I’m Keith Browning. I’m a successful cartoonist whose strip The Watsons has been syndicated in newspapers all over the United States and in some other countries for decades. In early 1995 I was working on a cover for a book collecting some of my comic strips. Each volume collected strips that focused on one of my characters and this one was for Cindy, a girl in 7th grade. As with the other books, I drew a detailed, oversized version of my character for the cover of the book.

You should realize that comic strip art is always drawn enlarged, and shrunken down for publication. The book was going to be printed on 8-by-8 inch paper with 3 strips per page, keeping the Monday-to-Saturday storylines each week on a pair of facing pages and in the typical size for them in newspapers, but the original strips are drawn two to a 15-by-11 page, and reduced by about 50%. The cover art was even bigger, because unlike the strips inside, it was going to be printed full bleed to the edges of the page, and I was using an 18-by-18 inch section cut down from an 18-by-24 page to draw it on.

The Fateful Night

I was behind schedule, so I was up all night trying to draw the most detailed version of this character I ever had. I think I pretty much had her done when I passed out in my chair in front of the drafting board.

When I woke up, I was looking at my work. But not the oversized cover panel of Cindy I’d just been working on. Had I fallen and knocked other work out of my desk?

When I cleared my eyes, I realized it was more than that. 360 degrees around me was comic book art. I looked down at myself. I was Cindy. What the hell?

I was in my bed, or on it, anyway, because I wasn’t under the covers, and I was wearing what I’d drawn on Cindy last night. I guess I’m Cindy now.

It was morning, so I figured I’d shower and change, and figure out what morning it was afterward. I grabbed a full change of clothes and headed for the bathroom. Or at least looked for it. I opened every door. There was my brother’s bedroom, my sister’s bedroom, my parents’ bedroom, some closets, the living room, kitchen, and den, but there was no bathroom anywhere in the house.

Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember ever having drawn a bathroom in the Watsons’ house, or anywhere in the strip. But surely they needed one! Surely they still went to the bathroom, even if I never showed it! Right?

I returned to my bedroom and changed into the new clothes without a shower. In the moment while I was naked, I examined Cindy’s body. Since it was a mass-market strip published in newspapers, I’d never drawn what Cindy had between her legs. I hadn’t even done it privately for myself; that wasn’t my kind of porn. So did she have anything?

Nope. There was no hole of any kind down there. Good thing I did not have to pee. I could do one over on Harlan Ellison and write “I Have no Urethra, and I Must Pee,” but so far, at least, I didn’t have to pee.

Eventually the rest of my family woke up and we all came down for breakfast. It was a school day, and we all went off to catch our respective buses: Mine to middle school, Faith’s to high school, and Kenny’s to primary school. I instinctively knew where each of us caught our different buses. No, I remembered. Cindy remembered, and I could review those memories in my head.

School was boring, since of course I already knew everything that was being taught. But I turned in my assignments; when the time came, I discovered I had papers ready to turn in. I likewise took note of new assignments. I played along, pretending I was the 13-year-old girl I appeared to be. I sat with my friends at lunch, which was the best part of the day, all of us bringing our sack lunches and swapping items with one another. Naturally, there were no restrooms in the school, either, but fortunately, I never felt the urge for one.

The whole world was drawn like a comic strip, and nobody else noticed. I guess it was the way the world had always been to them. But it worked as if it wasn’t. There was science, and it was apparently possible to magnify things and see in the same level of detail as people did on Earth. It just looked funny to my eyes.

When the day was through, I came home on another bus, did my homework, ate dinner with my family, and went up to my room to think.

I had surprisingly many possessions up here. But they were all things Cindy had had at some point in the 23 years I had been drawing the strip. That was a lot of plot lines, and it gave Cindy a lot of toys, dolls, posters, and other possessions. She had a huge wardrobe, which apparently contained every article of clothing she’d ever worn. And that included panties and training bras. Why? Why would you have panties at all if you didn’t have any genitals?

After some thought, I decided the reason was because there was a plotline once in which Cindy’s mother Linda described a panty thief she experienced in college. That established that there were panties in the Watsons’ world. And everything else around here was based on the Watsons’ world. I have fallen into my own comic strip, somehow.

By the late 80s, it had become OK to talk about bras, and I’d put in a story about Cindy getting her first training bra. This established the fact that not only did bras exist but Cindy wore training bras. I had nowhere near the number of bras or panties as I had blouses, T-shirts, pants, skirts, shorts, dresses, and shoes, but I had enough.

I had pajamas, too, because at some point Cindy had had a pajama party and that implied the existence of such. When it was time for bed, I put on my pajamas and got into bed properly this time, not just lying on top of everything the way I had done the previous night. And I got up again the next morning.

Continued Life as Cindy

It was not quite Groundhog Day; time passed, though one day was much like the next. Summer came, and I had fun during the school break. I had a lot of time to spend with the three friends who lived in my neighborhood. Then fall came, and I went back to school. But I was still in seventh grade. Nobody questioned that, either. Cindy had been a seventh-grader for 23 years, and she was destined to remain a seventh-grader. The kids all remembered being in sixth grade and the other grades before that, as could Cindy. I could read Cindy’s memories, and she remembered being in all those other grades and not being in seventh before now. But I knew.

I made it through another school year, learning the same lessons. Mostly the same, anyway. All were classes that I’d had Cindy in at some point during the strip, even though there were actually too many different ones for Cindy to take in one year, so two classes changed. And I made it through another summer. And then another year of seventh grade.

What a messed-up world I had created! One where time doesn’t flow properly and basic cause and effect doesn’t even work. We take food and drink into our body but we don’t let anything out. There was even a nutrition lesson in school that talked about the importance of eating the right nutrients, how nutrients and sugars and fats were absorbed from the food we ate into our body and other components of our food were eliminated. But it didn’t go into any specifics about elimination. Apparently we did it, but it happened magically without ever visiting a toilet or soiling our clothes or any such thing.

Faith went on dates now and then. But I couldn’t. It wasn’t that I wasn’t allowed. I simply couldn’t bring the subject up. Nobody asked me out, and I couldn’t even take the initiative to ask a boy out. For that matter, I couldn’t have more than casual conversation with anybody who wasn’t one of the roughly thirty named characters in the strip who Cindy had ever associated with. The rest of the people were there, but they were just filling roles. I could go into a store to spend my allowance on something, and I could ask the store employees where something was or how much something cost or I could say I wanted to pay for my purchase, but I couldn’t say anything unrelated to their job as store employee to one of them, nor could they say anything to me except appropriate responses to my in-character actions. I simply could not will my body to do things that Cindy did not do in the strip.

I’m pretty sure people didn’t have sex in this world, either, but some women got pregnant, and the stork came and delivered their babies. What was supposed to be a metaphor in the comics was real. But it was the same women repeatedly having the same babies, who are forgotten about after a while and then born again. They were the parents and babies I’d written into the comic strip. There weren’t other ones, or if there were, I didn’t find out about them.

Years passed, and I lived the same existence over and over again. Sure, it wasn’t exactly the same, but it was essentially the same. There were funny things that happened differently each year, but they were all the things I had written about in Cindy’s life the last 23 years. I was reliving my own comic strip in the first person, and it was boring. I needed to end this somehow. I wasn’t sure how I could do it, but I needed to get out. This was a curse, being forced to live the same year over and over again, forever, knowing everything that could possibly happen and being powerless to change any of it.

Eventually I decided to see if I could get out the way I got in. The year I was in at this point had Cindy in an art class, so she both had the ability to draw and had the equipment. I tried to draw as realistic a version of myself, that is, Keith, as I could. It wasn’t great; Cindy wasn’t an artist and I only had letter-size paper. I didn’t have a drafting board either, but I had a desk. After several attempts, I finally felt like I had drawn my last night as Keith to the best I could recall, including a small version of the picture of Cindy on his drafting board. I stayed up as late as I could, sitting at my desk, adding tiny details to the room, until I finally fell asleep.

Becoming Keith Again

It worked, sort of. I awoke as Keith, slumped over my drawing board with the drawing of Cindy. But I was still in a cartoon world, and a more poorly drawn one now. But it was a version of my Earth, not a version of the Watsons’ world. There were bathrooms with showers and toilets again and I gladly took the first shower I’d taken in about a dozen years, as well as the first pee.

After I dressed I found that my wife Barbara was ready with breakfast.

“Did you finish that drawing? You were up all night with it.”

This was reassuring, in a way. Even though I was in some sort of comic strip, I was in my real world in the comic strip, exactly where I’d left off. Indeed, I found the drawing of Cindy that had started this all (which oddly, alone of all the things here, was drawn as well as Keith could draw, and not in Cindy’s style), and the already addressed mailing tube I was going to use to send it to my publisher. Since time was of the essence, I went and mailed that, first thing.

Once again, in this world nobody else seemed to notice they were in a comic strip, even as they were reading one themselves. But my life went on in ways that made sense, but were new to me. I had free will. I wasn’t limited to just actions that I (or someone) had drawn in the past. I drew new comic strips for The Watsons, inventing new funny stories for Cindy and the other characters to get into that were in character with the established story. When I wanted to, like for the cover of one of my books, I was able to draw something that looked more realistic than the world I was living in.

Eventually, Barbara died and I was left alone. And I was getting pretty old, and that still meant something in this world. I felt the aches and pains people tended to associate with old age.

But I didn’t have to die. I said to myself, “I can draw my way out of this!”

I set to making another drawing of myself, as Cindy had done, but with my own skill. I drew myself younger, how I looked after the strip was successful but many years before I had first discovered the strange ability I had to fall into worlds I had drawn on paper.

And that was successful, but too successful. I came out younger, but I had rewound history. The world had gone back, too, and I was in my old trap of living history I had already seen. Whatever I did didn’t matter, and history went down its predetermined course. And I was still in a comic book world, but it was a better drawn one. It wasn’t long before I was planning a way to draw myself out of this world as well.

I’d lived a full life as Keith, interrupted by twelve years of being Cindy in a time loop, and trying to get more time as Keith had failed miserably. Maybe it was time to be somebody else. What if I drew an alternate Earth? Could I change things and experience a different world? But what should I draw?

One thing came to mind. I had lived twelve years a a girl, but not as a real girl. I got to wear the clothes, but I didn’t get to experience dating as a girl, or having to sit to pee, or periods, or many of the other things that made women women. Those things were outside Cindy’s experience, even though as a thirteen-year-old girl, she should have had her first period. She never did, though, because I’d never written a story like that, and she didn’t have any place for the period to come out, anyway. What if I drew myself as an adult woman?

For a moment I wanted to throw this thought in the wastebasket. I’m not transgender! In the later years of my life as Keith, gay and transgender culture had moved increasingly into the mainstream. And I was happy for them, but that was them and not me. Likewise, I didn’t try writing them into my comic strip. It was outside my experience and I felt that I would be unlikely to do them well, that I’d only upset the gay and trans community by drawing them poorly and upset the straight cis community by including gay or trans characters at all. Somebody else could do that, someone who knew it better. And they did, to limited success.

But then I figured, “Why not?” I had already admitted to myself that Keith had had a full life. Though while living as Keith I’d never felt like I wanted to be or should be a woman, during the years I lived as Cindy, not once did I hate the life because I was a girl. I hated it was because I was stuck living the same year of life over and over again, with such tight limits on what I could do. The rest of the experiences of living as a woman were an unexplored aspect of life.

So that was my next project. On one of those large sheets like I’d used for the cover of Cindy’s book (in another life; the event hadn’t happened yet in this world) I drew me at my drafting table, except with me clearly pictured as a woman. And I stayed up all night adding little details to the drawing until I fell asleep into it.

Becoming Female

I woke up at my drafting table as a woman, roughly speaking a female version of Keith. And my room was there mostly how I remembered it.

But, DISASTER! That was all there was. When I opened the door to leave the room, there was NOTHING. A featureless void. I threw a wadded up piece of paper and it seemed to sail on forever. I dared not let go of the door since it was clear there was nothing out there to stand upon. Through the window I saw nothing as well. It seemed I had drawn myself into a world which featured nothing but the room I came into.

So why the difference? There was one pretty obvious reason why. When I had drawn Cindy, that was part of the detailed world I had invented in The Watsons over 23 years, and so what I am now calling my second life took place within that world. Both when Cindy had drawn me and when I drew myself, I had drawn something from the real world. Both my third life (which picked up where the first one had left off) and my fourth life (as younger Keith) took place in that real world.

This last time I had made up something different. When I had fallen into the drawing of Cindy it was associated with the many other drawings of Cindy which were present in the room, which contained complete archives of all my strips. This drawing wasn’t associated with any other drawings, even though I had meant for it to be associated with real life as the drawings of Keith had been. It was counter to that world, however, so I got as my fifth life just what I drew: Female me in a room. I wasn’t even properly female; like Cindy, I had nothing between my legs. That was a good thing, since I didn’t have any bathroom to use if I had needed to.

But I had drawing supplies, because they were part of that room I had drawn. With literally nothing else I could do, I started drawing. I drew the whole house, and myself, and my husband (who I pictured as a male version of Barbara), in different outfits, and naked as well. I drew a bathroom. I drew a refrigerator full of food. Every detail that I’d thought I’d need to live in this house. With all these drawings gathered around me, I drew myself, the female me, once again, almost identical to the drawing I’d made the night before, and stayed there adding little details to the drawing until I fell asleep.

It worked! The next day, I still awoke at the drafting table, but there was a house attached to it. And my husband was in our bed. And all the other details of the house were there. And things worked. I had a bathroom and for the first time I peed as a woman. But that was all there was. Outside the house was a void. I’d drawn nothing to indicate that there was a rest of the world, and so there wasn’t any in my sixth life.

Interestingly, I’d drawn a pair of “Barbara” and “Keith” signs that existed in my original house, gifts we got at some point, and this had made me be named Barbara now, and my husband Keith. But he was as loving and dedicated to me as Barbara had been. And why not? There was literally nothing else in the world.

It was a viable setup. It turned out that the refrigerator was always full, and though we ate the same food all the time, we wouldn’t go hungry. It was going to get pretty boring, and I dedicated myself to a new project. I had to draw the entire world.

Of course, I could not draw every detail of every person’s life. But if I was going to get to really experience life in the world as a woman, I needed to draw the world I was going to live in. I set myself to doing it. This time, instead of there being a dozen or so pages scattered around me, I was going to fill books with drawings. Fortunately, my drawing paper and pencils and pens were present in an inexhaustible supply as well. What I’d drawn in one of the drawings was always refilled no matter how much I took from it.

Keith didn’t understand why I was drawing all these “unreal things” but supported me in my efforts to do so. He clearly did not have memories of the real world, but he knew how to do the things someone living in this one-house universe would know. Every night Keith was always there in bed for me, which I made sure to always go to, since I did not want to risk falling into another drawing until I was really ready. Yes, we had sex. I was finally able to experience sex as a woman. I can’t say it was better or worse than sex as a man, just different.

Months passed, but when I literally did not have to do more than the human basics and my drawings, it went faster than I might have expected. I had put a calendar in the house and I used it to track the days. In less than a year I finished several thousand drawings ranging from the whole Earth as seen from space to every sort of thing within it. Finally, one night I drew my female self at my drafting table again, and let myself fall into it.