depression comix #415

You can read the full comic here.

Back to digitally drawing. Jacana is one of my favorite characters to draw (yes, some of them have names) because with drawing her I have to be especially careful. For the most part I never really tried to draw people outside of my own ethnicity before; my previous comics consisted of white or anime-styled characters and I really didn’t know how to approach ethnicities. I was afraid I would really mess it up — either draw my standard white person and colour it later with just darker skin or go the other way and draw a terrible caricature. But when Jacana was added to the strip, it made me pay real attention to the details of different people and my goal was that the ethnicity would be easily recognized without colour, and it would be devoid of all the stereotypical trappings that would make it offensive. I still have a lot to learn obviously, but Jacana was the first step in which I felt I could approach different races and be comfortable I was paying homage to their grace and beauty without patronizing them.

As for the topic itself, when I was at my downest, a lot of these kinds of thoughts were creeping in on me. Regardless of how people frame it, suicide does take effort, and one positive aspect of depression is that even though you have these thoughts it’s difficult to find the energy to pull it off. It takes actual spoons to prepare yourself for death, and if you don’t have any it might actually be saving your life.