Is that a comic in my window?">
Is that a comic in my window?
Your eyes do not decieve you. Any sharp observers among you will surely notice that this is a repeat, and somehow has become more topical a year after I drew it. Just puts me one closer to Nostradamus. But, of course, this comic brings up the question, “why doesn’t this mildly interesting blog live up to its namesake more often and actually post COMICS!?!??” This certainly is a valid question.
I realized the other day that it’s been nearly a year since I stopped producing daily comics, and that only lasted three months in the first place. It’s not that I don’t want to be making comics, it’s just… well, there’s two reasons.
The first is that I can’t seem to get myself into a good working situation. When I started Debt On, I was completely penniless. I had crazily moved to South Carolina on a prayer and fled the state with my last 100 dollars. I wasn’t homeless, I did what most 22-year-old guys just out of college would do when they fall flat-on-their-face broke: I moved in with my parents.
But I didn’t have a bedroom anymore. My sister and brother had juggled things around so that my brother lived in a room too small to share, and I just couldn’t live with my sister. So I was stuck in the guest bedroom. Which my parents had renovated into a hallway.
Debt On was drawn on my parents’ kitchen table either before everyone came home from work, or after everyone went to bed. The other times were entirely too noisy to get any work done. The computer work was done on the family computer, in the aforementioned hallway, over a dial-up Internet connection, fighting with my sister for screen time. While it was theoretically possible to produce the strip that way, it was an unsustainable model, and my month buffer eventually dwindled to nothing. And I know Charles Schulz drew Peanuts for years on his parents’ kitchen table, and to that I say that Mr. Schulz was an only child and did not own four dogs.
Anyway, while I retouched and tweaked some of the dialog for this strip I realized how much fun I really did have making the strips. But that brings me to the other part of the problem. In all my moving I very infrequently have the room to set up any kind of inking workspace. Just three weeks ago I finally got a bedroom where I could set up a desk, chair and bookcase.
But these things take time, and money. So far my time has been been occupied with finding some kind of employement, and my mind has been keeping a lock on my money for fear of a repeat of my last moving disaster. Worse, my computer keeps going down, this last time it was completely useless for almost two days. So I don’t dare do any serious comics projects for fear that all my work will be suddenly lost.
But know that getting back to some serious production is in the back of my brain. And that I have worked on some strips but embarrassingly never finished. When I first started taking cartooning seriously, I read a column of advice by Matt Groening for aspiring cartoonists. FINISH YOUR WORK! he said, that cartoons were uselss if they’re half-cooked ideas or half-drawn conversations. When I look over any of that unfinished work, I know that he was soooo right. And it really kills me when I realize that stuff was some of my best work and nobody has seen it at all.
But in the meantime, I’ve been keeping up here so long as my computer’s holding up. You might have noticed a few cosmetic changes recently as well. I also changed the essays page a little, making it kind of a best-of-blog in addition to its usual functions. I’ve also been listening to a lot of Charlie Brown jazz, and you can be certain I’ll be coming back to that very shortly. Other than that, I’m playing the guitar, loading my iPod and starting my new job tomorrow. (what!)