from edits (assuming I get a publisher).
My big concern about the book is that it not be too grim, sad, or unrelenting. I've known plenty of joy along the way, and I want that to come across too.
Art notes:
Getting a handle on these pages was a challenge, the second page more than the first. These are fairly static, minimal action pages. On the ritual page, there was one big action that served as the focal point. I'm not a big fan of sound effects in my work. I played with adding something here, but it didn't really gel. Technique is pretty straightforward on these, with minimal Photoshop corrections. I'm developing my own set of tools as the work evolves: sparse backgrounds, use of gray value from pencil to weight the visuals of more airy pages and panels, and a deliberate sense of framing. That last drawn panel on the second page turned out okay- everyone sitting around the table celebrating quietly. The final page is lifted verbatim from the draft edition. What can I say? Sometimes it's right the first time. I just took a traditional 35mm photograph from back in the day, scanned it and added text.
The tools used here are much the same as on the previous posted pages, so no updates necessary. I did get a porcelain escargot dish to use for inking, based on the recommendation of Terry Moore, and it's pretty cool.
Next: the chapter on Mother begins. I will need to find a better title for that one! In the draft the title was Esther and Gandalf, and I don't care for that at all now!
