I was just going through the server logs and found another visitor to my cartoon series, A Coming Out Story, who came here via the following Google search:

coming out story garrett

This isn’t the first time it’s happened either.  I’ve had roughly…oh…a half dozen or so occurrences of someone coming here looking for my cartoon specifically.  That is, some combination of the cartoon name and mine used as a search string.  They don’t know where on the web to find it I reckon, but they know the name of the cartoon and they know the name of the guy who is doing it.

That’s just…amazing.  Considering I am not advertising this cartoon At All…  I know it’s been picked up on some cartoon aggregators…most notibly the list at gaycomics.free.fr.  I get lots of traffic from there every day…mostly people who just check the main page to see if a new episode is up.  For them I’ve just added a set of better progress bars to the page, so people can see how things are moving along, and be reassured that the cartoon hasn’t been abandoned because I am so slow at getting out new episodes.

But this is new.  I get hits all the time on "coming out stories" or "coming out" or "gay coming out story" or "gay teen coming out story"  But only recently…in the past four or five months, have I had any of those searches include my name…it’s always my last name…in the search string. 

That’s just…amazing…

I was noticing in the server logs this morning that someone came in from an ip address at the University of Maryland on the following Google search string:

coming out comic garrett

Well…that made my day right there.  Someone went looking Specifically for my cartoon series, A Coming Out Story. They didn’t know or couldn’t remember the title exactly, but they knew what it was about and at least the last name of the guy who did it. 

Nice.  Cartooning was the first love.  I gave up hope that I’d ever make a living at it for pretty much the same reason I gave up on being a professional photographer.  I’m just not competitive enough, and when I was younger too timid, shy and scared to try making a go of things as a freelancer.  Ironically, I ended up spending most of my life freelancing in other fields, only one of which, architectural modelmaking, even remotely touched on my artistic skills.  But there it is.  I gave up dreaming about seeing my cartoons in print anywhere.  Then along came the internet and I could just put up my own web site and see if my stuff attracted anyone.

It does.  I have put zero effort into advertising anything I do here and yet after just a few years I get hits on my cartoons from all over the world.  Not a torrent of hits.  But the steady nature of what I do get is more rewarding then you can imagine. 

Which is why I’ll be spending the weekend down in the art room…

…In which our teenage hero discovers that the parts that make up a brain aren’t necessarily on speaking terms with each other.

Click on the image above to go directly to the new episode…or Here to go to the series main page.  I did a little review of the panels I put up over the weekend and yesterday, made a few minor corrections, and started sending out the email notices.  If you didn’t get one and want to be put on the mail list let me know.

If you checked in yesterday or Sunday you should know that I shuffled the upcoming episodes around a tad and there is a different one now listed as coming next.  I’ll do the one on how I got my camera bug later…it doesn’t really fit at this stage of the story. 

The series divides into three parts really.  The first part is the one I’m still on right now, which is about how all these sexual feelings just suddenly seemed to start happening to me out of the blue and I started getting all twitterpated over one of my male classmates and all of a sudden I was just flailing around with all these really strong new feelings I was absolutely not prepared for, didn’t understand, and didn’t really want.  The second is how I stumbled around trying to avoid having to deal with the realization that I was really sexually attracted to guys, and that I was actually falling in love with this one particular guy.  And finally, how I finally came to terms with both of those things and how I moved from confusion and denial into self awareness and pride.

I have about 70 percent of all this scripted, but obviously I’m still working on it as I go along.  For one thing, I added a bunch of material to this episode after I started working on the pencils and wasn’t really satisfied with it.  But I really need to kick up the output here a tad…or I’ll still be working on this when I’m 90.

I just put the last of the pages up for episode 11 of A Coming Out Story… 

Whew…

Now I’m off to bed.  It’s late…I’m tired…  But…satisfied.  It’s a good sign when I can still stay up late working on this, and be chuckling to myself while I’m finishing it up…

More later…  For now I’m just happy to finally have this one behind me.  I really hope I don’t get this blocked ever again on this project…

I’m going to wait another day before I send out the email notices.  I want to look it all over tomorrow morning with fresh eyes first, just to make sure there isn’t anything major I want to correct first.  Then I’ll send out the email notices.  But for all you folks who read the blog…it’s all there…finally…

I was hoping to have episode 11 of A Coming Out Story up by the end of the weekend, but I just couldn’t.  I got to a point tonight where I knew that if I kept on going I wouldn’t be paying enough attention to what I was doing, so I broke off.  I still have two pages to go, and half of one left to finish.  But it’s looking good for tomorrow.

In the meantime, since this one Has taken so long, I’ve gone ahead and put up what I’ve finished so far. I’m so embarrassed that this one has taken me so long to get done, that I feel like I owe everybody who has kept on pinging this site for a new episode.  So I went ahead and put up what I managed to get done tonight. The rest won’t be up until late tomorrow (Monday) though.  So you can decide if you want to see what’s done so far and be left hanging until tomorrow, or go ahead and peek now. I won’t officially announce the new episode until it is all done.  At which point I’ll send out the notice to my mail list.

And…I have a complaint.  Firefox for Linux isn’t displaying the PNG files I put up correctly.  At least not the version I’m running here at Casa del Garrett on Mowgli. I was being so careful to get the web files just right…and they looked great on Bagheera (the art room Mac).  Then I come upstairs to Mowgli and bring them up and they look horrible. I’ve no idea if it’s a graphics library issue on my particular machine or what.  But the panels seem to display just fine on Firefox running on MacOS and Windows.  They also display just fine in the KDE Konqueror web browser that’s running on Mowgli.  So it isn’t the files I have out there.  If the lines look a tad fuzzy in your browser let me know what browser you are using, on which OS, please.  I may have to change the encoding on them if there is a big enough problem.

I have finally…Finally…finished the pencils and inks for episode 11 of A Coming Out Story!  And it only took me…what…a year and four months?   That obviously wasn’t an actual year and four months worth of work.  For the longest time I simply could not go anywhere near my drafting table, for some reason I still don’t really understand, other then so many stresses in my life just all came together all of a sudden and I just couldn’t even bear to look at my work area down in the art room.

But it’s coming together now.  I still have some work to do in Photoshop…adding the panels and text and touching up this and that.  It’ll be the touching up that takes the most time, because I want to get things as right as I can before I put anything up.  This episode comes to seven and a half pages.  That’s two rows of drawings per page, at about four panels per page.  But some pages had more then that.  I think I did 29 panels in all for this one.

I have it all scanned in.  Now I have to polish it up and put it online.  I’m hoping to get that done by next weekend.  Finally.  Yes…I know…I’ve promised finish dates before that I’ve let slide.  But the heavy sweat work was the pencilling.  That part of it really gives meaning to the phrase 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.  Actually, I’d say it was more like 2 percent verses 98 percent.   But now that’s done, the rest is just a matter of cleaning up.

I actually had to go back and re-do some of it after I’d been away from it for so long.  I wasn’t satisifed with many of the earlier panels and I re-drew a lot of it.  Then I added two more pages to the beginning of it.  But those two pages came out of my pencil pretty fast, compared to the rest of it.

The next episode may run to as many if not more panels, but I think it will go quicker because it tells a story more then this episode does.  The drawing for 12 will be a lot less repetative then 11s was.  You’ll see what I mean when I put 11 up.  Finally.

I’m still not finished with the pencils, but I decided to switch gears for a bit and do the inking on the pages that are finished.  I have three pages inked and scanned in now, and I hope to have the whole pencils and inking part done by Tuesday.  That’ll just leave the Photoshop part, which is where I touch things up a tad and add the word balloons and stuff.

Then…I’m going to Disneyworld.  For a few days.  A co-worker invited me to hang out with him and his family while they’re down there and with gasoline prices being what they are now I wanted to go Somewhere on my vacation after all.  My initial plan when I blocked out these two weeks of vacation was to just stay home and work on A Coming Out Story and take care of a few household chores.  But I need a change of scenery severely.  This has been a stressful year for me, and particularly in the days surrounding the election.  I’ve been so…angry…after Proposition 8.  I’m actually looking forward to immersing myself for a few days in a fantasy world where there’s nothing but blue sky and happy times all around.  I’d book a week in Pleasantville right now if I could. 

In lieu of that, I booked a room inside of Disneyworld at one of their onsite hotels and got a "park hopper" pass, which basically lets you wander around the entire enclave.  Otherwise your ticket only gets you into one theme park at a time.  I’ve never been to Disneyland in California yet, but Disneyworld is so friggin’ huge you can actually disappear into it and not come back out for days.  Which is my plan this time.  Last time, I just stepped a toe in, and wandered about Pleasure Island for an evening.  This time I’m just going to immerse myself in it.

For the first time in my life, I just want to leave the world behind.  At least for a while.  All my other travels have been about exploring the world…or at least the part of the world I can get to by driving down some random highways.  Now I just want to get far away from it.  I want to see if I can recapture, for a moment, what it felt like back when I was a kid, and the life I had ahead of me looked so wonderful…so full of promise…

When I get back I’ll finish up the artwork on episode 11 and get it posted.

Since last Monday I’ve finished half a page on Episode 11 of A Coming Out Story.  It’s slow work when all I have is the weekday evenings.  Tonight I was only able to finish one panel, but that got a page done and I can see the end of the pencil work on this one in front of me.

A few panels are some of my best pencil work so far.  There’s a close-up of a young me with my head on the pillow at the beginning of this one that I’m especially happy with.  And one pencil of the object of my affections that gets him pretty well right, as I remember him strolling through the hallways of my old high school.  I’m getting good now at drawing my main actors with a few simple lines.  We’ll see how well they translate into inks.

I’m able to have fun again with the whole situation I’m relating in my story.  I think now, that part of my cartoonist’s block this past year has been that it wasn’t fun revisiting it, because I was living it all over after again having found him again after 35 years of searching.  That shy seventeen year old is still there inside of me, and I’ve been walking on eggshells for over a year now, stressing all over again about what he thinks or doesn’t think of me.  It’s crazy…I’m a grown man now…but there it is.  So trying to get my sense of humor back about that part of my life so I could work on the story just hasn’t been do-able.  I’ve been stressing almost exactly like I was 35 years ago.  Maybe some day when I’ve finished A Coming Out Story, I’ll do one about how finding your first crush turns you back into the kid you were all over again, and all the things in your past you thought you’d settled and resolved you only thought you had.

The other thing that may have got me motivated again is a couple books I’m reading written by gay men who were imprisoned in Britian back in the 1950s for "homosexual offenses" or "gross indecency".  I’m into a book my Peter Wildeblood, Against The Law, in which he gives an account of his being caught up in the Montagu scandal of 1954 and his subsiquent imprisonment.  Part of what I want to relate in my own story is how it was I managed to navagate my way to self acceptance without hating myself, and how easily it could have gone the other way for me.  I was lucky in so many ways, but mostly in that.  Because I fell in love, and because the guy I fell in love with was a decent, good-hearted guy who was good to me, I never hated myself. 

But that was purely accidental.  I came of age just after Stonewall, and just before the APA removed homosexuality from it’s list of mental illnesses, and the popular culture all around me constantly told me I was some sort of disgusting, degenerate monster.  It was seeing my sexual orientation in the context of being in love, that saved me from that.  It was pure luck.  And I was fortunate also, very fortunate, to be coming of age right when the modern gay rights movement was taking off, just after Stonewall.  Ten years earlier, and I might have been locked up like Wildeblood was.  Or sent off to a mental hospital.  That would probably have killed me.  It killed a lot of people. 

And the hate is still killing people.  When I was a gay teenager, gay kids got absolutely no adult guidance while making that difficult transition from child to adult.  The only thing we were taught then was that it was tragic, if not utterly disgusting, that we existed.  It is barely any better nowadays.  The religious right is fighting a furious, bitter, scorched earth battle to keep gay kids from accepting themselves and growing up to live healthy and whole adult lives.  We have to hate ourselves, as much as they hate us.  One thing I want to try to do with my story is get across the message that gay kids need to be loved, like all children do.  They don’t need to be taught to hate themselves.  It is a crime against humanity, to teach a child to hate themselves.  Reading Wildeblood’s story reminded me of that other reason why I wanted to get my own story down, in my own way.

For some reason I was suddenly able today to sit down at my drafting table and finish two pages of the next episode of A Coming Out Story.  Just…bang, bang bang…one panel after another…just…came out of me.  The first hour or so of it was very difficult, but there was none of the reluctance to immerse myself in the storyline that I’d been experiencing for the past year or so and after a while it just kept coming.  Two pages of good quality pencils.  It was as though I’d never stopped drawing it a year ago.

I’ve got another two and a half pages to go and the pencils are done.  After that, the inks should only take about five or six working days and the Photoshopping another two or three.  By working days, I mean solid four hour stints at the drafting table.  That’s a working day when all I have to give it is the time I have after work, or weekends.

I have no idea where all this just suddenly came from.  I’ll probably be pondering it for the next few days.  So much has happened since I started this little tale.  So much, just over the past couple months.  But I was able to churn out pages of this thing during other times of stress in my life.  For some reason I just couldn’t so much as bear to look at this thing for a long, long while.  Now I can.  And…it’s fun again.  I think that’s probably the biggest thing.  I was banging out panels and quietly laughing to myself at the humor in the storyline as I drew them.  It was a fun I haven’t had in a long time.

I’m going out for a brief walk now.  I need to take a break.  But I feel as if I could do some more when I get back inside.

I’ve lived with this creative urge inside of me all my life and I still don’t understand it.  It comes and it goes in its own good time is all I can figure.

[Update…]  Did two more panels before turning in for bed tonight.  I keep this head of steam up and I’ll have the next episode out the door before the end of the month for sure…

I get email…

Hi, just wondering when your next installment of A coming out story will hit the gay comic list

Gulp…

Hi ***…

I’m so embarrassed about this one taking so long.  Every night I see people all over the world pinging that page to see if there is a new episode up and I just cringe.

It’s in pencils stage now, and the work is slow for somewhat personal reasons.  I don’t want to give away too much of what happens in the story, but basically the object of my affections in the story vanished from my life, quite suddenly, after high school.  I started doing the cartoon, in part, to get something of that part of my life, that I’d never been able to put to rest since, out of me.  Then after decades of searching, I actually found him.  We’ve been chatting off and on ever since and it’s churned up a lot of old feelings I thought I’d laid to rest.

So it’s been a bit of a struggle to keep going with this…but keep going I will.  I just need to get back into the groove of it again.  I have it all plotted out…I just need to get on with it.

Thank you for asking.  I really appreciate the interest people are taking in that story.  If you like, I can put you on a mail list I have to notify people when a new episode is out.  I am going to try really hard to get the next one finished by the end of this month at the latest.

-Bruce

I really need to just get on with it…  Especially now…

Happy National Underwear Day…!

A Coming Out Story…Episode 10  

Actually, the real object of my affections back then wore BVDs.  Most days I could tell anyway.  But I thought Jockeys were sexier back then (though I wouldn’t admit it) and so I used a little artistic license there. 

Back when I was still trying to convince myself that I wasn’t gay, oddly enough I could tell exactly what kind of underwear a guy was wearing just by getting the slightest glimpse of the waistband…usually in gym class.  If I could see enough of the stitching through a guy’s gym shorts, or if he was wearing his pants tight enough, I could tell that way too.

"T.K." used to drive me absolutely nuts whenever he was out on that tennis court.  Not only did he wear his gym shorts very tight…tight enough that I could clearly see the lines of his underwear…he’d wear a loose t-shirt that didn’t quite go all the way down his waist.  So every time he took a swing at the ball I’d get a glimpse of his stomach…and that little bit of elastic waistband.  At 17, it was electrifying.  For the life of me I couldn’t turn my eyes away.  But I knew I wasn’t sexually attracted to guys. 

If you’d asked me anything back then about women’s lingerie I wouldn’t have had clue one.  Matter of fact, I still don’t.  For a bit of fun…hang out at the Victoria’s Secret at your local shopping mall and watch guys as they walk by.  Most of them just can’t not look…even if their wives or girl friends are with them.  And some are completely oblivious.  That would be me, usually.  Too bad there isn’t a men’s equivalent store chain.  I’d make it a point to stroll past its window every time I walked in a mall with one.

At the end of episode ten, my libido warns my teenage self that things get more complicated after they invent designer underwear.  But it’s a happy complexity…

Episode ten of A Coming Out Story is up now…

…In which it begins to dawn on our hero that resistance may be futile.  Click Here or on the graphic above to go directly to episode ten.  Or click Here to go to the main series page.

Coming up: Episode 11 – An Intervention Moment.  In which Left Brain and Right Brain try to reason with this Libido character.  Probably sometime in August, after my trip out west.

Okay…I’ve finished the pencils and the inks on episode ten of A Coming Out Story and scanned all the pages in.  There are five pages comprising twenty-four panels in this next episode.  All that’s left now is the Photoshopping, which I’ve already started on.  That amounts to just some touching up, adding some shadows and the crosshatching (yes…I cheat on the cross hatching now.  But it saves me weeks of work per episode…) and adding text and word balloons and panel frames.  I should be done and have it posted by tomorrow evening, barring some major problem.

I’ve been giggling the whole time I’ve been drawing this one.  I hope its contagious. 

Looks like I’ll have the pencils for episode eleven done tonight…if I’m not being distracted by this really cute new neighbor that I have that is.  I’d hoped to have them done by Sunday night but it just wasn’t possible.  But as long as I can start inking on Wednesday I can have eleven up by the end of this weekend.

I hope those of you reading this series get as many giggles while reading eleven as I’ve had drawing it.  This one’s been a lot of fun to draw.  It’s about something your gay neighbors go through during adolescence…that period of time when (if you’re a guy, say) you start realizing that you’re looking at other guys in a sexual way and it’s embarrassing and you don’t want to and you keep trying to stop you’re utterly unable to stop.  Your eyes just keep straying back to that really cute guy, and then they wander all over his body like a pencil sketching out every line and curve…and you catch yourself doing it and you think ‘stop it’ and you look away and then a few moments later your eyes just start straying right back again…  I can laugh about it now, but back then it was very, very irritating…

I finished episode nine of A Coming Out Story last weekend, and I have a road trip coming up in another couple of weekends.  I’ll be on the road for most of the month of July, first going to visit some friends in the mid-west, then out to the Four Corners area to explore a tad more, then to California and a visit with my brother, then to Portland Oregon and the O’Reilly Open Source Developer’s Conference.  Given my past performance getting out new episodes it seemed a sure bet that I wouldn’t have anything more up until August at the earliest.  But I have a head of steam up now, and I really really want to get episode ten up before I leave for the west.  It’s one of several upcoming ones I’ve been chafing at the bit to do since I started scripting this series in 2005.

So I’ve been trying hard to push everything else in my life aside for a couple hours every night after work.  Naturally several things suddenly popped up that needed my immediate attention and I thought I was once again letting precious drawing time pass on by.  But somehow I’ve managed to finish half the pencils on episode ten already.  I’m shooting to have all the pencils done by the end of this coming weekend.  Then I can have the episode up for sure by the following weekend.  Or even sooner.

I’ll probably take my portable drawing board (it has a parallel attached to it), my small scanner, the Wacom tablet and drawing supplies along with me on the trip.  I might be able to get another episode out while I’m on the road.  It really bothers me that I’ve been working on this thing since 2005 and it’s 2007 I only have nine episodes up.