Loss 28/101: Loss through art and the death of a cartoonist: Carol Tyler

#040. Carol Tyler is an award-winning and self-described ‘cartoonist and comics-book person’ from Cincinnati, who is known for her autobiographical comics and being married to Justin Green.

Loss #28 of 101 - Loss through art and the death of a cartoonist.

The genre of autobiographical comics is completely new to us. This genre is all about telling personal stories in the form of comic books or comic strips. Carol and her husband Justin Green have been at the forefront of the movement to create these since the 1970s. 

Claire first connected with Carol when she reached out to say her latest comic book was on a similar 'mission to explore grief' as The Silent Why. Her new, unique, comic project explores the landscape of grief set in a place she has called Griefville. Sadly, between our initial connection and recording our conversation Carol’s husband, Justin, died of cancer; adding another element of grief to our chat in this episode.

Justin Green is described as “an American cartoonist who is known as the ‘father of autobiographical comics’," best known for his 1972 comic book: Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary.

We feel very privileged to share her story of loss through her own bereavements (eg. losing eight people in four years, including her parents and two sisters), her art (especially Griefville), and more recently losing her husband, which she is processing in public alongside many admirers of his work.

Throughout this conversation you’ll hear Carol refer to a number of published works, and we’ll post images on our social media too, such as:

• The Hannah Story: currently out of print
• Soldier’s Heart: https://amz.run/5lG7 
• Fab4Mania: https://amz.run/5lG8 
• The Job Thing: https://amz.run/5lG9 
• Late Bloomer: https://amz.run/5lV6 

To follow Carol and her Griefville progress, including the trees she mentioned, visit: https://www.facebook.com/carol.tyler.18 

More about Carol:
https://twitter.com/CarolComix
https://womenincomics.fandom.com/wiki/Carol_Tyler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Tyler

Transcript

Carol: 0:00

'Hello, my name is Carol Tyler and I'm here to talk about grief, loss, comics grief, the loss of a comics legend, and a lot of other things.'

Claire: 0:16

Hello, you! And welcome to The Silent Why podcast. We've got an episode with a difference today and a lot of exciting stuff ahead in the next hour. As you might already know, we're podcasting with a mission to find 101 different types of loss to hear from those who've experienced them, hoping to open up conversations and understanding around loss and grief. I'm Claire Sandys...

Chris: 0:35

I'm Chris Sandys, and in this episode, we're looking at loss and grief through the creative eyes of Carol Taylor from Cincinnati. She's a'cartoonist and comics book person' (as she describes herself), she has received multiple honours for her storytelling, including one of her artworks actually being put on the top 100 Comics of the 20th century.

Carol: 0:54

'I've always felt duty bound, to be honest, to be authentic, to tell the truth, and also understand that we have a very short shelf life. And if there's a story that feels like it needs to be told, by golly, I'm gonna tackle it.'

Claire: 1:09

She's a cartoonist known for her auto biographical comics, a genre of comics that was completely new to us. For others of you who also haven't come across this area of art before, autobiographical comics are pretty much what they say on the tin. But here's some information to give you some context on Carol's world.

Chris: 1:25

So autobiographical comics are personal accounts and stories in the form of comic books or comic strips, they first became popular in the underground comix movement(that's comics spelt with an x), and are very different to mainstream comics, in that they're often socially relevant or satirical in nature. And the content is forbidden to mainstream publications, for example, in them you might find explicit drug use sexual content and violence. They became popular in the US in the late'60's and '70's, and in the UK in the '70's. And since then it's become much more widespread. Carol and her husband, Justin Green are at the forefront of the movement to produce these in the '70's. As you'll hear in this episode.

Carol: 2:07

'I dipped the pen in and started to work the red ink and I started to cry and the drips from my eyes were falling on the page, and they hit those red lines and I grabbed a tissue and I was dabbing. Dabbing the red lines. So what you see in the comic are the smears, from the tears, my first foray into serious deep emotional, addressing loss on the page.'

Claire: 2:33

I first connected with Kara when she got in touch to highlight we were on similar missions; us with our podcast on loss and her with her new unique comic project exploring the landscape of grief set in Griefville, a new comics that started after eight people that she was close to all died in a period of about four years

Carol: 2:51

'Because none of the old griefy things like the Grim Reaper or the River Styx, none of that stuff had any relevance to me. So suddenly, my head popped open one night, and it went on for a couple of years and I just had to be awake and try to understand it.'

Claire: 3:07

In between our first zoom chat in April and our podcast recording with her in June, Carol sadly lost her husband of 38 years to cancer, adding another quite unique element of grief to our conversation today.

Chris: 3:18

Justin Green is described online as 'an American cartoonist who was known as the father of autobiographical comics, a key figure and pioneer in the 1970s generation of underground comics artists. Best known for his 1972 comic book, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary.'

Carol: 3:35

'The heart of the man, the generosity his enormous talent, beauty, all of those assets just, that's him. And my thoughts for him, and my feelings for him are nothing but gold leaf, it's golden, he's a gold leaf artist. He's a great man.'

Claire: 3:51

Carol still wanted to chat to us and we feel very privileged to share her story of loss through her own bereavements of losing her parents, her two sisters, her art, especially her new project Griefville (hopefully out next year), and more recently, her husband, which she's processing alongside public grief for many admirers of his work.'Because life is not all sombre, so of course, death and grief and mourning is not going to be all sombre either.'

Chris: 4:14

Throughout this conversation you'll hear Carol refer to a number of published works, such as

Claire: 4:19

Hannah's Story.

Chris: 4:20

A story that tells the story she uncovered of her sister's tragic death when she was two years old.

Claire: 4:24

Soldier's Heart.

Chris: 4:26

This was about her dance experiences during World War Two and his undiagnosed PTSD.

Claire: 4:31

Fab4mania.

Chris: 4:33

Carol's obsession with The Beatles told through the eyes of her 13 year old self and the Chicago concert when she saw them live.

Claire: 4:40

The Job Thing.

Chris: 4:41

Where Carol explores jobs from hell. And also some of Justin's works, including'Justin Green's Sign Game', and'Binky Brown meets the Holy Virgin Mary'. We'll put links to these in the show notes if you want to see examples of that artwork while you're listening.

Claire: 4:55

Plus, she taught me a new word that I'm loving -'griefy'.

Chris: 4:58

Carol get things underway by speaking into the confusion around being a cartoonist, what it is exactly that she does, and more about the sort of autobiographical comics she's drawn over the last few years...

Carol: 5:11

Well, what do you put on the line where it says 'please let us know your profession'? And when I say cartoonist, it brings up in people's minds everything they think about cartooning, and that is political cartooning or funny animals saying funny things. So cartooning is a very broad term. But what I do is tell stories, I write everything, and it's long form, in other words, over a series of pages, not panels or comic strips you find in the newspaper, and not single panel gag cartoons, but over a series of pages. I break down exactly what it is I'm trying to convey, whether it's a story about a funny thing happened with my daughter, or trying to talk about, like I did a strip, comic strip and they appear in magazines, there are magazines and there have been formats over the years that allow for this. So it's a full page like 8.5 x 11, just think of any magazine. In there, you might find a 10 page story I write about getting an ear infection while I've got a toddler on an aeroplane, and I have to get off the plane, but I have no money, no diapers, nothing but I'm stuck with this terrible-two's toddler in an airport, but I have a serious sinus infection. It blew up my eardrums. So it turned out to be 10 pages of like going through the difficulties of that. But then at the same time, this book I did is 364 pages took 10 years to do, I was trying to figure out why my dad was such a crabby old son of b***h my whole life, excuse my language, but he was one of those cantankerous sorts from World War Two. And he never really spoke maybe two or three words, and he was always busy and wonderful that he called up after my mom had a stroke, and he just talked a blue streak and told me everything about World War Two. And he was in his 80s. Woah, what? I grabbed a pad of paper and I wrote everything down, and then I wanted to know more. So went to investigate about it and came to find out there were a lot of empty spaces in his story. And in the pursuit of that, that my quest to find out what the heck happened to him. Now remember I'm drawing everything out visually, all of this, I just said it's all drawn. So I find the form of the piece and then I draw pictures for it. Turned out he had what they call PTSD today, he had shell shock during the Battle of the Bulge. And they didn't recognise that as a problem TBI(Traumatic Brain Injury), they didn't recognise that back then, you just had to get back on the line, get back to it, quit complaining. And so he did that. But what that did was you have a tormented guy, coming home stateside, came home to a wife and daughter, and within a year that daughter died. And so I also had to investigate what happened with that, which meant that I had two parents, both parents traumatised by something that happened in their lives. The story about my my mom talking about losing her daughter, I had done that I actually folded that into soldier's heart. But I had done that story as a 12 pager about a decade earlier, it appeared in an anthology magazine, people saw it, and that was wonderful, but I wanted it to be within the context of where it really happened. And that was after dad came back from the war. They didn't talk about their trauma, what happened to them. And then once I figured it out, it explained everything, all of their guarded behaviour, all the terse moments, all the strange outbursts, that all made sense. So it was my job as a'cartoonist, comics person', to sort through all that to interpret what mattered to telling the story. Because the challenge is you can't just start with the first factor the first moment and then just plough through and tell everything because it's literature. It's visual literature. So the whole selecting process and juggling the panels and chapters and trying to make sense, you know, it's quite a job. In the meantime, my marriage had fallen apart. When Dad told me this, I was in the middle of personal turmoil. And then towards the end of telling their story, they all were getting ill because they're in their 90's now, and then my sister got ill, a sister who did not expect to get ill, because she was so robust. And so in the context of what's going on since I tell stories about my personal life, and then I have personal things going on. And it turned out that the subjects of my story all died while I was telling the story. So you have the 'how do I approach this?' And 'how can I grieve them?' but yet I want to tell stories, I want to tell their story, but I didn't want this storytelling to be therapy.

Chris: 10:19

On that point of storytelling, which is obviously so key. How much do you think is, is you processing this trauma? And how much is it good for you? And how much at the same time are you balancing it with thinking of an audience of who, who do I want to tell this story to?

Carol: 10:33

Well I always feel like the story will find its audience Is that where things started with you having this sort of because if it's based in truth, and it rings authentic, if a person's interested, they're going to want to seek that out. So I don't really think of an audience. But I did think when I was doing Soldier's Heart, I thought, oh, you know, this would be good for veterans who deal with PTSD. I went to one of those veteran events during the Iraq War, maybe, and the people did not like that story, because it depicted a man who was suffering from PTSD, 'and don't you know, that warriors are not supposed to have that'. So I realised that, oh, God, you know, the very audience I need is on the other side of that patriotic stuff. It's the people who are struggling with just getting through the day. But how I got it out there, one of the things I did was, while I was kind of in the tail end of the book, and promoting on top of everything, I taught a class on visual storytelling, Sequential Art at our local college, and I set up part of the semester where I would bring veterans to the classroom and have the kids interview them and try to extract some details so that they could tell the story. You know, especially students, college kids, 'it's all about me! My life!' So I said, 'No, there's other people out there'. So let's, we'll do the veterans thing. So I did, I brought veterans in and for so many of the veterans in the students, oh, gosh, the connection was very powerful. And many of the veterans had never spoken to their families about the trauma interest in loss and grief? Was it from that phone call? Or did they suffered, but they were able to tell the kids, so it's very transformative experience for my students and me, woah I'd go into class, you know, would blow my head off. So growing up, I had heard my dad with his funny little anecdotes about everything, and then when it came to the military, it was you have that before that anyway? like, 'oh, yeah, big joke'. When it came to doing the book, I In 1993, my dad decided at age 72, he was going to sell houses, realised what he was talking about was training, stateside stuff, but the actual combat, that's when he had called me sell everything, go up in the mountains and build a cabin. that time broke down the phone, the first words he said to me, were 'rivers of blood'. I'll never forget it. And I was like, Okay. Went to help my mom get rid of a mountain of stuff she'd'What? Hello?! Wait, I haven't spoken to you in years, on any level more than 'Hey, how you doing?' Now you're telling me rivers of blood! What does this mean?' collected. My sister and I were going to help her go through stuff. We're cleaning out the house, and I said, 'What's this box?' And she's like, 'Oh no, don't touch that, I can't deal with it.' Here's this box that's sending out major emotional difficulty for my mother. I said, 'Well, we don't have to' and she says 'no, go ahead and open it up'. And it was all of Anne's stuff, Anne is my sister that died, that I knew existed because we saw her picture and photographs, but she was never spoken about at all. After us kids were all gone off and doing our things and had families. My mom, in a prayer group, she finally let her guard down with the prayer group and started to grieve. Okay, this happened in 1947. So it was 1990's that she started to grieve, started to open that thing she had to slam shut. She lost her daughter. My dad was home from the war, he was messed up. They just had to forge on, like I said, but the official narrative that we'd been told our whole lives, we knew, we all knew she got burned, hot water scalded her, that was it, that was all we ever heard. What we're hearing from my mother, when we opened the box, was a few more details, serious details about how she... it's difficult for me to talk about... but it's important. She had emotionally bonded with my sister, her daughter, because dad was off at war, and she was living in a hell house. My dad's parents were mean, not the dad, the mother, so her mother-in-law(argh!) and she did not like her in my mother was from a part of the United States that's considered like lowbrow. So she was from Tennessee, but she was a self made woman. She went to business school, she got a great job. She got out of poverty, her parents were pig farmers. So it'd be think about Yorkshire or something like that and having to come to London. So they looked down on her and they gave her a hard time. And so she really really got close to her daughter. And then when my dad came home, my dad said, are getting out of here. So it took them a while because there were no apartments but they finally got their own place. And then she had another baby and then was pregnant with a third and then one day she was fixing supper and dad was at work and Anne reached up and she wanted to help mommy, so she quick, grabbed like a footstool and got up there and grabbed the boiling water for spaghetti or something and it just scolded her. And my mom, there was no phone, there were no telephones, so she grabs her daughter, and she's yelling;'Help! Help! Somebody help me!' There was no ambulances, no 911, no calling for emergency. Somebody finally heard her wailing and a lady came in, took care of the little one, my sister Jenna. They ran her to the hospital, somebody got a hold of my dad at his work. They took her into the hospital and bandaged her up and the nuns or the sisters or sister nurses said go home, she'll be fine. And they had her all bandaged up and she waved to mommy and daddy and 'I'll see you tomorrow'. And so I'm having to draw all this, remember, drawing this, putting the context together about how, how it was that this moment came and what it felt like for them. So they got on their Sunday-best the next morning and went into the hospital to pick up their daughter. And the lady says,'Oh, we have her listed as deceased'. You know, like,'what? No, no, no, she just waved to us. We're supposed to pick her up this morning. Argh!' So what happened was, they gave her some kind of medication, and they laid her on her back. See these are the types of things I had to research; what were hospitals like back then? Well, you had a series of beds all in one big open space, there were no individual rooms and not like today. So she was in the children's ward and one of these little beds and they later on her back, at night she aspirated and choked. So she died alone in a weird room with a two way glass. So then they had to then go to get a casket- 'Wait? What I have to go buy a casket? I have to buy a little outfit for her to wear, in the ground? It doesn't make any sense!'

Chris: 18:02

What's going through your head, what's on your heart, while you're turning the story into illustration?

Carol: 18:08

You can't be emotionally so embroiled that you can't function because it's very, very heavy material. But you know, I was thinking of things like technical stuff that can always fall back on that like, alright, well, if I'm going to show the 1940s maybe I should use like a sepia tone ink. Or if I'm going to show my sister and I helping her in the current time, which was the 90's, what would be kind of the colours, you know, teal and mauve or maybe I'll go with a green or something like that, to indicate that, what visual motifs can I use? Because I was I knew I was going to have to steer the audience through different eras looking back, being in the present, and then my mom's reflection would feel different than my narrative voice reflection. So yeah, there's a lot of things to juggle. And then there's the tedium of like, alright, dip the pen in the ink, put the ruler there measure measure, I want the panel to be like, let's say the image size is 10 by 13, the papers 11 by 14, I'm gonna make a half inch margin, blah, blah, blah. So the mundane aspects of creating the visual presence on the page. And then you've got, you know, on the side, I got my line paper scribbling out trying to do blocking, like in other words in the first panel, I'll write this, second panel, how about what needs to be said here? Because there's also a trick, when you do visual storytelling, you don't say it, and then show the same thing, you say it and then you have to show something that hints at what's coming next, which hints at what's going to be said next, and so on. So it flows like a river. It's more like syncopated rhythms. There's things that I've had to perfect over the years, so that you flow along with the story and yet there are moments that you can stop and linger and grab a hold of. So this one in particular, in juggling the elements of looking back and forward and all that, and full colour by the way, in ink, you kind of know where the electric parts are, and where the dumb parts are. Oh I got to draw a street car here, okay, I draw a street car, oh, I need to draw the moment where she gets burned, how do I do that? At the time when I was drawing that there was a tragedy in our town. And a girl had been abducted. And it was the funeral. They were televising it live. I was watching that I have a little girl. It was like, connect the dots, the little girl, a little girl. It just brought so much emotion to the fore, I couldn't handle it. I just turned everything off. And I stood in front of my drawing table. I zeroed in on the fact that I'd have to draw my sister with the water boiling, coming on her and then her burn. And as I was drawing, I was so distraught. I thought I got to show the burn, I'm gonna use red ink, I dip the pen in and start to work the red ink and I started to cry and the drips from my eyes were falling on the page. And they hit those red lines and grabbed a tissue that was dabbing, dabbing, the red lines... so what you see in the comic are the smears... from the tears... there's one for you ad copy guy - smears from the tears! Yes. This is the first my first foray into serious deep emotional addressing loss on the page. But that comic that I did, isn't that funny, it's a comic, landed on the top 100 Comics of the 20th century, because of the fact that it moves people who read it.

Claire: 21:44

What's it called? Tell us the name of it.

Carol: 21:45

The Hannah Story. My mom's name is Hannah. And it was her story she was telling me. So I felt like 'oh, witness to history, I'm gonna write it down'. And I felt like, I need to make this into something. You know, my mom would say like,'Oh, why is anybody's business, why you make our lives people's business?' It's like, 'Mom, you're talking about your experience. I'm sure there are others'. I mean, I had a weird experience where I had postpartum psychosis in the 80's, after I had my daughter, and I wrote about it, and I drew it. And it's raw. I mean, I almost stabbed her to death and then almost stabbed myself. Why would I do that? Well, I had postpartum psychosis, and it wasn't talked about at the time. Women can sometimes totally flip out hormonally when they have children. That story got printed out had this out there before Brooke Shields talked about having postpartum psychosis, before it became a thing. Because I believe in the power of just telling your story, tell the truth. And let's just trust that the human experience has a resonating quality within all of us, because we've all suffered, you know, when you recognise that, gosh, if I feel like this, others sure are feeling this way. And I also felt duty bound, especially with my parents, and my sister, this is the only moment she has on Earth, her little bitty life lasted two and a half years. And it it profoundly affected our family. I felt duty bound. I've always felt duty bound, to be honest, to be authentic, to tell the truth, and also understand that we have a very short shelf life. And if there's a story that feels like it needs to be told, by golly, I'm going to tackle it.

Claire: 23:32

So this sort of autobiographical comic is obviously something that a lot of people probably wouldn't have heard about or know much about, because when we hear the word comic, like you've mentioned before, a lot of people think superheroes and if you mentioned cartoons, a lot of people think children. So where did this kind of genre come from? And how old is it? How long has it been spanning for? Is it quite a new thing in the world of kind of illustration and drawing or is it like a quite an old art?

Carol: 23:59

It's a very healthy branch of a tree of cartooning and comics. And there have been people who you're always going to reference your personal experience to some degree when you do any kind of storytelling or art, you know, self referential, but the guy I ended up marrying that I met fell in love with these attributed as being the father of this genre. He invented it. His name is Justin Green, Justin Considine Green, who in 1972 wrote a comic book now we're talking about pulp staple binding, so it was a comic book. He had been tortured his whole young life with what we now know is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. And it was during the underground era and they called comics - C.O.M.I.X - back then, comix. There was something called the Comics Code that came along in the 50's and it was a railing against the horrific EC Comics. People were banning comic books, people were burning comics and some nervous nellies came up with the Comics Code to try to sanitise the form. And then when the underground cartoonist happened, that was would have been in the late 60's, early 70's, it was a way of saying, 'we're going to say whatever we want, nobody's going to tell us what we can or cannot say'. So blasted open the door to sex, drugs, rock and roll and comics. And in that Justin spoke of his torment, with OCD, and it was a confluence of that, his symptoms had to do with the Catholic Church, the repressions, Virgin Mary, that's why the the comic is called Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. And it blew people's heads off because this is mostly people were drawing about dope and get laid, and he's writing about having sexual discomfort around statues of the Blessed Mother and it had to do with being a bad person. But it wasn't it was it was his mental illness. He spoke to his experience in a way that had never been spoken of before. It was so shocking to people. It said to people, yes, you can discuss you can talk about whatever you like. And people have. I mean, you've heard of Maus by Art Spiegelman? Art Spiegelman did Maus only because he saw what Justin had done with Binky Brown. And the examples are many, and the whole autobiographical comics genre is due to Justin Green. I will say, when I read Binky, I thought I felt a kinship because he was from Chicago, he's raised in the 50's, I'm from Chicago, raised in the 50s. And my affection for him and understanding of him was immediate, because I thought, you know, I get this, I get this guy. The problems he had with mental illness just tore my heart open.

Chris: 26:58

Do you think he would say similar with you, because you both really unique characteristics of being able to tell real experience and share real strong story through comics, So did you have a real appreciation of each other's work in that regard?

Carol: 27:16

Well, when I met him, you know, in my mind, he was the greatest. And he is the greatest in many minds, and he shouldn't be, come on everybody, he's the greatest. But when I met him back in the 80's, summer of 1982, I did paintings, the paintings were narrative, and the paintings told stories, at times, I would make them in on separate panels sequentially. So I was headed in that direction, and I was also doing stand up comedy, which now they do, they have people come up and they tell their stories. Well, I used to get up on stage and just blab blab blab because I love telling stories. And with Justin, I met Justin and I got to know some of the underground scene, comics and stuff, it was like, I'll just do this form because I like to draw. So I can't say at first he had an appreciation. But yes, over the years. It's odd, because even though we had this gigantic romance, that flourished and got married, had a kid and had a family, I still maintain my maiden name and made sure that we didn't do jams. In other words, I wasn't going to become 'Mrs. Justin Green', you know, riff off his energy. I felt he deserved his career, his life, and I admire, admired him, I still admire him. And I just would have to develop my chops through my own like trial and error. So I started out, getting some stuff published, and right away, people responded to the storytelling aspects. And I was, you know, you see your stuff in print the first few times, it's like, you can't use painterly techniques in the graphic medium, I better learn how to do pen dipping better. So I kind of put painting away and focused on black and white. That's all they could afford, back in the day, colour printing was cost prohibitive. But once that drum scanner was invented, and we were able to do colour, you could actually use art materials again, which I hesitated because once I caught wind of the graphic mark the potential and the power of that, it kind of helped the structure of building a comic. Eventually, I figured out ways to incorporate the two, and so I've gone far afield from the question which was had to do with Justin's admiration which yes, very proud of me. Very supportive. Always saying 'my wife, Carol Tyler is a great cartoonist', and I really I felt like 'oh god, I got his approval', I loved that.

Claire: 29:49

This doesn't sound like a nine to five job because there's so much emotion involved, there's so much inspiration involved, I'm guessing it's middle of the night stuff sometimes and then long hours and then nothing for maybe a month, so how does it work when you've got two people that are doing that kind of... what, what did life really look like?

Carol: 30:08

Well, it came in phases, because I couldn't do comics when I had a little baby, of course, he did signs for money, you know, we both had money problems, because comics are, not so much now I think they're having a better time of it, I don't know, maybe not with the internet, I'm really not in a position to say, but back then in the 80s, we're talking about working for 25 bucks a page, or 50 bucks a page, and so how you gonna pay the bills, and you're doing a comic that takes maybe 20 or 30 hours to do each page, and you're gonna get paid 25 or 30 bucks for it, it's horrible, horrible page rates. And I would just have to slog through, I had the baby like, literally nursing her, she'd be on my boob, and I'd be had her in my left arm, let her go ahead and nurse. And then I do do do do do and draw with the right hand. The Job Thing, which is a book I did, but it's also my was the reality, The Job Thing, I had to go to work, you know, daycare school, picking the kid up from school, signs. Somewhere in between there, thankfully, Justin was able to do a monthly comic strip called The Sign Game that he had in a magazine called Signs of the Times Magazine, it was a half page, and he would tell a little anecdote about sign painting, which tended to be about signs, but mostly about the guy painting signs. It was always funny. Because also he's talking about hand painting signs, and over the course of the comic strip, the whole industry changed there was no more hand sign painting went to vinyl, and machines and computers. And he never made the transition. And we'd sit there and say 'Argh, what am I going to do for The Sign Game this month. And we'd be sitting at the table, having supper and I'd say, 'oh, wait, how about this?' So what we did was for the same game, we would jam on the scripts, like, 'what if the guy, wait a minute, what if he walked in the shop, and he says, 'I hate the way you paint that letter O, the true mark of a great sign painters how they do the letter O', or just, we'd be driving down the street and our little girl or a little daughter would say, 'I hate that letter, it should be a sans serif font not a serif letter'. And he'd say 'Victory!', you know, he'd made an impression with his family - they know the difference between great lettering and garbage. So we had that going on and that paid a little bit of money and I had different jobs and it was just really hard. And then maybe there'd be a gap and you could get something done or something would come in and we just didn't land the big gigs because it's just the way it tumbled out and the way our lives were and once the kids were all off to college and all that, I was like, one day I was going 'wait a minute! I got some time. Wait, I have a block, I got a big block of time, I could work for three days straight and not be interrupted'. And that's when I really started working on seriously long form graphic novels, comics. So for example, The Hannah Story, so while I was on unemployment, for eight months, I did The Hannah Story, because I had a large block of time my kid was at school, when I went to do Soldier's Heart, which started as a trilogy called You'll Never Know, and then culminated in the big, the one big volume called Soldier's Heart, she was off at college, whoo hoo! So anytime I was able to do anything long form early on, it was because either there was a gap in a job or I had daycare, or something. Anytime Justin was able to do anything, it was between signs and just having to flog himself, doing an all nighter or whatever to get the work done. We also did a series of comics on musicians that appeared in at Tower Records magazine. So that's the way it had been, just the constant struggle of that. And then the biggest thing that comes is, 'Am I ready to face this work?' Or 'can I do this work at this time?' I'm pretty much working class, it's like'well just sit down, to work. Tyler, shut up, quit complaining, get your work done'. But I'd have an emotional outburst. And Justin would say,'Just do your work!' In other words, 'don't spend your time in an emotional trauma, embroiled in drama' and we can all be drama queens, you know, queens and kings.

Claire: 34:46

When I first spoke to you, two or three months ago, about initially doing this we were talking specifically about the grief work that you were doing and then sadly since we spoke Justin died, so now you've got a fresh grief on your hands. How are you finding that when you were already working in the subject of grief so heavily already?

Carol: 35:05

Well, first of all, I have to tell everyone that you can do grief work, and you can talk about grief and not be sad. I've been doing a book on grief and mourning ever since the last one died, and by that, I mean not Justin but from 2011 through 2015, just about every member of my family, that was elderly. And then my sister, like I said, and neighbours and my best friend on the street, and it came out to eight people died in a short period of time. And I was like,'Woah, I guess I should write about that'. And I sort of tried to, and then I didn't, because it was like, I didn't want to follow up Soldier's Heart with another book that had the same vibe. Another words I had to live with the grief, which was debilitating, trying to understand this is a new place. This is a new voice coming at me, this is not 'my dad calls up on the phone and talks about World War Two'. And then I had an episode one night, because it all ganged up on me. And I had a hallucination or a vision or something, it felt like my head cracked open, half my head melted. And I understood, and I knew that there was a new world and a new language that I'd have to become familiar with. And it kind of revealed itself over a period of time, actual place, an actual language, there were terms, it all had to do with this new trying to understand grief, because none of the old greify things like the Grim Reaper, or the River Styx, none of that stuff had any relevance to me. So suddenly, my head popped open one night, and 2016. And all this stuff started to tumble out., and it went on for a couple of years, and I just had to be awake, and try to understand it. And then in 2018, I sat down one day, and I had a six foot long piece of paper, and I started on the left, and I took the three days, but I drew out the whole, mapped out the entire thing that my brain was perceiving about death and mourning. And so it was more like, 'oh, a map', it was like an art, Revelation. So when I say you don't have to be sad, well, it does bring sadness, it was like, 'Alright, Tyler. So now you got the map of the place where you're going to grieve and kind of the terms of what this place presents and where you're going to be in it, and how this is going to happen. And so you're going to tell the story about what happened, or is it too hard for you? Or you're going to make it universal? Are you just going to be writing an essay? What are you doing, lady?' And so I said, 'let's get to the hard parts. What's the hardest thing about that? What's the deepest, most awful thing about everything that happened in that period of time? Why don't I hit it hard right now and get it out of the way?' I didn't even get close. And then I did it again, a few months later, 'why don't you just hit it hard? Get in there. Come on'. I don't know, at certain point I was able to do that. I was able to get into some of the places and I was able to get close to things that if they make me cry, I know I'm on it. If they make me get the chills, I know I'm on it. Because I'm not like a person who sits down, writes a script, and then just like dutifully, oh, okay, I'm on panel six on page 13. It doesn't work like that, because it's art, you know, I'm finding it and sculpting it as I go along. It has a lot to do with listening and sound and place. That's what came for me. That was the unique thing that came with doing the grief interpretation, was a sense of place. Like there was actually a place that you go to when you grieve. You're you're at home, yeah, but no, you're in a new place. And that's what came forward when I had melted was that it gave birth to a sense of like a place I call it Griefville, Griefville. And the reason why it's Griefville because the man, who I invented who told me about it, I kept saying 'Why would you come up with a word that's hard to say? Grief-ville.' And so that little snippet made it fun, you know, the fact that some guy will say,'Welcome to Griefville, Griefville'. You know, I could have come up with any number of other things, but to find that which is humanity within it, the stupid things we do and gloriously wonderful things because it's not all sombre, because life is not all sombre, so of course, death and grief and mourning is not going to be all sombre either.

Claire: 39:38

One of the things we ask most of our guests is just whether the question 'why?' has been something because a lot of people assume that you asked the question 'why?' a lot in grief. But for you, I'd like to know why grief? Why do you think grief chose you, or you chose grief as your as the subject or as something that you've been so immersed in?

Carol: 39:56

It started that, I had to tell their stories like I said, I feel duty bound often. All along, I have felt that. Even when I was little, I felt 'what is the point of this life? Why am I here?' I had existential angst from a young age. When I was in my 20's, it was like, panic over the idea that not existing or not mattering, that you could go through life, and die, and nobody would notice or care. I just thought that was horrible, or that the world is going to engulf us. And nobody will know that my dad was the way he was, or the I was the way I was, or my family was it was, or who are we? Why are we here? I wanted to like almost like, anchor us. They say, I've learned since kind of doing a little investigation of grief, is one of the most prominent terrors for people who are getting ready to die is that there'll be forgotten, you know, that will be annihilated, we will not have a presence here in this life, on this world. And it's true, we don't know fifteen generations ago, what some ancient ancestors sounded like or felt like. And when everybody died, I was outraged that my sister died mostly. I mean, the the old folks are gonna die. We we've, we know that. Older people are going to pass away and we're prepared for that, but my sister was unexpected, my sister, Jenna, who was my age, close to my age. She's just[click] just like, that had ovarian cancer during the midd, and she had a very difficult end, and I thought I need to, again, anchor this. This is outrageous, it's important to me. And I need to make sure she doesn't get forgotten, duty bound or whatever. But then I found it was just, 'oh, wait, why is it my job?' Going through all that 'can't I just be free of this? Can't I just play and goof around and...?' And then I found a central place in my mind with Greifville. And then I drove into another country soon after that. And I actually found an actual place a farmhouse for sale, cheap, it had been busted up by drug addicts. Miserable types had wrecked it. And so they were selling it on the cheap. But when I stepped out of the car, I just felt this sense of swirling like this.... and that this was a place. And at this place, I would be able to talk about what happened, I'd be able to figure it out this grief, it had more to do with uplift, it had more to do with'discovery' than like the so called underworld or hell, the hell realms. So it was all about uplift. So it's like 'just go there, Tyler, let's go'. And let's talk about Griefville, let's just go ahead and put that out. And you can talk about everything else. And you can talk about the up. When Justin passed away, he plays a role in my comics, but never has like a co-equal we're always just he's just a character, you know, I never worship at the altar of my husband or something like that, you know, I just look for that which he's bringing to the story, what would be his function at this time in the story. And I really feel like he's part of the uplift the up part, I always knew that the ending of the story had something to do with like Griefville is the place, the stories of what happens with people is like what, what I must do in the place, but to come to the conclusion of that has to do with the swirling up that I was saying, and Justin is a part of that. So when he passed away, I right away, whatever difficulties we had, and all of that just he became part of this updraft. And I'm so looking forward to talking about because he, one of the things that kept coming up with everyone who passed away, I just had this image in my head that I had to open a gate for them. And so with Justin, you know there's this gate, just the gate of love, because it's all about that. And when you think about it, you're going to lose somebody, I mean, think about how they feel they lost their life. You're losing the presence of them, but they're not here, and it's sad and you can mourn it but at the same time you can join the uplift.

Chris: 44:36

That place that you found that dilapidated farm space. Did you become owner of that?

Carol: 44:41

Yeah, well, my dad because he was totally disabled. His knees were wrecked during World War Two and really got that as he got older so they finally gave him Total Disability. And when he passed away in 2015, the Military came up with some kind of cheque, yeah disability something or other, I don't know, thank you. And after all was settled within the estate, it wasn't much, but it was enough that I could throw that down on the dilapidated farmhouse. It was fun. Justin, I had a good time playing around with the house, but then he got, he got sick, and it got to where all he could do was run the lawnmower. But he loved it there. We don't live there. We love it. And it's a place where you can park your angsty mind if you don't feel good, or 'oh, we'll go out to the farm'. It's an hour's drive. And I usually spend the summers there.

Chris: 45:39

So much of the imagery and thought and wondering that you've shared about the sort of personal losses with Justin's death only what a few months ago now. How has it impacted you having to almost share that death with the world? Because he was uh, you know, he had profile he had following it supporters and fans. So you know, while you're processing so much internally, yourself, and at the same time, probably reading and being contacted maybe by supporters wanting to write things and pay tribute did it have much of an impact on you, with there being an outpouring, externally?

Carol: 46:17

Well, it was difficult with Justin, because at the end of his life in the last year and a half, then I made a correlation between the level of pain he was dealing with, and the number of really horrible posts he would make about conspiracy stuff. So I concluded that all of that had to do with pain. You know, he was in so much pain, and he didn't share that little bit of information. So we didn't know, his family, we didn't know the extent of his misery, it was bad. Now I read his notes, you know, you kept journals at the end of his life, it's like 'Oh, why didn't he let us in?' No, he didn't. So I have most of Justin, our lives, his like you said his profile, his legacy, are incredible romance our life together, the year of the hiccup, we call it, that's when he had a different friend for a year, it happens. But all of that seems just so much more important than the suffering part. I equate it to when you are pregnant, you're going to have go into labour. Women immediately forget the pain of labour once that baby's out. And Justin did have so much pain and agony and turmoil and at the end, and it just makes me feel more compassion for him. I'd don't have judgement. As I said in one of the statements I made, yes, I will admit I was fed up with that truth stuff. But the heart of the man that generosity has enormous talent, beauty, all of those assets, just, that's him. When I met him, I felt like it opened the gate to the rest of my life and I feel like the gate is, is wide open. And my thoughts for him, and my feelings for him are nothing but gold leaf, you know, it's gold, and he's a gold leaf artist. He's a great man. You just don't think of the tough parts. They're there. And believe me, I can grind them back in. Because there's no thing in life that's seamless, or perfect or wonderful. There's always the rats, the flaws, the smelly thing. Those are wonderful, too.

Claire: 48:47

What do you think the impact is on like the comic industry, when you lose someone like that that actually sort of birthed a whole genre?

Carol: 48:53

It's odd because people they take the type of comics that he's done for granted for people my age and people that were influenced. But the younger kids, they don't really know his work because it went out of print. They're not as well, they're moved, but they're, they don't just don't know. So part of the mission that my daughters want to take up, they want to make sure his books get reprinted and his work is out there, because it's definitely held up. I used to teach a unit on his comic Binky Brown when I taught comics. Yeah, it really affected people. Here's a guy who wrote about mental illness unflinchingly. You have permission to write about whatever is tormenting you, if that's the case, we'll just in the way I taught the comics class period. It was like, the thing to do is to always speak your truth. You know what you got to do kids you're so used to being squired around and parent your parents put you in the back of these minivans or took ya to the soccer game or protecting you from life, 'No, no grab your jaws, rip your jaws open, stick your arm down there, pull out the thing that's got you messed up, whatever it is making you choke, that's your work. I loved that class, because working with the youth, and through the example of Binky, I would also read have them read The Hannah Story, and other works, I mean, it wasn't about us, but we read all kinds of work. They wanted to talk about Batman coming in, but when they left there, they wanted to talk about coming out of the closet, or why they weren't going to tolerate your boyfriend slapping them anymore. Or I had a girl from China, who said, 'I want to tell a story about the man in my village who was beaten to death because he didn't get a permit. He didn't pay off the Chinese authorities to have a small fruit stand. And he said, No, I'm not doing it. And so he got beaten to death'. I said, 'wait, you're going to tell this story, and then you're going to go back home, you're going to tell the story here, you know, you run the risk in an authoritarian regime like that'. And she says, 'I don't care. You make me feel powerful.'

Chris: 51:13

What seems clear, as you've just described with the students, is that while many people picture and think of a fantasy and drawing or telling stories of fantasy, yourself and Justin, particularly, have sort of birthed this, this movement of actually grounding things in reality. Do you think that might be one of the things that Justin is well remembered for?

Carol: 51:34

Oh, absolutely. Not just Binky Brown that all along he's, he's stubbornly stuck to that which he believes is the right thing to do, even with some of the sign painters have come forward in this period of mourning Justin. And I've talked about how they would say that when you're mixing paint, it needs to be like cream, and he said, 'No, buttermilk', and they thought about that, how it had to be a certain consistency. This was a workshop. Oh, God, he ain't going away. ain't going nowhere.

Claire: 52:09

We came across the fact that there's a documentary being made on YouTube. Is that right? Called married to comics? That's correct. How does that feel to have something memorialised like that? So your marriage and relationship is captured in that way?

Carol: 52:21

I'm just so thrilled that it's gonna come out because it does show the greatness of him that shows the qualities that I think are important in what I've been trying to do with my career. And yet, we do funny little things together and come to odds, you know, so, and he's been a, John Kinhart, that's his name, this videographer, he's brilliant. And he showed us a preview of it a couple of weeks ago, after Justin passed away. I thought I'd be weeping through the whole thing, not to say I'm not weeping, I do have my weep moments, of course, but I just felt like wow, what a celebration. This is great. It's wonderful.

Claire: 53:00

Has his death influenced or changed Griefville at all for you? Has that landscape shifted at all?

Carol: 53:06

In Griefville, everyone gets a parcel of land. And on that land, there is a structure of some sort that's personalised. So for some people, it's their car, or guy with a gun and a bottle of Hooch in a trailer, you know, camper, a tent. My particular structure is a 19th century mourning bonnet that actually belonged to my great grandmother that I found in the stuff I was like,'what's this?' My mom said, 'Oh, that's great grandmother. She wore it during the Civil War'. So there's this place called the Swail of Woe. And a swail is when the land goes way down. It's kind of damp down in there. Farmers don't like it because you can't really get down in there and mow it, and weedy, it can be weedy, I talk about how some people really do get stuck in there. On the way to finding my parcel. I go through the Swale of Woe. It's like it's never easy, that's the whole point of this, going through the swale, explain to people, it's never clean. So you know, somebody dies, they die on their deathbed. It's a happy death, and then you cry and put on black and going on with your life. Then I thought, okay, there's more to it, though, that's what came to me after Justin. It's not because of him because of this, but there are people who all of a sudden know their deceased relative more than they ever did before they find out truths, or they find out facts that they weren't, they didn't know they didn't, they're privy to because it was secret, because Justin was a very private person. And I found when going through his stuff, that he never let go of a single letter anybody ever mailed to him. So we have letters from the 1970s fan letter from Kurt Vonnegut, you know, everything under the sun, old girlfriends you name it, and I thought, okay, they reveal that this is reinforces what we all believe we all know is you very generous guy, talented. So that was one little piece. So that's they're getting through the swail, but in terms of his loss, how it affects Griefville, in my bonnet, my in my personal in Griefville, it's when I step outside when I say 'I can't be in Griefville. I don't want to live in this bonnet forever'. And it's when I step out of there, out the back door of my bonnet, that I'm at the farm, now we're at the farm. And that's when I look for him and he's not there. Not there. What happened to him? All this time was waiting. I was putting him on hold waiting to get out of this. Now I can't. Justin's not there. But who I'm with is, I so I will talk about that, but what really happened out at the farm was that, the American Bulldog during the height of the pandemic, 18 year old Pitbull I'm out in the country with that, and my other dog, gets into some garbage and eats some horrible bones that chew up his internal organs and I can't get a vet because nobody comes out because it's the pandemic and I'm stuck out there myself and I got this dog and I witnessed him dying for three days. It was horrible. And I buried him out by the pear trees. And it was so powerful. It brought me back to this power of the transition moment. He's dying but yet the wind is blowing, he's dying but the guy is mowing the neighbor's mowing, look at how beautiful the wind comes through the curtain, 'Junior, will you please just die already!' I always find the beauty somehow. There's always the uplift, there's always the positive. So at Junior's grave, why is it that this one particular type of flower that I've never seen anywhere, pop up out of his grave the next year? Why is it that Junior, where his great is, always something miraculous happens in there. It's become the focal point of this place we call, we realise now was an old orchard. There's a cherry tree that we discovered because we found a place to put his grave and so on. So here we are, with Justin realising him and realising that guy was a gift bringer. Some people are like that. He continues to bring the gifts of insight and beauty and truth and honesty and generosity and justice. His name is Justin, what more could a person like me trying to tell stories ask for?

Chris: 57:41

When your time on this earth comes to an end, Carol, how do you think you would like to be remembered? Maybe in illustration? Are there any particular elements of of what you've described do you think would be, yep, if I want to be memorialised in illustration, these are the elements I'd like to be drawn.

Carol: 58:00

I think that's everyone's going to find a little something that matters to them. My students will want to remember that I said to them 'draw no matter what', you know, maybe somebody will want you to be having my arms up in the air saying 'woo hoo', you know, because you intersect with different people in different ways, and you meet them where they're at, and you bring whatever you got at that time. I would like them to remember how exciting it was when I saw for me when I saw the Beatles in person, for example. But as I would also like them to see how, how much fun I had when Julia was a baby. I don't know! It's up to you. I don't want the responsibility. But I hope it's all things that helped you to have a happier better life. That's all.

Claire: 58:49

And when do we get to see a bit of Griefville?

Carol: 58:51

It's about, that book is about two thirds done now. Now you're asking me a really hard questions. Eugh! Because there's whole back end Justin part, going out to the farm to do that for several weeks. Let me put it this way. In January of 2022, on the 16th of every month, I started posting a tree from Griefville, that is going to extend over 16 months. Because I told myself by then I should be within striking range of starting to promote the book. So the trees of Griefville appear on my Facebook page which is@Carol.Tyler.18. Everybody's p****d at Facebook, but that's all I got. I don't have time to do website and all that junk. So if you go if you go back, you can look on the sixteenths, anything that bugs me about politics, I'll put that on Twitter. Anything having to do with Griefville and The Ephemerata, the book, I'm putting on Facebook on the 16th. But if you go back I did one, the one in February had to do with Ukraine. And so on. You'll go through you'll see you'll get the vibe. People like it when I post pictures of the farm and stuff like that because everybody wants to go the farm. We call it the Ink Farm and it is definitely has magical properties. I have to say one last thing about the farm, if I may. So Justin like to use lead paint. And when he used lead paint, he would get what we called fumed out. He was fumed out. And he had used lead paint even though for years I'd said'Don't Don't Don't Don't Don't. Stop doing that! Every time you use lead paint it f**k's you up man.' 'I know, I know it!' But he had this one job and he had to use lead. He left the gate open the dog got out and he got hit by a car and I found her down on the main street. She sure enough, I thought she was gone. We got the dog put in a truck and drove her real quick to the emergency vet place. And they said, 'Ah, we don't know if she's gonna make it'. Hence the pacing begins for three hours. They let me back in there and she's in hyperbolic chamber, 'go home and we'll call you tomorrow or if anything changes'. I go home. No call, no call, no call is getting towards evening and I call 'Oh yeah, she's okay. You can come see her'. Go in there to see Tue, that's spelled T.U.E. Because we found on the second, on a Tuesday, Justin found her on the porch just before my mom died. And he said,'I think we should have her. I don't know why.' Well, they rolled her out on this cart. And she's got this jacket on. 'We don't know if she'll ever walk again. But she'll be ready to go home tomorrow.' So I brought her home and she was on medication. But I made a fascinator for her out of one of her chew plates, and we watched Harry and Megan's wedding together. And she was laying there and I thought this is all wonderful and everything but she's got a walk again. So Justin and I carried her out to the car. And we drove to the farm. I just had this idea that if I can layer on the grass out at the farm, everything would be alright. She had been so broken. So this was four or five days after she got hit. We get her out to the farm. I lay her in the grass. And she's starts rolling around in the grass it was I said, 'Oh, look at her see so sweet'. But then she would just sit there and I thought,'Aw. How are we going to do this?' Because this was the wild dog who also would chase herds of cattle, much to the chagrin of the local farmers. She was wild didn't like to be contained. That's why she got out and got hit. So I thought,'ah, forgot dog food. Justin, I'm going to go into town, I need to get some dog food. She's not gonna go anywhere. But just watch Tue, she's just right there.' 'Okay.' So I start the car and I get about four or five car links down the road, I look out the rearview mirror, and here's Tue chasing me down the road chasing the car. It was like, 'oh my god, it's a miracle'. People say that the farm has magic. And after Justin had his cancer surgery, he went out there, and he laid in the grass. I mean, there's just, it just has this vibe.

Chris: 1:03:21

We've reached our final question. So what's your Herman?

Carol: 1:03:25

it is really hard to maintain a belief that whatever your thing is that you want to do that you can somehow do that. How many people give up on their dreams that requires risk? And it requires attention and nurturing? And so many times I could have said, 'Oh, there's comics doesn't make any money or this marriage is bust.' But there's a belief there's this idea of fostering a sense of possibility that no matter what, I need to do this thing. 'I'm not going to get divorced. No, no, I'm not going to give up on Tue, or my daughter who struggled for years with her OCD, or Justin or my comics.' Just to always have a presence in the idea that it can it can happen

Claire: 1:04:26

Fostering a sense of possibility. What is it that you need to do that for? Not give up on? Keep working towards? Thank you, Carol for sharing your story and Justin's with us, especially so soon after his death. And for the honesty you both feed into your art to inspire others and help set them free in their creativity.

Chris: 1:04:46

There are plenty of links in our show notes. If you'd like to learn more about Carol and Justin will also put the link to Carol's Facebook page to follow her Griefville work as it progresses. And for more about our mission to explore 101 losses, check out@thesilentwhypod on social media or visit the website, www.thesilentwhy.com.

Claire: 1:05:06

We're finishing this episode with some words about a comic that Carol published in 2018, reflecting on her obsession with The Beatles as a 13 year old girl, speaking in a newspaper article, Carol said this about Fab4Mania:"It's me, reconnecting with the person I was before life came along. I needed to know before the loss and the rest, that there was a band and a girl."