Looking at the photograph of Sylvia Nickerson posing with the cutout landscape she drew of Hamilton, it appears like she's a character in her own graphic novel.

Which is appropriate, because the comic the artist is making, titled "Creation," is deeply personal, about Nickerson's true odyssey of life, death and renewal in north Hamilton's Beasley neighbourhood.

It is ultimately a love story, she writes in the introduction, "although not always an easy one."

Love, that is, tangentially of the romantic kind, but more directly of motherhood, and her city, and neighbourhood; love carved out of sometimes painful experiences.

Nickerson arrived in Hamilton from Toronto 10 years ago with the man she had just married, dreaming of launching an art career among the emerging "creative class" of the James Street North gallery scene.

Then she had a baby and, like new parents sometimes do, found herself longing for freedom she had given up. Meanwhile, the rougher edges of Beasley seemed everywhere; pollution and poverty clouding her idealism. (It has among the highest poverty rates of any neighbourhood in the city.)

She even discovered that renewal and gentrification on James North, where she worked in a gallery, was criticized in some quarters for displacing those who lived in low-rent units there.

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Were artists like her part of the solution, or the problem?

She started jotting notes, sketching scenes, and living the story as she was envisioning how to tell it.

In one frame of "Creation," a man and woman scream at each other on the street as the narrator, pushing her son in a stroller, laments: "How could I ignore that this same place was where so many dreams had come to die?"

Nickerson was born in St. Catharines, grew up in Milton, and graduated from the Etobicoke School of the Arts before studying fine arts at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. She was always strong in math and science but art was her calling.

"I was a pretty impractical person from an early age," she says. "Looking back on it, I wouldn't have been an easy child, because my parents were probably like, 'What is she going to do?'"

She found commercial outlets for her work over the years, her illustrations appearing in publications ranging from the Washington Post to Utne Reader.

Breaking ground on the comic was a leap into the unknown for two reasons: the story is mostly autobiographical — she feared showing it to her parents, who were in fact complimentary — and because while the comic/graphic novel format has perhaps never been hotter, combining storytelling and drawing was a first for her.

Drawn in black and white, the comic has a noir feel at times, as the mother/narrator wonders about carefree lives and careers that will not be hers.

She walks with her child past graffiti and panhandlers, and the boy — Nickerson's son — is obsessed with stopping to explore every recycling yard and piece of litter. One day, they discover a man lying in a dumpster.

"He's fine," someone assures her. "Just sleeping."

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Nickerson recently had a showing of the first few chapters of the comic at Casino Artspace, a studio on Mary Street, where she does her work, having moved four blocks east from her initial studio. (To read panels from the comic and to contact Nickerson go to: sylvianickerson.ca)

Casinohas a bohemian feel inside and features about 15 in-house artists ranging from musicians to painters and a shoe maker. Nickerson lives a few minutes' walk from the studio.

The story is to be continued, but midway through a draft of the third chapter of "Creation" the tone seems to change, offering striking landscapes of the city and a revelation from the narrator: "I used to know things. Things I learned from books. Things I learned in school. Now what I know are our bodies, and these streets."

Nickerson had once desperately wanted to live in the neighbourhood, then desperately to leave, and came around, if not full circle, to feeling it is home, her perspective changing even as scenes around her could alternate between heartwarming and tragic.

"I guess in some ways it's been a great place to live and in other ways a really hard place to live," she says.

In future chapters she plans to reference the day she attended a memorial service in a coffee shop for a woman named Laura Young, who had found friendship and support in Beasley where she panhandled. Her murdered body was found in a snow bank in 2011. (Charges were laid, but later withdrawn, against Loujack Café, who was convicted of four attempted murders in Hamilton.)

"I think sometimes there are dark and difficult things in life and some people get out, and some don't," Nickerson says. "I think that's what my comic is trying to say."

At the end of Chapter 3, the narrator pushes her stroller to Bonanza Bakery on Murray Street, where a man outside the front door asks her for money. She offers him food instead, which he declines.

Then a woman greets her, and she accepts the offer.

In the final frame, the narrator asks the woman her name.

"Laura," she replies.