How Did I Get Here?

Like most artists I absorb the influences in my immediate environment. As a child, Archie comics, my brother’s Mad and Cracked magazines, X-men cartoons on my grandparents’ satellite dish inspired me to draw a team of female superhero characters with colourful capes and bulbous heads too big for their bodies. I was a nerd-intellectual from the start, lecturing to a row of my teddy bears, alone in my bedroom. I would make little newspapers and leave them out for my parents to read. I was a storyteller, absorbed in the world of afternoon soap operas and novels, re-creating emotional dramas with paper doll families I had cut out of the Sears catalogue.   

As a young adult, I took it to a new level, reading anything and everything I could on the Holocaust. I was dark and nerdy but I kept that to myself. Outwardly, I was popular, athletic and musical. I always had friends to hang out with, but my interior world was something separate. A world unto itself. 

 As a university student in my early twenties, I had the opportunity to study abroad in Prague. It was a big turning point for me. I found a place I could relate to. It was dark and light at the same time, historical and artistic. There, the whimsy of the Art Nouveau tradition mixed with gothic gargoyles and the bustling energy of tourists clashed with the brooding post-Communist attitude of the locals. I attended outdoor classes at Kafka’s gravesite, the Jewish cemetery, battlefields, and Holocaust prayer rooms. The trip shifted my focus entirely. I veered off the law school path and onto one consumed with Central European history.

I decided to pursue a PhD and become a professor. The ten years that followed were the most fulfilling and challenging of my life. I studied in Vancouver and spent summers in Germany, researching. I even found a way to spend a summer in New York, researching at the UN. It was on that fateful trip that I met graphic novelist, Sonja Ahlers.  

Sonja was in New York for the launch of her new book, The Selves. I met her at Desert Island Comics, in Brooklyn. I told her that I was a historian toying with the idea of writing graphic novels. She was so gracious in her response, telling me that many comic writers were limited by their lack of interest in or patience for research. If research was something I loved doing, then half the battle was won. The world of comic writing was limitless for me because I could go beyond fantasy, superhero or sci-fi genres. I walked out of that store feeling ten feet tall.

I spent the next five years learning about comic book writing as a means of procrastination from my PhD dissertation. In 2011, I moved home to Saskatchewan from Vancouver with only a few chapters left to write. I house-sat at my Aunt and Uncle’s cabin on the lake at Kanata Valley. It was a particularly cold winter, with most days averaging below 30 degrees celsius. All the summer crowds were gone, leaving the neighbouring cabins vacant. I would sit by the fire and look out at the frozen, snow-drifted lake and work on my dissertation. It was deathly quiet.  

I had settled in for a day of reading through German archival documents, taking notes. I came upon a picture of a little boy and I decided to take a break and do some “fun” writing. I opened a new file and labelled it Graphic Novel. I noted the document number and began writing the story of this boy. I based it loosely on the documents, but soon it developed into fiction, with a diverse cast of characters. Eight hours passed. I stopped only to go to the bathroom and didn’t even think about food, which is extremely rare for me. A detailed plot poured out of me, complete with notes on characters and ideas for spin-offs. I think I had been bogged down in an academic writing structure for so long that I forgot how much I loved storytelling. When I stopped writing, I put a line at the top, “this is my calling, this is what I should be doing.”

But, I still had two years of gruelling dissertation writing, edits and oral exams ahead of me. In the last year of my academic career, I was starting to feel detached from the academic world. I attended a German history conference in Denver, in an attempt to re-ignite my interest. I found myself drawn to the conference panels that fed directly into my comic book plot line. I was starting to veer off course again, this time towards a new medium.

An incredibly validating moment came at dinner one night, as the keynote speaker, Holocaust survivor and author Ruth Kluge took the stage to speak. She devoted a portion of her address to the strength of comic books as a new medium for history, touting the impact of Maus and the form’s ability to relay history through visual details. At one point she looked in my direction, and I felt chills, like she was talking directly to me.

Of course, she wasn’t looking at me at all, but it drove the point home nonetheless. I had no need to continue on the path I was on, if I was being called in another direction. I realized that all my years of research and experience would not be wasted if I changed course, and that my work would be accepted in comic book form. Here was someone I deeply admired and respected standing in front of me, validating the genre and my future as a historian/storyteller/artist.  

  -Dr. Kelly Cairns, January 4, 2021