A Place Called Cat Mountain
A Place Called Cat Mountain
Long before I became a digital artist, I used to draw comic books. They emerged from the roughly scribbled note books and sketches, I’d been keeping for years. I’d originally planned to be the writer with a very talented friend doing the art. As our life began to go in different directions I was still making notes and drawing characters. I slowly learnt to draw storyboards and eventually comics myself.
Over the years, I’ve accumulated boxes and boxes of sketch books, storyboards, comics, stories and even a handful of plays. All of this has coalesced into a place called Cat Mountain, the mountain by the sea.
I’ve been planning a website to put it all on for a very long time. As the work slowly emerges, the keen eyed of you will spot shades of Love and Rockets, Sandman, and most of all Bloom County, in these tales. All of which inspired me greatly to make comics myself and whose influence is impossible to deny. Along with a million other bits of books, films and music, all mixed up with the many fragments of my life, that have been thrown into the melting pot.
I’ve spent most of my adult life in the company of musicians, artists, actors and ne-er do wells. I’ve met more eccentrics of both the lovable and the roguish kind, than I care to remember. Most of them on the run from whatever can be called normal life, and so was I. This off beat sensibility has permeated deep into my creative work.
Working on these stories and characters was where I first began to realise I was trans. Most of the main characters were female. Similarly watching films I always identified with the lead character. Recently I saw an interview with the trans newsreader India Willoughby, so many of her experiences and emotions resonated with me.
These latent trans feelings finally crystallized playing online video games. I couldn’t abide having a male avatar, presenting myself as male just seemed so wrong. Having a safe place to explore and nurture my female side was one of the happiest moments of my life. It soon became obvious I couldn’t keep it inside any longer.
Then a serious illness in the family turned my life upside down. My Mother’s health began to deteriorate. It wasn’t something that had come out of the blue. The worst fears of the family became fully realised and she was eventually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Although it has brought the family much closer together, watching my Mother slowly die as her mental faculties fail, has been heartbreak after heartbreak.
Not surprisingly the artistic routine I’d spent years building up, went completely out the window. Replaced by years of travelling from one side of the country to the other and the eventual, inevitable relocation.
Somehow I ended up on Twitter and managed to establish myself as a digital artist and online Dominatrix. Even as I was creating buckets of digital art, in my heart of hearts I wanted to get back to writing stories and drawing comic books. To return to the journey I had begun so long ago.
Once upon a time there was a lost boy who lived by the mountain and the sea. Deep inside the lost boy was a lost girl. A lost girl who had always been there, trapped for such a long long time. Singing, calling, crying out from underneath the rubble. A girl with orange hair.
The girl summoned all her strength and climbed towards the sunlight, turning the boy inside out. There she stood on the top of the rubble, watching and listening, as the wind blew through her orange hair. After a long contemplative silence, she turned and whispered.
“Little by little, there’s a voice in my head.
‘Return to Cat Mountain.’ is what the voice said.”
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