And lastly, in the wake of my interview on Xana’s Artist blog, I know there are going to be people asking me about them. Thus, here is nirvhannah Shepherd’s Soundgarden cartoon master post: the story leading up to their creation and why three years later, I’m a proud mama. This has taken me a total of three weeks to write up because of having to deal with other things and also formulating how this anti-novel of a post will come together.
****Just as a note ahead of time: I mention my depression and experience with bullies in this, so turn away now if you’re easily triggered
I grew up in the kind of home that sheltered me from a decent portion of the world. My brother and I are eight years apart (he was in his senior year of high school when I was still in elementary school); when I entered this world, he and my parents all raised me and protected me from the skeletons in the closet of this world we live in.
This environment was, as the old adage goes, a blessing and a curse. Growing up sheltered allowed my immediate family to pull closer together: no one could hide anything from anybody. If something happened to one of us, the other three were just as affected. It was wonderful because we all got along, a few hiccups here and there, but nothing too serious. Having such a tightly-woven familial base allowed me to excel in school: in the first half of the first grade, my teachers noticed I was performing at a level well above my classmates. By January, I found myself in the gifted program and making the honor roll every quarter.
Outside of class, I read incessantly, reading about paleozoology (or study of dinosaurs and all things prehistoric) and geology, and also reading my choice of fiction. In his first two years of high school, my brother had acquired an interest in astronomy as well as chemistry. I was rather close with my grandfather, who was a nuclear engineer for thirty years—it wasn’t uncommon to find me and him in his garden, and he would tell me little factoids about certain plant life, or we would sit at the kitchen table and he would throw some knowledge on nuclear science at my young brain.
At the same time, I doodled constantly and even attempted to develop story lines for my doodles. I was also a part of the last generation of kids who played outside until the street lights flickered on. I daydreamed about making machines and developing technology akin to that in Dexter’s Lab.
Even at a young age, I could sense I had two parts within me that couldn’t be ignored for a second: one was a mad professor wanting to go Nikolai Tesla on everyone sans the blowing up the beautiful earth part of things, the other a massive, fertile imagination. I bring the other part up because even at a young age, I knew I was a creative person living in a world that focuses on making money in an analytic field.
By the end of the first grade, I had decided I wanted to go into paleozoology and my best friend at the time into geology, and the two of us would go into business together, because the two go hand-in-hand. However, my parents and I moved away from Carson City four months before the fourth grade was over, going to California for reasons I don’t think I’m even allowed to say much less even understand or recall said reasons. Gone were my dreams of attending University of Montana with my good friend and being the atypical dinosaur and prehistoric creature fossil finder, gone was the periphery of kids I had grown well-acquainted with, and gone was a part of our family: my brother stayed behind because he would be attending the university in Reno that fall.
I felt so out of place in California. Never mind the new kid blues for a minute: I felt like a freak. My wandering tendencies and taste for all things intellectual were taken out of context and misinterpreted by everyone. I made a few new friends but a majority of those friendships lacked substance for me. As a result, I was bullied often; by the fifth grade, I had developed this “me against the world” mindset because my big brother was absent and my parents or grandparents always believed I was overreacting and thus I felt ashamed of being bullied. If I ever got picked on—and I was pushed around for years—I kept it to myself. Growing up in a sheltered home resulted in an inadequate stating of my thoughts and feelings and on top of that I duly believed there was something wrong with me, which is why I never had that “rebellious teenager” phase by the time I hit thirteen years old.
By the end of elementary school, I had already decided on a career for myself since paleozoology was off the table and I didn’t feel confident enough in my artwork at the time since anyone I tried to talk to either pushed me away or would laugh at me. I come from three generations of housewives and also three generations of engineers: my grandfather was nuclear, my dad is automotive, and my brother is chemical, and my other grandfather taught collegiate chemistry for as long as I can remember. I was going to be the first woman in my family to break the housewife spell and enter mechanical engineering, and then aerospace, which would then lead me to a career as a head engineer for either Ferrari or McLaren F1 teams.
The 7th grade is neck and neck with my senior year for my most bittersweet year of school. Puberty and adolescence hit me like a brick wall in the greater part of 6th grade, and then that summer leading into the 7th grade. Lost my grandfather to brain cancer, lost my cousin to fatal injuries from a car accident, ridiculed even more for the most trivial of shit like my appearance, the way in which I dressed at the time, and also my taste in music.
Some time in the sixth grade, I found myself sitting in the car in the parking lot of the supermarket in the town we lived in, waiting for my parents, and I had the radio switched on to the station about an hour away. The song Outshined slid on, and I was mesmerized. I had a love-hate relationship with music all throughout my childhood because my parents are terrible singers so I remember for years, I was turned off from a lot of the music my family listened to. This one day changed that for me: I had four questions in mind as I began paying attention to the song.
Who is that powerful, strong voice? Who is playing that loud guitar and why is it so good? What is with that thunderous sensual bass and why is it unlike anything I’ve ever heard prior to now? What is up with those big-ass drums and yet why are they so finessed?
The disc jockey came on soon afterwards and said it was by Soundgarden. I was floored. I wanted to know more about them, this strange garden of Sound, like what did the rest of their catalog sound like and who was who in the band. Not even a couple of days elapsed and I heard Fell on Black Days on the same station, and I knew from that day forth those four men held a special place in my world. (The actual thought itself was “who are these guys? I LOVE this band!”)
(I’m hinting my age a little bit here but) I soon discovered I had entered into no-man’s land for new Soundgarden fans, being an eleven-year-old in the mid-2000s. Anyone I tried to talk to about them would stare at me as if I had just escaped from the insane asylum: add that to the mix of reasons why I was bullied all throughout middle school and a little bit into my freshman year of high school. The bright side to this is I uncovered a lot more music like Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Silverchair, Green Day, the Ramones, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nine Inch Nails, Foo Fighters, Tool, Korn, Queens of the Stone Age, Faith No More, and many more.
However this only reminded me I was still at that raging hormonal crossroad of oblivion otherwise known as 7th grade, and I felt even more out of place amongst my peers.
Somewhere around Christmas, I found myself drawing again, just simple little doodles akin to those from my days in elementary school. I had acquainted myself with the otaku, or anime, kids and I was blown away by their skill at creating and recreating anime characters. I wanted to try my hand at such activities, but I could not, for the life of me, draw those big watery eyes. I then improvised and made almond-shaped eyes instead. For the most part, the head, and also the body, was improvised except for the spiky hair. My first characters, primitive at best, were rather one-dimensional, drawn in regular mechanical pencil.
I went on with these little characters, which I later based off of Formula 1 drivers at the time, going well into my sophomore year of high school. I had music as my inspiration, juxtaposed with everything else. Even as I was really beginning to focus on going to college and the engineering program at my high school, I continued with my cartoons and an interest in the arts. I listened to music every day and in my freshman year, my dad took me to the little mom-and-pop music shop in town and I bought Superunknown as a birthday gift to myself—I still have that copy, too. The jewel case has seen some better days and the lyric book is worn at the staples, but the disc still plays like when I first gave it a spin back in the spring of 2008. However, some time in my junior year, I had to retire from making my cartoons and put Superunknown on pause to focus on advanced placement classes and school clubs.
My aforementioned senior year was truly bittersweet. Disregard graduation for a minute; in retrospect, that had very little to do with it. I lost the one thing that made me believe my immediate family was joined at the hip: my parents split up after nearly thirty years of marriage in April 2011. Shockwaves pulsed through both the maternal and paternal sides of the family and through all familial friends; my dad and my brother are both going to agree with me on this, too, I sustained the most psychological and emotional damage. It didn’t help that my dad and I were evicted within three weeks because my mom never paid the rent for the three month tenure at the house we moved in over New Year’s.
I still recall the day after it happened, kneeling down to the shelf beneath my stereo, the same shelf which held my CD collection, and nothing I had at the time could suffice my emotions at the time. I spotted Superunknown at the base of the stack of jewel cases: I hadn’t touched it in nearly two years.
When I was still the midst of becoming a Soundgarden fan, I fell in love with the music, their feral, unique vibes giving my imagination a weird unconscious drive. It was music for my young wandering Renaissance mind that soundtracked my young teenage bullied angst and yet also reminded me of my innocence. It was not that an eleven-year-old could relate to dark, nihilistic lyrics about living in a fucked up world or wanting to die.
However, on this particular day, the music on Superunknown, Head Down and Half especially, resonated on a level I can’t even begin to describe. I could feel it so deeply and so intensely that I was brought to tears. I played Superunknown every day for nearly six months until I moved into my dorm in September. I even played it when I was all alone for the first two weeks of May.
April and May 2011 were single-handedly the worst two months of my life: my mom had left, my dad and I were ten minutes from living on the street, then evicted, I also had AP exams during that time, and—I kept quiet the entire time about it. A major misconception about keeping difficult events under lock and key is they will be uncovered in the worst way possible at some point in the future. Forget the “it’s nobody’s business but ours” shtick; the individual family members, and I’m guilty of it, too, had unknowingly instilled shame within me for trying to reach out to people. I graduated with my head up as I was ranked twenty-ninth out of close to four hundred students and within three months, I had called my dorm at the tech school I went to my new home.
I remember for the first three months of school I wore the mask fairly well; no one had to know where I was coming from, especially when it’s behind me.
After Christmas 2011 in which I had spent a month down in California with my dad, my uncle, my grandma, and my cousins, I returned to my dormitory… only to find my roommate had moved out. For the first part of the winter term, I enjoyed having the room to myself. I didn’t have to worry about going down the hall to the lavatories to get dressed and since I’m self-conscious of the sound of my singing voice, I could sing to myself just being by myself in the room. But no one is above karma, whether you want to be or not: by the end of the winter, I was lonely. All the friends I had made in the fall had moved onto other things and other people, and I soon fell back into the hoary old label of being the weird new girl with a big mind who seemed to have a difficult time socializing anymore.
My coursework wasn’t helping, either. I had noticed—even from the get-go, now that I look back on the start of my short-lived engineering career—I was in way over my head, no matter how much I tried to understand.
I’m an inquiring mind by nature, why can’t I get most of this through my skull?
The other side to this is I understood too much, and I fell victim to boredom. I soon grew disillusioned with my career choice, and likewise with the previous year, I kept it behind closed doors. I only withdrew more from the periphery of students: by the end of the school year in May, I only left my dorm room to get food, go to class, or use the lavatories. From the outside looking in, I had become a quixotic loner, a human being who was never there and mentally checked out most of the time. I had cut myself off from everyone and it flew over everyone’s heads, and for a while, it did mine.
One evening, out of boredom, I found myself carousing about on the Soundgarden forum of which I joined the month before, a week before my nineteenth birthday in April. I spotted a rather cartoon-y drawing of Chris with a few good comments beneath it. Inspiration came out of nowhere: suddenly the inner muse resurrected within me. I wanted to do something right then and there.
I logged out real quick and delved through my desk drawer. I found a small stack of watercolor paper, heavier grained, not necessarily appropriate for cheap-ass mechanical pencil graphite, but I preferred it over notebook paper. I hadn’t made one of my spiky-haired characters in what felt like forever, but I just let the pencil and the music (I gave Superunknown another spin on my laptop) be my masters.
Soon I had a simple sketch of a character of Chris. My old cartoons were one-dimensional, like simple outlines: I couldn’t do those again, because regressing back like that would bring back too much pain for me. I was older at this point, as well, nineteen years old, so it was time to grow up and away from that middle-school angst.
I returned to the desk drawer and found a handful of black ink ballpoint pens. I took one and then sat back down at the edge of my bed. I traced over the pencil lines and then improvised the shading on the character. Within two hours, I had a pen and ink caricature of Chris Cornell. I signed my name and dated it in the lower right-hand corner.
I didn’t have a scanner at the time, however I did have my web camera. Thus I took the best picture I could and then posted it on the forum.
Overnight, the cartoon was well-received. I then decided to continue the following day.
I created the one of Kim, on the dot, right then and there before lunchtime.
After lunch I left for my twelve o'clock class, and then returned to my dorm to make a cartoon of Ben. I had to come to a certain point with him and then hit the pause button because of my mid-afternoon class at the time and then go to dinner. But after dinner, I completed Ben in his full form.
I decided from there to burn the midnight oil and created one of Matt, simply just to set a record for myself. I completed the one of Matt before the date May 31st was up with half an hour to spare.
That summer brought about more cartoons in that same style. After a depressing, self-destructive winter laced with existential nightmares, I finally threw in the towel with engineering and chose to become the artist I am now, which was then followed by even more depressing winter with more existential crises.
It wasn’t until that summer, summer 2014, when Chris Cornell himself saw the one of him with his very own eyes. I had tweeted the cartoon for his birthday; a week elapsed and I completely forgot about it, so it’s no surprise that it was a total surprise.
Kim Thayil witnessed the same cartoon on a birthday card within two months–my friends in Seattle and I organized a card for him, which he’d hopefully get during the Pre-Season show, which was on the fourth of September, his birthday;that plan backfired, however he got it within not even a week.
I sent Ben Shepherd the one of him for his birthday, a part of my second letter to him. I'm a little wary to say we're "officially" in contact with one another, but we are in contact with each other; on a side-note, I think it’s safe to say that man likes me a lot (I think, anyways).
The whole world witnessed all four of them in collage form that Halloween. As a result, they are my most famous cartoons to date, the ones that make me the proudest mama.
I didn’t actually assign the name “Rag Dolls” until this past January, and the collective of cartoons as the “Rag Doll Circus.” It’s a good thing I finally gave them a name because I’m not leaving here until someone explains to me that they’re anime; the word “Gothic” trips me up a little bit, too.
I had always referred to my cartoons as just my cartoons. It wasn’t until I heard the song Rag Doll by Aerosmith that the name just stuck with me and I came to realization that yes, they do resemble little rag dolls. I am also a Monty Python fan, explaining where the “Circus” part came from; the “Circus” is also a slight acknowledgement to my dreams of wanting to go into F1, since “the F1 circus” is the collective of teams, drivers, and officials going around the world.
And on a final note, I would like to add that the Tim Burton style was totally on accident. I am a Burton fan (I’m also a fan of Henry Selick, who actually directed Nightmare Before Christmas and also Coraline, and I’m a fan of Brett Helquist) however all three men have just a small influence on me. The style of the cartoons is merely coincidental.
So happy 3rd birthday to my boys, and for those you who read all of this, holy hell and good on you xoxo
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