I didn’t notice the parallel between Slocum holding the galvanized pipe and Johnny holding the sledgehammer until after I drew it. Panel 6 should have been Johnny standing in the same attitude as Slocum in panel 2. In case you haven’t read the book, Johnny is not threatening his uncle with the sledgehammer; he’s just knocking the tire off an old Lincoln Town Car.
A really difficult comic for me, almost on the level of difficulty of “To You, as a Woman.” It’s just so sad. It didn’t help that, the day before I started working on it, The Man asked me to watch The Green Mile, which I had never seen (or read—I was an avid Stephen King fan as a young person, and the publication of the book coincided with the end of my love affair with his work) and it really crystallized the feeling of being overwhelmed by pain and suffering and man’s inhumanity to man. There’s not a lot of hope here: Slocum is clearly irredeemable, and Johnny’s path to responsibility is guilt-ridden and regrettable. Also, many people know that I spent 5 years taking care of a friend with a traumatic brain injury, so that pain is all too familiar. Plus, trying to draw the same character in a variety of poses always stresses me out.
Nevertheless, she persisted.
It took an entire week to create this comic, working in bits and pieces because the whole was too terrifying to contemplate, but I powered through and finished around 3 a.m. Sunday night. Then I uploaded it. I uploaded it 6 times. Every time I uploaded it, I saw a mistake and felt compelled to go back and fix it. The first 5 were kind of little: 2 of them were missing apostrophes, and 1 was that Slocum didn’t have an ear in panel 5. But the 6th time, the time I said, “OK, now it’s got to be right,” I noticed a mistake in the title. Among my writer friends, I’m considered a pretty excellent copyeditor, but somehow I had gotten through the entire process (I drew the title first) without noticing that “American” was misspelled. That’s when I gave up and went to sleep because it was almost 4 a.m. and if I’d overlooked that, who knows what I might have overlooked, and how would it be possible to discover it in any case?
The next story in the book is a lot more pleasant, although it also involves gross bodily injury of the sort that will likely affect the character for the rest of his life, but at least it doesn’t feature any psychopaths.
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