How to Draw Intermission: September 2023
Swooping in with a list of required comics reading for the month of September.
Howdy, friend.
Fall is here—I literally just got out my box of sweaters for the season, yay!—and I’m working toward a major deadline for my graphic memoir HARD BODY—sneak peek below!—which means no new full issue of How to Draw this month. But I still wanted to offer you something, so if you’ll allow me, here’s a short tangent followed by some recommended comics reading for the month.
I made this short little comic based on a conversation I had the other week. It went pretty much like the comic shows: A friend asked me why I love ballet, I said I didn’t know, thought about it a minute, and then proceeded to CRACK MY BRAIN OPEN RIGHT THERE ON THE SIDEWALK.
Working on my graphic memoir has me realizing how pervasive body dysmorphia has been in my life—even if I didn’t have a name for it until much later on. I’ve always felt gangly, unathletic, uncoordinated. I see photos of myself and often my first reaction still is: Who’s that ape with the long arms!?
I’ve long said I hate dancing, but I think that comes down to feeling estranged from my own body after years of hating it, judging it, picking it apart and trying to mold it into something I thought it should look like. Guess what: That creates some pretty gnarly dissonance!
It’s funny because music has always been such a big part of my life. I listen to gobs of it daily, think about it when I’m not listening to it, and make curated playlists for innocuous acts like *checks notes* walking to work. And yet dancing to music feels remarkably uncomfortable to me.
After I made this comic, I started thinking about the few sports I’ve done in my life, swimming and water polo, and how, even though I was wearing a Speedo and had a lot of skin showing, I felt a certain ease being in the water, my physicality hidden beneath the surface. There, for the first time in my life, I found a certain amount of grace as I kicked and paddled and dove.
So I started investigating the link between athletics and moving our bodies and body dysmorphia and the social expectations of how we look while moving, the politics of body acceptance in 2023. As I did, I immediately thought of Tillie Walden’s Spinning, a beautiful graphic novel about the pressures of competition and body image issues and what it’s like to feel disconnected from yourself.
Inspired by this exploration, I figured I’d curate a list of graphic books that deal with body- and self-image and, in some cases, recovery, that are absolutely worth your time. If you’re unfamiliar with anything on this list, I hope you’ll check them out.
The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner
Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
Fights: One Boy's Triumph Over Violence by Joel Christian Gill
Dancing at the Pity Party by Tyler Feder
Lighter Than My Shadow by Katie Green
Body Music by Julie Maroh
Hot Comb by Ebony Flowers
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See you soon. ♡
– RJR