How to Draw (Trauma)

How we navigate trauma and memory in graphic memoir, Mister Rogers, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, hex #E8E1D9, and more.

Howdy, friend.

Fall came and went in a hurry, didn’t it? As I write this, Thanksgiving is just a few days away, which means December is just around the corner. Naturally, as always this time of year, I begin thinking about changes, accomplishments, goals hit or missed, and what next year will bring.

I’m deep at work on my book HARD BODY—a deeply personal narrative about the depths of my body dysmorphia and what that’s looked like during different periods of my life—which has me thinking a lot about how much I, too, have changed and learned and grown. The Rob I’m writing and drawing about is very much a different incarnation of today’s Rob. Showing myself in this book—all of the bad and the ugly right there on the page—has been insightful as I come to terms with various traumas I’m still unpacking.

This got me thinking about how comics-making lends itself well to discussing and dissecting our stories, all the anguish and internal/external wounds that make us who we are. So, in this issue of How to Draw, we’ll explore how the graphic form allows us a breathing space that traditional writing may not, as well as detail how I’ve decided to tell my own stories and traumas.

If this is your first time visiting How to Draw, a hearty welcome. You can check out our archive of posts here. And if you haven’t already, please consider subscribing so you don’t miss a thing.

Cheers to your health and safety, friend. ♡

– RJR

“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”
—Fred Rogers

In my twenties, I began to self-harm. The truth is, I didn’t even know it was self-harm until many years later. When I was going through a depressive spell, or my body dysmorphia was flaring up in a major way, I’d pinch the inside of my thighs as hard as I could until I broke skin and bled to punish myself for eating that cookie, for not running harder, for not lifting more weight. I don’t bruise easily so it was very much out-of-sight-out-of-mind. I’d hate what I looked like, who I saw in the mirror, attack myself, and be healed up within days.

I kept this to myself until I started working on my graphic memoir, HARD BODY. I was embarrassed, I was appalled, but most of all, I wasn’t sure how to tell this story. When I began making diary comics, I used the space on the page to tell short, silly stories about my life (petting cats, daydreaming about owning a boat, lying in hammocks). But I realized something as I continued my comics-making: the space on the page felt freeing in a way I hadn’t experienced before.

In the years before I eased back into drawing, I had a hard time writing about my trauma; there was something about seeing those stark words on the page that felt like little pinpricks; there wasn’t any way to maneuver around them—there they were, and there was no escaping them. This resulted in me—often—dancing around a memory in my writing, not wanting to see it laid bare on the page.

With comics and art, suddenly I felt safe to explore these topics, often explicitly for the first time; there was a buffer now: the memory, the art, and then me. The blend of visual and narrative storytelling allowed me to express complex emotions and thoughts related to my body dysmorphia. I saw myself on the page, yes, but it was disassociative in a way. I was both subject and storyteller, and I could show what I wanted to show. It was empowering. Using comics to delve into this trauma has given me peace and strength to even write about this period of my life in this newsletter—the first time I've publicly talked about my self-harm.

(I detailed how I arrived at drawing myself as a rabbit as a means of a similar self-protection in my very first Substack post, which you can read here.)

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home explores trauma in a deeply personal way, centered around the author’s complex relationship with her father who struggled with his repressed sexuality and eventually died in what may have been a suicide. It’s a gorgeous book and a huge inspiration as I began thinking about what the form could do for me—and what stories I might finally be able to tell.

When I first cobbled together the pitch for what would become HARD BODY, I was shocked at how raw and open I was and how eager I was to explore. I had rarely talked about my body dysmorphia before, but now was going all the way into it, lifting every stone and showing what was underneath.

Why? Well, again, comics as a medium was giving me something new to play with:

• Expressing traumatic experiences through visuals felt less daunting and overwhelming, an additional layer of expression and communication that felt more accessible.

• The symbolic representations used in comics made it easier for me to communicate indirectly—allowing some degree of detachment—using characters, settings, and imagery to symbolize my experiences rather than directly describing them in writing.

• In this form, I had control over the narrative, visuals, and pacing, empowering me to structure my story in a way that felt safe and manageable.

HARD BODY begins when I was living in California right after college. Quickly, I associated having a pleasing physical form with being happy and successful—if people wanted me then I was doing something right. It was how I determined my worth. However, my insides were soured with depression and loneliness from years of self-body shaming, from warped perceptions of myself and how others viewed me—and from social and filial expectations. I thought about my body constantly, how my stomach folded over when I sat, how I could be doing better at X or Y, how disgusting parts of me were. At my lowest, I calculated myself from every angle, how I would be seen, what needed to be worked on, what I hated. I was heinously mean to myself—relentlessly so. For a long time, I couldn’t envision continuing to exist with all the strife in my head.

So, how to show this on the page along with the religious and family trauma I wanted to loop in? I’m going to show some pages from HARD BODY with the text removed, to explain some ways I’ve navigated showing and telling.

Up first: After a breakup with my LA girlfriend, I was lost, desperate for connection. For too long, I hated being alone, hated seeing myself in the mirror, and defined myself by the desire a partner had for me. Clearly, that’s not enough to build a strong partnership, so I serial-dated without taking time to heal. I’m using a limited color palette for this book, so wanted this page to feel overwhelming as Robbit contemplates who he was without a partner, and how he began to sink into a toxic state shortly after this. I ended with a sparse final panel to really hammer home the point.

I enjoy the use of negative space in my work. Here’s another page where I’m dwelling on the media I had been fed my entire life that twisted my brain into thinking a male body had to look a very specific (and mostly impossible) way. Again, the text has been removed, but the idea of Robbit cascading down past television sets showcasing some of his favorite hunky actors seemed like the perfect fit for the narrative work on this page. I also chose to make this a full-page bleed with no panels so it feels endless and overwhelming.

I also enjoy using repetition to get a point across. Here, Robbit is alone on his couch in the evening, slowly fading into blackness as he ponders his isolation as a result of his debilitating body dysmorphia.

In the final few panels I’ll share here, some actual manifestations of my body dysmorphia: an inability to see myself in any sort of constructive way—my appearance distorted when looking at pictures, and Robbit as the same color as the background—not being able to see past my exterior in a meaningful way.

Here then, dear reader, are some questions to ponder when working with trauma:

• What visual ways can you show trauma in your work? Will you show it explicitly or abstractly—and why?

• How can you manipulate setting, font, space, and color to show trauma on the page?

• How do your images play with and against the words you use in your narrative to discuss your trauma? How can you use this form to your advantage to give yourself and the reader space to digest your story?

I’m still very much at work on this book, and while it has opened up old wounds, it very much has helped me reframe my trauma. Truly, this book is doing work for me that a traditional memoir could not; this intersection of words + art allows me to play with dark and rough spots from my past but with a sense of disconnect that makes me comfortable to put more and more on the page—to find a sort of peace. Remember, as the indelible Mister Rogers said: “Anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.”

What I’m reading:

• Star Wars: Visions – Peach Momoko #1 by Peach Momoko

• Lady Snowblood (Volume 1) by Kazuo Koike and Kazuo Kamimura

• Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq by Sarah Glidden

• The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott by Zoe Thorogood

• The Nice House on the Lake (Volume 2) by James Tynion IV, Alvaro Martinez Bueno, and Jordie Bellaire

A perfect panel:

• Roaming by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

The color I’m obsessed with right now:

• hex #E8E1D9 – “Pearl Bush”

News:

• I recently created a FROGS & TOADS OF NEBRASKA poster that will be sold exclusively at the University of Nebraska State Museum gift shop in 2024. For those that don’t live in/around Lincoln, Nebraska and would still like one of these, I’ll be running a one-time print run of this poster on nice, thick eggshell paper (each signed and stamped) before the end of the calendar year. Stay tuned to my Substack and my Instagram page for further details—coming very soon!

• I’m ecstatic that I’ll be teaching a six-week ONLINE course beginning February 2024 hosted by the fine folks at WritingWorkshops.com called Visualizing Memories: A Graphic Memoir Primer. We’ll dive into a captivating exploration of personal narratives through the fusion of words and art. Together we’ll discover how comics provide a unique avenue to delve deeper into our past, offering a profound means of reflection and investigation that traditional writing often can't match. (Think: Why graphic memoirs instead of just memoirs?) We’ll have lessons about avatars and their creation, reflections and investigations of the genre (looking at a wide selection of graphic memoir samples), script writing, and we’ll put it all together to create fully finished comics. The goal is to demystify the form and see how powerful it can be for your narratives. This is going to be a tremendously generative class, and space will be limited. Stay tuned for the official announcement and details on how to sign up, which should be soon!