Image of Then This Happened... A diary about breast cancer

Then This Happened... A diary about breast cancer

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The cover of the book is right after we left the doctors office. We were just told my wife had to get a lumpectomy. We got in the car and she shouted. She doesn’t even remember doing it. But I remember it.

This is a daily cartoon journal. I wanted to get back into creating comics and animation. However, the day I started, we found out my wife had breast cancer. I could have just given up. But I needed to do something to help me deal with the news. So I drew. It's nothing special, the first one was just a drawing I did on my phone. But it felt so therapeutic to draw what I felt that I kept drawing something about each day to help me deal with it. It first it was on whatever I had around me to draw it on, my phone, a napkin, a post-it note. But over time as we dealt with it things became more clear and so did my comic journal.

My wife is now in recovery and cancer free. But drawing about what we went through each day I think really helped us get through it. It started a dialog that I don’t think would have been there otherwise.

The comics aren’t all about going through cancer. We still had our day to day lives and sometimes it was just about that, remembering something about each day.

It’s really easy just to say “Nothing happened today”. So I wanted to make sure I found something to look back on.

After a near death experience like that, we knew that we wanted to do something different with our lives... which will happen. So we started taking chances.

We wanted to meet people in the artist community in our city. I was posting these comics every day on a website I created called American Bandito. So I started a podcast on the website. I posted an ad on Facebook that basically asked artists within a 10-mile radius of where I lived if they wanted to be on it.

I started meeting artists through that ad. People I never knew before. And things started happening from there. One of the people that I talked to for instance, also did pop-up events. And she told me I should try it. So I did. I printed my comics as little books I made myself. It was almost a year later we were selling things at an art event and that became this collection of comics from my journal over that period of a year.