Broken Frontier

Comic is a very frustrating business.  There’s little money, little recognition, and oodles and oodles of work to keep up on.  Let’s do a rundown of what a day in my life looks like.  I wake up at around 6:00am, do an e-mail check and do follow ups for about thirty minutes, then another twenty minutes checking the news sites and message boards I frequent, then, go through all my notes and comments I’ve received from scripts and projects the day before.  Then, I have to shower and eat so that I can get to work.  While at my day job, I check my e-mail and do status checks via IM, while trying to smash my way through my actual day job’s work.  I spend my lunch hour making phone calls to my agent and manager to check on the status and get a schedule for the upcoming days.  At 6:30pm I leave work, making whatever other phone calls I need to do as I drive home.  I walk through the door, eat dinner and watch a “decompression hour” of TV, and then go into my office and actually work on scripts or whatever bit of production needs done until around 2 or 3 in the morning, at which point I go to bed just in time to wake up and do it all again.

That’s seven days a week, around twenty hours a day.  Suffice it to say I don’t “have fun doing it,” but, it’s necessary. So, what’s all that work for?  Why do I work myself beyond the point of logic and comprehension?  Because I love what I do.  There’s a very important demarcation there.  I don’t love the hard work, the sleepless nights, the brain frying, but I love what it brings me.  The joy of having a comic with my name on it in my hand makes up for it all.  Well, mostly. 

There’s a guy I know who made a big stink about not being able to have a day job and be a professional writer.  Well, semantics aside, it’s just a lie.  If you want something badly enough, you find a way.  I’ve known from the day I was old enough to comprehend such things, that I wanted to write.  Not necessarily comics, but, I wanted to create things for all the world to see.  Comics, despite the hard work, are probably the easiest way to do so.  Ultimately, all you need is one other person to believe in you unless you can draw yourself, or vice versa, and you can make comics.  Hell, you can make comics and distribute them nationally.  The same can’t be said about any other medium.  Sure, the financial rewards are greater, but, as someone who works in the TV industry, let me tell you, there’s nothing ‘satisfying’ about what happens between your vision and what ends up on the screen. It’s a cacophony of suits all eager to get their greasy little paws all over your project, just enough that if it’s a hit they can claim responsibility, but if it’s a failure they can blame you.

That’s neither here nor there though, because, frankly, even with the creative control and so forth, there’s really only one reason to work in comics.  Love.  Comics are a bastard medium, and consequently, aside from the occasional boom, will for the most part be treated like it.  Certainly, there are guys making a decent living in comics, but, for the most part, everyone’s scrambling around to fit their dream into their reality. 

Frankly, that’s good enough for me.