I’m home visiting family in Kentucky, and my grandmother gave me a little notepad filled with my drawings from when I was a little girl. It is a treasure! Most of the drawings are little story sequences, too, so I will show them in sets. Here’s the first…

This is two different stories about some recurring characters that young-Lisa often drew: Dog and Cat (even as a child I was terrible at naming things).

In this short bit, Dog is about to bite a startled, bug-eyed Cat (I watched a lot of cartoons as a kid) but Cat dashes away just in time, leaving Dog to chomp the nothingness so hard that his teeth fall out before he falls to the ground, dismayed. I feel like I must have lifted this bit straight out of a Tom & Jerry cartoon or something.

 

Dog and Cat meet sometime later in another adventure which I’ll probably need to narrate.

Dog and Cat are arguing at the top of a cliff. Okay okay I know I JUST started but I have to make an aside. I drew this on a notepad that my family clearly used for leaving notes for one another. Do you guys remember that? The age of leaving physical notes? There’s something nostalgic about coming across a notepad filled with nothing but little blurbs like “went for a walk,” or “your Mom and I are at the grocery” or “I’m at Kempo, be back late.” Lots of times we’d even leave timestamps on them, so if you woke up from a nap and saw that the parents went walking at 6:15 you’d have an idea of when to expect them back. Did other people do this? I assume of course they did, but looking back on all these little notes feels delightfully archaic, from a different time, and thus it starts to feel foreign and a little unreal. Anyway, I’m getting on a tangent.

So, Dog and Cat are arguing on the top of a cliff…

Dog decides that the optimal solution for winning this argument is to kick Cat off the cliff.

Cat has bumped his head from the fall and is furious!

Full of resolve, Cat pushes the bump back down (again, I’m certain I lifted this straight from a cartoon I had seen)…

…and marches straight up the side of the cliff to give Dog a piece of his mind! The jagged tail was a classic visual I used to denote anger.

Cat resumes the argument!

This time Dog shoots Cat back off the cliff with a cannon.

Cat is so mad that he RUNS back up the side of the cliff.

Dog sees that Cat is almost up the cliff, and ponders his response.

Right behind Dog happens to be a flat wooden plank, like a door (I know it also looks the same as the cliff face but trust me on this one)

Cat is almost to the top, so angry! Look at those speed lines!

At the top of the cliff Cat runs right into the door which Dog has conveniently placed. Splat! I also lifted this from a cartoon, but I think my young mind didn’t understand why the door gag was funny in particular contexts, I just knew it was funny. So even though the joke makes no sense to put a door at the top of a cliff, I always thought it was hilarious.

This particular story, about Dog kicking Cat off the cliff, I eventually revised in the 1st grade, when we made our own books. It had color and everything! So I was, what, 6 or 7 in 1st grade? So I must have been 5 or 6 when I drew this version.

I’m pretty sure it was actually my first sequential work, as most all my drawings before then had been self contained stories in a single scene. I remember drawing this when we were on vacation at the lake, and being super proud of it, running around and showing it to everyone in my family and cracking up as I explained what was happening.

As you will soon see, this kicked off a new habit of drawing sequential work. Stay tuned for more!