So in Guts, you do see me having panic attacks, and that’s not something I’ve ever been able to describe. And no one’s every really asked me to describe it either. So again, the words were never really there for that. But I knew that I wanted to use color to depict that experience, and I knew I wanted to use sort of abstract art to show the character in tight spaces, and also falling through negative space, and feeling like she’s on unsteady ground, and just everything’s very shaky.
Because sometimes it’s just — it’s the sensation of a trembling in your body, but with comics you have the opportunity to depict that in lots of different ways. And so they were in my original script, but my first round of notes, I had a couple of different people read the script, and they all said, “More. We want to see more of this. We want you to show us more, and tell us less.” And I mean, my editor, Cassandra [phonetic], she gave me a great note, where in the first draft, I showed this happen, and then at the end of the scene, I said, “I had just had my first panic attack.”
And she said, “Take that out. Don’t say that. Don’t tell us what it was, because then it kind of leaves a mystery, and then the character kind of has to solve the mystery over the course of the book.” So that phrase does come up much, much later in the story. But it’s true when you’re a kid, or when you’re a young person, or anything, if something weird is happening to you, and you don’t know what it is, you probably don’t have a phrase to describe it, and everybody goes, “Well, I don’t know what’s wrong.”
And there’s not anything physically wrong, so how do you say that you’re sick? You’re not sick, but something’s not right. So we changed the line to, “Something was definitely wrong.” But that leaves a dot dot dot for the reader, and I think that’s life, right?
