HEY YOU
In Nov 2022 I decided to revise and redo the DODL site. I’ve always tried to do too much with it and after my divorce, I took everything down. Which. Well. Deleted eight years worth of work, more or less.
Now I’ve been going through things to try to figure out what I want to expose and what I want to shut down— the internet is a bastion of anonymity, but I am basically opening up my soul like a freaky meat wallet (pictured):
I scraped the eyes from the human images of the people that I’ve parted with on poor terms. Despite all my anger and resentment and/or my just fucking ghosting people, I don’t really want things to go back to them when people don’t know them. If people know, they know, but otherwise— they get anonymity.
Now, myself… well. I’m constantly living in my internal world and breaking off pieces to turn over in my hands. Autobio is just a weird way to look at and interpret the self and revisit experiences, I think, and they’re a great way to look at how I was thinking at one time or another. And at the same time, the view is so limited that it really just encapsulates things as if I were standing ten meters away, uncertain as to how to react. It showcases an inability to communicate that I’ve struggled with for years.
Do I overshare? Undershare? Or the most wicked combination of both?
The answer is the third option. I realized when I was rereading and reviewing all the comics as I censored things (and uncensored things) that I never actually communicated what was most important to me, keeping everything secret. The more intimate the look got, the more distant and quiet and cryptic the comic. But when it came time to blame myself for something, it got huge, vibrant, nasty— I loved to paint myself in this negative light, showing off the worst parts of me while hiding anything deeper.
Anyway! There will be essays like this throughout the comic as well. It’s a journal project now. Real autobio memoirs. Hopefully this time I won’t have to shred my project to bits!!