Analog

Slowing down life and slowing my mind.

I was recently interviewed , well really just had a conversation with my friend Josh, on Talksplode, a segment of the iFanboy podcast. We discussed my lettering career and then my turn into children’s books.

I mentioned that I got into lettering kind of accidentally. But once in, I soon got married, bought a house and had kids. My focus was on making money which is the furthest thing from where I wanted to be. I grew up wanting to be a cartoonist. When I was offered a job lettering, I convinced myself it was a way station until I could get my art career going. Plus, I was in good company. Charles Schulz had lettered comics before he started Peanuts. I was doing it to learn a new craft that would help my comics. I did learn the craft, but soon I had no time to devote to my comics career. One would say, “What career?”

I was lamenting that to my friend Erik Larsen, who offered to kickstart my comics-making career by giving me 2 pages a month in his comic to do my own thing. It made no money, but it got me drawing again on a steady basis. Soon after, I got a job drawing single panel cartoons for the Complete Idiots Guide books while also lettering. That was a crash course in cartooning. I was writing and drawing cartoons about Ancient Egypt one week and computer programming the next. It was steady work and my skills improved exponentially.

Then, as my comic in Erik’s book, called Desperate Times, continued, I submitted it to comic strip syndicates and Amy Lago at United said she really liked the strip and we worked towards making it their next strip offering. It wound up not happening, which was heart-breaking.

At the time, the writing was on the wall. Newspapers were dying, comic strips weren’t making much money and a whole new crop of cartoonists were making what was called webcomics. Instead of newspapers, they’d offer their strips on their website. So, I decided I just wanted to do a strip for me. I didn’t expect to make money, and boy, I didn’t. It lasted over 2 years and had moderate success…meaning a few hundred people read it. But, I got better by doing a daily strip.

I did a book for Marvel called Franklin Richards, a book called Cow Boy, and then Brad Meltzer asked if I’d do a line of children’s books with him. And as I’ve just finished drawing our 40^th book of the main series, I realize that all that work has gotten me better. I know it’s kinda obvious, but when you’re in the middle of it, you don’t realize it. By no means am I saying I’m great by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve improved. I love what I’m doing and I think it comes through in the work.

That said, I missed just drawing for myself. As a kid, I never felt happier than when I was in my room just drawing for the love of it. I loved trying to learn how to ink with a brush, work on improving my character design and style. I would use real pens, pencils, and brushes. Real paper. And make mistakes that couldn’t be fixed with command-z.

So, in between books and other projects, I’ve secretly been writing and drawing a strip for myself. I have about 8 weeks done and I don’t know if I’m going to post them. I may. They might not be any good, but I’m doing the strip for a number of reasons. First, I love the meditative quality of the writing and drawing. My anxiety drops, I don’t doom scroll, and I feel better in general. Second, I love the “happy accidents” as Bob Ross calls them. I like not trying to be perfect. Maybe the jokes aren’t great, maybe I didn’t draw something exactly as I wanted, but that’s okay. I feel like I’m learning to improve again.

Third, I mostly work digitally these days—it goes faster, it’s easy to make corrections, and doesn’t require scanning. So, to just slow down and draw and write has really been a joy.

Finally, I don’t have to change anything I don’t want to. I live in a world where my co-creators will ask for changes, editors and publishers will have me make changes, designers will have me make changes. Now, that’s part of the process of the business and I don’t really mind, but I get to do this one thing for me. No one can ask for changes and if it’s not good, so what? I’m doing it for me.

So, get off the grid and do something just for yourself.