Broken Frontier

Here is an interesting idea for a comic. To pull a name for the concept from thin air, I am going to call this book Time Trap.

A lot of my writing is semi-autobiographical, so for the purposes of this book, I am going to create a protagonist who is in his early 30s, balding, married and who works full time (45+ hours a week) in the media. Just for fun, I am going to give this guy a dog too.

This guy, I’ll call him Jay, has massive powers at his disposal – he commands two weapons, the Imaginatron and the Wordix Cube. Together, these tools, much like Green Lantern’s ring, give him the capacity to create anything he desires. Also, like Green Lantern’s ring, these tools can’t be used forever without an impact: they need to be rested.

However, in small press comics, there is no rest for the creative (or the wicked!).

Jay (a pseudonym for myself in case you didn’t know already!) isn’t alone in this universe. There are hundreds of others like him: students, doctors, lawyers, construction engineers, singers, salesmen, office workers, factory hands … a veritable army of imaginers who live double lives.

A bare handful of the people who I deal with every day in my work know about this column or about They & Them, Tiki’s Phayrie or Legacy: Rebellion or any of the other story ideas that I am working on.

Like many other breakout creators, I work in a world that is totally separate from my creative endeavors.

A typical day for me starts at 6 am when I wake up and check my emails. I answer anything that has come overnight from the USA, and then I take our Australian cattle dog Jedi for a walk.

This is some of my best thinking time in the day and I often find myself coming up with news ideas as I lead Jedi through the morning-dark streets.
But when I get home from our 15-minute walk, I head into the shower and I lock into my “get ready for work mode”. For the best part of the next 12 hours, I am in work mode, my mind (almost) 100% focused on representing my workplace in the media.

When I get home, sometimes even before I greet my wife and dog, I check my emails. Sometimes, like tonight, I start to write a column. Other nights I will read a comic that I need to review and on the rare occasion when I don’t feel like 12 hours on the go has completely lobotomized me, I will churn out a few pages of script.

Are you tired yet? I am … However, this is my reality, as it is for many other creators, aspiring and established.

Many of the creators I know have other jobs such as freelance graphic design, copy writing or editorial work. In this kind of work they flex similar creative muscles as those they use when working on comics, yet they do so in another field of work. I do this too – I spend my whole day writing briefs, media releases, issues papers and management reports, just as I spend my nights writing columns, character descriptions, plots and dialogue captions.

It never ends.

However, in my case, long hours in the office chained to a desk, one hand on the keyboard and the other on the phone, drain me of my capacity to come home and churn out great work.

Sometimes, like this weekend gone by, I just can’t get into the mood to write. After spending all week on the computer at work, all I can manage to vaguely do on the weekend is surf the web. Last weekend, I set myself three writing goals for different projects I am working on … I didn’t meet any of them.

So, what to do? How do you manage a burning desire to break in with the reality that you just can’t produce brilliant work 24/7? How do you balance your creative dreams with the need to earn a paycheck? How do you trade off quality—I don’t know if it is possible to give everything you do 100% effort—either your comics or your paying job are going to suffer.

At this stage of my life, comics aren’t paying the mortgage, so I can’t make them my prime priority. This drives me crazy. Sometimes at work, when I should be dealing with a response to a complex medical issue, all I want to do is re-script a page of Legacy: Rebellion…

But, I have to snap out of it.

I can’t offer any answers this time around, only questions. I am seeking solutions, rather than being in a position to provide them. I need the thoughts of fans, creators and readers as I move forward in my evolution, comics pulling me in one direction and job/life/family pulling me in the other.