The Worst Journey in the World: Graphic Novel

When I set about seriously to make these graphic novels happen, coming onto ten years ago now, I heard a lot from animation-to-comics friends about how much work they were, endless hours at the desk, no friends, no sunlight, only book. To this, my response was: sign me up. I am formed by nature to go merrily into the tunnel and stay chained to my desk drawing something I love. That’s my idea of heaven. For the most part, it came to pass exactly how I had anticipated: my hours, days, months, and years working on Volume 1 were some of the happiest of my life. I never regretted a moment. I was looking forward to jumping straight back into it for Volume 2.

What they don’t tell you about the comics life is that having a book published is as much work as making the darn thing in the first place, and none of it involves sitting alone at your desk lost in your drawings. It involves lots and lots of emails, shouting into the social media void, making graphics so people notice your shouting and then square versions of these for Instagram, more emails, events for 200 people on the other side of the country, events for what turned out to be eight people closer to home (fun, except for the two weeks burned on preparing a custom slideshow), video calls, vertical graphics now that Instagram prioritises Stories, articles for Patreon so you can still pay the heating bill, despite not having anything for those articles to be about … By the time I was nearing the book’s first birthday, I was starting to despair of ever getting a start on Vol.2. I sneaked a day or two of actual book-related work as a treat in the midst of all the business. By the following spring I had a US publisher, and the same process started from the top, though thankfully they were a little bigger and had their own social media person.

In April of 2024 I took an entire month “off” simply to tackle all the admin that had stacked up over two years of playing whack-a-mole while spinning boiling pots. Part of this admin involved shopping around for, lining up, and filling out forms for, a moving company to take the last of my possessions out of storage in the States and send them to the UK, where I had just applied for citizenship. In May I flew over there to get my stuff onto a moving truck and also help my parents pack up their own stuff to move back to Canada. I had the entire glorious month of June free to work on Vol.2 while my stuff was in transit across the sea. This, I thought, was a foretaste of the second half of the year, after family had come for a long-expected visit and the move was complete, when all the crazy would be behind me and I could finally get back into that sweet sweet comics-making tunnel.

I was invited to book my citizenship ceremony on 23 July. My stuff arrived from the States on the 25^th. I finally had everything unpacked and the chaos sorted out on the 29^th. On the 30^th I had an appointment for a mammogram to check out what felt like an identical breast cyst to the one I’d had the previous year. I’d been on medication that made cysts more likely; I wasn’t worried.

It wasn’t a cyst.

It took a week for the lab results to come back and prove that I did in fact have cancer, but the doctor was pretty sure of it in that little room with the tissue box where they took me after the biopsy. My hopes of returning to the book in the second half of the year evaporated. Instead, the crazy kicked up a notch: I went for a full mastectomy, which everyone expected to be more than enough to do the job, but one of the lymph nodes they sampled turned up some cancer cells as well, and that meant chemo. It was supposed to have finished in January this year, but kept having complications, so it went through April, and then radiotherapy finally finished in June. The good news is, I’ve had all the scans and there is no evidence of disease; I’m in the control group of a drug trial and will be very closely monitored for seven years, so if anything recurs in that time, they should catch it early. I am, now, feeling a lot less like a potato-starch dog poo bag sweating on a hot pavement than I had been a few months ago. The bad news is, my stamina is still a long way from where it was, and creativity takes a lot of energy. I have essentially had a year of my life stripped away and I don’t know how long it’ll be before I can expect anything like normal productivity. I am grateful not to be at death’s door, and grateful for the friends who have really gone the extra mile for my sake this year, but also very angry at the enormous waste of time.

Narrative imperative demands that I say, now, how much this experience has taught me about suffering; that I will be able to portray the characters’ trials so much more authentically; that my relationship with life and death has deepened and that this will inform my work in a positive way. But none of that is true. I have quite a good imagination. I could imagine Teddy Evans’ hellish go of scurvy perfectly well without experiencing Taxane Acute Pain Syndrome. Many times I have felt deeply Scott’s desperation in a desolate wasteland where everything was going wrong, long before visiting the Addenbrooke’s oncology ward. In fact I felt it more deeply, because one thing a long winter of anxiety, fatigue, cannulas, beeping machines, and fluorescent strip-lighting will do, is shut down one’s capacity to feel anything at all. How can I tell this story without feelings? How will I know if it’s working? What if I have no passion left for anything? Can I do three more books on autopilot? Will they even be worth doing, if so?

I have started writing again. Very, very slowly, I can feel some of the love for it trickling back in. A lot will depend on how the rest of this year goes, and whether I will ever again have the chance to focus on what I’m doing. I need a few successive days of it to start “feeling it” again, and I rarely get more than two in a row without being pulled onto something else or having an energy crash and having to sleep it off. But I’m hopeful that as Vol.1 becomes old news, I won’t be needed for the song and dance anymore, and can properly get back in the tunnel.

My plan is to get the scripts done for all three remaining volumes before I start drawing anything. This is practical in that I need to make sure all the elements of the story are in place when it’s still at an easily fixable stage. It will also mean that, in a period of disruption such as the last three years have been, I can dip in and out as necessary: I can bash out a page here and there so long as I’m working from a cohesive script where storytelling decisions have already been made. Those storytelling decisions, however, require sustained concentration and immersion in the world and characters. That is what I absolutely have not had, hence no progress on the books.

I am very sorry there is no Vol.2 yet. Trust me, no one wants it more than I do. I thought I would be wrapping it up about now, and instead I am just barely starting. What I have always told people who ask what I plan to do after Worst Journey – “I just want to finish this project before I die” – is more true than ever. None of us knows how long we have, but there’s a serious chance I have less time than most, and I am very aware that I need to use what I have. I am trying. I don’t know what more I can do.

Now that things are starting to get a little bit more back to normal (knock on wood) I hope to post more updates here, but I always post monthly updates on Patreon, even if those updates consist of “felt like crap, no comics today”. If you want to keep your finger on the pulse of this endeavour, please subscribe there – you can do so for free, and get the updates straight to your email inbox. (You can also subscribe at a paid tier and get even more content, but that is up to you; updates are always free.)

Thank you for being interested in these crazy books – that is certainly more than I could have hoped, when I was starting. I really hope you get to read them all before I die … and that I’ll finally get to think about what I’ll do after finishing them.