The other night I went to Art Spiegelman’s “What the %@&*! Happened to Comics?” talk in Puyallup, and as usual, brought one of my trusty sketchbooks with me. Since comics and I go way back, and I’m a big Spiegelman fan, I think I got a little carried away with the doodles accompanying my lecture notes. I was a little abashed when the people next to me noticed and commented; all I could say was, “I do this a lot—it helps me remember.”

I’ve always been an obsessive note-taker, but I discovered in college that adding sketches to my notes went a long way towards my good grades in art history (this must have been the “Naked Ladies of the 15th and 16th Centuries” lecture).

Then when I fell in with the book arts, drawn diagrams were a godsend for remembering complicated equipment and technical processes.

By the time I graduated, the habit was ingrained. I found not only that drawing was an excellent memory trigger, but also helped me focus on the moment at hand.

The comments on my Spiegelman doodle reminded me that I had a funny habit of drawing comic artists and writers (from the left, Marjane Satrapi, Harvey Pekar, David Mazzucchelli)—and often portraying them as comic-book characters themselves. As I dug through something on the order of fifteen sketchbooks to find my grumpy Pekar sketches, I unearthed scores of these things, from all manner of locations and events:

classes, performances and lectures (my favorites are the Mt. St. Helens interpreter on the bottom left, and my steam locomotive class teacher—yes, you read that right—on the far right);

public transit and airports;

family gatherings (yes, I quoted the above verbatim; I love the Tailor’s Uncle Sam!);

work meetings;

wedding receptions, restaurants, coffee shops;

and even my own mirror, when I’m working alone.

I draw when I’m trying to document an event, when I’m nervous, when I encounter a particularly unusual face, when I’m telling a story of an odd person I saw that day, when I want to preserve a loved one, and even when I’m not really aware of it—I found plenty of sketches that I had no memory of making.

Maybe there’s some psychological disorder that lists obsessive and semi-conscious sketching as a symptom, but this is one compulsion I’d like to hold on to. I know I spend more time drawing the speaker than taking actual notes, but if I remember the content just as well, I suppose it all comes out in the wash. Besides, I can’t possibly be the only one who does this, right?

Right?