ErikaMoen
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COMIC: The Star Sweeper (2003)
🕑 Added 2023-11-01 06:21:24 +0000 UTCOne million years ago (20), my gaggle of fellow teenage girl cartoonists put together a black and white zine of short stories to sell at a comic convention. The theme was fairy tales and I adapted a short poem I found in a book collecting the old weird stuff (You know, the kind of folk stories Disney would sanitize before turning into an animated classic safe for '90s families).
Cover by Dylan Meconis. Anybody here been around since the Pants Press days? I was 19/20 years old in 2003.
So anyway, I didn't record the title of the book but the poem I transcribed went like this:
There was an old woman
Tossed up in a blanket
Seventeen times as high as the moon.
But where she was going
no mortal could tell,
for under her arm
she carried a broom.
"Old woman!
Old woman!
Old woman!"
Said I.
"Whither,
ah whither,
ah whither so high?"
"To sweep the cobwebs from the sky,
And I'll be with you by and by."
The idea of a badass old woman in vintage aviator apparel sweeping cobwebs off stars in the sky immediately planted itself in my brain and I produced the following three pages:
I miss making zines. On my last few New Years Resolutions lists I've written "Make a zine" but, obviously, I've never followed through on it. Someday! Someday.
Anybody have any of these in their stash of old minicomics from the early '00s?
Comments
Erika Moen
!!!! Seriously??? Wow!
Devon McGuire
I definitely have that zine but I feel like I bought it at SDCC from someone who was not you! 🤔
Erika Moen
Oh my gosh! Thank you so much for sharing that link! This is the first time in literally 20 years that I've ever seen any evidence that this poem exists outside of that one book I read that one time in 2003!
Mandy Shapiro
I immediately heard the lullaby in my head from the Wee Sing nursery rhymes and lullabies cassette I had as a child that wove the songs into a coherent story. Now available on YouTube. Links in case anyone is interested The old woman: https://youtu.be/kh2gxMiR21s?si=f0nv3yJ_T9jwXGGA The full album playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lt3jNr0O9Y1XGtILJePhIsvC4E_G6Uah0&si=jxznGSltJsIlLlEZ
