"Potato Love"

Have you ever fallen in love with a potato?

With a lot of my illustrations, I try to tell a narrative through them, and most of my inspiration comes from my own experiences. With this short comic, I was reflecting back to when I was having a tough time with personal relationships and my identity. I found myself falling into a very immature mindset which I hadn’t felt so potently since my teenage years.

I would question the rejection back onto the person; ‘Why not me? I’m a good person/we suit each other/it felt so right etc…or am I not? Why can’t you see what I see?’

I think it’s a very common feeling, when we are faced with rejection we want to understand, we want to be selfish with their time and be persistent. It’s understandable, I still see it in plenty of adults, but ultimately it’s flawed. It reduces the other person to an idealised figure and has a habit of making you resentful. I had gone through this thought process many times, but it was the first time I felt uncomfortable about why I was thinking this way. It was driving me insane, and I needed to put it out of my head and be able to look at it from a distance – I needed an exorcism.

So I made this comic. I like the idea of an unreliable narrator because that’s what it does to you. Every action takes on a very different meaning and twists it into your own rose-tinted vision. Even if the other person said some innocuous thing, it’s another potential sign that they’re into you. They could even be an inanimate stem vegetable and still give you chills.

I find that the best thing about the comic is how people have interpreted the story. Some see it as a story of obsessive, toxic love; others have really related to it and see it as a tale of unrequited love with someone who, no matter what, cannot return those feelings.

I love drawing comics and take a lot of inspiration from the independent comics scene. So far I find that my biggest issue is getting overwhelmed or lost in my thoughts, so I just jot them down in a book or paper. Even if they’re just stick figures or rough shapes, it helps me be able to look at the narrative as a whole. I’m not too precious at this stage either, so it means I can chop and change composition and copy without much fuss.

Just getting stuff onto paper for me is helpful to get things going; otherwise, I just end up procrastinating. Once I have a finished set of sketches I then make a more finalised sketch in Photoshop and then colour. I still have plenty to learn about creating a comic/story and hope to do more in the future!