English: In 2014, webcomic creator Ellipsis Hana Stephens (known as Tarol Hunt "Thunt" Stephens at the time)
[1], best known for creating
Goblins, suffered a
nervous breakdown and went on hiatus. After two months, her wife persuaded her to draw what she was feeling; she produced this image.
She subsequently described it as follows:[2]
"So a lot of you have already seen the picture. The thing I drew when my brain had more shaky cam than Man of Steel. Drawing this was a huge help at the time, since communicating just… wasn’t something I could do and I needed to express myself in some way. I honestly think things would have been a lot worse, had Danielle [her wife] not told me to draw “what you’re feeling”. Since this picture was not a business decision, I’m applying an open license to it, so… do whatever you like with it. Make posters, t-shirts, crop circles… anything you like.
So… what does it mean? Mostly, I don’t know. I think the doll is supposed to represent me? I’m not sure. I just started drawing this image of a broken doll and the rest of the picture grew out from that. She’s got heavy make-up on the right side of her face and no pupil in her right eye. Why? I don’t know.
I have no idea why her right hand is smashed and why there are a bazillion fingers. I just kept drawing fingers. When you’re going through a thing like this, you tend to latch onto ANYTHING that isn’t panic inducing and repeat it over and over to avoid the things that are terrifying (which is why I wound up reading Elfquest non-stop). I did this with the fingers. For some reason, I felt less freaked out when drawing the fingers, so I just… kept drawing them.
Is the monster Mr. Fingers? I’m not sure. I didn’t plan on drawing him, I just drew without thinking and that’s what came out. And what happened to his squished ‘foot’? I have no idea. The plushie/doll that the monster is coming out of is the doll that Fumbles tried to return to the elf child in Goblins. I do know that. And the monster’s neck, is a tongue wrapped in thick wire.
The green bit on the light bulb is my wedding ring. I have no memory of drawing that part. There are a few parts of the picture I don’t remember drawing, but what really pisses me off, is the knife.
I drew a beautiful knife on the floor. It’s what was meant to have been used to scratch up the back wall. I remember drawing it. Danielle remembers seeing it. But at some point, I erased it and drew in the floorboards where it had once been. I don’t remember doing this and it bothers me, because I liked that knife. It looked awesome. Why the hell did I erase it? Grrrr.
The Goblins pages in the picture are all pages where someone dies. This was done with more conscious thought than the rest of the picture, as I had to go through the archives and find each of those pages."