On animals

🐄 Ammit is the name of an Egyptian demon whose body is comprised of a crocodile, lion, and hippo – the three most fearsome animals of the land. She devours the hearts of those deemed impure upon death. I learned about her in a book I got at a used bookstore. I really liked how she’s put together, it made me think about how animal-hybrids are common throughout time but how we depict them shifts with culture and taste. 

🦘 When I was a teenager I was bewitched by surrealist games. Most have heard of exquisite corpse; I really liked making dadaist poems. There’s something enthralling about surrendering a bit of the process to someone or something else. I spoke a bit about this in a recent talk I did for the New York Comics Symposium about collaboration – I categorized surrealist games (a bit cheekily) as collaboration with the universe or luck. 

🐗 I recently saw a film called Chronovisor. Not a film everyone will enjoy but I liked it a lot! The main character is a monk-like figure who spends most of the film reading in the library. It made me want to go to the library and look at books.

🐭 My picture book, Young Cat, Old Cat, was released in late September. The book is about living with and grieving cats. In it I reflect on how we mythologize our pets and how a pet’s life span can define our own lives. A child asked me, after a somewhat bumbling storytime in New York, what my favourite thing to draw was. I said “animals,” which I don’t think I’d formally realized before.

🐍 I recently participated in Wordfest, in my hometown of Calgary. One of the events had a unique structure: 6 authors speak for 7 minutes each on a theme, in our case, animals. Though the participants came from different backgrounds (poetry, non-fiction, memoir, etc), there were some interesting echoes across the pieces. There was a curiosity about how animals perceive the world and a questioning of “human supremacy.” I read my short comic, Boundless.

This week, I set out to visually explore animals – the mythology, their meaning to us, our depictions of them. The idea of animals is powerful to humans, possibly even more so than the animals themselves. I’m sharing some of the results throughout this post. The process was a little more intentional than my typical sketchbook work – this is where the archive comes in. I used books I bought from the University of Toronto Book Sale as “prompts.” I just picked up whatever looked interesting, including a medieval bestiary, a Morgan Library compendium of historical children’s book illustration, and a coffee table book on ancient Egyptian drawing. 

Further reading on the topic: Why Look At Animals? by John Berger, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.