Birthday Book
Welcome back!
Apologies in advance for the nostalgia.
This photo was sent to me by super-reader Chip Donahue, who found this 2001 drawing of the goldfish’s castle on eBay and put it in his actual goldfish tank!
October 8th is my birthday - I’m 45.
It's also the release date of my new book, which is also an old book:
The Goldfish & Bob 25th Anniversary Edition
I’ve now spent more of my life with Goldfish & Bob in the world than I spent without it.
That’s a weird thing to realize.
I drew it when I was only nineteen, and the first self-published version came out in 2001, when I was twenty.
I felt like a grownup, but I also still felt like a kid.
I still do - it’s insane to me that I have a mortgage.
← Check out that old Toddbot t-shirt.
The comic is very much about that I think. When I re-read it, it was almost like reading the work of another person, which I guess it is.
The kid who made that comic was very much reaching beyond their abilities. The desire to make some kind of statement was there, but the ability to do so - or even to know exactly what to say - hadn’t quite caught up. The ambition was bigger than the ability, and I think that’s probably why people still seem to enjoy this little story about a guy and his fish all these years later. There’s a tension between the intention and what I actually made.
Admittedly, I thought about re-drawing the book.
What stopped me from entertaining the thought for very long (other than it would take so much time) was that maybe if I’d been a better cartoonist, I might have actually made the grand statement I thought I was making - and the comic might have been worse. My still-forming skills were part of what gave the comic its value.
Because I was trying so hard, The Goldfish & Bob ended up with this odd mixture of youthful seriousness, uncertainty, simplicity, and sincerity that I couldn’t deliberately recreate now.
So instead of re-drawing the thing, I spent most of my 44th year working on this big anniversary edition.
I pulled out all the boxes from my closet, looking for original art, notebooks, and mini-comics from when my past self was working on Goldfish.
I found a lot of stuff.
Some I remembered and some I’d forgotten about. Some led me down internet rabbit holes trying to fill in gaps in my memory, or gaps in my archives. I looked up old emails from when email was a new technology. I dug up newspaper articles about myself from 1999. Remember 1999?
Remember NEWSPAPERS?
I’d never use the word “career” today, but I am still putting them out on my own.
I scanned SO MANY things. Scanning is SO BORING. Ugh.
But I am really happy with how the book turned out.
It’s so full of good memories and really embarrassing art.
I won’t get into it too much more here, since there are plenty of deep-dive essays throughout the anniversary edition, but I felt like I should write SOMETHING. Your first “graphic novel” (as it was called, despite its brief 80-pages) only turns 25 once. And it’s my birthday, so why not reminisce a little bit?
That’s how birthdays work, right? We look back before getting on with looking ahead…
Anyways. If you only know me from The Poet, or from Seamonster, this old work will all be new to you, and will show you a bit of how I got around to making the stuff I make now. And if you’ve been hanging out all through the years, there’s still lots in the new edition you’ve never seen - some of the extra comics in it have never been seen by anyone but me until now. There’s also lots of stuff about what the indie comics scene was like back then - for all you indie comics history buffs.
So I wanted to take this brief moment to let you know that The Goldfish & Bob 25th Anniversary Edition is out now.
My next post here will be about something besides my own comics, I promise.
