notes on Busybody #1
September 7th, 2023 10:25![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alibi_shopI wrote these because I just reprinted the first issue of my solo-anthology thing and the second one is finally underway. There's really no need to read these notes but I just like writing them.
"The Therapist": In its original black & white version, this was the first minicomic I ever made. It was 1999, I had gotten inspired by meeting a bunch of small-press cartoonists in Brooklyn, and I had just started living alone after a bad extended breakup of my first long-term relationship.
During the late middle section of that breakup, we had answered an ad from some university psychologists who were paying a little money for people to beta-test their new couples counseling idea; I'm still not sure exactly what that idea was (although in the form they had us fill out, there were some odd questions about whether each of us liked to move more slowly or more quickly when walking, talking, having sex, etc., as if maybe "life pace" was the secret factor in relationships). There was a little bit of actual conversation which didn't really go anywhere. Anyway, the interviews happened in some area of the university that seemed semi-unused, where the hallways were full of large machines from some other department like biology—fridges, centrifuges, etc.—a spooky effect that gave me the idea of a mad scientist doing couples therapy. Also I've always been a fan of The Fly.
Many years later I returned to the story and added the coloring for a slideshow reading at SF Zine Fest. Desperate for more material, I also wrote and drew "Discovery" for the same reading; I'm not really sure where that one came from, except that I'm so bad with names and faces in general, and so used to bluffing my way through conversations, that I could almost imagine literally being in that situation. It was maybe a little bit awkward that the audience for that reading, watching me vent about my love issues in fictional form, included the person I had just started dating... but we later got married so I guess it was OK.
"Refresher": I did this as an exercise where the prompt was to play with point of view. Strict narrator visual POV is something I was always skeptical of in comics, it seems to me like more of a movie device and it doesn't work well in movies most of the time either, but for some reason I felt better about it as long as there was a detachable head. The setting is an arbitrary fantasyland with elements stolen from probably dozens of other people's fantasy stories.
Shift Report: This is the first chapter of what I imagine to be an 11-chapter book. I'm hoping to keep serializing it in Busybody until I either get enough of it done for an actual book pitch, or find that I'm just not up to it. Half of it is in this real-time parallel-stories format, the other half is about following each of the main characters closer up.
Like "The Therapist", the first attempt at Shift Report happened in 1999, when the story takes place. I had just started what turned out to be a fairly short career in nursing, and I was working my first hospital job, on the night shift. At the same time I was starting to try to do comics, and when some of the people I had met in Brooklyn decided to do a 24-hour comics challenge (that is, stay up all night trying to do a 24-page story from scratch), I thought: "I have no idea what to do a story about. Maybe about this job? 24 pages, 24 hours... OK what if it's literally a 24-hour real-time story and each page is one hour and there are 4 strips per page, 3 nurses from 3 shifts plus a patient." Even if I hadn't already been sleep-deprived from the job, I couldn't have done much with that ambitious idea at the time, but before giving up I managed to draw enough to get a general idea of what it might be like and who the characters might be. Then by the time I revived the idea (and expanded it to 4 pages per hour), it had become a period piece.
The "Noel" character and the general nature of the job are autobiographical; the other people are all vaguely-remembered composites. Noel lives where I lived in Greenpoint, and the real job was at NYU Medical Center, what's now called Tisch Hospital, in Manhattan on 1st Ave. and 33rd St. The floor was an acute-care unit for people recovering from orthopedic surgery or neurosurgery, and the two patients in the uppermost strip have had two procedures that were common there: a total knee replacement, and a craniotomy (like for removing a brain tumor). Boyd, the craniotomy guy, is a bit loopy not so much from the surgery as from the high-dose corticosteroids (similar to prednisone) that are necessary to prevent swelling of the brain, although maybe he was just like that anyway, who knows.
A lot of hospitals have two 12-hour shifts; this one had three 8-hour ones, more or less (the evening one was longer, giving it some overlap with nights for practical reasons), and people argue about which of those is better, but I think just for story structure purposes here it's better to have three. It's common for entry-level people like Noel to start on the night shift; his idea that he might get onto the day shift after less than six months is unrealistic. The "shift report" is the transition time where the previous nurse passes on notes to the next nurse, either in person or by audio recording or both (p. 21, p. 25, p. 26). The other thing that has to happen once per shift is verifying the count of drugs in the controlled-substances cabinet (p. 24).
"The Hospital Follows Me" was drawn (without the coloring) for my dream series An Inside Job, which you can read the rest of here. I was no longer on the night shift by the time that dream happened, but you can see I was still haunted by night-shift vibes.
"The Therapist": In its original black & white version, this was the first minicomic I ever made. It was 1999, I had gotten inspired by meeting a bunch of small-press cartoonists in Brooklyn, and I had just started living alone after a bad extended breakup of my first long-term relationship.
During the late middle section of that breakup, we had answered an ad from some university psychologists who were paying a little money for people to beta-test their new couples counseling idea; I'm still not sure exactly what that idea was (although in the form they had us fill out, there were some odd questions about whether each of us liked to move more slowly or more quickly when walking, talking, having sex, etc., as if maybe "life pace" was the secret factor in relationships). There was a little bit of actual conversation which didn't really go anywhere. Anyway, the interviews happened in some area of the university that seemed semi-unused, where the hallways were full of large machines from some other department like biology—fridges, centrifuges, etc.—a spooky effect that gave me the idea of a mad scientist doing couples therapy. Also I've always been a fan of The Fly.
Many years later I returned to the story and added the coloring for a slideshow reading at SF Zine Fest. Desperate for more material, I also wrote and drew "Discovery" for the same reading; I'm not really sure where that one came from, except that I'm so bad with names and faces in general, and so used to bluffing my way through conversations, that I could almost imagine literally being in that situation. It was maybe a little bit awkward that the audience for that reading, watching me vent about my love issues in fictional form, included the person I had just started dating... but we later got married so I guess it was OK.
"Refresher": I did this as an exercise where the prompt was to play with point of view. Strict narrator visual POV is something I was always skeptical of in comics, it seems to me like more of a movie device and it doesn't work well in movies most of the time either, but for some reason I felt better about it as long as there was a detachable head. The setting is an arbitrary fantasyland with elements stolen from probably dozens of other people's fantasy stories.
Shift Report: This is the first chapter of what I imagine to be an 11-chapter book. I'm hoping to keep serializing it in Busybody until I either get enough of it done for an actual book pitch, or find that I'm just not up to it. Half of it is in this real-time parallel-stories format, the other half is about following each of the main characters closer up.
Like "The Therapist", the first attempt at Shift Report happened in 1999, when the story takes place. I had just started what turned out to be a fairly short career in nursing, and I was working my first hospital job, on the night shift. At the same time I was starting to try to do comics, and when some of the people I had met in Brooklyn decided to do a 24-hour comics challenge (that is, stay up all night trying to do a 24-page story from scratch), I thought: "I have no idea what to do a story about. Maybe about this job? 24 pages, 24 hours... OK what if it's literally a 24-hour real-time story and each page is one hour and there are 4 strips per page, 3 nurses from 3 shifts plus a patient." Even if I hadn't already been sleep-deprived from the job, I couldn't have done much with that ambitious idea at the time, but before giving up I managed to draw enough to get a general idea of what it might be like and who the characters might be. Then by the time I revived the idea (and expanded it to 4 pages per hour), it had become a period piece.
The "Noel" character and the general nature of the job are autobiographical; the other people are all vaguely-remembered composites. Noel lives where I lived in Greenpoint, and the real job was at NYU Medical Center, what's now called Tisch Hospital, in Manhattan on 1st Ave. and 33rd St. The floor was an acute-care unit for people recovering from orthopedic surgery or neurosurgery, and the two patients in the uppermost strip have had two procedures that were common there: a total knee replacement, and a craniotomy (like for removing a brain tumor). Boyd, the craniotomy guy, is a bit loopy not so much from the surgery as from the high-dose corticosteroids (similar to prednisone) that are necessary to prevent swelling of the brain, although maybe he was just like that anyway, who knows.
A lot of hospitals have two 12-hour shifts; this one had three 8-hour ones, more or less (the evening one was longer, giving it some overlap with nights for practical reasons), and people argue about which of those is better, but I think just for story structure purposes here it's better to have three. It's common for entry-level people like Noel to start on the night shift; his idea that he might get onto the day shift after less than six months is unrealistic. The "shift report" is the transition time where the previous nurse passes on notes to the next nurse, either in person or by audio recording or both (p. 21, p. 25, p. 26). The other thing that has to happen once per shift is verifying the count of drugs in the controlled-substances cabinet (p. 24).
"The Hospital Follows Me" was drawn (without the coloring) for my dream series An Inside Job, which you can read the rest of here. I was no longer on the night shift by the time that dream happened, but you can see I was still haunted by night-shift vibes.
