Hamilton Comic - "Middle England" Draft

All members of my Monthly Minicomic Club have likely already seen the cartoon essay I created about seeing Hamilton in 2015 (a copy of it should have arrived at your house by now!), and maybe you've also seen that it ran up at The New York Times this past weekend (and will be appearing in the Arts & Leisure section this coming Sunday).

I thought it would be interesting to share an earlier draft of this, where I really, really wanted to connect my experience with the show to a scene I'd read in a novel by one of my very favorite writers, but I just couldn't make it happen.

I figured this might be of interest to show how sometimes I have ideas that I love, that I'm ultimately not able to make work, and also to share what my comics look like when I'm submitting them in a rough draft format.

This is a version of the comic that I submitted to The New York Times Book Review, before eventually revising it and sending it over to the Arts & Leisure section.

The back-page of the Book Review is formatted differently than the Sketch Pad feature in the Arts & Leisure section, with a little more space to spread out. The full comic would have printed like this:

This submission never got formally rejected. I submitted it, and then never heard anything back. Then, later, I sent over a different piece and the Art Director over there very kindly replied, letting me know he liked it, but that the Book Review was scaling back on this kind of content. He essentially suggested that it was because they couldn't figure out how to put the comics online (the Book Review pieces I've done were always print-only), and were therefore missing out on the additional revenue that web-pieces can generate. A bummer, to be sure. I only wrote three book reviews for the paper, but I really liked the thought that if an idea ever came to me while reading, I might be able to turn it into something for them.

You can see how my Middle England version of this comic does keep some of the same elements as the eventual Hamilton piece - just that feeling of being in an audience (of liberals), thinking that the wars were all won and we were on the right side of them. I wanted so badly to connect this to the scene in Jonathan Coe's book where all his characters find themselves unexpectedly moved by the 2012 London Olympic opening ceremonies, how they perceived the spectacle as proof that the country had arrived somewhere good, not knowing at the time what reactionary forces (Brexit!) were about to make themselves known.

I really liked this angle, and wish I'd been able to get a version of it published. But, I think probably the final version that made it into the Arts & Leisure section is tighter and more to the point. And this panel in particular, I think says what I really wanted to say, and wasn't there in my earlier attempts.