 Hello, my name is Delia Robinson and I'm here with a cranky that was made originally for a young person's Graphic novel camp and I was asked to come and talk about my the book that I the graphic novel I've written and the reason I chose a cranky style is that the book is written in two separate styles One for the main character Peter that's his it's it's a chatty colorful Cartoon style and the other style is no words at all the story of his grandfather and they alternate And I didn't see any way that I could stand in front of a room full of children and point out things here so I turned it into a cranky format and a cranky is a primitive form of television or and It's sort of been making a resurgence is very popular for for street theater and protest theater So and as I cranked through I'll use the profess professorial Pointing stick one of the children at the graphic novel camp said this was gruesome It's a Barbie doll head on a ski pole, but it was my Relic from my daughter's growing up when this was the scepter, so I'm going to use it for the professors Professors device now another word is when I work and am happily working I'm amazingly messy and this cranky didn't have the controlling influence of a ballad which most of my cranky all of my crankies have been Song and ballad crankies, but this one had nothing except for what it was like to write this book this Accidental book and so it it has scribbling all over it when you make anything of this sort or novel don't do all the scribbling Nobody wants to read it. So here we go This is it an accidental graphic novel a shirt way story This is a cityscape alright on With the glasses I made a graphic novel, but I didn't mean to make it. I made lots of mistakes and Then here this is I've decided to make myself look better than I do. So that's allegedly me. It says I Didn't plan the plot. I didn't plan any plot at all. It just came to be a Plot that could be stated in one sentence a man had a secret Next problem. I didn't think about the future all the characters in a cartoon Must move in the direction of the future because and that in our world is that way and I just had people going higgly-piggly any which direction and had to correct all that later when it came time to go to press and Example of how the problem of that can be is with a little cranky. I made for a song which I'm not gonna sing Oh, dear me my friend there but It's going exactly backwards you crank it through and the song is Stop kicking my dog around every time I go to town the boys are kicking my dog around dog around dog around You better stop kicking my dog around That's the song the end and so the way I do it in my dyslexic way was starting with the end and going backwards all the way through so when you think about doing a cartoon or a Graphic novel by all means think which way is the future and let all the action take place heading that way So that was something I didn't think about and another thing I didn't think about was I almost forgot to give my character some special features So they could be recognized from one picture to the next and so think about if you're doing this give somebody a top Not or red hair or really big eyes or a funny hat anything I didn't mean to do it. I didn't think about it But as it happened my main character is bald so he was bald and I have lots of sticking out white hair So that took care of this problem But I hadn't it's good to think about it So here's this cranky about how I made this accidental book and Here right away. We have a problem. Here's a huge mend Or I didn't think about what was going on and I had to glue things together and all not good But what is this? That is where I was trying to think about when I Who my character is gonna be and you have many options here It could be a story about Babar, which it's not and I thought well that was all I like that idea I like the idea of it being whoops about an ogre. That's a much better story and pretty interesting but it wasn't it was a story about me writing a book and so there it is that's me beautified and Stick her right on there and let her tell the story as long as she can stay in place So what's here? This is the story. I Had drawn it as just arms disembodied arms. It was a horrible sight. So that's why this head got stuck on there Okay, I found a book in a free box. That's true I found it in the free box but the free box was in the library But I recommend don't draw in the whole thing if it's too much work I just drew a landscape is much easier than drawing the library with all those stacks and books and then I Knew a person it says I met a person but I had known a person who told me many stories about his family this is Peter and Another thing here is his eyebrows. I don't draw all that well I think and so I use eyebrows pretty heavily I recommend high breath if they're going this way it says one thing and if it goes this way another and so He obviously is a little anxious And he really doesn't look like this at all But I went home and I made cartoons about his stories And I drew my cartoons in the pages of that book I found in the free pile because the book was named Peter here It is this is the book and I scribbled all in it all of his stories are in this book Like that page after page after page you tell me a thing I draw it and then I weeks might pass I'd see him again. He'd tell me another one of these stories and the stories were interesting to me because they were so totally Different from anything in my own life He's a group in wealth in in New York City on Park Avenue, and I grew up as a growing weed out in the country So it fascinated me and I went home And I drew his stories into the pages of this library book that had been discarded and was very shabby But had nice paper, but the question is was this okay? I still have trouble were thinking about what I did that I didn't tell him I'm drawing pictures of your life I just did it and the reason I didn't think I needed to tell him is because I never Expected that anyone else would see it, but me it was for my own Pleasure and amusement to kind of try to make these stories He told have a have a life that went on in my imagination And so there is this woman who should be me drawing and here's a little tip that I discovered along the way This hand I was tired of drawing that hand hands are hard to draw So I just set a coffee cup there and I use that a lot when I'm drawing a cartoon or a Graphic novel. I just put things in front of the things. I don't want to draw. So here it is Here's the book I drew and I drew and I drew intermittently for years Says here book very shabby. So here's all the pages coming out of this book that I've been drawing on and that's how they look and Over time my drawings changed a little bit, but I didn't really mind that the style head of was evolving The drawings began with the unfortunate story of my friend Peter's birth There it is. I say yuck as does his father yuck Peter was born and the doctor says good God Peter was born with it a Problem called projectile vomiting pyloric stenosis it the baby Vomits not just a little bit it shoots it quite a distance though And it's a shocking to see and terrible for the baby because they quickly dehydrate and they die and so the doctor Was I said good God that's a problem and here's Peter looking like a pink larvae going up Nothing stayed down. So I just drew it. I didn't correct anything. I didn't redo anything I just drew and drew and drew because after all it was just for me and then the doctor says looking very pleased This baby will need immediate surgery. Oh Darn says the mother and the baby's going up and Then the doctor says still pleased. It's a very difficult long recovery big scar lots of nursing care is needed That's him the mother says but but we were going we were planning to spend the summer at Cape Cod And then down here pinned in with a paper clip which the editor let me do all little notes throughout the book that things I learned later. It says not Cape Cod long beach That's of what I learned later. It was the right place. Here's the dad sneaking off looking yellow and miserable I always drew him as a yellow miserable looking guy So there he is there she says the doctor says well go to Cape Cod We'll take care of everything you can pick him up at the end of the summer and The baby says gee thanks as he vomits and That's how Peter spent his first summer He was left at the hospital and I said to him why would your mother do that and leave her darling little newborn Irping baby in the hospital for several months and he said she Respected what the doctor said so much that she thought that must be the right thing and so there's his first summer and The book goes on and on one thing about Peter's style the drawings for Peter's part of the book is that they they look like that and They just go on whenever I have a story I want to tell that's what I do One day I met Peter in a cafe and he was mopeier than usual and I say what's wrong? And he says with the talkie bubble in the wrong place That should always be up somewhere where you can see it because this looks like he still has a barfing disease I said what's wrong? He says I'm thinking about my grandfather And he told me his grandfather's story and I drew that in a different style and I didn't draw it in the book I drew this on pieces of nice drawing paper and I used no words with it And I was inspired by these pictures by old photographs They were taken of the time that his grandfather lived and his grandfather came as a young boy To the United States a young man maybe 18 or 19 from this muddy little village in Russian They don't even know the name of it anymore But it was a very crowded nasty place and it wasn't a part of Russia called the pale Where people who were Jewish were forced to move whether they wanted to or not if you were rich You could buy your way out of it or if you were famous you could get out of it But everybody else just had to pick up whatever they owned and move and they moved into this region Where maybe a village would have 10,000 people in it and overnight it would have 80,000 residents and not enough to eat And know where to sleep and it was a real nightmare So what happened is anyone who had a dime headed for the closest port and got on boats and Somehow or another and they all helped each other do this people shared the shared money so they could do it and Peter's Grandfather he must be one of these people in this crowd went to the boats and got on a boat going to America and That was in 1894 I guess or 92 and they sailed and sailed this is my idea of what a long ocean voyage would look like And then after a long time they saw through the fog the city of Manhattan the city of New York That's Manhattan and he they got to Ellis Island when they got through that all that testing and stuff that went on at Ellis Island to make them allow them to come to the United States and Off he goes into the city with his friends that he's made on the boat and the city is jam-packed They've made high-rise buildings. They've never seen anything like it And they've got a wander through there to find Hester Street where the people from his part of the village of the of the pale now live and There's are the shabbiest most torn down wretched houses and he had to find a place to live and With with this there's something else about this kind of drawing that I discovered and other people have discovered before me is if You don't like the white that you've painted photoshop Well can pour it in and when it pours it in it kind of is equal might spread in this magical way that I actually liked Same with the black the black is intensified by photoshop, and it made the printing process better Okay, so and then one day I had a visitor a Wild man who turned out to be a publisher and he said heard you're doing something unusual Can I see it and I and he said I want to publish this after he saw it I want to publish this and I said you can't do it There I am you can't do it why not he says and the reasons we've already gone over them a little bit It's someone else's story times to it's Peter's story, and he might not want it told probably doesn't and It's the author of the book story and She definitely won't want it told because she copyrighted that book and I drew it number two reason Why not I drew it on that copyright protected library book the library book part is not the problem The problem is the copyright that says you cannot use that material in any way you want and The printed words are clearly readable through my paintings. There's no question what book it is and Also number three up here The pictures are drawn in two different styles the grandfather style with no no words Peter style all the Colorful chat chat and those styles just didn't look comfortable together at all and I didn't see how a book could be made out Of that and he said you're you're clever You'll find a way and ask for Peter just ask him I thought oh, okay, so I asked him and What did he do he walked away? This is a man who when it if he doesn't want to say no to someone He just slightly turns and puts his head going the other direction and that definitely means no and I knew that that meant no and so I just dropped the subject and said can't be done and occasionally the Publisher would call me up and say did he change his mind and I said no and he said ask him And I said I don't think I will and a couple of years passed and one day I met Peter on the street the actual truth was he came up to me in the farmers market and He said remember what you asked me a few years ago, and I said no and I said Yes, I do and he said well you can do it But you don't know the whole story and I thought well then he came over to my house And he signed a release he's a shy man So he just let me take a picture of him signing this paper which says I can use the story in any way I want but I can only show his legs and feet in the picture and Then he stole told me the story of his grandfather His grandfather arrived here penniless He Peter said I came home from the from my summer in the hospital in a taxi but he arrived down at the wharf on a very very run-down boat and after this long and terrible voyage across the ocean and In ten years this penniless boy became extremely rich He had a great big house on Riverside Drive He had servants and that's known because of the 1911 census said so or the 1910 census said so and He also owned the largest sweatshop in America at that point and maybe the whole wide world it was called the triangle shirt waist factory and the reason it was triangles because it was in a building shaped by a Try like a triangle down in Greenwich Village and shirt waist is a garment of a woman's shirt a blouse that looks like a shirt, but you tuck it in at your waist, so it's a shirt waist and Then I drew stories about the factory Because I started reading about these factories. They were kind of frightful and definitely frightful in fact their wages were amazingly low they He he Hired young women to do the sewing who came from the same part of Russia He came from they spoke Yiddish or Russian and didn't speak much English at all if any They were required In most sweatshops and I'm not true No, I'm not sure if this is true about his but in most you were required to pay a Rental fee for the chair you sat on out of your wages You had to pay for the thread and for the needles you used even though the thread went into the garment that he sold You still had to pay for the the sower still had to pay for the thread and you had to pay for the Electricity to run the sewing machine all taken out of your wages people's wages were cut for all kinds of things That was a punishment was to cut your wages and if you got up to go to the bathroom It was so tight and crowded there that other people had to get up to get to move so that you could get out of that Tight row and this was an enormous haul with rows of sewing machine stretching as far as you could see from side to side Jam packed in there and it was very very difficult situation There were thread girls were the young girls that came to work sometimes with their mother and they were Used for pulling basting stitches when I if I were sewing a garment to hold things together before The sewing machine sewed it you would sew it with great big Hand sewn things to hold everything together and that's called the basting and they would these little girls were used to pull out the basting stitches and so the finished garment was ready to go into the shops and some of these workers were as young as three or four years old and The average wage for those younger people was a dollar fifty a week and they worked from seven thirty in the morning until nine at night That's a long day Now this picture says most the workers were mostly immigrant women Yes, the half the workers were from the russian part of the pale almost half of them were From italy from sicily and there was one irish girl working the day that this happened Of the story happens. Okay. This picture is different in Then I didn't know things when I drew this picture. This is an early picture that I didn't know that it's a cut And fashion the the what they were working on They would cut off scraps and the scraps would build up on the floor So that and they weren't often cleaned out and so you'd come to work You'd be waiting ankle deep through scraps to get to your sewing machine And as you the work would be that you needed to do would be stacked up high all around you And over your head there was a bar where you would reach up when you finished sewing a shirt waste You would reach up and hang it on a hanger over your head So all around each sewer was this mass of fabric in various conditions Scraps and finished goods and well goods ready to be made Then with the grandfather's part of the story I drew half of it with the cartoon style about the factory the factory part of the story I drew half of it in cartoon style and half of what were in these older Sort of styles of that that I thought match the times Here's a bunch of little thread girls and button girls. They're sewing on buttons Working with an older person there to supervise Here's girls who just changed the threads and the bigger sewing machines And she's doing some sort of sewing or basting pulling And so that was what it was like in there long hours A lot of Difficult times and it was but here comes the really really bad part And why peter felt that his grandfather's story was hard to tell That that's a key When they went to work The workers went in through one door of this and up to the eighth floor of this high rise building And once they went into where they worked into this huge long hall the door was locked They were locked in while they worked the reason they were locked in is the boss thought they were going to steal from him It they'd go down on the street and hand off one of the finished shirts to some friend and he would be losing money So they kept the doors locked while he was at work He didn't trust them and that is a a worldwide Scenario in sweatshops that seems to happen that the bosses lose They don't trust their workers and so they do something like this and invariably I don't know why it is but a locked door in a sweatshop seems to invite a fire because it's happened all over the world again and again from Ever since there were sweatshops up to the present And uh, so here's how I drew this part of the story And it says on a saturday afternoon on march 25th 1911 a fire broke out on the eighth floor at the triangle shirt waste factory And I drew that in two styles the The cartoon style and then later on I drew that more Artie style and I'd say fire and so what happened the garments They don't know where the fire started But it probably was a spark from a sewing machine or one of the wires down on the floor covered up with scraps But the scraps caught fire they Blazed up they caught fire to the stuff on her table and then they shot up to the things hanging over her head and burned them So everything just went whoosh into an incredible inferno and Workers ran for getting out of there and discovered the locked door There was a freight elevator that they tried to get on but it broke and and Didn't go anymore There was a fire escape, but it fell off the building because too many people tried to go down it And some people got away across the roofs by finding a way up to the to the the boss's office up on the roof and But not very many escaped not everyone was there that day. It was um, it was a saturday and so The or the most observant jews that was their Sabbath and they weren't there, but it was still about the It was a horrible event for many many hundreds of people And the last picture I drew for some time because it just made me so sad were these last two of women falling and this With had the words to just take the torn at random from the book that I was using the library book And I was surprised later when I looked at it when it said I shall always remember you And this one says dead as long as and then it says peter. I am frightened And I thought well that was amazing words to have chosen there and when I had to change the words on this thing So it could be published I went on to photoshop and I put the photoshop Cursor on one line and I ran it along the next line So the two lines would be combined into one and it turned the words It turned the the lettering into nonsense But here I didn't do it. I left it as it was in the original book because it was so meaningful to me This is how the streets looked with the people who didn't want to be burned jumped out the windows and they were touching and hideously painful stories about that That the falling of these girls through the air because it was There were workplace accidents all the time in america and they were hidden They happened inside of the factories and nobody saw them happen But this happened on a main street in broad daylight the end of the day But people were going about their business shopping for their dinner And it wasn't like now where there'd be grocery stores You went from the grocery from the butcher to the baker to the green grocery who had the vegetables And you shopped at different stores So you're in and out going up and down the street and suddenly there are women Leaping from this building and falling to their desks on the sidewalk nine floors down And eight floors down and it was it was Unbelievably horrible and then people look up and they see the building is the on that floor is all on fire And there's a young man standing in the window and women behind him being pushed up to the window by the fire And he is taking each one by a hand. He helps her up onto the window sill He says a few words to her and then helps her step off into space And then the next one and the next one and one by one He says goodbye to all his friends as she he helps them step into death And then the last girl that can get through the fire He helps her up. They hold hands together and they step off together And nobody was ever sure who he was among the men who are working there who were up on the next floor up And he must have come down to help his friends And so there were acts of of heroic courage, but mostly it was an event of unknown people Dramatically dying in the front of the eyes of of of the public and The horror of this event because it was seen by so many hundreds of people it did something unexpected It opened the door to allow labor unions to have a chance to support workers They had been kept out by the bosses and now they they were able to get rules for safe working conditions And for fair wages and for all the things of protecting workers that the unions took Took control of and many people had been trying to organize for better working conditions And now they just jammed the streets and the hundreds of thousands of people showed up for the funeral marches for the victims And just for labor marches in general and people were It would all happened because of this ghastly fire And historians say that the owners the peters grandfather didn't do as peters said He told me he didn't do anything that all the work all the bosses didn't do And they say that it was common practice at the time to lock the workers in just he was the one that that caused this Nightmare and so but people still argue about this. It was a It was a big important thing to discuss peters grandfather and his cousin who Some people say it was just a friend But peter says no they were cousins and they married sisters And they were accused of being responsible for the worst workplace disaster in the united states Maybe ever they were tried in a criminal case And they were set free Because there was no proof that they themselves had locked the door with that key They ordered the key to be used to lock the door perhaps, but there was no proof Whoever locked the door was probably dead in the fire and They themselves couldn't be blamed And so here is a picture from the book saying clean hands He got off with clean hands except he really didn't because everybody Knew what he had done Or what he was accused of doing and it looked very bad for him And a week later in all the newspapers in new york city, he took out an ad saying The shirt waste company is still open for business Visit us at our new location gave the location and guess who visited the fire marshal And he said they broke all the same rules too many benches too may so machines all crammed into a small Space that were in so tight that you couldn't get the emergency door open And so they were shut down on that and he moved off to california to do some other line of work And uh, but most of the family stayed in new york But they were deeply ashamed of this and they raised peter to never talk about this disgrace And that's a lot of the book that i'm not going to put down here But it it shows how his life has been lived to carry a secret that he was told to never tell Never tell it. It was too horrible to tell and don't ever let the family be blamed for This and so he had to carry this burden all his life and then he tells someone and what did I do? I drew it so that was a But he didn't was never blaming or angry at me about it He didn't ask to see my work He wasn't that interested in that I did that except to say that this might be the only Biography he would ever have and he's an artist and he would like the fact that I talked about that his development as an artist in the book And that's the last part of the the book about peter and of him reading and then it as he reads the Our body sort of falling through his his thoughts And then it says that art is a way to talk about things that otherwise can't be said and The book then ends with pictures of the victims of the fire the ones that had photographs I looked at their photographs and drew their pictures and that is the last The last part of the book And to me this was the extremely moving and difficult to draw And it's just these are the people who who had pictures who died in the fire and And I drew them and drew them and drew them until I ran out of Till I ran out of pictures and that ended the book And then here is the end and there's peter relaxing outdoors under a tree And it was a pleasure to share this project with you