Zig-Zagging Blog Tour

Welcome to my very first Blog Tour!

I was invited by TLC Book Tours to be one of the hosts for the online book tour for Zig-Zagging: Loving Madly, Losing Badly, How Ziggy Saved My Life by Tom Wilson.

Plot: In this memoir, Tom Wilson tells us the story of his father starting the "Ziggy" cartoon in the 1960s and his own path of development as a cartoonist.

Tom started with his own characters and made it to the cover of People magazine with his father, Ziggy and Ug (the younger Tom's most famous character). He took over the Ziggy cartoon series in the mid-1980s as his father's health deteriorated.

Tom also tells us of his family's struggles after his wife, Susan, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Susan lost her battle after 7 years of treatment, leaving Tom and their two young teenage sons.

My Reaction: I don't read lots of non-fiction, but I loved this book. Tom did a great job of tying together his story with a superhero theme -- first his vision of his father as a superhero and then trying to be a superhero for his own family. As he describes growing up in the cartoonist profession and, especially, his struggles with grief and depression after Susan's death, he weaves throughout his story the concept of what it really means to be a superhero.

I grew up with the Ziggy cartoons and so, of course, I loved the cartoons interspersed throughout the book that illustrated Tom's struggle or mindset during the time periods he described. So often, Tom described Ziggy as a younger brother who had become successful through perseverance. The thoughts and comments of the Ziggy character became a counter-point to some of the depression Tom was facing.

Most especially, though, I liked Tom's theme that life is made up of detours. The book is written as a flash-back and the only present-day "action" is Tom's drive from Cleveland to Cincinnati to go home to his sons. Tom uses the turns and detours in the physical highway to illustrate the detours his life took which led him to be the primary artist of Ziggy and a single parent.

I recently participated in a continuing education course and the speaker spent about an hour talking about life plans. He expressed sympathy for people who just wind up in certain careers or paths because of outside influences. Alternatively, he indicated that we should all be making 5-year plans, and then breaking those plans down in to 1-year schedules and 3-month schedules. Especially in light of the current economy, I saw this planning idea as helpful, but hardly carved in stone. It seemed incredibly unreasonable to me to think that writing a plan on paper could control the direction of one's life.

Tom Wilson's story seems much more realistic to me -- that the detours become an integral part of life's journey, not something that can or should be avoided. Some detours lead us in directions we could only dream of finding. Others lead us to places we would never want to go. Either way, they become a key part of who we are and who we will become.

Five years ago, I would never have imagined that I would be married and living in West Texas in a small town. What about you? What detours have you seen in your life?