Is it true that I'm no longer young?

Hello, drawing book readers! Here’s this week’s selection of pages from my old sketchbook journal series. I started posting these back in 2023, with my first journals from 1996. Now it’s 2026 and we’ve reached 2003!

At this time, I was living in a new-to-me rented house in Calgary’s Bridgeland neighbourhood (which, back in 2003, seemed a bit sketchier than it is today!). But, I wasn’t worried about my neighbourhood. I was worried about something else: at the age of twenty-nine, I was worried about getting old.

Reading this now, over twenty years later, it seems a bit silly! But, it’s part of the story, I guess, so here we go.

(At this point, I digressed into some other musings that will have to be a Drawing Book episode of their own. A few pages later, I came back to the question of what was bothering me…)

Sorry I am not ending this week’s comic on a more uplifting note, but at least I’m ending it with some great tunes and an excellent play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile. You might enjoy Neko Case’s lovely tune, “I wish I was the moon.” It is beautiful, but I have never been able to understand what it’s about (or if it’s even about anything.) And then there is the creepy but great song “Lather” by Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane. It starts out with the line: “Lather was thirty years old today,” which is maybe why I had it on my mind at the time I wrote this comic (I was twenty-nine). Lather asks the question I was wondering about for myself: “Is it true that I’m no longer young?”

The song ends on an ominous note, with the narrator saying: “And I should have told him, ‘No, you’re not old…’” You have to wonder, what did Lather do when he heard this news? Yikes!!

What did I do, with all these philosophical musings about getting older, back in 2003? I just kept making comics, and I kept getting older, too. In fact, I am still doing both of those things today, in 2026. So, if you are twenty-nine and feeling old age creeping up on you, don’t despair! There could still be many sketchbook pages in your future. I hope so!

See you next week for more stories from the drawing book!