‘100 Demon Dialogues’ Creator on Creativity, Imposter Syndrome and the Need For Empathy

Lucy Bellwood wants to help.

A self-styled “adventure cartoonist” — a title referring to her autobiographical work about tall ship sailing and whitewater rafting through the Grand Canyon, amongst other topics — Bellwood is branching out in new directions. Her new release, 100 Demon Dialogues, addresses her own inner demon and, in doing so, discusses imposter syndrome and the need to accept her — and our — own flaws.

The book started as part of #The100DayProject, but as Bellwood explains below, the response to each installment as it was posted online changed not only how she saw the material, but also its potential. Heat Vision spoke to her about her origins as a cartoonist, the need to be vulnerable and the Cats’ Campout. (Don’t ask. Keep reading.)

100 Demon Dialogues feels like a pivotal book for you — one that is more traditional cartooning than comic book, per se, but also you shifting your attention as a creator. But before we get onto that, I want to start with the basics: When did you know this was what you wanted to do? Have you always wanted to be a cartoonist?

I definitely did not always know I wanted to be a cartoonist. Looking back on the road to where I am now is like being on a train facing backwards. You look out the window thinking, “Of course I’m going this way. Where else could I have gone? There’s no train track anywhere else.”

Drawing has often been a tool for me in times when I don’t feel comfortable talking to other people. I never felt quite at home with kids my own age. Drawing pictures of people became a way to slide into a social environment — to fit in. I still catch myself doing it sometimes. I don’t draw to avoid people, but it gives them a conversational in. Even now I’ll catch myself thinking, “If I draw people, they’ll like me.”

I was fortunate to have a lot of creative support from my family. My mum was a cartoonist for several years before I was born. She did single-panel gag cartoons and ran her own business printing them onto mugs and t-shirts and greeting cards. She backed off when I was born (running a business out of your house is a lot of work, turns out), but got into painting flower pots to sell at the farmers market when I was about four or five. It’s technically one of my first experiences tabling as a creator, going out there with her.

She’d sit there with all her flower pots and I’d sit at a tiny table covered with a tea towel. Underneath the tea towel there’s this Play-Doh diorama I’d made with a bunch of plastic toy cats around a gummy campfire. The handwritten sign says, “10 cents to see The Cats’ Campout.” People come up and give me a dime and I rip off the tea towel and say, “There it is!” And then I do it again for the next willing audience.

I made two dollars and 50 cents, which I know because it bought me a tiny Lego kit from the toy store in the same parking lot.

And you were thinking, “I’m done. I’ve made it.”

Yeah! That’s me, a ‘Successful Artist.’ Never have to work again in my life. It’s funny, I only put it all together fairly recently. This stuff gets its hooks into you at an early age.

Do you think about that while you’re tabling at conventions now?

All the time. (Laughs.)

Are you ever tempted to re-create it? Have your table and say, “Here are my books, I’m a serious cartoonist, That’s what I do. But if you also want to give me 10 cents…”

“…you can see The Cats’ Campout!”

So how did you become a cartoonist, as a career? What was the path you took to get there?

Getting onto Elfwood and DeviantArt around age 10 was huge for me. Going to small schools, it was rare that there was more than one capital-A “Artist” in the class. I was always sitting in that box by myself. The internet was the first place I could look around and say, “Wow, it’s not even that other people are into this, other girls are into this!”

Around age 12 my mum apprenticed me to a family friend named Eben Matthews. He was a creative powerhouse doing design, comics, illustration, web development — the whole nine yards. Eben looked at all of my anime-influenced, hyper-stylized fanart and didn’t say, “This is bad and wrong and you’re doing art bad and wrong.” He said, “You’re great at what you’re doing. I want you to trust me while we set all that aside for a bit. We’re going to start from scratch so you can learn how to do it better.” It was invaluable because he phrased it in a way that didn’t make me feel bad about what I was doing. It was just an encouragement to sharpen my technical skills. That was really compelling for me. That’s the way that you encourage kids to learn fundamentals.

When I moved to Portland for college, I was following all of these creators like Erika Moen, Dylan Meconis, Aaron Diaz, Meredith Gran, and so many other people. I went to the Stumptown Comics Festival — my first comics convention — when I was a freshman at Reed [College] in 2009. I got to meet Erika and Dylan, but also Kate Beaton and David Malki! and Scott C. I still have very janky comics I drew in my sketchbook from that day about how excited and nervous I was to be there.

Which is so charming now, because they’re your friends!

I know! I tricked them! I did it! It feels magical because I’m a little too old to be a Tumblr generation cartoonist, but not quite old enough to be a first-wave webcomics cartoonist. But I very firmly wanted to be in that second camp. It felt like all those folks were on a train leaving the station, and so I ran flat out and caught the caboose at the last minute wailing, “Take me with youuuu!” (Laughs.)

The thing that really kicked me into choosing comics was taking a summer course at the Center for Cartoon Studies in 2010. Alec Longstreth gave a lecture that was super inspiring and also totally terrifying. It held the seeds of a lot of what I’m passionate about in my work now. The talk was very heavy on metrics: measuring your page output, tracking your income, balancing your deadlines. He was so realistic about the grind of what it takes to be a career cartoonist, but also so fired up about it. He was a couple of years into drawing his graphic novel Basewood, and had vowed not to shave or cut his hair until he finished it. Alec’s a tall dude. He looked like this ginger Yeti at the front of the classroom.

At one point, he pulled up his ring finger and said, “Okay, you see this ring? This top ring is for my girlfriend. But the bottom ring is the one that comes first. This ring is for comics.” And I was, like, “Dang, this dude is committed.” Alec had a huge impact on me. It was some sort of evangelical experience. You know you go and you’re, like, “Yeah, I’m gonna be a cartoonist, it’s going to be great, I’m going to sweat ink and bleed paper and —.” Anyway, I’ve mellowed out a little these days. But not much.

You’ve made the decision to be a cartoonist, but — before you mellowed out, as you put it — did you know what that would mean? When I first discovered your work, you were a self-declared “Adventure Cartoonist.” Was that in place as soon as you realized cartooning was your path?

The whole time I was interning at [Portland, Oregon-based comics collective] Helioscope — and even when I was sort of a semi-intern after I graduated the program and wasn’t a member yet — people would say, “What do you want to do? Work for Marvel or DC? Do webcomics? Do graphic novels?” But I’ve never been a person with a rigid “here’s how it’s going to be” mentality, you know?

That’s fascinating to me because so much of your public persona was based on “I am an Adventure Cartoonist” that the idea that you weren’t convinced about that, or passionate about that direction, is surprising.

Well here’s the distinction: I want to pursue things that I’m curious about, and that sits above the craft of making comics. And I know people for whom the opposite is true — they’re all about the craft of making and telling really good stories and comics, but subject matter is less of a concern.

And sometimes I’m envious of them! When I see weak spots in my own artistic ability, I think, “God, if I was focusing on craft to the same degree as person X, I’d be such a better storyteller.” But I feel like my work lives and dies on how much passion I can muster for the subject. And if that isn’t present, there’s no engine to drive the work.

?

Sometimes I feel like a snob when it comes to accepting jobs, because people will write to me with proposals for gigs that I feel “blah” about, and I just can’t bring myself to take them. Time was I couldn’t afford to say no, I’m finally getting comfortable with the idea that saying passing on things that aren’t compelling opens up space for things that really are. That relationship can be so indirect, though. It feels like a trust fall every time. It’s also a position of enormous privilege, which I try not to forget. The key is passing those jobs along to other creators as often as I can. What’s not right for me may be perfect for someone else.

Does this change the way you identity as a creator? Do you think of yourself differently now that you’re becoming more self-aware of not only your strengths, but your interests?

Tabling at conventions is getting weirder now, because people come up and ask, “What’s the deal here?” and I give them my Adventure Cartoonist spiel, but then I have to turn and say, “And this is this book about Imposter Syndrome!” It feels very disjointed. I’ve been trying to figure out how to avoid burning this professional persona to the ground because I feel like I just figured out how to talk about myself as “Adventure Cartoonist Lucy Bellwood,” but now I’m saying, “You know what? Scrap that, I’m way more interested in this emotional work.”

Why are you burning that character to the ground? I don’t want to say, “It’s a different type of adventure,” but what I’m hearing is the audience is there for your point of view. It almost doesn’t matter what you’re writing about, people are there for your take on it. You’re not burning Adventure Cartoonist to the ground.

Fair. I think going on an adventure means like being brave, and being brave means doing something even though it’s scary. And that’s generally what characterizes the work that intrigues me the most. And fascinatingly it’s also the work that people respond to the most — who knew? People like seeing other people being brave because it inspires them to also be brave.

Okay, Let’s talk about being brave.

Yeah! Let’s do it.

You’ve done Baggywrinkles, you’ve done Grand Adventure, you’ve done these things, you’ve built the Adventure Cartoonist brand, identity, whatever you want to call it. What made you even start doing 100 Demon Dialogues? Was it that the subject scared you? Was it that it was a break from the adventure cartooning thing which was becoming your personal brand?

I’m a sprinter when it comes to work. I respond best to being put in an environment where — well, here’s an example: I had no internet for three weeks on my first Grand Canyon trip. What was I going to do, take a vacation? Heck no! I drew a 28-page full-color comic because that’s what I do to make sense of the world — and I didn’t have to answer emails for almost a month! It was bliss.

I think it’s telling that when I’m left to my own devices and actually given breathing space, I draw. It makes me happy. And what’s hard about where I’m at right now is that I have to fight to make time for that kind of drawing.

I don’t think Demon Dialogues would be the book that it is if I hadn’t pursued it as a type of sprint — that 100-day, improvisational drawing project. The structure helped me get at the really deep stuff.

The first time that I did one of those conversational demon comics was back in 2012. I was fulfilling my first Kickstarter and, ironically, grappling with the same issues that I’m grappling with now. It’s not that any of these problems are new or different. It’s not like you get to a level of professionalism where they don’t apply anymore, so there’s always more to say.

When I did a month of daily demon comics for Inktober in 2015, they struck a chord. You can’t help noticing when people respond to your stuff online, right? Your ears perk up and you go, “Oh, there’s something here!” So for Inktober the following year, I decided to do it again.

Even though I only managed six entries in 2016, again: people really responded to them. And I had a year’s worth of additional followers. Something was building there. The final entry I posted that year was about feeling inadequate beside your peers, even in the face of your own accomplishments, and I think it set the tone for what I wanted to dig at when I came back to the project.

I’m still surprised those comics resonate, because to me it feels like such a personal thing to share. But every time there’s an entry that feels too specific or too personal, that’s the one that’s going to resonate the hardest.

You’re still surprised even though you have years of experiencing this?

Absolutely.

Does that make you feel braver about sharing? I’m asking because two things are coming very clear. One: Drawing is therapy for you, and is a necessary therapy; it’s something you have to do, And two, there is something in you that pushes you to go further with your self-examination. You don’t settle for, “This gimmick worked so I’m going to work with this gimmick forever.”

My mother trained as a therapist, so I grew up in a household where we talked pretty openly about feelings. Very un-British, I know. Super out of character.

I also attended alternative hippy schools that were big into councils. A council is an all-school gathering where students and teachers sit in a circle and pass a talking stick. Everyone is encouraged to speak and listen from the heart. It’s easy to roll your eyes at that stuff as a teenager (or even an adult), but it had a huge impact on me.

Everybody has a small, scared person who just wants to make friends living inside of them, right? It was such a gift to have spaces where I felt okay talking about that stuff. Now, if I see something in me that hurts, I walk into it. It doesn’t put me in a state of emotional zen or anything. It’s not elegant. But that’s the process of becoming an adult. We’re all just trying our best. If nobody talks about it then we’re all going to go through the rest of our lives thinking that we must be doing a terrible job.

That’s very difficult to do, though. Especially for a creator, surely. Isn’t there an impulse to do the very opposite of what you’re talking about? Don’t you feel the need to present yourself as a hyper-competent, very accomplished artist, instead of talking about what can go wrong?

Accomplishing things in public builds a barrier between you and people who know you (or knew you before). They look at this avatar and think they know what kind of person you are and how you’re doing, but it’s never the whole picture. In September 2016, I spoke at this big conference about getting off food stamps while people were busy assuming I had “made it” as an artist. Building a career online was choking off my ability to share the scary, challenging, lonely, messy stuff that came with the territory. I cracked. So I told a room full of 800 very impressive people that I felt like a wreck.

And they all got it. It was the opposite of what my survival instinct told me, which was: “You’re going to get up there and you’re gonna be too messy and too raw and everyone’s going to laugh at you and you’re gonna be cast out of the tribe.” Instead, people came to show me their own DHS cards. They hugged me and thanked me. They knew what I was trying to say.

It’s a little embarrassing to talk about needing that external feedback to understand the worth of what I’m presenting, but if I’m honest, it was crucial. That vote of confidence from a group of people whom I really admire and respect led to feeling braver, which led to pursuing 100 Demon Dialogues as a fully fledged project. It’s like finding bread crumbs in the forest, you know? Each one says, “Keep going. Keep going. We’re out here.”

Of course it’s hard to know where to draw the boundaries, because it’s very easy to just give it all away to the internet. And that’s not strictly healthy. Boundaries are good. There are things I’m not obligated to post on Twitter or Instagram, and sometimes it still feels like a leech attached to my brain. But knowing that the vulnerability that’s valuable to me is also valuable to other people — that seems like the logical culmination of everything that I’ve been working on.

As you alluded to above, 100 Demon Dialogues is a collection of material created for the 100 Day Project. Was it important to have a framework like that in order to create the book?

I love the 100 Day Project because it’s a practice. You show up for it over and over and over again. I’m not great at giving myself permission to be imperfect, but the length of the project requires it. That permission is crucial to making anything. When you’re engaging in a small, intentional creative act for three and a half months, some days are going to feel amazing. Other days, you’ll feel like hot garbage. But the output of those days is going to be indistinguishable when you look at your project later. It’s a mind game.

When you were creating the work, and releasing it online as part of the 100 Day Project, it clearly touched a nerve with the audience. Do you have any idea why that is? 

We’re caught up in this moment of speaking the unspeakable. The #MeToo movement is giving people a platform to discuss trauma and abuse. And then there’s this trend in comics toward “relatable content.” I’d call it the #ItMe trend. I’m thinking of creators like Allie Brosch and Sarah Andersen. They’re using humor to tackle depression and anxiety. Their work isn’t glossing over the hard stuff — it’s humanizing it. 100 Demon Dialogues is somewhere in the middle of those two trends.

We hear so much about how we “should” feel about certain issues and experiences, but so little about what other people have actually gone through. It’s hard to share your financial struggles or fears of not being loved, but every time I’ve interacted with someone who’s been willing to share those stories — that’s what makes life bearable for all of us.

And that’s the thing I’m starting to realize I’m most interested in.

When you started it, how much were you aware that that was what was driving you — that what is important to you is this sharing and demystifying of universal experiences that none of us believe are universal?

I don’t know if I could’ve articulated this when I started, but 100 Demon Dialogues is very much a self-care manual for trying to meet my own needs. I’m an only child with older parents. I’ve been bracing for the pain of losing them pretty much since I was old enough to understand death. Is that going to make it any easier? No. But it’s given me a lot of time to wrestle with what it takes to feel seen and safe and held.

As children, we spend a lot of time wanting our parents to be there for us. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they’re not. That relationship echoes through the rest of our lives.

I could say, “Oh, yes, I wanted to make this book to help let other people connect with their own demons,” but that’s not the truth. It started out as therapy for me. I was probably a month in before I realized, “Oh, this isn’t just for me.” It changed the whole ending of the project. I threw out a call on Twitter and said, “Hey, do you wanna be in a thing? Send me a photo of yourself.” And then I drew folks who responded holding their own demons for the 100th entry. It felt right. It had to be a team effort. Posting that final entry and launching the Kickstarter and publishing all these social media posts inviting people to help make the book a reality simultaneously felt like conducting a symphony. But it wasn’t until people started writing to say they felt like I’d stuck the landing that I could really exhale.

How much did the response factor into your decisions about the book? Not only creating the cartoons themselves, but also deciding to run a Kickstarter launching exactly as the cartoons finished, to fund the book? Did you think, “It’s now or never?”

The project was gathering so much momentum. It impacted my decision to crowdfund the book rather than taking it to a publisher. People were invested.

But you’re right that part of it was me saying, “Oh, my God, I have to ride this wave while it’s here because it might not be here tomorrow.” It’s like if I — and this is part of the sprinter mentality — if I keep moving and making stuff, I can keep fooling people. If I stop and look at it for too long, I’m going to understand that it’s actually trash. Or someone else is going to notice that it’s actually trash.

Despite this fear — and it’s not trash, obviously — I feel like you’re doing more than just looking at the work in more detail now. You’re touring the book, and that means more than just sitting down and signing copies; you’re engaging with the people who attend the signings, and asking them to participate in the process by sharing what their inner demon tells them. It feels like going beyond the traditional artist/audience relationship.

We don’t just draw comics because we like doing it — we draw comics to share them with an audience. And I really prefer it when that audience is made up of flesh-and-blood human beings who I can see and talk to and be, like, “Hey let me shake your hand. You’re a real a person. We made a connection.” It’s the theater person in me. Building a connection face-to-face is a totally different experience. I’m, like, not cut out to draw comics in a room by myself all day every day.

What’s really appealing to me is the notion of being able to do that connective community work in person. I mean, that’s a long way off from being a cartoonist, but then again maybe not. We can use comics to do all kinds of things. Am I going to become a facilitator? Or a creative counselor? I don’t know. It just feels so good to be working with this raw, real emotional material because it comes back around to all this stuff that’s resonant from my childhood. Anytime I’m pursuing something creative that draws on those threads, I feel like I’m going in the right direction.

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100 Demon Dialogues is available in bookstores now. Bellwood is on tour, appearing at Big Adventure Comics in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on Wednesday; 826 Valencia in San Francisco on July 25; and Bart’s Books in Ojai, California, on Aug. 3, with more locations in the coming weeks. More info can be found here, and more info about her books can be found here.