The Saturn Return

Hello, drawing book readers! Here we are for another week of comics from my old sketchbook journal series. As we make our way through the pages of a 2003 drawing book, we find ourselves in an unusual part of my autobiographical comics journey.

I started these sketchbook comics in 1996, as an assignment for a class at art school. I wasn’t making them for anybody else to read, and I definitely wasn’t thinking about publishing them. But by 2003, things were different. Not only had I been writing comics for almost a decade, I’d also written comics for a few local and international publications. I’d experimented with some self-published web comics. People were starting to ask me if I was working on a longer book.

No, I wasn’t! I was busy being a flight attendant and helping my mom pack up and sell our family house. And I had started channeling my creative energy away from comics and into independent literary criticism, while thinking about going to grad school. (That didn’t happen, although I had a lot of fun thinking about some really good books.) But I was still writing sketchbook comics, and I had started thinking about how I might be able to gather up some of the short stories in my sketchbooks into a little volume.

The subject on my mind in 2003 was my fast-approaching 30th birthday. The theme of “aging” had been coming up in some recent comics. And then I learned, from a friend of mine, about the astrological concept of the Saturn return. I tried this out as a title for the book, and even made a cover page (the first picture at the top of this story).

The spaceship I drew on that cover page, and in the picture below, is the Feininger-inspired spaceship from my story for the comics anthology Project: Telstar.

(The clarification that John Donne was not a “gauche” poet is a reference to a comic about poetry that I shared here last week.)

I didn’t finish this part of the story, but I did start writing comics with the idea that they could be part of a little collection of stories. I can share them in the weeks ahead - including the story mentioned on the title page (the one about decaffeinated coffee). I think that the story from last week about “Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle” was also meant to be part of this collection.

This project had an impact on my spontaneous sketchbook style: instead of just writing down what happened that day, I was trying to write the Saturn Return stories in the same sketchbook. Looking through the sketchbook now is a bit confusing, because some pages were connected to stories, and some were just random standalone pages. Here are two pages that fit with the general theme… but I’m not sure where they were meant to go.

Spoiler alert: I never finished, or published, the Saturn Return stories. (Maybe I should do that in honour of the NEXT Saturn Return, 29 1/2 years later!!?) But I did write an “Afterword,” which may have been intended to follow a short story in the book - or maybe for the whole book? I can’t remember. But I did think this page was funny, and I still think it is funny now.

So maybe my takeaway from today’s drawing book story is, please keep paying attention to science and scientists, and please keep reading the news! Especially local journalism (I can recommend The Sprawl here in Calgary). In recent years, independent journalism all over the planet has been facing existential threats. But things happen in cycles! Maybe you’ll be the one who helps to tip the balance in a more hopeful direction. And of course, thanks for reading the drawing book today!