#depression comix

depression comix #505

505

This one got posted on January 8.  I’ve been feeling quite down recently, so it’s been easy for me to channel this into depcoms which are basically just explanations of how I feel.  The bipolar character hasn’t appeared for a while so it was time to being her back. Also how easy it is to forget you need treatment just because the depression doesn’t affect you at that particular moment.  It was good to do a comic that was just came out and expressed something that people could relate to.

In 2012 I made a 16-page ashcan of drawings & small comics about my experience recently being diagnosed with depression and anxiety. I posted a few of the pages here on tumblr, but I decided to release the whole PDF for download on itch.io!

Some previews:

It’s free to download, but every donation is appreciated ✌🏼

depression comix #497

This one had been lingering on my computer for several months. I had an idea, and because I still haven’t learned my lesson I didn’t write it down before starting to draw it, and through the drawing process I forgot the text I was going to use. Then I looked at it and having forgotten the text thought, looks like I’m drawing erotica.  I redrew it, and it made no difference.

Sometimes this happens, and when it does it gets me a place where I can’t get past it and work on another strip for the same comic.  I pulled out a few depcoms in the meantime, but most of them recently seem really forced.  I even did a few strips for that other comic.

I knew I had to get past this one somehow.  So I redid the final panel to show more regret and played with the dialogue several times.  It suffers from too much dialogue now, but I trimmed a LOT of dialogue from it.  I have a nasty habit of repeating myself when I’m worried about not being understood, so I had trouble keeping it brief (I failed).

To help out, I did some research on the subject.  There isn’t a lot of research unsurprisingly, because of the taboo nature of the topic.  A person who uses sex as a crutch isn’t seen as a person who needs help but someone to be shamed, and it’s difficult for people to acknowledge the problem and seek help.  It’s not as obviously destructive as an alcohol, drug, or gambling addiction but it can be destructive in the long run.

http://www.depressioncomix.com/posts/497/

depression comix #498

You can read the whole strip here at the depcom site.

All of this is true.  A number of years ago, I met a wonderful person who just happened to have Tourette’s. Although she was an amazing person, she had never seen the inside of a movie theatre.  She lost her virginity in a one night stand where she was told to leave in the middle of the night because he was too embarrassed to be seen with her.  A lot of other shitty things happened to her too.  She taught me a lot, that a lot of the time, life just isn’t fair, and it can be unfair in such a profound way.

depression comix #500

Wow. I made it.

I didn’t think I would make it to 30.  But here I am at 500 more than eleven years later.

The thing is I don’t think I have much more to say.  I feel like I’ve finished this race by crawling over the finish line, not by running across it. I feel emotionally and mentally drained by this comic. I want to go on, but not be thinking about depression for comic ideas.

This was a hard comic to do.  I couldn’t focus on characters and plot lines so much, I had to focus on mental health issues and form characters around these themes. Each strip had to be able to stand up on its own without knowledge of any other strip in the series and be sufficiently generalized so that the characters, despite not having much depth, would be familiar.

500 seems like a good number. Thank you for making it here with me.

https://www.depressioncomix.com/posts/500/