Thanks-grieving Day

Conquest, brutality, and genocide are a part of my pre-history as a white American man. The stories of my people’s history that I inherited, are full of half-truths, fabrications, and assumptions of divine mandate. I am ashamed of the evils my nation has perpetrated, and continue to perpetrate against Native Americans. I am also ashamed that it has taken me a full 36 years of my life to finally take the time to listen and learn the history of Native American people FROM Native American sources.

If you are, like me, a non-native person, take some time today or tomorrow to write down all you think you know about Native American history. Write down what you think you know. Also, write down any assumptions you have about Native Americans. I will share some of my own, though I am not proud of them:

Stories are Magic

“Magic doesn’t exist,” say the grown-ups. “Magic is an invention of fiction and does not affect physical reality. Grow up and accept the fact that ghosts haunt our half-conscious moments, rainbows are merely physical phenomena, and powerful potions will be left in the fictional schoolroom of a Wizarding school in the far North of the United Kingdom.” I heartily disagree.

I believe in magic. I believe we have the power to shape reality with spells and potions. I just think we forgot that the magic we have has been with us since prehistory and we can see the sparks of magic staining the walls of ancient caves. Our magical abilities seem almost banal and most of us forget that we may be enchanted by powerful, commanding charms.

The ability to create, share, and expand on stories is magic. I don’t mean merely fictions where trolls turn to stone in the morning light, or visions of an intergalactic fleet of starships. Every one of us, not matter where we come from, has our daily experience interpreted for us through foundational stories. We each have answers to questions like: What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose? Who is my friend? Who is my enemy? Who do I love? What do I value? To answer any of these questions, we tell stories and more often than not, those stories contain echoes and rhymes from other stories we have heard.

When I think about how I view the world, most of it has been a series of stories that shift, move, and grow. None of us was present for the creation of physical reality, but most of us have a foundational story we lean into when we start to question the big questions:

“YHWH spoke physical, Earthly reality into actuality on day one, literally.”
“An infinitely dense, hot point of pre-atomic potential suddenly expanded rapidly from the estimated size of a pin-head to the size of a grapefruit and eventually the full expanse of the known universe, this action set in motion the fundamental building blocks of our physical sense of space-time: matter and energy.”
“Eternal love from pre-time formed reality to set in motion and seeded worlds with life and guided the formation of consciousness.”
“The Great A’Tuin, a Giant Star Turtle, swims through the universe with four massive elephants on its back each supporting the Discworld.”

Our minds are built from stories and can affect our moods, how we see the world, and our emotional and physical health. When I am sad, I think of stories of other people who have experienced sadness. If the sadness gets to be too much, I find a trusted friend who then, through the power of storytelling, help me break the spell that my mind has conjured from bits of experience and other spells.

I see arguments as a magical battle, where words and images try to push unique visions of reality in contrast with one another. Spells are cast on television, through the radio, on our newsfeeds, and from our places of work. We use our own inner spell books to help us navigate through these places of magic:

“Immigrants are taking our jobs away!!!” A voice yells at me through a screen. “Most immigrants, who are people, are looking for a better way of life and claiming they want to take my job merely to hurt me is preposterous,” I tell myself. “America was founded on principles of democracy and freedom for all and was ordained by God to subdue the continent.” An American history spell book tells me. “The United States of America is a nation of settler-conquerors, founded by white, male land owners who systematically committed genocide against (and is currently trying to erase)  hundreds of Native nations to take their land, through oath-breaking and brutality.” An American Indian author reminds me; calling into question some of the original, and corrupt spells in my own inner sanctum.

As much as I may want to think of the world as an easily understood reality, I have learned to be honest about how much my own experience is founded on how I interpret reality. Stories are the magical spells that connect my senses to meaning. My upbringing as the son of two conservative American Christians in the 1980 and 90s wove spells of absolute morality, a judgmental God who happily sends the unrepentant to hell, and American exceptionalism into the foundation of my own mythology. Having those ideas challenged by stories and experiences, which led to a paradigm shift in my late 20s, helped me to see how those were not spells of life, they were enchantments meant to reduce my full potential and keep me subservient to, and in support of, systems of oppression.

How we interpret the world determines how we move in it. My classical western education taught me to see the world in purely materialistic and economic terms. The history of European civilization post-enlightenment has shown how cruel it is to view the world in these terms. Gone is any reverence for the wild or the natural. Pair that worldview with a theology where this Earth is meaningless, and you have a recipe for destruction. Stories, like powerful magical incantations, have the power to change our physical reality.

Stories are important. They are necessary to our survival. Abstract thought, no matter how closely attached to physical experience, is magical thinking. I am convinced that to meet the challenges of the 21st century, better stories, better FOUNDING stories, must be told, internalized, and shared. I will do my best to use my magic for the good of others and to experience the spells of other people, weaving them into my consciousness.

So. Do you want to tell me a story?

 

Like a Bolt of Lightening from a Clear Sky

Last year I was in the weeds illustrating four children’s storybooks while trying to keep up with my freelance work and daily tasks at my job. I pushed myself hard, finished the illustrations on time, and then was hit by the flu. Three months later illustrating or cartooning became physically unbearable for me (I have an MFA in sequential art). Four months afterward, I was in full burn out unable to draw anything other than disconnected sketchbook pages and a few “journal comics.” When the Summer came around I was mentally preparing myself to bury and grieve my identity as a cartoonist. In September, I began the work of reimagining my future as perhaps a writer or to simply focus on the typesetting and design work I did as my day job. Yesterday, everything changed.

Image copyright 2019 by Sam Carbaugh

I drew this comic straight to ink with no preplanning or thought. I just let my pen and subconscious play across the page, placing characters whom I created years ago and never found the right vehicle for expressing them. When I has finished I was happy with this short comic and asked myself, “What happens next?”

As soon as I asked myself that question and allowed my mind a little creative space to begin fleshing out a story, a world began to bloom. Not just a world based on things I had seen or read before, but something truly original. My brain began to pull together ideas, images, desires, fears, and dreams I had been collecting for decades. Like a puzzle being completed in record speed, everything fell into place. Not only was this something meaningful to me, the ideas I was having made me want to share it with the world. I began to rough out story ideas and arcs for characters, the world felt so real to me I was became an explorer discovering concepts, characters, and plots naturally with little effort.

Has this happened to you? Has an idea come so amazingly fast and unexpected that it feels like it has been there for years?

In my creative life I have often put the cart before the horse, asking myself what will sell, how can I make money, where will my next freelance gig come from, and other distracting thoughts in the pursuit of a career. I never had something like this that felt like it was pulling ME forward towards creating a comic. This doesn’t feel like work, or an obligation. It feels like an exciting, real, original something I can offer the world.

But more importantly, even if the world says, “No thank you,” I WANT to make these comics for myself. I WANT to create these because it feels like a natural extension of who I am. It is playful. It is scary. It is me, one hundred percent.

In the past I have gotten excited for some creative ideas and made grand plans to write, or cartoon, or illustrate only to have the grind of daily life and distractions keep me from following through. I am more aware of my own creative process now and I have done enough work in therapy to know how to protect this project until it is ready to be shared. I don’t want to exert undue pressure on myself, or reveal things too early. I want to do this right and I want to actually publish comics. I will wait until I have the work finished on a few comics before I begin to tease and share this world with you. Just hang tight.

However, I will tell you HOW I hope to publish these and NO they won’t be via social media. I will follow in the footsteps of previous graphic novelists before me and publish mini-comics that will eventually get collected into volumes and finally into larger graphic novels. They will be about 20 pages each and I plan to publish them by volume monthly and collect roughly two volumes a year (if it takes me longer, it takes me longer, no pressure). The mini-comics and books will be in black and white with some “value-added” merch included with the monthly comics to direct subscribers (stickers, pins, etc). Once I have the first volume completed and am working on the second, THEN and ONLY THEN will I begin to table at conventions (SPX, MICE, MoCCA, TCAF, and others around the midwest) to get my work “known” to a wider audience.

That is the plan as it stands now. I know I can create at least a page of comics a night. This plan feels sustainable to where I am right now with my life and work. The story ideas are exciting and scary because there is real risk in what I want to talk about the sort of things my soul wants to talk about. I actually want to create now.

I can’t wait to show you.