Val Wise
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Petunia Sketchbook July 2023
🕑 Added 2023-07-05 22:46:16 +0000 UTCI have a lot of work to wrap up this month on top of moving, so I've been using my sketchbook to draw things that relax me (boobs). Also a rare self portrait...I didn't use ref for it. I don't think it looks like me but my husband does. I guess he looks at me more than I look at myself!
Also -- some roughs for the next pages of AMPLE! Some lines of dialogue are from an old script, most were invented as I wrote. Very excited to have more time to work on this story once the month is over.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the second drawing in this sketchbook. Recently I picked up a copy of Shelley Jackson's 2002 short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy. When I saw the title of the final story -- "Fat" -- I was immediately on edge. I haven't read any of Jackson's other work. I needed to read this story first, or the dread of what it could be would loom over me while I worked my way through all of the text leading up to it.
I read it very quickly and anxiously, trying to be open to it, and as I kept reading I slowed down. I walked around my house a bit. Then I read it again, actually taking in the first pages. I really liked it. After I read it I drew this picture and cried. I don't know if what I got out of it is what Jackson intended, or what I'm "meant" to have gotten out of it. I'm not a big reader, though I'm trying to change this. So I feel I have to qualify all of this rambling with the fact that I'm not Good At Reading, and this is my reaction as a small fat person to a story about fatness written by a (presumably, from what pictures exist online) thin woman.
I can't read stories or comics that present themselves as being about eating disorders. My skin gets hot and I, often unjustifiably, feel angry at them. This is the first fictional story that connected with me and how I feel about my lifelong relationship with disordered eating, and what feels like triumph to me, not like I'm being condescended to or validated in my recovery only when I'm still in an acceptable body (what if the body I recover into, what if the body I want is not acceptable?).
I feel like since I've had this experience of connection, I can say "okay" and calm down and maybe go back to some of those stories that I was averse to. I mean, I initially read this story BECAUSE I was so averse to it, but it was already in my hands.
It's also fucked for me to think about how this book was published when I was 5, around the time my first troubles with my body began. How something that would so profoundly touch me was in the world all along!
Anyway! Sorry I haven't been uploading finished pages from When Death Comes lately! I'm scrambling to have everything inked before we start our move next week. You can expect a big batch of pages at the end of the month as I work on finalizing the comic for submission.
Thanks for reading, as always! <3 Sorry it was a long one
Comments
Snrrrk. Well, boobs are good. 😌 I especially love the third picture, just a pleasant, joyous look with a nice glow to it. And I think, whether it looks like you or not, it's a very lovely self-portrait. ❤️ On the note of Shirley Jackson, though, (and I still need to read her, she's one of the few horror classic authors I want to dig into, I've got a copy of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE and WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE), I think, historically and biographically, Jackson was a fat child who dealt with an overbearingly conventional mother who picked at her weight constantly, which led to her weight fluctuating in her teenage years (likely due to an eating disorder from abuse), and even moreso when her marriage was getting strained, when she was prescribed amphetamines. Anecdotally, she was definitely more fat than not. And a few Shirley Jackson fans I know, one a trusted fat trans one, would stand by that and claim her as one. So, if there's a sense of connection, Jackson was likely communicating via her own experiences there. Hope it might add a little more to your appreciation of the story. 😊 Hope this month's move takes it easy on you, and that next month, you can really dig into the flesh of AMPLE and WHEN DEATH COMES.
Beautiful work as always! <3 you are so my favorite artist
