This was my grade one class and my first experience with school - I'm on the top row, second from the right. closest to the teacher. I failed that year and had to repeat it, that's what the system did back then. I was younger than most of the students because my birthday was Dec. 31st, being born two weeks prematurely. It's interesting to think that had I been born "on time" in January I would have had an advantage and it's quite possible I would've passed. But instead, I continued to fail - both grade two and three, and had to repeat those as well. Little Alice started falling through the cracks in the educational system.

My graphic novels have been the perfect medium to explore what happened after that, but ultimately I think it's ironic that my experience in school gave me the motivation to tell my story. In a sense, my books are my thesis, the story of my journey done in a non-academic way. This year I'm entering into my second term of teaching at College, so I'm still in a classroom after all those years - it certainly has its challenges, but I'm really loving it!

As Robert Louis Stevenson said; The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I'd like to wish everyone a very MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

Here's a link to an article titled The Audience Shapes the Comic that I wrote earlier this year for an online journal Eric McLuhan edits for the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design - I wanted to apply what I had learned from his book Media and Formal Cause to comics, and I'd be very interested in hearing your response, thanks!

Journal of the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design

I was giving a talk about my books the other day and I mentioned these quotes; the two at the top are on my drawing table - they keep me going. 

I had reached a point in my life where it was difficult to navigate - it was literally a juggling act! Sometimes we retreat into the past when we feel overwhelmed... Edgar Allen Poe's "Descent Into The Maelstrom" was one of McLuhan's favorite passages. which he used to describe modern living. He said, "Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological transition."  On the micro-level my life was dizzying but on the macro-level the world was changing without much awareness of the change. In my generation the technology of the book was being overshadowed by the new media of TV, and an awful lot of technological change has occurred  since then. Good or bad, we all have to navigate through these changes, no matter how big or small. Both Poe and McLuhan thought pattern recognition was key to navigating through the maelstrom.

I'm sorry to say, I won't be posting pages for a little while because the rest for this book are still in various stages of completion, but I'll be working diligently on them over the holidays. It's actually been in a real juggling act in the last few months - Ken and I are teaching a new certificate program in Comics & Graphic Novels at Camosun College here in Victoria (the only one of its kind in mainstream post-secondary schools in Canada!) that just launched in september, and we're having an amazing time! Hope you'll check it out at: www.camosun.ca/comics

Anyway, I'll still be posting things, and thoughts on things at least one a week - so please stay toooned!! ;^)

My childhood was not the norm, so we made do with what we had and learned to be creative at an early age. We used an old Volkswagon hood as a toboggan in the winter, and the shell sign from a gas station as a raft in the summer. Growing up in a junkyard was always interesting - it was constently changing and filling with things that were either obsolete or just old and discarded. I guess you could say my dad was one of the early recyclers, but the term hadn't even been coined back then!     

My dad and Ken's dad were two very different people, but they got along just fine. Mine ran his own scrap metal business and had lived in the same house for more than fifty years, the one I grew up in! Ken's dad was a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force and  they lived in just about every province in Canada, as well as in Germany, where Ken was born. 

My dad didn't go far in school, and was uneducated in the traditional sense, but he was a self-taught man, who possessed earthy wisdom. He loved talking to people about any subject - had a knack for storytelling, and he'd have you hanging off his every word. My Dad never wrote much but loved to read, especially about different cultures of the world; in a way, he travelled to distant countries via the books he read.