Archive for ‘Essays’

28 items.

No Drama, Thanks, I’m Driving

by Colleen Doran on November 4th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Colleen's Work, Colleen's Work, Essays, Culture, Fandom

Every once in awhile, I’ll post something a bit controversial or confrontational. Not every week, not even every month, but search long enough, you’ll find something. On the whole, I try to restrict my posts to industry-related issues.

A while ago, I had a long talk with some friends and decided that it’s best to cut fandom from my blog subjects. While I deplore exploitative fan cults, have been the victim of same, and have seen many friends abused by them, I just don’t have the stomach for it all anymore. I don’t believe my posts on those subjects make much of a difference since there are so many effective fan resources that seem to manage it all just fine. There will always be con artists at conventions, but I simply don’t have the time or energy to follow it all anymore.

Industry pariah Rick Olney comes back over and over, and there’s been enough written about him to power the entire internet for a year. It doesn’t matter. He never learns.

Rob Granito got outed as a professional plagiarist and spent months dancing in what he believed was the spotlight he’d earned for his pains. And he keeps coming back.

I only blog about things that interest me and fulfill me, and this sort of thing does neither anymore. It just makes me sad and disgusted.

I suppose blogging fulfills some basic need in me to protect people from the exploitative creeps that made my early years in fandom and publishing so horrible. I have a strong urge to make things right. But I can’t protect people from themselves and their bad choices. And I believe I’m making a bad choice in continuing to try.

I frequently receive letters from people asking me to blog or link to some fannish scandal, and now I have an inbox with 864 messages in it. I have a buttload of work to do before I leave the country to go work a job in another country. If I spend only a few minutes on each of these letters, it will take me over 43 hours just to answer my mail.

I’m not blaming any of you who write me, I’m blaming me for not making better time management choices and better choices about where to place my focus.

Every once in awhile, someone (usually the subject of one of my posts) makes the ridiculous argument that I blog about these things for the massive attention they bring me, for surely on a site like mine, I must be raking in the dough every time I blog. This particular accusation was hurled at me by Rob Granito’s unfortunate wife who had no idea what her husband was up to. Like any loyal wife, she angrily defended her spouse. She did, eventually come to learn the truth about her husband. I have nothing but sympathy for her, and wish her the very best.

Here’s what I wrote in the comments thread at Ty Templeton’s blog about whether or not blog posts about fan scandals make for big traffic.

200,000 hits, and they think that makes them popular?

Here’s how that math really works out.

Rich has about 60,000 regular readers.

If only 10,000 of them click on a story 20 times to read the comments thread, you get 200,000 hits. Those are not Granito’s readers, those are Rich Johnston readers. It would be easy for just a small percentage of Johnston’s readership to account for many hits with 100 posts and readers coming back over and over again to read the posts.

I’ve written several blog posts on Granito on my site, and Rich linked back to one of them. These posts showed no significant increase in the page views on that day over any other day with a new post. As a matter of fact, the post that brought me the most hits over the last month was not the Granito story – even with Rich’s link back – but a day where I posted about educational programs for immigrant artists, and a sale on my graphic novels.

Granito is not popular, Rich Johnston’s blog is. I routinely get over 300,000 page views on my site every month, and my stats show as many as 90,000 unique visitors per month.

However, deeper analysis shows that of that number, only about 20,000 of them are dedicated readers.

No one with a modicum of web savvy confuses hits with popularity or actual readership. And most people would be smart enough to distinguish between hits and page views. If I pick up a new reader, they may sit down and read my entire webcomic, running through 500 pages in one sitting. Because my site got 500 views, that does not mean I got 500 views from 500 people. What I got was 500 views from one person.

200,000 people did not sit down and delight at the wonder that is Granito, anymore than I have 90,000 regular readers of my blog, just because that’s what my stat counter indicates. There’s a big difference between a hit and an individual reader, and a page view and a hit, and a unique reader and a visit.

I suppose you could all consider this public declaration of freedom from fannish drama a flouncity flounce, but I just want some of you to understand that even though I know there are some very unpleasant things in fandom, I need to move on and concentrate on other things. I just have too many great projects going on, too many great friends, too many things to do, and I feel like all this mess poisons the well.

For the record, if I wanted to blog about something that really interests people and brings in the traffic, I would restrict my blog to posts about my garden. And Sandman.

We moved servers last year which wiped out much of my traffic data, but I think you’ll find this interesting: my most popular blog posts are:

Look up there. Ten Things to Do with Those Pesky Green Tomatoes. Yeah, that’s right. A post about gardening. Biggest Post Ever.

And the blog post about Death and Dream got a plug from Neil Gaiman a few weeks back, hence the traffic.

Some dude liked it so much, he made it into a tattoo. Nice!

Alas, I can’t recall the name of the cool guy who sent me this pic, so email me and I will link. But be aware, it may get lost in all that email. I’m about to do a mass deletion.

Anyway, the occasional accusation of massive attention hogging and big bucks made from fannish wankery is pure nonsense. These posts really don’t bring in much traffic, and the most trafficked of them brings in about $1 in advertising income at most. I have no financial incentive to blog about uber drama. Really, people. Clue stick.

I’m just tired and sad at the constant wankery and fighting that never ends, all the con creeps that come back year after year like a polluted tide.

I need to move on.

I’ll continue to blog about art and industry-related issues that have a more positive focus and meaning for me.

With a major emphasis on the positive.

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The State of Colleen’s Industry From Print to Web: It’s working, and I didn’t need a gag strip to make it pay

by Colleen Doran on October 13th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, A Distant Soil Blog Posts, Blog, Colleen's Work, Colleen's Work, Essays

Been doing a lot of behind the scenes conferencing with some webcomickers, and crunching my numbers for A Distant Soil. The news is all very good, and while I don’t have as much time to do deeper analysis as I’d like, my bottom line is up significantly, and my online audience is ten times higher than when I started the five day a week online serialization of A Distant Soil 2.5 years ago.

Here’s a look at an earlier post with graphs of my traffic.

Most of the advice I got about making webcomics pay has not only not worked for me, but seems to stem from what I call “snapshot thinking”. For example, one blogger scolded me for not doing things like social networking and posting info about my Facebook page and whatnot on my site. Absurd. Not only have I been ubiquitous on blogs, message boards and the like for years, but the social networking buttons are right there on my home page almost every single day to the point of spamminess. Sometimes I remove them for a day or two because readers tend to gloss over things they see every day. I know I do. Moving things about or removing them periodically makes people notice changes. I can move the widgets around any time I like.

Another example: a blogger scolded me for not monetizing my work, what with my not having a working bookshop and all. But…we’ve almost always had a working bookshop. If I’m on tour, we take it down. If we have problems with the shopping cart, we take it down. I’m in Australia, we take it down. But he didn’t see a working bookshop that day he popped in! I’ve had bookshop sales on this site since somewhere around 2003.

Snapshot thinking: what he sees that day is all there is.

Of course, what a new reader sees that day is all there is too, and you want to grab the new reader. But I also need to balance that with holding on to my old readers and making the experience good for them. So sometimes things will go up, get changed, come down.

Another suggestion was to watermark all the online pages or to put the website address on them to curb pirating. Oddly, I got this suggestion from someone who said they could not find any pirated files of my work online. If he can’t find any pirated files, what good is his advice to curb pirating?

It took me about 3 minutes to find one popular website with my stuff, and as of right now, there are 23 seeders and 2 leechers. Over the last week, I believed they’ve had about 60 leechers in total. Maybe these people will never buy my books, some of them did, but want digital copies. Regardless, it bums me out when I don’t get the traffic here, but what can you do? Currently, I’m working with Image Comics to do digital restoration on ALL the A Distant Soil art and to create new covers for legal digital books. The official release will be significant improvement over what you get online from unofficial sources. Since I have well over 1000 pages of art to archive, as you may imagine, this is a time consuming task.

I repeat: the work is decades old, and there were no scanning services available. All the tones are BY HAND. These need to be cleaned up and restored. We’re not just dragging our feet to frustrate the anxious digital reader. We want to give you a good book that will last, in a package we can be proud of.

Also, pirating isn’t coming from the daily postings, it comes from the scanned books. Every single page posted on this website has already appeared in print first. I have had many conversations with people who have absolutely no idea that all this work wasn’t drawn yesterday.

No one’s not going to pirate my work because of an online watermark.

But thanks for the attempt to help.

I think the problem I have dealing with some of the You Should Just People is that they are all coming at it from a webcomics perspective as if that is the only perspective. It isn’t. Much of their advice not only doesn’t apply to me, when I’ve tried to implement it, it did not work for me at all.

One extremely strident critic of print cartoonists went on and on about how our print work is just soooo boring and not art and yadda yadda, and how we need to do short gag strips to make it big online. One wonders about people who sob about the artistic merit of print comics pushing the idea that it’s gag strips that make the world go round. I want a webcomic market in which success isn’t limited to stick figures and geek jokes. (EDIT: Yes, we know webcomics are about more than geek jokes, but the most financially successful do tend to be gag strips, just like the most successful print comics tend to be superheroes. And the advice I’ve gotten about web success has been “Do a gag strip!” which is on par with print comic advice along the lines of “Learn to draw superheroes.”)

Since I don’t do geek jokes, people like me need to find an audience that not only enjoys what we do, but is willing to pay. Since it is unlikely we’ll go for the low hanging geek joke fruit, we need to be able to make more money with a smaller audience.

My audience is now ten times higher than it was when I started online. (see linked graph above)

More precisely, I’ve been online since 1999, but my earlier efforts tanked. I hired DC McQueen as a consultant and designer in 2009. It took about a year for traffic to rise, and it took another year for a significant increase in income. If I were starting from scratch, this would have been misery, but I’ve got a huge inventory of pages, which is an advantage most people simply don’t have. This is a MASSIVE advantage, print people (consider doing as I did: breaking whole print pages into pieces. They’re easier to read online.) We need to realize and exploit our innate advantages, and praise the creator rights that allow us to pick up something we did 20 years ago and find a whole new market for it.

Don’t worry about being dated. I get people coming to this site all the time who have no idea when this art was done. It’s always new to somebody.

If you are print to web like me and don’t do geek jokes, the vast majority of the webcomics community is not going to have much to do with you. Stuart Immonen and other print artists really didn’t get much buzz when he took his work online (it’s down now.) Quality was not the issue. Immonen’s work is brilliant.

We are not going to reach the same audience as most webcomics, and many of our print readers are not into webcomics. It’s simply a different culture. While there is crossover, people who read Penny Arcade are not going to come here and decide this site is just The Best Thing Ever.

I love this: Dorothy Gambrell creator of the webcomic Cat and Girl, regularly posts updates about the financing of her project. Here is a graph of her income. So far this year, she has made $12,847.53 on her webcomic and freelance work. I believe she is a full time creator, and has been posting her comic online since 1999.

She appears to have traffic comparable to mine. Almost all of her money comes from t-shirts and donations. Almost none of mine does.

I’m not going to post my entire income here, because that’s a little more transparency than I would like. But if I limit my income entirely to online income, then last year Cat and Girl did significantly better than I did, but this year I did significantly better.

I have freelance income and royalty income that Ms Gambrell doesn’t have. So I make more money anyway based on my publishing income alone. But I wanted to see how I would do with just online income, especially since a large portion of financing A Distant Soil’s finale will depend on that income.

Between July and now, I have made more money online than Ms Gambrell has made all year. Almost all of that income is from original art sales and book sales. I had a limited edition book sale earlier this year that went very well, and will pay for two entire issue of A Distant Soil from Image Comics next year. In fact, my web sales this year were shockingly good. I had almost given up on this whole thing, and we’ve come back like a champ.

I can’t sell t-shirts or coffee mugs to save my life. Guess what? That’s not my audience. I don’t do slogans. The t-shirts and coffee mug financing of comics does NOT work for people like me. Here’s what we do have, and most of our sales are on journals and cards.

Original art and limited edition books make our money. My art sales are significantly better than they have been in years. Many webcomic artists have very little, if any, art to sell.

I can also sell and market many things from projects for other publishers here, as well as A Distant Soil. A webcomics artist does not usually have that advantage. Until this year, I saw no serious benefit from this. My mainstream work was not selling here any better than A Distant Soil was. We just weren’t getting the traffic. I’d get a bump once in awhile from a link and go “YAY! We’re SAVED!” but it didn’t last. Now our daily traffic is better than our old big bumps. But you don’t see me cheering unless I’ve been watching a trend for at least six months.

Sales of A Distant Soil books are up. Not a huge amount of money, but the difference is clear. My royalty check this period was up by a full third.

Putting my work on the web alone did not yield results, and neither did chatting on FB: money did. I spent thousands of dollars on advertising, countless hours pushing my work. More precisely, I skipped San Diego Comic Con, and invested that money in the site. San Diego regularly costs at least $8000 to attend and get a booth. Staying home and putting my work on the web has brought me a far higher return on that investment than going to San Diego. If I go to San Diego, it is highly unlikely I’ll pick up thousands of readers at one show. I picked up thousands of readers on the site and got to stay home and avoid convention crud. More importantly, I more than doubled that $8000 investment. If I go to San Diego, there’s a good chance I won’t get my $8000 back.

This doesn’t mean you should not go to conventions. I intend to go to San Diego next year. However, I think being online is a new form of convention. And it costs less. If you can manage your time, keep from getting into foolish internet dramas, then you may realize some serious benefits from your online presence. It has taken me a whopping 12 years to make it work.

Now, just because it’s worked well for a year, that does not mean it’s smooth sailing from here.

I’ve seen a number of webcomics whose traffic and income tanked over the last year. The top gets stronger, the long tail is very, very long, and there is a tiny percentage of well off and everyone else is poor.

Last year was a dismal one for us. The year before…not so much. This year…we’re recovering…but…well…let me explain.

When I first started out putting the Dreamland Chronicles online in 2006, I had already created about 150 pages of the comic for print. So it was easy to stay ahead of the 5 pages/week schedule…Almost 2 years later…we can barely get more than 13,000 uniques a day.

Has the webcomic thing crested? Did those with first mover advantage hog the spotlight? Is the market too glutted? Is there hope for a comics middle class?

Dunno.

I’ve done much better for myself this year, but I had money to invest (many people do not) and a huge inventory (many do not) and a loyal print readership, some of whom were persuaded to pursue me here (many have no pre-existing audience).

And, for the heck of it, I almost completely stopped advertising to see what would happen to my traffic. My core audience remained, though I stopped picking up as many new readers (duh). And since my core audience rose, my income went up, even without further advertising investment. (EDIT: to clarify, my core audience in 2011 remained steady from 2010, even though I cut advertising dollars to almost nothing.)

Will these happy trends continue for me and my humble book?

Dunno. Sure hope so.

I welcome your thoughts and suggestions

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Colleen’s Victory Garden: Raised Beds, Weedguard

by Colleen Doran on April 17th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Colleen's Work, Colleen's Work, Essays

Out here in the country, almost everyone has a garden. With the rising cost of food and gas, it’s a necessity for some. When I went to the post the other day to ship some orders, all anyone could talk about was their garden.

Here’s my veggie garden in progress. It took almost four years to set this up the way I wanted it. It’s about 80 feet long and 20 feet wide.

Almost everything in this garden has been set in raised beds.

I tried in-ground gardening the first year or so, but the losses to vermin were terrible, and the maintenance even worse. Adding raised beds, barrels, and pots greatly increased productivity and ease of care.

The big barrels are from local wineries. They cost a fortune in the city, but ours came cheap. However, they are very difficult to cut, so if you don’t have the tools, forget it. Of course, you must rotate the crop every three years, so while a few of mine have harbored potatoes, this year they will have flowers instead.

At first, my dad made my raised beds for me, because the commercial raised bed kits were so expensive. But last year, Sam’s Club began carrying sturdy plastic beds which clip together in minutes. They cost almost half what making them from scratch costs, and they last longer.

Even expensive, treated wood can’t compete with plastic. With wood, there is also the danger the seller will try to pass off safe wood for treated wood containing arsenic. So, the plastic beds are safer and better in every way.

Here’s a direct link to the Sam’s Club order page. I bought mine in the spring for $38 each, but a quantity went on sale in the fall for only $26 each. I’ve seen similar units for sale in catalogues for $70 or more, not including shipping.

This is also a great deal for the urban gardener, since you can create an instant garden space without tilling. You can also buy two units, clip one on top of the other, and grow root veggies like potatoes and carrots with ease.

For added protection, I usually add a wire cage beneath the beds to prevent moles and voles from burrowing into them. As you see, the entire area is covered with kill mulch. This helps cut down on weeds, especially the pesky ones which like to grow in the cracks and crevices around the raised beds.

A wire cage bent over the unit also allows me to place row covers neatly over the beds. This green plastic cover is especially created for cool weather vegetables like lettuces and cabbage. This small unit is a secondary garden near the kitchen. The main vegetable garden is down the lane near the stream where I can hand carry water when the well is low.

Warm weather causes some veggies to grow bitter and to bolt: that is, to go to flower. Clip off the little flower bud heads and eat them, which will extend the growing season of many cool weather veggies. The flower buds of kale and collards taste of sweet cabbage.

One raised bed with the garden soil you will need to buy to fill it, will cost less than $100. Depending on what you choose to grow, you may harvest $500 worth of fresh produce per bed. I routinely harvest 30lbs or more of fresh heirloom tomatoes per plant. At over $3 per pound, that’s almost $720 worth of fresh tomatoes out of one 4′x8′ box. Even if you can’t can your own veggies, those tomatoes will make pound after pound of delicious sauce, which you can freeze.

BTW: unless you know what you are doing, do not buy top soil for your beds. Buy potting soil. It’s more expensive, but I’ve had terrible luck with poor quality top soil.

Grow basil right there in the same box as your tomatoes. It naturally repels white fly and others pests, and you’ll have all the basil you need for your pasta recipes instead of dropping $3 per bunch for fresh basil at the grocery. The basil also blooms beautifully. Harvest the seeds for next year, and you’ll never need to buy another packet of the stuff.

After the first year, the maintenance on each bed will only run about $20 per annum, even less if you do your own composting. One bag of humus, and one bag of well rotted manure will give a 4′x4′ box all the nutrients you need for planting another year, and they cost about $4 each.

Don’t be afraid to use manure in your garden beds. I know you’ve all heard horror stories about e coli from commercial nurseries. The short of it is many of these nurseries utilize poorly trained labor, some of whom do not exercise proper personal hygiene. The e coli is not necessarily coming from the fertilizer manure. If you know what I mean.

A commercial nursery without proper oversight may also use fresh manure, which is dangerous, and a major source of e coli.

Quality commercial manure is well rotted, sometimes for a couple of years. This process breaks down the bacteria, and creates a nutrient-rich, natural source of food for your plants. I’ve used manure in my garden for years, all aged for two years or more, and it’s more valuable than gold to the gardener!

This year, I’ve also decided to try Weedguard, a compostable paper mulch. It fits almost perfectly in the raised beds. I plant my seeds in the little holes, as you see here.

Even the most carefully monitored garden will get weeds. I’ll try anything to avoid spending my summer months plucking ground ivy from around my beans. I’ve never used this product before, and I’ll post a success report later. You can achieve similar results with newspaper, but this was much easier to handle, so I like it already.

BTW, never use color newspaper pages in your garden. Color ink can be toxic.

Sometimes it’s fine to let your food plants go to seed. On the whole I don’t recommend it, because your beds may be more productive if you rotate your crops. If you can get $100 worth of produce with a second crop, it’s foolish to wait for plants to go to seed which you can buy for $1.

That said, I let my celery go to seed last year, because it was so pretty, and the butterflies loved it. As you can see, the result is, a lot of celery volunteers! The little plants are delicious and peppery. Clip them and throw them into salads to allow the healthiest plants to grow into stalks.

You should always have some flowers in your vegetable garden. As you can see in these photos, I have tulips, daffodils and roses, as well as many herbs. You need to feed the bees and birds, or your veggies won’t produce. We encourage the native bee population with mason bee nests, which are inexpensive and easy to set up. You can buy them here.

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If you’re not happy, comics won’t make you happy

by Colleen Doran on July 3rd, 2010
Posted In: Blog, Colleen's Work, Culture, Comics, Creator Resources, Colleen's Work, Essays

Follow up thoughts from the thread about Wally Wood below:

Which came first? The depression or the comics career?

Sad accounts of creator’s lives; they throw everything they’ve got at comics (or acting/writing/fine art/fill-in-the-blank,) and end up in a very bad way.

My completely unprovable theory is that some emotionally-challenged people are attracted to fantasy-oriented careers in hopes of creating a world they can enjoy, and in which they can find acceptance.

And when they can’t find joy in that career, when the work doesn’t make up for the other things wrong in their lives, they implode.

Comics is a business. It is not a nurturer, it won’t make up for the fact that you were picked on in high school, it isn’t the family you never had, it’s not the boyfriend who will love you.

It’s a very tough business.

It won’t make you happy if you are not happy. It will make you even unhappier if you can’t be happy without it.

What little I know of Wood tells me he was a deeply disturbed man, and there was no way comics was going to heal what was hurting him.

I had an extremely sad encounter some time ago with an older pro who had fallen on hard times. Did not know him well at all, but out of the blue, he contacted me for help. He told me he was discriminated against because of his age. He lied about his age, too, shaving off the years: I’d never met a man who did that before. He was no older than a number of very popular creators I could name.

When I finally got to see him some time later, I was appalled. He was emaciated, filthy, and he stank. He left his smell on my clothes, and I had to speak to him with my hand over my lower face to avoid his breath, and to keep from gagging.

One look would keep any client from hiring this guy. Aside from his personal hygiene, he acted insane. He didn’t need a career, he needed immediate medical care. I got him medical care – that day – and gave him money. He walked out of the medical facility that same day, and immediately blew the money.

I later found out that a number of other people had been giving him money, too. He repeatedly lied to me about his circumstances (loans, jobs, contacts, etc.)

On finding out he had misrepresented himself and had not made wise use of the medical care or money, I cut him off.

You probably have never heard of this dude, and I don’t really know him at all. Since I had no legal standing in the matter and live in another state, there was absolutely nothing further I could (or wanted to) do.

I bet he still thinks he is discriminated against because of his age. All he could talk about was how he had to get more assignments. Yet clients gave him assignments he never completed. He disappeared for weeks at a time. Then showed up filthier than ever looking for jobs, for help, for handouts.

I don’t see a happy ending for this guy. For all I know, the end has already come.

You can’t help some people.

Some of these dudes don’t need comic book jobs. They need mental health care. Helping them stay in this business with mercy jobs and handouts is enabling, not art patronage.

Some people should get as far away from the art and entertainment business as possible.

When things go well as a creator, there is nothing like it. It’s a high, an emotional drug. Some people get addicted to it. They don’t look at any payoff except the payoff of seeing their work being seen. Eating, medical care, roof over head: tertiary concerns. Until the day they wake up and realize they are fifty-years-old, they have no savings, nowhere to live, and their teeth are falling out.

There are so many people who will never get to see their work professionally published. One gig would satisfy them for life.

And there are others who, once having tasted the apple, they live the tortures of Tantalus, the juiciest fruit forever out of reach.

One job isn’t enough, one success isn’t enough. Whatever they had, they want it again. Whatever someone else has, they want that, too.

Few people have long term careers in any field of art and entertainment. Not being able to sustain this gig for decades is not failure. The only failure is in not being able to lead a happy, fulfilling life. You don’t need a pro career to do that. Immolating yourself on your art pyre will not make you a better artist or writer.

My friend Julie Ditrich gave me a great talk about self awareness: knowing who you are, what you are, your capabilities, your limits.

I am a professional artist, and I have had very little training. I had more than 12 years of training in music. That’s one hell of an investment.

Back in the Dark Ages, I was cast as a lead in a production of the musical Bye Bye Birdie. I played Kim.

Our little company always gave one performance featuring the understudies, so my understudy, Kacey Camp, took over for me. I sat in the audience to enjoy the show.

I watched Kacey stomp my performance into the dust. She acted better, she sang better, she danced better. She was lively, gave dull lines a funny spin. She sparkled.

And she really enjoyed herself.

I never felt comfortable performing, but let me brag about my wide vocal range: I made eyeglasses vibrate whenever I hit that high A at the end of the “Ed Sullivan” song. I plumbed contralto depths.

But I was not into it, and just because you can hit those notes doesn’t mean you should.

I didn’t even want the Kim role, the part of a pop idol-obsessed teenager. I didn’t even act like a teenager when I was a teenager.

The director called my family and asked my parents to talk me into auditioning because they were sure there was no one else in town suited for the part.

Then there was my understudy, singing, dancing, and acting like a dream. I had had weeks and weeks to practice the same role, and I wasn’t half as good.

I finished out my little role for the rest of the run, and that was that. I didn’t have the drive or ability to succeed as a pro performer, and I never auditioned for anything again.

Kacey became a professional actress with stage, TV, and film credits.

I became a cartoonist.

I never missed performing music in front of people. If I want to sing, I warble in the shower.

12 years of training – including summer music academy and private lessons – down the tubes.

I can sing anytime I want. No one can stop me.

If you want to make pictures or write stories, no one can stop you.

You do not need to be a pro to be happy. The pursuit of the pro career for which some people simply are not suited has led many people to great unhappiness. I was not suited for a career in music, despite 12 long years of banging away at it.

Know thyself.

It isn’t a question of whether or not this is something you want to do: the question is, can you make a living at it?

You don’t have to make a living at art to enjoy making art. Give yourself the freedom to make art without the burden of art making you.

By the way, Kacey Camp and I have been very good friends ever since.

What’s the story, Morning Glory?

What’s the tale, Nightingale?

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Work is Good

by Colleen Doran on March 25th, 2010
Posted In: Blog, Colleen's Work, Culture, Comics, Colleen's Work, Essays

Work is Good and there is a lot of it.

These things are in my head at the moment.

If you get stuck on a page, even for five minutes, move on. Pick up the next page and keep drawing. Try some area of the art that is less challenging. Hair or feathering, or hatching. Leave the difficult part for the next morning when you are fresh.

Every line is progress. Don’t force yourself. Don’t beat yourself up if you have to set something aside for later. Chip away at each page in bits and pieces, and each day, the task will get small and smaller and the blank area of the page will get smaller and smaller. You don’t have to do everything at once. Just be steady.

For whatever reason, I now find having TV and movies on while I work kind of irritating. I have been working in complete silence for hours per day, and may watch one or two movies late in the evening. I guess I just have so much going on, I need the solace of silence most of the time.

Whenever you are trying to concentrate and are under a lot of pressure, that’s a guarantee that whatever project you thought was dead will rise as a zombie and drop a deadline in your lap.

I have lost almost all interest in comics blogs. I just can’t consider breast size and whoever the hell plays Captain America in a movie important anymore. Changes to copyright law and the content of the Wall Street Journal interest me.

That’s not a knock on people who have leisure time for the fun stuff. I just don’t right now (I wish I did – kinda. Too much work is better than not enough, though). Maybe someday I will be moved to care about Power Girl’s boobs, but I don’t think I ever really did care about Power Girl’s boobs.

I’ve been beating myself up for months about the slow pace on Gone to Amerikay, and then I remembered how long the book is. Long. Doing this book is the equivalent of doing pencils and inks on a bimonthly book in one year. And more. I did other assignments besides. That’s a dead, solid pace for me, and this is some fine, detailed, heavily researched work.

Beating myself up is a daily ritual. Whenever I don’t meet my own standards, I twist and writhe, and am so angry and upset with myself I can’t sleep.

Yesterday is over. Can’t do anything about yesterday. Have to let yesterday go.

I need to do 75% of a page every single day. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t. On the days I don’t, you’d think I have kicked a puppy or poisoned a tree I feel such guilt and horror. Then I fear the drawing board the next day. It looks at me accusingly.

Every day is a new template. Whatever I did yesterday is not a reflection on what I will do today.

I don’t have to be perfect every day.

No one is.

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