Hello Abnormals;
I’ve been getting a lot of questions, comments, emails and any other variety of messages asking about a lot of things, about the webcomic, the archives, the company… So I thought it was about time I gave a little “report” of sorts on my current situation and how things are going. As I wrote, it turned into something totally different than what I planned when I started writing, which is interesting because that is pretty much what this whole text is about. It’s a long article, for sure, but if you’re into my work I really would appreciate it if you took the time to read this. Alternatively, if you’re working as an artist online in any way that could be considered similar to what I do or have done, then you might benefit a bit from what I’ve learned – or what I’m learning.
Or not. Let’s see, shall we?
Around the beginning of August I made some drastic changes in the way I work. It wasn’t really that weird, honestly. I’ve been working as an “online artist” for over 11 years now, and along the way I’ve changed my methods and approach numerous times. I even gained a reputation for starting storylines and projects and then abandoning them afterwards.
Up until a couple of months ago, I had been producing a webcomic called “The BONEBREAKERS” and publishing three pages a week. I was working with my business partner, Dern, who at the time co-wrote the comic and we had a company called “SCALLYWAGS International”. Additional to the webcomic, we worked on KICKSTARTER projects. The webcomic served as a way to gain popularity and push the Kickstarter projects forward while the projects themselves brought in the necessary money to keep our company going. It was a good model up until then. I got to dedicate myself exclusively to producing art and to make a living off of it.
Being a full-time, professional comic artist has been my life-long dream. To have been able to make a good living off of it, travel and even hire extra people to help me produce the comic was amazing. Additional to that, I was working on exciting projects, successful Kickstarters and in contact with amazing people, planning projects that I never even would’ve dreamt I could be a part of. Aside from that, I was teaching illustration and character design, helping new artists and the local art community grow. While I still had a lot left to accomplish, what I had was definitely giving me a feeling that things were “getting there”.
But it was also a very delicate, unstable model. A company that consists of two people living thousands of miles away from each other depends entirely on both those people being able to function correctly. So when one of us had some health issues, well… we kept running onwards for a while. That run eventually turned into a walk and that walk eventually turned into a limp. In retrospect, we probably should’ve taken care of whatever was wrong right at the beginning, but we didn’t. When it came to be that those health issues made it so one of us just could not continue any further, the whole thing came tumbling down.
Saying that I lost all of it would definitely be an exaggeration. But it is true, however, that I no longer have any of that. As I have explained before, in August we finally had to admit that my business partner’s health problems were an issue, and so our company of two had to be separated. The webcomic – which up until then had been the main focus of my work – had to take a backseat to other things that would be more financially sustaining. I had no other projects going on because the webcomic demanded my full attention, not making it possible for me to take on other projects. It gave me some amazing results, though, producing a book I’m very satisfied with in less than a year and getting me halfway through the second one by now. But the webcomic on its own does not make any money (and book sales are definitely not enough to make a living), and without the money-making projects that the webcomic pushed, alternatives had to be considered. I went back to making commissioned artwork and reduced the frequency with which the webcomic updated. Maybe things would be different if we had faced this problem at its beginning – but hindsight doesn’t solve anything.
At first, I thought that this would be a temporary situation and that things would go back to the way they were – eventually. But during these couple of months I’ve discovered some things about my work and myself, both as a person and as an artist that… well… let’s just say that now I’m not so sure.
I’ve been working on commissioned art for these past two months and I have to admit: I’m happier than I was before. If freelancing is like walking a financial tightrope, then working as a commission fantasy artist is like walking a tightrope with your eyes blindfolded. You just move forward and hope that your foot will land on the rope. I’m living day to day, going through my savings and not really knowing if I’ll make it through the next month. But artistically, I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time. Why is that?
One of the things I’ve discovered during this time is that maybe – just maybe – the webcomic wasn’t really going anywhere. For me, as an artist, I mean. Sure, the story and the characters were going places, but what exactly could I do with the webcomic that had not been done already? And this thought crept into my mind for the first time while I was at San Diego Comic-Con, last July. I mean, there’s plenty of stuff, naturally. I saw just by looking around at the other comics on display that surrounded my booth the incredible myriad of possibilities that the webcomic presented. But the question that started bugging me was: “do I actually want this?”.
Don’t get me wrong, I saw a lot of artists I admire and the things they do are amazing. Their accomplishments are incredible, and the giant steps that have been taken towards legitimizing webcomics are admirable. There’s a whole section of the convention dedicated to them, and if you don’t think that’s an advancement right there then I don’t know what you’re expecting. Of course, there’s a lot more that needs to be done and lot more obstacles to overcome. But isn’t that true for pretty much everything?
But again, the question that was making noise inside my brain was not if webcomics are good, or worth my time. The question was if I actually wanted what I was seeing. I was seeing plenty of different webcomic artists, many times more successful than I am, and while I did admire them – I found that I did not want to be them.
My aspirations were pushing me in other directions. And if I’m honest, I have to admit that they always have. I found myself, just as I have in past visits, standing in front of the Imaginism booth, admiring Kei Acedera and Bobby Chiu’s work, and thinking to myself that maybe that was the kind of artist I really wanted to be.
At the core, there’s really not that much of a difference. We’re all artists pushing towards the perfection of our craft. But on one side you dedicate yourself completely to the story you’re trying to tell, and you use art as a way to communicate it, to share it with people. Comics can be beautiful, elaborate works of art. But they don’t have to be. Comics can also be stick figures, photos, doodles and crude drawings. It sounds harsh, but the art is a means to an end.
On the other side of that wall you dedicate yourself to being a better artist and perfecting your craft, and then you use that to whatever purpose comes along. It can be comics, of course. But it can also be illustration, concept art, cover art or simply art for art’s sake.
Just this week I was reading a review on the “Death of Wolverine” series. Basically, they were saying that the comic was no good, the story wasn’t interesting and that you were pretty much just reading it to watch Wolverine die – and that the way he died was not interesting either. In the end, they said that the comic had pretty art, and that if you wanted to see pretty art, that then, maybe, the comic series would justify a purchase.
Many of you might argue that what I’m saying about comics is not true, but think about it for a second. In comics, art is just a tool, a resource being used to bring the comic to your eyes. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a matter of priorities. A bad story, uninteresting and poorly told plus amazing art still equals a bad comic. While bad art plus an amazing story can still be a great comic.
It’s just that my own priorities are not set that way. I prioritize art, I suppose because I am an artist before anything else. Sure, I love telling stories, and I’ve got plenty of stories to tell. I love making jokes and gag comics and creating characters and universes for them to live and grow in. But all those things are just the things I use to make art – not the other way around. I don’t produce art to tell a story, I tell a story to produce art.
And my focus on art is precisely that itch that I had not been able to properly scratch for a while. Of course, I can make the webcomic as good-looking as I want it to be (we discussed this already, didn’t we?), but even then I still have to hold back on certain things. For example, one of the things I love about what I do is that at ANY moment I can learn something new that will completely revolutionize the way I work. You normally work hard and study and steadily advance with art, slowly but surely. But every now and then you come across something that just changes the way you work completely, and you leap forward. And you can’t do that with a comic. It has a set aesthetic that you need to more or less maintain through a book. You can’t just start a book and finish it with a completely different artstyle.
So maybe making my own comic, my own story, book or whatever just isn’t my thing. I love making comics, but maybe I’m more suited to be working on projects just as an artist, not as the complete creator-writer-artist package that I am with The BONEBREAKERS. I see the artists I admire the most in the world of webcomics, people like Lar deSouza and Garth Graham, and I see that they work on stories written by other people and… well… they definitely look happy. They push their art forward, always getting better, always raising the bar. I try to do so, too, of course. But I feel like the weight of my own creation is keeping me from reaching the artistic heights I aspire to, and I’m left wondering if maybe being the one-man-army just isn’t for me.
To be fair, webcomics are not the only thing I recently discovered were not satisfying me artistically. I found myself feeling the same way about concept art, too.
The art classes I taught were for an art school that focuses on concept art. There, I’ve come across legions of people that are basically just mashing photos and textures onto a set of brush strokes and declaring it art, and as an artist I just can’t force myself to accept such techniques. I won’t deny that they require skill, and that it takes certain artistic sensibilities to be able to produce a “photobashed” image that works. But it’s utilitarian, something that is only justified because of time constraints. I understand that the requirements of the concept art field make it so that the focus is on the visual expression of an idea and not on the artistic merit with which such an image is produced, but I feel it akin to a person preparing ramen noodles for dinner and then declaring themselves to be a chef. I can understand that you needed food fast and efficiently, and I know that there’s many ways to make ramen noodles taste better. Some people can make them better than others. But I would hesitate to use the word “cooking” for that sort of thing. I see it more as “preparing” a meal. And to me, photobashing is “preparing” an image.
So I didn’t just decide that maybe webcomics were not my main focus, I also decided that concept art (or at least that kind of concept art) was not for me either. There’s plenty of places where my approach to concept art (or art in general) would be appreciated – but not in the school I was teaching at. I enjoy learning anatomy, I enjoy learning perspective. I love using my Wacom pen as if it were a pencil or a paintbrush and trying to master it so that my art has a certain “feel” to it, and I have absolutely adored studying color and illumination to better understand what’s going on with my images and the world I’m trying to portray through them. And I absolutely cannot even start to imagine myself tracing over a photo, copy/pasting a texture from Google images or using an image of a person that I found online or even took a photo of myself as a replacement for actually drawing the person.
This is also why I quit teaching classes. Oh yeah, by the way, I quit teaching most of my classes. I still love teaching, and want to continue doing it. But I can’t be a part of a school that is teaching so-called artists that there’s no need for you to master anatomy when you can just trace a photo and call it a day. I can’t handle students that don’t find each failure as a reason to be excited about what new things you can learn but rather see them as further justification for using photobashing. I can’t teach students like that. I’m sure the people that still work at that place would argue that I’m mistaken. But such arguments are pointless, I don’t work there anymore so let’s just leave it at that. So anyway, I left most of my classes behind and kept only the ones at the University (two nights a week), where I can still teach digital painting the way I enjoy it.
By now, you’re probably tired of reading this. But hopefully by now you’ve also understood a bit about how I feel, the path I’ve been walking and what’s brought me to the conclusions I am making. So… what am I going to do?
First off, if I’m not enjoying something, I’m just not going to do it anymore. The webcomic is giving me no benefits, neither financial nor artistically. At the present time, the webcomic is feeling like something I have to do, not something I want to do. And I find myself working on it just to get it over with so I can work on the stuff that really excites me – the commissioned images. I’m not going to quit it completely, but I feel that I need to put it on hiatus for the time being. Get some distance from it and wait to see if that old excitement comes back to me. This doesn’t mean I want to quit making webcomics, not at all. It just means that I want to stop making mine, and see if maybe there’s other comic projects out there that I can be a part of. I might make some comic strips from time to time, for different things. But this feeling of obligation and lack of benefit just isn’t working for me.
Indeed, I’m looking for work. I’m looking for projects that excite me and dream jobs that I could never be a part of if I was busy all the time making The BONEBREAKERS. I want to take a shot at mainstream comics, or at least a decent sized publication. Maybe some cover art. How about table-top RPG art, or cards? There’s so much stuff I’d love to be a part of that I stopped pursuing to make the comic.
I’m sorry if this news disappoints you – but can you honestly say you never saw it coming? The only reason I can even afford the time to continue making the webcomic right now is because I have an intern that helps me color it. That intern finishes her term in a couple of months and then what? In my current financial state I can’t go ahead and hire another. I can barely even make enough to pay this one for the remainder of her contract? This is a decision I had to make sooner or later. And if I learned anything from August, it’s that sometimes you’ve got to solve problems before they become something you can’t ignore anymore.
So for the time being, I’m going to focus on commissioned images, looking for work as an artist on new projects and increasing my own skills. It’s just what I want to do.
A lot of people have told me that I should consider Patreon as a way to fund the comic and continue working on it the way I want to. And I have – honestly – looked into it. But I’m not sure I could gather enough funding to sustain myself and my business. Besides, it would require me to go back to working full-time on something I don’t want to work full-time on.
I do, however, want to continue teaching. So additional to those things I said I was gonna do before, I’m also going to start paying more attention to my YouTube channel, where I want to start making tutorial videos for people that want to get started with digital art. I don’t know if this a good idea, but I want to at least give it a try. And perhaps I could start a Patroen for that? Is that something any of you would be interested in?
So that’s my current situation, and a “report” on the state of things and what’s going to happen with me and my work. I’m going to take a break from my own webcomic, focus on my art and try to make things work out. I’m going to make tutorials for people that want to start painting and drawing digitally and I’m gonna to see where all this goes.
If anybody wants to help support me and my work in any way, you could either become a Patreon when I open that, or commission artwork. If you know of any work that I would be a good fit for, pointing them in my direction or me in theirs would also be very useful.
At the moment, I’m not sure what’s going to happen, if this is all just going to blow up in my face or if I’ll even have enough to pay rent next month. But hey, it’s not like we started working through the internet because it looked like stable, guaranteed work, right?
I don’t have anything settled yet, things are seriously messed up right now. You’re getting to see me scramble around, trying to make sense of my own work. And I apologize for that, this is probably something nobody needs to see or read about. But I’m really just trying to keep it together here. If anybody has anything to say, I’m trying to keep an open mind here. I’m not gonna lie, I truly feel a bit lonely in this whole situation, so I appreciate whatever you’ve got to say, but please don’t come to comment on how you hate that the comic is ending or anything like that. It might sound selfish, I know, but this post is about ME, not the comic.
Good hunting;
O