- I just have to draw.
If my hands got cut off,
God willing they will not,
I would draw with my mouth or my feet.
My name is Nicole Georges.
I am a cartoonist and an illustrator in Portland,
and I also teach people how to make comics.
When I moved to Portland, I was 19 years old.
I moved here from Kansas.
And I was so excited by everything that was going on here.
I was excited by the Zine scene, and bicycles,
and vegan food and everything, that I was keeping a diary
just frantically drawing everything that happened
all the time, and that turned
into my diary comic, Invincible Summer.
I started teaching Zine workshops to homeless youth
and senior citizens.
I still do artist residencies, teaching middle schoolers
and elementary school students how to tell
stories through pictures.
When I'm working on a page, sometimes I get to a point
where I wanna make sure the thing I'm drawing
is anatomically accurate, and in order to do that,
I will take pictures of myself doing the poses
that are depicted in my pencil sketches.
I like any kind of advice, I just love it.
In my Zine, Invincible Summer, one day I did a fake
advice column called Ask Nicole, America's Smartest Girl.
And one of the questions was, dear Nicole, how do I get
creepy men on the bus to talk to me.
And my answer was, get visible tattoos, because nobody
can resist a visible tattoo as a conversation starter.
Like if you ever wanted to see the prison tattoo that's
under the shirt of the man on the bus,
just have something yourself and he will gladly take off
his shirt to show you and try to make a bridge there.
When I was 22, I went to a palm reader and she said,
you should talk to your dad more often.
And I said, I can't talk to my dad more often,
because he is dead, but thank you anyway.
And she said, oh, let me stop you there.
Maybe the man you think is your father is dead,
but your real father is very much alive.
When the psychic said that, I asked my sister if it was true
and my sister broke down crying and said,
"It's true, it's true, I'm so sorry."
I didn't know what to do, so I called
Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who's a conservative, right-wing
radio host, and I got on the air and I was so excited.
Even though she's right-wing and conservative
and she hates feminism, and gay people she only kind of
tolerates, I still was thrilled to be on the phone with her.
So that's what my book, Calling Dr. Laura, is about.
When I was finding out the secret was true by asking
my sister, getting up the guts, and then deciding what
to do about my mom.
I did get up the courage to come out to her about knowing,
and I also came out to her as gay at the same time.
Just get it all out of the way,
just like a clearing house double whammy.
When I was a kid, I had a lot of animals as friends.
Animals were very tolerant of my bad behaviors.
I was just a sarcastic, really kind of caustic mean
little kid, and animals were not easy to offend.
They were steadfast, and they were somebody I could talk to
and be myself around.
They didn't ask a lot of questions.
They didn't bug me.
My mission statement in life is to help animals
through my art somehow.
I try to reflect the emotional lives of animals,
however that hits people and whatever they decide
to do with that is their own business,
but I would like for people to care about them a little bit.
I also feel that about gay people.
I feel like people reading my book, they're reading a story
about a gay person and they're having some kind
of connection with me as a character.
When it's time for them to vote on something that impacts me
or make a decision that impacts a gay person,
they think like, even if they don't have a lot of gay people
in their life, maybe they feel like they have me
in their life.
I adopted a dog when I was 16, and it was kind of like
having a baby in high school, because I was saddled with
the responsibility of that dog for the rest of her life.
Her name was Beija.
Fetch is a story about me getting Beija, our time together,
her barking at people, me writing a manifesto for her,
which I pasted up around Portland, and her helping me
through really, really, hard times, terrible times.
I would say it's almost like a queer, feminist, Portland
Marley and Me, if I had to take it there.
This is Ponyo.
I got Ponyo at the Humane Society a couple of years ago.
I was reeling with grief after my dog, Beija, died,
and I was just trolling the Humane Society.
I held her on her back for a minute.
She did this little smile, this like relaxed smile.
She was just so happy to be in my arms, and that was it.
I was out of town a lot this year doing book tour stuff,
and then I came home and she was blind.
She was 90% blind.
She was running into things.
She would go to jump on my lap and have perfect form,
but be jumping a foot away from where I was.
So I had to take her to a specialist.
I'm not a millionaire, so I thought I could have
a fundraiser for this.
A lot of people like Ponyo.
I made special art, like limited edition artist tote bags
with Ponyo on them, and within a week we were funded.
We got the surgery.
It went great, and now she can see.
Well sometimes people say to me, how did you get a book?
How did you get your agent?
And I don't mean to sound like a grouch,
but what I would like to say to them is,
all you have to do is pay out of pocket to publish
your own work for upwards of 10 years, go on several tours
where you make little to no money, have a bad childhood
that you have honed the writing skills to be able
to express, and then maybe someday a publisher will want
to give you some money and take a chance on you
to make a book that could then come out.
The process, to me, is to find something you like
and just keep working at it, and that's it.
Don't put the pressure on it to be your job,
do it because you love it, because that's the thing
other people are gonna love.
People wanna see your true personality in yourself,
and I think it takes practice to learn how
to be vulnerable in public.
I don't try to do what I think other people want me to do,
I don't think that would work.