David Heatley no longer has an active account at Drawger. As you may know, Drawger is a subscription-based service and it could be that David Heatley decided not to continue using Drawger. That's okay. People come and go over time.
"My Brain is Hanging Upside Down," my 128-page full-color graphic memoir is now finished and is off to the printer. It comes out from Pantheon this fall. I'll be posting about upcoming events soon, but wanted to post today about the process of working on it. The book has taken me about 5 and half years to complete.
I started out drawing comic strips about my dreams in a self-published pamphlet called Deadpan in 2002. Once that started reaching stores and I started getting some responses and feedback, I decided I wanted to explore other parts of my story. At film school, I had done "portrait films," which were kind of cubist in nature. I would project 4 quadrants of the same person, shot from different angles, but doing the same activity. I got to thinking about trying to do a "portrait comic strip." Something I hadn't really seen. Ron Rege, Dan Clowes and Chris Ware were starting to do these multiple-strips-on-a-page comics, emulating a newspaper funnies section, but with narratives that connected to one another. I thought I would focus my pages around a single person. The various vignettes would add up to a portrait. I drew "Portrait of my Dad" for McSweeney's #13.
Next I wanted to try a good old fashion autobiographical diary strip, in the tradition of Aline Kominsky, Joe Matt, and Julie Doucet. I liked Jeffrey Brown's first book "Clumsy" a lot and was definitely inspired by his doodly line quality. But I felt like I could probably pack my entire sex history into one comic strip and leave it at that. I didn't want to be a cartoonist who was endlessly telling the same story about longing or heartbreak. I also thought it would be compelling to start at the very beginning and include all my early childhood sexual experiences, since it's all one big continuum. I drew my Sex History in about 6 months. And then I took 6 more months to painstakingly paint every panel with gouache. I think it elevated the strip beyond slapdash diary and closer to something an obsessive outsider artist might do. Sammy Harkham published the strip in Kramer's Ergot 5.
In 2004, I got a Xeric grant to self-publish Deadpan #2, which consisted of "Sex History," "Portrait of My Dad," and some dream comics. Even though most of the work had already appeared elsewhere, I wanted to see how the 3 sections spoke to each other, hoping it would comprise a kind of self-portrait. I think it worked okay, but realized I had a lot more I wanted to say to fully round it out.
I met Michael Homler, an editor from St. Martin's Press at a party in 2005 and he asked if I was working on any book-length comics. I immediately thought that I could expand what I'd done in Deadpan to fill a softcover collection. I pitched him a book called "I'm Open, " suggesting a few supplemental strips to round out the contents of Deadpan 1 and 2. I worked on this book for the next 2 years. But by the end of 2006, I realized that the book had changed completely. It became obvious that the scope of what I now had in mind didn't fit the original vision of the book I'd pitched to Michael. We parted ways amicably in 2006, and I'll always be grateful to him for his initial enthusiasm and support for my work.
I took some time to refocus the book and titled it "My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down," after a lyric from my favorite Ramones song. By 2007, with the book solidly structured and mapped out, I signed a contract with Pantheon. I was able to quit my long-standing day job that June.
The year of work on the book since then has been astounding. I've had every emotional experience possible. Rage so strong I needed to twist towels, scream, punch pillows (while my wife and kids were out for the day). A torrent of tears and grief. Unprecedented joy and a sense of my spiritual purpose on the planet. Most days have been simpler than that. Sitting in my chair and penciling, inking, or coloring. Day after day. Watching the pages slowly fill up with ink, then color. Watching the layout pages grow, then rearrange themselves until they landed in the correct order.
Here we are, almost June of 2008 and the book is done. Every last image and piece of text hand-drawn. I'm proud of this thing. It's a tome. It's an illuminated manuscript of my life. It's my statement to the world, broken into 5 chapters: Sex, Race, Mom, Dad, Kin. I've told it all. And now I'm spent.
I can't post too many images from the interior for obvious reasons, but I thought I'd post a visual tour through the process of finding my book's cover. That process alone spanned 2 years and generated countless sketches. I was looking at a lot of Tadanori Yokoo posters, trying to get a similar riot of graphic styles, clashing and coalescing. The images are roughly in chronological order and most are embarrassing. But I believe in leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Hope this is helpful to someone out there.
I'm satisfied with what it turned out to be and so grateful to be finished. Thanks for looking. Stay tuned for more!
