{"id":5365,"date":"2019-03-05T16:01:21","date_gmt":"2019-03-05T21:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/?p=5365"},"modified":"2020-09-24T14:56:44","modified_gmt":"2020-09-24T18:56:44","slug":"drawn-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/drawn-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Drawn Out"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Illustration<\/div>

Drawn Out<\/h1>
When Frank Gogol began processing a personal tragedy, he turned to an unexpected source: comics<\/div>
By Breanne McCarthyIllustrations by Nenad Cviticanin<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/header>\n\n\n\n

Frank Gogol\u2019s early life was a series of painful setbacks. His father died of a drug overdose before he turned 2. His mother, who also struggled with addiction, did her best to support them by working multiple waitressing jobs, but they moved around often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gogol enjoyed a relatively stable home life for a few years after his mother met his stepfather. There were Christmases spent as a family, birthdays that had gifts. But his stepfather also struggled with substance abuse, and when Gogol\u2019s mother relapsed around the time he turned 12, he was sent to live with family friends. When they were no longer able to take care of him, he was placed in a group home where he remained through his teen years up until the week before he moved in at Monmouth. During his freshman year, Gogol received word that his mother had been hit by a car and was in a coma; she died a few months later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf I had known then what I know now, I may have realized things were a little bit more off,\u201d Gogol says of his upbringing, which seemed mostly normal to him. \u201cMy mom\u2014she wasn\u2019t the best person, but she was a good mom. She really did bust her butt working two to three jobs making sure I was taken care of.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An anchor in the chaos for Gogol was the fictional worlds provided by books, comics, and cartoons. He was an avid reader and vividly remembers buying his first comic book at the Rite Aid in Hazlet\u2019s Airport Plaza in 1997. \u201cI think having those colorful characters like the Ninja Turtles and Spider-Man growing up, they were helpful in keeping me young when there were things going on around me that would maybe make other people have to grow up a little faster,\u201d says Gogol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His love of reading led him to take as many English courses as he could in high school, and it was there that he first felt inspired to write. For an honors class, he had to read Their Eyes Were Watching God<\/em>. A key passage in the book, in which the main character decides to leave an abusive relationship and lets her hair down for the first time, resonated with Gogol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s sort of on-the-nose poetic. It\u2019s symbolic of her having her freedom\u2014her hair is no longer up in this tight thing; now it\u2019s down and free like she is,\u201d says Gogol. \u201cWhen I took that in, I really fell in love with what stories can do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He enrolled at Monmouth as an English major with minors in creative writing and graphic design, earning his bachelor\u2019s in 2010 and, a year later, his master\u2019s in English with a focus in creative writing. He quickly found a job in marketing but floundered on the creative writing front, he says. He knew he wanted to write but was unsure what to write about. \u201cI was having a lot of false starts: talking a lot about wanting to be a writer, trying, and then not getting really far.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then in early 2015, Gogol had an aha moment. Feeling unfulfilled at work, he was reviewing a conversation he had with a friend on Facebook Messenger that had spanned years. When Gogol saw how long he had talked about wanting to be a writer\u2014without actually doing much writing\u2014he realized it was time to \u201cfish or cut bait.\u201d With the blessing of his then-girlfriend now fiancee, Catherine, he quit his job to figure out exactly what it was that he wanted to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He freelanced at first and then, thanks to a gift from Catherine, enrolled in a class offered by Comics Experience, an online comic book school. For the class, he had to write a five-page script. That story, \u201cEmbrace,\u201d is a snapshot into the life of a father struggling to connect with his autistic son. Gogol, whose cousin has autism, combined his own worries of parenthood with stories his aunt had told him of the struggles faced by parents raising children on the spectrum. Within two weeks of the class ending, he had found an artist, colorist, and letterer who turned the script into a complete illustrated comic within 10 days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOnce I had that finished story, and I could read the script next to the finished pages and say, \u2018This is my thing,\u2019 I really\u2014there\u2019s no better word for it, but I\u2014got addicted to it,\u201d says Gogol.<\/p>\n\n\n

\"Diane
An excerpt from \"Prayer,\" one of Frank Gogol's stories.<\/div><\/div>
\"The
An excerpt from \"Prayer,\" one of Frank Gogol's stories.<\/div><\/div>
\"Diane
An excerpt from \"Prayer,\" one of Frank Gogol's stories.<\/div><\/div><\/div>

 <\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Encouraged, he set out to expand his portfolio. He wrote a few stories back-to-back, writing each in a different genre to flex his creative muscles. When he had six stories finished, he laid the scripts across his office floor to look for holes in genre and style that he could fill with additional stories. He noticed a pattern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was moving things around, moving stories next to each other, and I realized that these stories\u2014sometimes directly, sometimes a bit indirectly\u2014addressed the stages of the grieving process,\u201d says Gogol. He hadn\u2019t consciously set out to write about grief but thinks that because of his life experiences, the grieving process had become somewhat ingrained in him through the years. (Not to mention, he particularly loved a comic book miniseries called Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America<\/em>, which included five stand-alone stories of Marvel superheroes grieving the death of Captain America.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat was another one of those touchstone moments for me, not as a writer but as a person, because I had all of this stuff happen to me, and sometimes I\u2019d dealt with it, and other times I hadn\u2019t,\u201d says Gogol. \u201cThis sort of gave me a framework to understand what I had been through and what I was going through up until that point in my life, and it really was just very helpful to me in a weird way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gogol ran with the idea and rounded out the collection with 10 stories in total\u2014two for each of the five stages of the grieving process. The stories span genres\u2014from drama to horror, magic to superhero\u2014and while all address the topic of grief, many also tackle current social issues. \u201cDifferent,\u201d for example, is about a transgender woman struggling to find her place in the world. She succeeds by finally accepting who she is and uses her painful experiences as a springboard to create a better version of her life. Another story, \u201cPrayer,\u201d features a woman in a Narcotics Anonymous meeting expressing how her financial struggles make it impossible to buy her son a Christmas present. When she leaves the meeting, she finds a box of presents sitting on her trunk (see illustration above). Gogol says \u201cPrayer\u201d is plucked straight from his childhood\u2014but it was his birthday, not Christmas, and rather than buying him presents, his mother\u2019s NA group chipped in to buy him a cake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While several of the stories touch on dark themes, highlighting the harsher moments of grief, some, like \u201cPrayer,\u201d are ultimately stories of hope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou know that the mother\u2019s and son\u2019s lives are not going to get markedly better between that story and the next morning, or maybe the next year, but the universe sort of provided for them in that moment,\u201d says Gogol. \u201cIt\u2019s realistic\u2014it\u2019s not perfect\u2014but it\u2019s hopeful… and that is kind of how my life has gone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once he had 10 stories written, Gogol paid over $3,000 out of pocket to have them produced by professionals. He sold collector comic books to pay for a large portion of that cost and then started a Kickstarter campaign to recoup some of the cost and to get the content out so that people could read it. Supporters who gave $1 or more would receive a PDF download of the finished product: GRIEF<\/em>, the anthology. He launched the campaign in April 2017, and to Gogol\u2019s surprise, supporters surpassed his goal of $1,500 within the first 10 hours. A few months later, Source Point Press approached him with an offer to publish GRIEF<\/em> in paperback form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Print copies of GRIEF<\/em> are available online, and Gogol also sells them at conventions. While doing so at New York Comic Con, he experienced a touching moment with a fan. A trans man who had purchased GRIEF<\/em> the day before returned after reading the story \u201cDifferent.\u201d The man broke down, crying quietly on the convention floor and thanked Gogol for showing a trans character in both a positive and accurate light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI do want to be a socially conscious writer… and I\u2019m of the opinion that stories should be useful to people in some way, shape, or form, either entertaining, or they should learn some lesson from it,\u201d says Gogol. \u201cAnd if we, as a society… talked about [grief] in a more positive way and embraced it and were more open about it, then I think we\u2019d be better off for it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No longer unsure what to write about, Gogol says he\u2019s at work on several books. But GRIEF<\/em> will always hold a special place for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is the kind of book I wish I\u2019d had when I was growing up. I think I would have done things differently with my own grieving process, and healing, and growing up,\u201d says Gogol. \u201cAnd that has 100 percent been my experience talking to people\u2014that is what [GRIEF<\/em>] is doing for people, and that\u2019s what brings me the most happiness by far.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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