Four years ago, I picked up a blue colored pencil on New Year’s Eve and began to draw. I’ve been drawing and writing in that specific shade of blue ever since, and I don’t know when I’ll stop.
Blue is the color of depth, of mystery, of distance, of grief. It’s almost otherworldly, but is in fact the color of the vastest bodies we experience on earth: the sky and the sea. I love that this color can be at once mundane and magical. Blue is the color too of liminal spaces, of shadows, and of what I think of as the elusive lyric in poetry, which ripples in the movement of associative leaps.
Like poems, comics ask us to make associative leaps between images and text, and then from image and text to meaning. In the world of comics and poetry, all image, and all language, is metaphor. Which is to say, everything means. And so, everything belongs.
I’m drawing my stories with this blue, molding its unknowable depth along the contours of my life, believing that if I can belong to blue, together we might belong to the world.
