Here is a bumper pack of antidote drawings I didn’t manage to post before the year ended. I made one for the first day of the new year, and it’ll be the last one. They’ve served me well, now it’s time for something else.
This was during the terrible slog of trying to produce the draft for a big illustrated story about my trip to interior Sarawak. I went through several more months of stopping, stalling and restarting before finally completing it, just as 2015 came to a close.
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Mini-PSB’s name is hard to explain. I shall try: We had a dear cat called Penyu, who we lost a couple of years ago. There was a similar-looking cat – all white with an elegant face – around the neighbourhood, so we called her Penyu’s Sister. Then a tom cat starting hanging around Penyu’s Sister, so we called him Penyu’s Sister’s Boyfriend, i.e PSB. He was the blackest cat we had ever seen, and he had a furry stump for a tail. Later, Penyu’s Sister disappeared, but PSB started romancing another cat (Chicken’s Sister – another story, I won’t get into it) who came to us for food once in awhile. They had kittens, and the only one who survived was the one who looked exactly like PSB, so we called her Mini-PSB. True story!
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Around this time I started getting chronic eye strain, which sounds like the lamest thing, but in my line of work, turns out to be debilitating.
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I took a long trip to KL, and when I came home to Port Dickson, Mini-PSB was gone. I did a page of these drawings as a way to be sad (some of them made it into this story about Bersih 4), not really expecting her to come back. The next day she showed up, angry and demanding to be fed.
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Happy new year! I bought boxing gloves and took up boxing again.
More on feeling the animal, and more on the internet wanting all your time.
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Antid Oto – italian for antidote – was one of Leon Trotsky‘s earliest pen names. I also love the Malay word for it: penawar. A few months ago, I started taking regular walks and making drawings afterwards as a way to deal with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction.
