There were so many things that happened this year, transitioning to my first full year as a full time artist, moving to a new city, etc etc definitely contributed to some of me being thrown off axis
Political events also. I think i reall started having my big art crisis around when the war in Ukraine started. News around that time was really...intense. And that was probably a point where i was VERY engaged with the internet/news cycle/twitter in particular
THINGS FOR ME, HAVE IMPROVED but it got really dark in the spring/summer in particular. I think I was also not getting enough excercise and my ADHD was turning into just, unmanaged obsessing over things not in my power or control
I have a whole list and contacts with smaller indie companies i would LOVE to do projects with because I know they’ll be more likely to want to do smaller/weirder things. But they also typically have much MUCH smaller advances and so it’s a lot more up front work before getting payout
Other 2022 thoughts; comics are like, one of the hardest fucking mediums to work on in terms of the raw physical hours put in. It’s LABOR intensive as fuck, while simultaneously being still extremely undervalued as an artistic medium.
I love comics a lot, but I’m not going to sit here and say I’m not doing the internal math on hours of labor to actual dollars coming back and thought ‘maybe I should just write a book’
My agent is first and foremost a literary agent so that’s not a transition that would be a problem. I wanted to be an author for YEARS before i started discovered comics, it’s still on my list of things I would like to do, and with a lit agent and an editor as a major publishing house, it’s a HIGHLY achievable dream now
I have a couple comic ideas also that are just, a little longer than i think is viable to be published. Multi volume comics in the US are still pretty much a pipe dream unless they are
I guess there’s image too? But i would say image still has a pretty narrow focus, and they’ve increasingly become a company that i wouldn’t want to work with anyway. There are better options now
IM JUST UNSURE. 2022 got under my skin as far as, what it means to be an artist or creator these days. What making art looks like in the world we currently live in, how much responsibility with have to that art, how much it matters or doesn’t matter what we do with it
The whole twitter thing has been bad too, I’ve stopped using it for months and that’s really cut me off from the art community and there’s not a lot to be done about that. There’s no alternative and i don’t expect to see one anytime soon
I’m also kind of not interested in making art for kids specifically, and that is where ALLLLL the money is. Middle grade is where you get the CASH. I might drift back to YA, but the expectation to avoid adult is extremely limiting.
And i sped the whole year juggling ideas and throwing them away because without knowing the goal and direction, it’s hard to know what idea to focus on? What do i want to commit to working on EVERY DAY for YEARS
I do have a project i keep coming back to that i think is probably my most passionate project, but I’m unsure if I can tell it the way i want to tell it in the
Big publisher >300 page singe volume restriction. 300 pages is honestly, nothing in a comic, and if there’s one big problem I’ve been seeing in a lot of my contemporary’s works
Like, I don’t want to point out any examples, even in a private space, but i can think of half a dozen extremely high profile GNs from the past couple years, literally some of the BEST people in the industry and they just
And it typically has about the same amount of content as say, a 90 minute movie. So if the story is too big, too sweeping, there’s just not time to make everything happen
Anyway, to circle back to the positive. I did spend a lot of time doing some artistic healing this year, consuming new things, trying to hone in on what exactly, inspires me and excites me and how to bring that to my own work.
I think while I’m still deep in the inking phase of LStM, im going to just, start cranking out ideas for my other project with no publication plans. Just follow the heart and hand and whatever happens, happens. And then if i can parse something pitchable out of that, great
like, me pouring so many things into it, that part of me had a crisis about what else i want to say. Which is of course, many things, but sometimes that’s hard to see when you’re staring through a microscope
-web comics being published retroactively