Seeing that it's Easter weekend, I thought I'd show this sequence. My Mom always made great dinners but the holiday dinners were extra special. I dedicate these pages to my Mom, in loving memory.

Beam me up Scottie! This was a fun page to do. based on one of my favourite episodes of Star Trek; The City On The Edge of Forever by Harlan Ellison. On this page we're discussing our upcoming trip to the San Diego Comic-Con, and on the way back a visit with Harlan. Ken had already worked with him and I was just about to meet him, and was a bit nervous, yes, but I was getting use to meeting a lot of well-known writers and comic-book artists. 

Today I've been working on a few more pages of us visiting Ellison Wonderland, Harlan's home, where we fall into the rabbit hole!!! Just a reminder that the pages I'm posting are not in any order, and the word balloons will be added later, when I've completed this book - soooon!!!

In this sequence I wanted to get across my fear of banks, or rather how intimidating I felt going into one. Later in life I read My Financial Career by Stephen Leacock, a wonderful short piece that I could totally relate to.  Math was not my strong point, which was compounded by my bad education - no wonder I wanted to shrink and put my money into a sock! I had a math teacher in vocational school that gave up on our class and decided to talk about politics instead, then when it came time to be tested, well, you can imagine the results. 

I'm taking a different approach in how I finish the pages of my second book.  I have about twenty pages in various stages of completion, so I'll be posting more as I finish them. 

This page is when we went to San Diego Comic Con, back then I had no interest in comic conventions. I was more interested in venturing out of the comic con I did not feel a part of, so I went for a walk. I wanted to educate myself in books I thought were important and challenging to me, so I picked up a copy of Plato The Republic. I didn't have an understanding of the beginnings of western culture but I was curious to find out more. Anyway I bumbled along and thought it was interesting to read, even though I didn't understand it fully. The cowboy in this sequence was posing as a wax figure, I thought he looked so real and I had never seen anything like it before, so, I decided to touch it. The joke was on me - a bit of American western culture. Ha Ha Ha!!!

This is me as a teenager, just goofing around in the junkyard. My dad wasn't very organized with tires, they were randomly stacked everywhere! The house in the background was our first home, which was quiet small with just one room we all shared, and at the time this picture was taken my dad used it to store more junk. We had no plumbing til the early sixties, that's whats so funny about this picture - we really didn't have "a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of!" which was one of my dad's favorite expressions. 

You can imagine how difficult it was for my mom  raising four kids, but the wood-burning stove kept us warm in the winter and I don't remember ever going hungry. We eventually moved out of that little house into to a bigger one, that still remains today. That's where my brother Ed lives now, he's a hard working guy just like my late Dad, the salt of the earth. It's always comforting to visit him in the summer, and I consider myself very fortunate to be able to return to the place I grew up. Who would have thought I'd be writing about it all these years later?

Looking back at my grade one class picture, on the bottom row you see a boy with glasses named Kenny - not Kenny Steacy, but it's amazing how much he looked like Ken in the photo below taken around the same time. I found this interesting because Kenny was my first crush, and he used to walk me home from school and buy me liquorice! One of life's amazing random co-incidences.

And who would have though I'd still be friends with Cathy, the girl beside me next to the teacher. We were both born in December, the smallest kids in the class - and we're the same giggly girls we always were! It's funny how I remember certain things in my school days, like playing in the snow at recess. I loved to carve objects out of the hard packed snow. Another thing that sticks in my mind was when I made a telephone, one for me and one for my friend Cathy, then we would chat about things. The kids today probably make cell phones. Later on in my sculpting career I did a sculpture titled Phonehenge carved out of lime stone with a Photoshopped background.

I was also commissioned to do this marble sculpture, titled Orpheus. Carving it reminded me of the sparkly snow in Ontario, which is much easier to sculpt! It doesn't snow much here in Victoria but when it does I really love to see the individual patterns of the snowflakes. I read some books that got me thinking of how we are very much like snowflakes, all the same but differing in the paths we take in life, the fluctuations we encounter on our journey making us who we are. For further context I highly recommend these two books: The Turbulent Mirror, and Looking Glass Universe, both by John P. Briggs and F. David Peat.

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!