Hi all.

We all have our ups and downs, and we all deal with them in different ways. My main way of dealing with times when I felt down was to set pen to paper and lay out my feelings through my comics. A large part of why I expressed myself this way was due to the artists I loved best.

Some of my seminal influences when I was just starting out drawing comics were artists like Robert Crumb, Peter Bagge, and Daniel Clowes. All of these artists wore their hearts on their sleeves, looked at themselves in a really critical light, and... seemingly just accepted the glaring flaws in themselves that they found, or otherwise just seemed to look at these flaws and say "hey, but that's me, and I am what I am."

As a very impressionable teenager, I took this at face value, and thought to myself "I am a loser who loves getting drunk like Buddy Bradley, I am a weirdo like Clowes and Crumb. I suffer from angst as well, getting this out on paper is the perfect way to help me deal with my problems!"

I found out quite a few years later that's not really how things work, and that mental health problems don't exactly go away by just acknowledging them. So I went on drawing comics this way for 15 years or so, with various Liam analogues serving as the main characters of my comics.

A few years ago, I decided that I wanted to "draw a big serious graphic novel" and that the best topic for this was how I became who I am today, the history of what I felt were my personal failings, and how I could become a better person. On reflection, this was a very poor topic for a comic, as even from the start, I was taking a deficit view of myself. From this position, all problems, whether imagined or not, are a mountain to overcome.

My friend Max Coombes and I were talking about drawing a few years ago and I mentioned that my view was that I felt like every day I was not drawing, I was actively losing my ability to draw, as opposed to refining my skills every time I sat down to draw. I guess that encapsulates how I viewed myself in a nutshell. Needless to say, this is not a healthy or productive way to view yourself.

The comic was going OK until I got to the point in the story that detailed the first year that I lived in China when I was teaching English. Without meaning to be too hard on myself, I made a series of bad decisions that culminated in me being locked in the headmaster of the school's apartment for about 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, and I couldn't deal with that memory when I got to that point. I still find it hard to think about that time in my life. Everyone was telling me that I shouldn't have gone to that school or that part of China, but I had to go my own way, and didn't want to take advice from anyone. Look where it got me.

I don't really want to go into details, but lately my mental health problems have been worse than ever. I have been pretty severely depressed this year, so the comics in this book follow that theme. They also look at more healthy ways to look at yourself. I have spent way too many years beating myself up about decisions I made years ago, and I don't want to do that anymore. It's not about the decisions you make, it's about what you do next, and how you pick yourself up after you have made bad decisions. Please try to be kinder to yourselves, everyone. Life is too short to be hard on yourself.

-Liam B, 2023