Comics at night

Hi, drawing book readers! I’m back with more comics from my old sketchbook journal series. Back in 2002, I was experimenting with posting my autobiographical comics online, and we’ve been working our way through those early web comics. Last week’s episode was about a trip to Spain. This week, I’m back to my usual life in Calgary.

Because I was a flight attendant with a regular shift on a night flight, I was pretty nocturnal. (And let’s be honest. Before I was a flight attendant, I was already pretty noctural… and even now, all these years later, I’m still a total night owl.) Anyway, here are some comics inspired by my day-to-day (or, more accurately, night-to-night) activities in Calgary, back then.

I still really love owls!! A while back, I wrote about an owl who spent a couple of months in my backyard, a few years ago. You can read that comic in the lovely anthology “Alberta Comics: Home,” published by Renegade Arts Entertainment - along with many other good Alberta stories.

Back to the drawing book, with a spooky page…

Later, I figured out later that my scary Montreal hotel dream might have been an episode of sleep paralysis. Luckily, that never happened to me again. But for a long time afterwards, I avoided Montreal layovers at that hotel. Yikes!!!

Ah, I remember all those days (nights!), trying to get things done, during hours when nothing was open! Back then, my art really depended a lot on getting photographs developed, and on making photocopies. Now, I have a scanner, and I can work in Photoshop. I haven’t made a photocopy in years.

Back then, nocturnal artists like me depended on West Canadian Graphics, a print shop that was located back then on the corner of 8th Avenue and 10th Street SW. It was open all night! I used to spend HOURS there, drawing, photocopying, adjusting, erasing with liquid paper, photocopying again… doing all the things I do with Photoshop now. (Today, West Canadian Graphics has evolved into West Canadian Digital Imaging Inc., and these days I take my graphic recording posters there for large-scale scanning. Actually, it’s kind of funny, but their scanning team works on a night shift, so they always send me my files in the middle of the night! Some things never change.)

This doesn’t have anything to do with this week’s comic, but maybe since I am writing about making art with a photocopy machine, I can include an example of what that looked like. Here’s a page from an essay I wrote around that same time. I wanted to include pictures in the essay, as well as typed copy. So, I typed the text and printed it on paper. Then I cut out the paper and glued it into the right spots on the page with the drawings. Then I photocopied that page, so it turned out like this:

After taping or gluing bits of paper onto your original page, the photocopy often showed the edges of the section that was glued on. Then you had to go over those edges with liquid paper and make another photocopy. And sometimes you had to adjust the darkness or lightness of the copy so everything looked all right. It sure wasted a lot of paper. But that was the way I did it, back then.

Anyway, back to the drawing book.

Finding delight in trivial, everyday things is still a good practice! I don’t think there is anything else I need to say about that.

Have a good week, and hope you find many trivial, everyday (or everynight) things to delight in!