Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Dumb: Living Without a Voice
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.georgiawebber.com/
CITY:
STATE: ON
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY:
http://georgiasdumbproject.com/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2015062906 |
| HEADING: | Webber, Georgia |
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| 100 | 1_ |a Webber, Georgia |
| 670 | __ |a Dumb, c2014 |b cover verso (Georgia Webber) |
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Comics artist, writer, and editor. Cranial sacral therapist and meditation facilitator; guest speaker at arts festivals and comics expositions; workshop and exhibition facilitator.
MEMBER:Canada Council for the Arts.
AWARDS:Ontario Arts Council, Writers Work in Progress, 2014, for Dumb.
WRITINGS
Contributor to various publications and anthologies, including Some Days, Stars/Diagnosis, 15 Minutes, The Rules, Access, 10 Reads of a Great Comic, Insight, Watch Me, Blind Spot, and Emerge.
SIDELIGHTS
Georgia Webber is a Canadian comics artist, writer, and editor who combines health, health workshops, art, music, and comic books. Her debut memoir in graphic novel form, Dumb: Living Without A Voice, chronicles her severe vocal injury and sustained vocal condition which causes her pain when she uses her voice. In the healthcare field, Webber is a cranial sacral therapist and a meditation facilitator. She is also an improvisation musician who blends healthcare, body awareness, and creative expression. She also hosts the MAW Vocal Arts community project through which people explore breath through listening, movement, and meditation.
In 2018, Webber published Dumb, her memoir and medical story of how an injury affected her vocal chords. After doctors told her to stop using her voice indefinitely, Webber found that she could no longer perform her customer service job, felt severe alienation, and had difficulty communicating. But as she chronicles in the comic, she persevered, determined to continue having a social life and finding effective forms of self-expression, through whispers, white boards, lip reading, charades, and ultimately, through the comic book itself. She gained support from her friends, and learned the important role having a voice and means of expression is in forming a person’s identity.
The graphic novel’s artwork is rendered in black and white with the only color being red accents. Scribbles and overlapping montages capture her frustration and anxiety, but also hope. Writing on the Comics Bulletin website, Daniel Gehen noted that the color red was important because “it adds so much to Webber’s storytelling ability without compromising its aesthetic. It’s unlikely that this book would work nearly as well (if at all) without the red. Because it’s a color used to symbolize fire and passion, those moments of agitation pop off the page.”
Writing in Publishers Weekly, a reviewer praised the book for its meditative quality saying: “What the book becomes is an ode to doggedness and a testament to resilience through change.” Living every day without a voice was a struggle, and “I imagine that relating her story was very nearly as difficult, but she emerges out the other end with a new appreciation of both herself and her life,” according to a writer on the Four Color Apocalypse website.
In an interview with Jane van Koeverden online at CBC, Webber explained that simply describing her illness doesn’t carry enough weight but “if I can write a story that gives readers the sense of being threatened and feeling uncomfortable while they’re reading it—I think they understand it better. Having the direct experience of the story is going to have a greater impact.” In her book, she incorporated her internal experiences, piecing together notes and episodes to paint a picture. The style of artwork she chose is a combination of minimalist expression, easy designs that she could work with for an extended number of comic issues, and “partly to make sure the things I was saying were as clear as possible. I’d say that the biggest influence that exists in the whole thing is Bill Watterson, and I’m doing my best interpretation of that whole style of expressive and somewhat-simplified drawing,” Webber told Shea Hennum online at Paste.
Calling the memoir heartfelt and emotionally moving, Hess Sahlollbey online at Silhouette added: “This is the medium that Webber’s story was meant to be told in, revealed not only by her account, but by the strength of Dumb as a whole reading experience.” Webber told Sahlollbey that comics was the perfect medium for her because in comics “each creator has to start from nothing and it was really about synthesizing and taking lots of components in the comic book medium.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, May 7, 2018, review of Dumb: Living Without a Voice, p. 53.
ONLINE
CBC, https://www.cbc.ca/ (August 23, 2018), Jane van Koeverden, author interview.
Comics Bulletin, http://comicsbulletin.com/ (August 15, 2018), Daniel Gehen, review of Dumb.
Four Color Apocalypse, https://fourcolorapocalypse.wordpress.com/ (May 11, 2018), review of Dumb.
Paste, https://www.pastemagazine.com/ (April 30, 2015), Shea Hennum, author interview.
Silhouette, https://www.thesil.ca/ (September 29, 2016), Hess Sahlollbey, review of Dumb.
georgia webber
comics artist, writer & editor
Georgia Webber is a comics artist, writer, and editor living in southern Ontario. She is entirely occupied by the intersection of health and art, making music, comics, and facilitating health workshops from this point of fascination. She loves performing, creating connections, and collaborating with others.
Georgia is best known for her debut graphic memoir, Dumb: Living Without A Voice (Fantagraphics 2018), the chronicle of her severe vocal injury and sustained vocal condition which causes her pain from using her voice. This difficult experience lead her to work as a Cranial Sacral Therapist, a meditation facilitator, and as an improvising musician, blending elements of healthcare, body awareness and creative expression within constraints. She has extended her love of the voice into the community with a project called MAW Vocal Arts. MAW hosts a vocal arts showcase event every few months in Toronto, Ontario, her home, as well as a regular practice session called Breathing Music where people can explore breath through deep listening, movement, meditation and sounding practices.
Georgia Webber Comics Artist, Writer, and Editor
1 Oneida Ave Toronto Islands, ON M5J 2E2 georgiawebber.com 416 312 1099
community work
2017 - present 2013 – present
September 2017 - June 2018
june 2018
may 2018 october 2017 october 2017 june 2017 december 2016
october 2016
2015
2012 – 2015 2014
october 2014 august 2014 2008 – 2012 2008 – 2010
awards
2015
2014
2014
2015, 2014, 2013 2010
Freelance Comics Editor
Comics Editor, carte blanche (www.carte-blanche.org).
Peer Assessment Comittee Member, Canada Council for the Arts, Literature: Explore and Create, Ottawa, ON.
Featured Guest, Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, Chicago, IL.
Featured Guest, Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Toronto, ON.
Workshop facilitator, Comics & Disability Activism, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON.
Workshop facilitator, Arts & Wellness, North York Arts Centre, Toronto, ON.
Keynote Speaker, Graphic Medicine Conference, Seattle, WA.
Workshop Facilitator, “Comics to EmPOWER!” Full day comics workshop at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre, Hamilton, ON.
Workshop Facilitator, “Drawing the Inside Out” Comics workshop for youth, Young Voices Conference, Toronto Public Library, Toronto, ON.
Juror, Comic Arts Works in Progress, Ontario Arts Council.
Guest Services Coordinator, Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Toronto, ON.
Guest speaker, Graphic Medicine Conference, Baltimore, MD.
Guest Speaker, “Radical Graphics and the Culture of Protest.” OCADU, Toronto, ON. Organizer, Silent Reading Series: Portland, OR; Seattle, WA, and Vancouver, BC. Volunteer, Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Toronto, ON.
Publisher, gangLion comics anthology, Toronto, ON.
Dumb – Nomination – Outstanding Series, Ignatz Award.
Dumb - Ontario Arts Council, Writers Work in Progress.
Dumb – Nomination – Nipper, Doug Wright Awards.
Dumb – Nomination – Best English Comic, Expozine Awards.
gangLion comics – Nomination – Best English Anthology, Expozine Awards.
publications
May 2018
August 2018
August 19th, 2016 June 10th, 2015 February 4th, 2015 October 24th, 2014 September 25th, 2014 September 5th, 2014 August 19th, 2014 Spring 2014
Spring 2014
Winter 2013 Summer 2013
June 2013
May 2013
The Rules, World’s Greatest Cartoonists, Fantagraphics Free Comic Book Day. Dumb, Graphic Memoir, Fantagraphics.
Emerge, The 4Panel Project, www.4panel.ca.
Blind Spot, The Hairpin, www.thehairpin.com.
Watch Me, The Hairpin, www.thehairpin.com.
Insight, The Hairpin, www.thehairpin.com.
Excerpt from Dumb #6, The Hairpin, www.thehairpin.com. Dumb Introduction, The Hairpin, www.thehairpin.com.
10 Reads of a Great Comic, carte blanche, www.carte-blanche.org. Access, Irene Anthology.
The Rules, Descant: Cartooning Degree Zero.
15 minutes, Taddle Creek Magazine, Issue 31.
Diagnosis, Matrix Magazine, Graphic Fiction issue. Stars/Diagnosis pamphlet, No Press.
Some Days, SELFIE, kevin macpherson eckhoff.
festival exhibitions
June 2017
April 2017
May 2016
June 2016
August 2015
September 2014
June 2013
August 2013
May 2013, 2014, 2015
November 2007, 2008, 2008, 2010, 2011
September 2008, 2009, 2010
Graphic Medicine Conference, Seattle, wa.
Ting! Comic and Graphic Arts Festival, London, on. Hamilton Feminist Zine Fair, Hamilton, on.
Hamilton Zineposium, Hamilton, on.
Rhode Island Print Expo (ripe), Providence, ri. Graphic Medicine Conference, Baltimore, md.
Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (cake), Ch1 Oneida Ave Toronto Islands, ON M5J 2E2icago, il. Autoptic Festival, Minneapolis, mn.
Toronto Comic Arts Festival (tcaf), Toronto, on.
Expozine, Montreal, qc. Canzine, Toronto, on.
Dumb: Living Without a Voice
Publishers Weekly.
265.19 (May 7, 2018): p53+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Dumb: Living Without a Voice
Georgia Webber. Fantagraphics, $22.99 (196p) ISBN 978-1-68396-116-1
Silence is a curse and a gift in this meditative graphic memoir of illness and rebirth. Webber's sudden, severe vocal injury destroys life as she knows it, from dampening her vibrant social life to making her job as a barista almost impossible. Instructed by doctors to remain silent indefinitely, she tries out all manner of novel ways to communicate: wearing bright lipstick to facilitate lip-reading, faux whispering, toting around a whiteboard. As the annoyance this presents deepens into impairment and isolation, she finds herself questioning who she is without her voice--and what sort of person she might become. Webber's spare art work is rendered entirely in black, white, and bright red. Simple visual cues provide elegant symbolism; cartoon stars lie heavy upon her as she visits the doctor, threaten to engulf her as she fails to heal, and spill over the book's front matter. There is no cheap catharsis here; the healthcare machine is alienating, and Webber's injury grows ever more enigmatic, as her loneliness remains. What the book becomes is an ode to doggedness and a testament to resilience through change. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Dumb: Living Without a Voice." Publishers Weekly, 7 May 2018, p. 53+. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538858696/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=57b3feb2. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538858696
1 of 1 9/29/18, 11:38 PM
Georgia Webber on Dumb, Self-Publishing and Cartoonist Communities
By Shea Hennum | April 30, 2015 | 2:00pm
Comics Features sElf
In 2012, Georgia Webber couldn’t use her voice for more than a few minutes a day. Searching for a viable mode of communication, Webber turned to comics, leading to the creation of Dumb—a self-published series that follows Webber’s journey as she navigates life without a voice. Webber is poised to release three new issues at this year’s TCAF (Toronto Comics Art Festival).
Since its inception, Dumb has grown beyond Webber herself. The cartoonist serializes the work digitally at GeorgiasDumbProject.com, but the print editions feature introductions from cartoonists like Whit Taylor and Julie Maroh, as well as professionals in sound studies. In these writings, the idea of voice is abstracted and expanded, and it becomes applicable in matters of race, linguistics and even physics.
Georgia sat down with us to discuss Dumb’s past, present and future and easing anxiety through the arts.
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Paste: Dumb looks completely different from any other comic I’ve read. How did you arrive at its unique aesthetic?
Webber: My aesthetic is not something that I chose. It’s more something that I had to discover as I was trying to tell my story, because I wasn’t drawing all that much; I hadn’t drawn in a long time when I started. And so I knew a lot of comics that I really liked, and I knew how beautiful a really honed technique could make a story. But I didn’t really have that, so I was just trying to make it as clear as possible, because I knew I didn’t have that much control.
So the aesthetic that I chose was mostly guided by storytelling devices—or to make it easier on myself. I was like, “If I get really invested in accuracy or beautiful backgrounds, it’s gonna take me so long, and I’m gonna discourage myself.” So the way I chose to draw it was chosen partly to make sure I would sustain drawing it and partly to make sure the things I was saying were as clear as possible. I’d say that the biggest influence that exists in the whole thing is Bill Watterson, and I’m doing my best interpretation of that whole style of expressive and somewhat-simplified drawing.
It’s so minimalist that it can change a lot, and that was another way that it could be easy on me—to make sure that, story by story, it would work. But it could also change if the story needed something.
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Paste : You talked about not having drawn comics in a while. As a kid, were you drawing a lot of comics and then you fell off for a while?
Webber: I drew incessantly as a child, because—well, I don’t really know why. My parents had a hard time getting me to stop. I’d go to bed after a day of drawing for six straight hours and be upset because I couldn’t draw more: “I wasn’t done! Why are you making me stop?” But I was also not that social as a child. It was a good way to keep myself engaged. And then taking that very comforting and natural practice of drawing all the time into art class in school—that’s kind of what killed it for me. In high school I kind of dropped it all together, and I was more focused on my external world, as opposed to my internal one, because friends and identity forming and all those things were more important to me at the time.
I only picked it up again when I had a project in a non-traditional art class in my last year of high school. But it was only in that last year, so I was like 16-17 at the time. I had this unit in class on comics, and I was like, “Oh! I love writing. And I used to love drawing. This is something I could probably do.” And so I drew for a little while there for a year or two in this independent study. But I got so excited about it then that I decided to run a publication for a little while. And running the publication really took a precedence over drawing things. And by the time that I got to drawing Dumb it had been, like, five years since I had really done a comic.
Paste : Were you still involved in comics between the periods when you were making them yourself, or did you move away from them completely?
Webber: I still loved them. I still thought they were where I would end up, and where I needed to be. But I was very invested in and working in small-press publishing at the time, so I was very overwhelmed by that a lot of the time.
But I was doing things here and there, like volunteering a little for TCAF, and picking things up to read them every once in a while. Not as much as I would’ve liked. I actually felt pretty daunted when I would read a comic, where I’d get so overwhelmed by the sense of awe at this person having done all this work and the beauty of the art. I would just get so overwhelmed by it that it felt like something I could never do. So I was very heavily involved, but I was very lightly invested.
Paste : Obviously Dumb is a really personal story, and I’ve been curious why you chose comics to do it, why you thought comics was the place to express this.
Webber: I’ve thought about it more since [starting], because it was a good excuse to push myself to make the comics that I’d always been wanting to make. I’ve thought about it more, and comics makes more sense for this, because it’s a very particular and interesting challenge for me to think about a story that is entirely about something audio based, something audible—and intangible in many ways, except for your own sensation of vibrations in your body. Those are all things you can’t easily convey in comics. It’s this big challenge for me to make this silent medium speak to people.
I’m still in the thick of really picking that apart in the issue I’m working on now. And also there’s this element to autobio that I love. In writing, if you’re writing about yourself, you reveal yourself slowly through your voice, through the words that you choose, through the events that you show. But in comics, the first drawing you do of yourself tells the reader so much about what you think of yourself that isn’t going to come through in just words. It’s not conscious. Like, when I’m drawing myself, I just need some signifiers so that everybody knows this is me whenever I appear in the comic: it’s these things. It’s the hairstyle that I have, and it’s the dots for eyes, and the lips have to be defined because I have to be able to put lipstick on them later. I wear a lot of similar clothes, and the boots that I wear. And those are the identifiers, and that’s all I was focused on. Thinking about that later, I was like, “It’s so interesting that I didn’t think I need to convey myself with any more complexity than that,” and I wasn’t concerned with making myself look really pretty or, like…anything specific. I was just like, “Give these basic, iconic things that people can grab on to and that’s enough, okay, move on.” In doing that, I didn’t realize how much I was saying about how I thought I should be represented to other people. I like reading other people’s autobio work, where they chose to make their head an animal head, or convey themselves with a sort of childish air about them, or with their imperfections really exaggerated. I think that’s really revealing and works really well for me and the things I want to say.
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Paste : And has that realization of this unconscious way that you draw yourself forced you to rethink about this time, or your personal identity?
Webber: I’m not sure I have a better answer for that than the comics themselves, because all my self-reflection is then whittled down to things that I think are the most important there, and how I’m trying to tell the story.
Paste : Do you think that would’ve been different if you had produce these issues in rapid succession, if you had to just churn them out without getting a moment to stop and reflect on what you were doing?
Webber: I think I’d have to be a different person for that to happen. I’m really not good with imposed instructions. I really can’t listen very well to anyone else’s ideas about what I should be doing, because I have such strong and loud ideas myself. I can’t envision a scenario in which I would actually feel the pressure to push out a bunch of comics with a deadline that forced me to compromise the quality of the comics, because I would probably quit if that was something being imposed upon me. I’d probably just say, “No, I’m not gonna do that.” So yes, I do think they would be very different…I think they would be worse. There would just be such a thin quality without multiple layers of thought going into every one of them and the time that that requires. So I just don’t get into those situations; even for myself, the deadlines I uphold for myself, I still check back in and say, “Here’s what I want to do, and there are all these reasons for it, but is this going to mess with the work itself?”
Paste : People talk about if you’re not doing it every day, it’s really easy to fall behind [on the craft, on momentum]. Do you find it difficult to maintain that motivation and that momentum to continue to make Dumb?
Webber: I mean, I’m balancing my whole life, right? It’s not like I just have comics to do all the time. I certainly wouldn’t be able to survive if that were the case. And that’s constant. I haven’t figured out any method or formula that works for me. I’m really just everyday being like, “How can I do the things I would like to do?” Maybe the things I would like to do aren’t going to serve me the best, they’re not gonna serve the work the best. Maybe my body needs other things too that I have to take care of first. I really don’t understand how people are drawing all the day all the time.
I’ve spent some parts of my life doing that, some parts of Dumb doing that, where I just made it this very intense, long workday, but I don’t think the work I produced out of that was actually better. I think it was just as good as it would be if I just worked for a week or two at a time and then took a bunch of time off, which is what I’m sort of focusing on now. Because those times that I’ve spent drawing more, I’ve hurt my body. Like, my hands are quite delicate now, and I have to be more responsive when they start to hurt and more careful with the times I chose to draw or not draw.
Paste : How big a role does the cartooning community play in your work and your personal life? How important that is to being a cartoonist?
Webber: I’d say it’s critical, because, as a human being, I can’t function outside of all communities. I was very lucky to find comics and feel it to be so warm and welcoming. I’ve been interested in other areas and found them to be too intimidating. Like trying to get into music when I was younger and—oh god, everyone is so cool and there’s so many crazy politics things and, y’know, they’re so cool. Too cool for me. And that’s such the opposite experience I’ve had with comics, and I have a real feeling of gratitude towards this industry’s openness and enthusiasm and the supportive nature of most relationships. And so to me, being a part of that is paying it forward to whoever is around.
The people I’ve met have been so lovely and encouraging, and I don’t know that I ever would’ve been making comics without them there saying, “You can totally do this, don’t be so hard on yourself, don’t take your own self down before you’ve even put something out, and we all go through this. And this is really worth it. It’s difficult but let’s do it together.”
Paste : Do you think you’d still have those same relationships if you weren’t self-publishing?
Webber: I don’t know. Because there is a closeness and a connectedness that you end up with when you’re the person who’s physically there interacting with people. If I was just handing off my work and saying, “Someone else takes care of all my publicity, or all my printing stuff,” it wouldn’t feel as much mine, maybe? I just wouldn’t know the people who are on the other end of that…I just think that a lot of good things can come out of humans connecting with other humans in an open and positive way. Which isn’t to say there’s no place for negativity or criticism, it’s just like, I definitely don’t want to be sitting away from all of that. I want to be sitting close to it and in the middle of it. That’s maybe just a personality thing. I know lots of people who are much more introverted, and they require much more alone time to take care of themselves. There’s nothing wrong with it, I just also want to be someone who makes them feel comfortable stepping out of that when they’re ready. And maybe doing everything myself is a just another [thing] to connect with people over. Or maybe I’m just a big control freak and I can’t handle other people touching my work. [Laughs]
Paste : A lot of people talk about how difficult it is to self-publish. But it seems like you really like it, and you get a lot out of it. What’s the plan for after Dumb ?
Webber: That’s a good question. I really can’t answer for sure, mostly because I’ve been having so many problems with my body not reacting well to the things that are required of it just to sit and draw or sit and be at a computer. That’s been really painful for me. I love comics, and I have some more ideas that I’d love to pursue and projects that I’d love to get into. I’m just kind of wary committing to anything just because I don’t know if I’m going to be able to physically do it without really damaging myself. So I’m feeling it out, but the next burning project that I have is not comics at all, so I’m gonna go check that out and see where it takes me.
Paste : What is that?
Webber: [Laughs]. It’s a podcast. Dumb is going to be a podcast. And that’s because the project itself led me through my own experience of voicelessness and the ways that can be both a physical and immediate thing and also an abstract idea, a presence in the world. The term “voice” really stands in for lots of different words, like “identity” and “autonomy,” and it’s all stuff I haven’t had—I’ve had this experience, this one I’ve been writing about, and there are so many more. So I got into making these comics and I got into putting introductions in each one, because I wanted to include more of these stories, more people’s experiences, and then I realized that wasn’t enough.
And also I want to actually use voices in my creative expression. It seems perfectly suited. That’s the next thing I’m looking at. I’m not even sure what comics are gonna happen. I have a couple more of the anxiety-based comics that I put on The Hairpin, so I’m going to finish that—I think I’ve got, like, two more that I’m going to put up. And then [I’m going to] see if anything else is feasible for my physical state and just kind of go day by day.
Paste : Regarding The Hairpin comics, they’re clearly something you have a personal connection with and you’ve dealt with anxiety first hand. What has that relationship been like and how has it affected your life?
Webber: Anxiety is a deep, deep part of my identity and existence. I don’t even a have a full understanding of it at this point, which has a lot to do with the physical pain that I talked about earlier, just like generalized pain or a location in my body becoming extremely painful but without any real explanation. I’m often going to doctors and they’re just like, “Your body is great. You’re like a textbook! Everything looks perfect. You’re so healthy.” They kept testing my body, like “everything is great! Don’t worry so much!” And they always say it’s probably stress. I’ve been working very hard to reduce my stress just because I want to enjoy my life more.
But even in all the work I’m doing, it’s uncovering how deep that anxiety has gone. And it’s probably just from being a very sensitive kid and all the stress that you build up and live with as some kind of normal when you don’t know better. So I’m trying to work with it now, and writing about it is part of working with it. It’s just like…this is so big and so intense in me sometimes, I should probably look at it from another perspective. And the artistic perspective is an interesting one for me too, because it’s very rooted in imagery, because my mind is what I use to see things before I can produce them. And I’m strengthening those images all the time, intentionally, because I want to be able to see them more clearly, so I can draw them. And then, when I have anxiety-related images, and I’m seeing things that I don’t want to see, that are scary or awful or just really gross—I can’t often make them go away. And I realize that I just had these things linked so strongly, that image generation and anxiety and fear, so it just made sense to start doing comics about it.
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Paste : Do you find it difficult to write and draw these stories dealing with these personal real-life things, or do you find it easier addressing them through art?
Webber: What’s hard is the translation. It’s not difficult emotionally for me to talk about these things, but it’s difficult to feel like I’m actually pinpointing the exact thing that I’m feeling. With regards to voice stuff, with Dumb, I’m mostly writing things that have happened, and they happened in a way [where] it was an interaction between me and someone in front of me, people outside me. There’s a clear way to draw that image. And with the anxiety stuff it’s 100 percent in my mind. And 100 percent in my body. And so I’m trying to convey [a] very physical thing that is invisible and then making it in this purely static and silent medium. So, that is hard. That is really hard.
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When a throat injury forced Georgia Webber into months of silence, she wrote a comic about it
Jane van Koeverden · August 23
Dumb is Georgia Webber's first book. (Submitted by Georgia Webber)
Dumb is a graphic memoir by Toronto artist Georgia Webber, who recounts the months she spent in silence recovering from chronic throat pain. Living without a voice proves increasingly challenging, as Webber is forced to leave her customer service job, grows isolated from friends and struggles to heal.
Below, Webber discusses the process of finishing her first book.
After the diagnosis
"There's a shorter story within the first few pages called Aftermath where you see me biking home from the doctor's appointment and processing being called a 'vocal abuser.' Within that experience of crying and trying to figure out what I was going to do, I realized, 'Oh, I can write a comic now' because I finally had something fascinating to me to write about."
Writing is not therapy
"I had a lot of fear and doubt about how much anyone could help me with healing my voice. I usually turn to talking about it when I'm having a problem, and I couldn't do that anymore. I definitely, at the beginning, felt hope, but a very pressured hope, that writing would somehow be the mysterious answer that the doctors couldn't provide. It would be some kind of catharsis or help me understand it in a way that a medical perspective couldn't. I actually ended up writing about how that is not a way to heal. You cannot put a ton of pressure on one method for maybe resolving something. It's a much deeper perspective shift to go from an injury and mourning the way that you used to live to finding that new way to live. Writing was part of it, but it definitely wasn't a magic pill."
A spread from Georgia Webber's book Dumb. (Submitted by Georgia Webber)
Being a silent woman
"I can describe the ways that being a silent woman carries a certain amount of threat or weight to myself. I can describe that to people and they can empathize. They can think about it and say, 'Yeah. If that was me... Interesting.' But if I can write a story that gives readers the sense of being threatened and feeling uncomfortable while they're reading it — I think they understand it better. Having the direct experience of the story is going to have a greater impact and possibly lead to the unfolding of my experiences synthesising somewhere deeper in them than just in the intellectual comprehension of facts."
Puzzle pieces
"I approach my comics writing process as a puzzle. I gather a bunch of pieces and decide what's interesting to me. Some of those pieces are probably already inside of me because I'm mostly interested in reading about internal experiences, and then I just go looking for the other pieces that I think would help me. What's fun is like having all the notes I have made on the table in front of me with a piece of paper and a pen and just trying to fit them together. That's always where I start.
"Once I have a sense of how these pieces are fitting together, then I need to draw to find out if they actually do or to find out how they do. My process is pretty cerebral for a long time. It's really coming from a thoughtful place and then getting expressive as it goes."
Georgia Webber's comments have been edited and condensed.
Georgia’s Dumb comic
Hamiltonian artist Georgia Webber shares a powerful reflection on losing her own voice
Arts & Culture • Sep 29, 2016 — (last modified) Sep 27, 2016 • 0 comments • Arts
By: Hess Sahlollbey
If there’s one thing that we take for granted, it is our voice. What happens though when we lose that ability?
It’s a thought that hadn’t crossed my mind until I heard the premise of Dumb, a comic by Hamiltonian artist Georgia Webber.
Dumb is Webber’s autobiographical retelling of her experiences and hardships with an injury that forced her to live without a voice.
In October 2012, Georgia learned that a severe vocal cord strain would force her to live near voiceless in order for her strain to fully recover.
Her vocal rest treatment allowed her to only speak for less than 30 minutes a day, but often led her to going weeks at a time without speaking at all.
Dumb was first recommended to me by Marvel Comics artist Michael Walsh. Following his glowing review of the book, I tracked down a copy at Mixed Media where Dave, the owner of the store, also spoke highly of the series.
Their recommendations however did not prepare me for just how heartfelt and emotionally moving the work was.
When I first met Webber, I was captivated by her ability express herself in the most eloquent manner in person and on the page.
I asked her when the thought of creating a comic about her experiences came to her. She responded with a firm “immediately” before getting up to grab us water.
“I have to drink a lot of water, it is part of the rehabilitation process for my voice,” she explained as she poured us each a glass.
“I needed the title of the series to be simple. I knew straight away that it tied into not speaking and the implications that come with that.”
Given the personal nature of the subject matter, Webber was quick to point out that to her, comics provide the purest vision of the creator.
“I’ve never been interested in watching my work on a screen. [In comics] each creator has to start from nothing and it was really about synthesizing and taking lots of components in the comic book medium.”
The writing, illustrating and publishing was entirely in the hands of Webber.
“Every issue before I had a publisher were fully produced works on my part. I’d draw them on normal printer paper, with Microns and Pentel brush pens, then scan them and use a computer to clean them up and move things around before folding and stapling them,” said Webber.
“I started by printing runs of 200 that would sell out. Then 350 then 500 before I finally decided to outsource that part of the process to have them printed professionally.”
The series continues to be selling well, however, the future of Dumb remains a little more uncertain. Webber intends for the series to end with issue 10, but it remains unpublished.
“I don’t know when I’ll be able to finish the series. I have two issues left but with the chronic pain in my hands I just don’t know when I’ll get the chance to wrap everything up. I hope that it’ll be by the end of the year but I just don’t know right now.”
Regardless of that uncertainty, the series so far still has rightfully earned its positive recommendations reception comic readers.
This is the medium that Webber’s story was meant to be told in, revealed not only by her account, but by the strength of Dumb as a whole reading experience.
Physical issues of Dumb are available at Mixed Media on 152 James Street N. or online at georgiasdumbproject.com.
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You’d Have To Be “Dumb” To Pass On This Book (Advance Review)
ON MAY 11, 2018 BY RYAN C. (TRASHFILMGURU)
I’ll let you in on a little secret : people have always been telling me to put a sock in it. I’ve been an annoyingly opinionated SOB my entire life, but now that I have some online outlets for my opining, I’m far more reserved in my daily interactions with folks. Even still, when you’ve got a side gig as a critic, plenty of people are still going to wish you’d shut up and go away. But what if you shut up — and don’t go away?
Canadian cartoonist Georgia Webber had to live through the answer to that question when a sudden and quite severe throat injury forced her into months of physically- and medically-mandated silence, and to call her experiences “devastating” is probably to sell them a bit too short — but they do make for fascinating, engrossing, and revelatory reading in her new (-ish, more on that presently) graphic memoir, Dumb, sub-titled Living Without A Voice.
Medical maladies have proven to be — and I really hate to put it like this, but — fertile ground for creative cartooning in the past, from Harvey Pekar, Joyce Brabner, and Frank Stack’s Our Cancer Year to Gabby Schulz’ Sick and Monsters, but Webber isn’t one to follow a trail blazed by others, as her sheer persistence in getting this material into print proves : originally published in single-issue “floppy” format by Retrofit/Big Planet, then moving over to Radiator Comics, and now, finally, collected in its entirety in a handsome hardback by Fantagraphics, it’s been the proverbial long and winding road for this comic, but that’s nothing compared to what Webber endured during the period of her life that forms the basis of this comic.
Webber had been leading the relatively typical (which is to say, carefree) life of a young Montrealer — splitting her time between a paid gig at a cafe and a volunteer one at a bike co-op, in addition to her cartooning and fairly active socializing — when her malady hit, and watching events beyond her control increasingly dictate, indeed to eventually entirely re-frame, the terms of her existence is uncomfortable in the extreme, but to her credit she never plays for her audience’s sympathy, instead trusting in her visual storytelling skills (which are quite considerable) to accurately relate her journey with supreme emotional honesty. It takes guts to lay yourself bare like this, but there’s not an ounce of self-indulgence on offer here, and that puts it a good few steps ahead of many autobio comics right there.
Unable to continue working a customer service job, Webber is forced to get creative when it comes to making ends meet — unable to converse with friends she needs to find new ways to communicate — unable to engage in her favorite hobby, singing, she has to find new creative outlets. All of these life changes necessarily result in an increasingly isolated and lonely existence, and Webber’s creative use of two-color illustration (I might be mistaken here, but it looks to me like she skips the pencils stage and draws with ink pens) expertly captures the feel of a life that is simultaneously devolving into chaos yet also shrinking in on her. Anxiety, fear, displacement, loss of control — all are conveyed with a kind of raw expressiveness that incorporates loose-form squiggles, dark splotches of ink, and even collage into an appropriately chaotic visual repetoire that says a hell of a lot with an economy of linework that at times almost even borders on the austere.
Ultimately, though, it is Webber’s struggle with a healthy self-image — the image that, let’s face it, she’s used to — that is perhaps the hardest hurdle for her to overcome, but is also, not at all paradoxically, the goal she is striving for. Her friends, her artistry, and her admirable sense of determination ultimately get her through, but not before she has to come to terms with a lot of truths most of us will hopefully never have to face, chief among them how intricately our ability to speak and our very sense of identity are intertwined. Every day without a voice was a struggle beyond Webber’s previous level of comprehension, and I imagine that relating her story was very nearly as difficult, but she emerges out the other end with a new appreciation of both herself and her life — as will you by the time you finish this remarkable book.
Georgia Webber wields the full power of the comics medium to address the life-changing catastrophe of being forced into silence.
Canadian artist Georgia Webber didn’t think much of it when she started to get a sore throat in the summer of 2012. However, when the deterioration of her condition prompted her to see a doctor later in the year, she received a devastating diagnosis: she had sustained a vocal injury that would require her to stay as silent as possible for at least six months.
While that represented a shattering blow for her, it also provided the impetus for Dumb – a series of autobiographical comics that inventively address the personal and social issues raised by the sudden loss of one’s voice.
Dumb by Georgia Webber
(Click to enlarge)
Webber has a confident, matter-of-fact cartooning style reminiscent of the late and much-missed British artist Andy Roberts. However, while her figurework is strong and appealing, she also has an imaginative, fluid approach to the form that she uses to match perfectly the tone and technical challenges of the story she wants to tell.
For all the infinite stylistic potential of comics, Webber takes on the creative constraint of using a ‘silent’ medium to describe a world defined by noise.
We’ve all seen attempts to depict music and song fall a bit flat on the pages of comics (although Hunt Emerson deserves a nod for the frenzied evocation of jazz in his Max Zillion strips). However, Webber succeeds by adopting a simple but effective technique; in the strictly black-and-world of her comics, she uses the colour red to represent noise.
This elegant device stretches from the simple highlighting of speech bubbles to a much more expressionistic use, as the backgrounds of noisy bars and parties become an emphatically marked ‘wall of sound’.
Dumb by Georgia Webber
(Click to enlarge)
Webber then takes the device a step further by depicting herself branching into two Georgias: the physical, vocally impaired Georgia, in black, and her imprisoned vocal self, in red.
In a deft use of the form, #2 shows the two Georgias locked in an initially balletic conflict with each other, as along the bottom of the page, in more conventional panels, the ‘real world’ Georgia goes about trying to bend her full and active life into the new status quo that has been forced upon her.
The two avatars end up in a brutal fight as Georgia finds herself categorised as ‘disabled’ and facing financial uncertainty and a growing threat of isolation. However, reflecting a process akin to the oft-cited Kübler-Ross stages of grief, the two psychological aspects eventually reconcile and reintegrate, and Georgia, with a growing sense of determination, sticks a note on the fridge: “It’s going to be OK”.
As alluded to above, Dumb also goes beyond the practical consequences Webber faces in her daily life. Her sudden enforced silence alerts her to the wider issues of how people – women in particular – are defined by their vocality. Does silence in a woman indicate compliance and docility? Later, she’d like to enter a relationship, but is worried about ending up with someone who fetishes her quietness.
She subsequently develops a code whereby if she wears lipstick, she’s indicating to her friends that she won’t be attempting to talk. But that raises the problems of what ‘message’ she’s inadvertently sending out by wearing make-up, and what lipstick represents in the objectification of women.
(Webber addresses this in a collaged tribute to the Québécoise artist Julie Doucet, whose occasional Dirty Plotte was one of my most eagerly anticipated comic buys during the 1990s, but who tragically left comics due to an ‘overwhelming and uninviting male presence’ that left her feeling unwelcome and uncomfortable).
For all the strength of the core comics, Georgia Webber is also expanding Dumb into a much more ambitious project: “a multidisciplinary examination of voice, with many authors and subjects”.
For example, the revised print editions of the Dumb comics include prose introductions from practitioners in a number of disciplines to which the voice is central: a music writer heralds the power of a vocalist’s scream; a language-learner explores new vocal personalities; and an opera singer and vocal coach describes voice in terms of an instrument that needs to be maintained.
The Dumb series is scheduled to run to 10 issues, with #4 and #5 making their debut next month at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) and #6 and #7 appearing later in the year (although pages from earlier issues are being posted regularly at Webber’s site).
If you’d despaired of ever finding a new autobiographical comic that had more insight and direction than the average Facebook feed, discovering the work of Georgia Webber will be like stumbling across an oasis in the desert.
Issues of Dumb, in both print and digital formats, are available from Georgia Webber’s online shop.
(Phew. I got all the way through without describing her as “an exciting voice in comics”.)
DUMB: LIVING WITHOUT A VOICE Reminds Us Of Life’s Fragility
Daniel Gehen August 15, 2018
People are funny. Not in a “ha ha, that’s hilarious” manner (though that can also be true), but because they can be so perplexing. This is especially true when it comes to what is considered valuable. Televisions. Jewelry. If you’re reading this, perhaps your comic book collection. We place value on these things while completely disregarding others. Such as our voice. Most people don’t give their voice a second thought – it’s always been there and always will be. Sure, it can become distorted temporarily because of a stuffy nose or a desire to make others laugh, but it’s always going to be there. Until it isn’t. What happens to us when we lose our voice? Dumb: Living Without A Voice is a graphic memoir by Georgia Webber which explores her experience living that very question.
When we’re young, we feel invincible. Whether you’re in your teens, twenties, thirties, and so forth (“young” is a relative term, after all), it seems like there is nothing you can’t do. Being a twenty-something in Montreal, that was the case for Georgia. She worked, went to school, and partied hard. As a result of that lifestyle, she caused damage to her vocal chords, forcing her into a drastic lifestyle change.
The art within Dumb may not impress those used to that of classic superhero comics. However, Webber’s pen-strokes have a simplicity that is as comforting as they are elegant. With each passing panel, her artwork draws readers further and further into this world. Though based in Montreal, Webber avoids using big-city visuals, making the reading experience a universal one. The cafe she works in may be in an urban area, but it could very well be the local coffee shop in a small, rural town. Touches like this make it so that the reader can easily see a version of themselves on the page right next to Georgia.
Webber expresses the frustration this temporary disability has caused brilliantly through her artwork. As time passes, her crisp, clean lines become rougher. The panel grids begin to bleed into one another until there is no differentiation. Eventually, the pages become a swirl of black, white, and red with text desperately making an attempt to stand out. It’s a great way to symbolize the actual struggle she experiences with her voice. Without the ability to speak, the words she wishes to express get lost in an ever-changing communication system involving note-taking, lip-reading, and pseudo-charades. While the early pages in the book are very well executed, these later pages – dripping with raw, unbridled emotion – that make Dumb a wholly unique and engrossing experience.
Throughout Dumb, Webber makes use of a very simple but effective color palate: black, white, and red. That last one is very important, as it adds so much to Webber’s storytelling ability without compromising its aesthetic. It’s unlikely that this book would work nearly as well (if at all) without the red. Because it’s a color used to symbolize fire and passion, those moments of agitation pop off the page.
Dumb: Life Without a Voice is a wonderful story, elevated by its true-to-life nature. With each captivating turn of the page, Georgia Webber’s personal journey is a stark reminder that no one, no matter how young or old, is invincible. The life that each of us have, for all its warts and blemishes, is still pretty great. All it takes is one thing, big or small, to turn it all upside down.