Inventory

I signed up for another one of Jocelyn’s online classes last month, and so far I’ve found it incredibly helpful in finding my way back to bits of myself and my creative practice that have been occluded by caregiving. One of the exercises was a mind map exploring all the tools we use to access and interact with our creative selves. The four stages she suggests are Ritual, Connection, Collection, and Synthesis. Here’s a big mess of ideas around those hubs:

A mind map showing various quadrants of creative connection.

I love letting myself use little doodles to explore concepts like this. I think it started after Shay Mirk shared some More/Less lists they’d made for the year and inspired me to make my own. (Pretty sure I did one for 2022 as well but I can’t find it so here’s an old one.)

A list of Less and More goals, featuring things like equating pain and work, blogging, ocean, trying to go it alone, and other little illustrated concepts.

I see these inventories and remember that I have such a robust series of practices for doing what I do. I also see how the things I’m pursuing in my life right now have roots in this list from two years ago, which I love. It all takes such a long time.

I recorded a Ramble about all this the other night that I still haven’t edited and uploaded to Patreon, but it’s coming. Still circling the question of my job and what I think it is vs. what it actually is.

Matt Thoughts

Got to catch up with the inimitable Matthew Bogart on the phone the other day after an embarrassingly long lull in communication (although his Patreon updates make me feel like we’re good pals just chatting away on the regular, so maybe that’s why I lost track). At one point he said “That’s the entirety of comics for me: turning story into space” and I think that’s a REAL GOOD LINE! I wrote it down immediately because YES! EXACTLY! What a great form of wizardry to practice.

But now I’m thinking about why it is that pictures occupy spatial real estate for me in a way words…don’t?? I’m tired and it’s the end of the day so I’m not going to dig into why right now. Just chucking it into the posterity machine.

Anyway: Matt’s a good dude. The last time I saw him he was letting me borrow his corner rounder during the Pandemic. That’s a real friend.

Operating Instructions

People keep asking me about AI and I really think how you feel about AI comes down to whether you believe art is about producing things (images, objects, data files, “content”) or about a way of operating in the world as an intellectual, spiritual, and emotional creature.

Austin Kleon

There it is again! Indentured spiritual servitude! Gotta beware that shit.

“We weren’t even watching ourselves”

An added benefit of Brendan’s Christmas thread of appreciation: an enormous slew of new blogs to follow! Honestly too many. I get overwhelmed easily these days. But I lingered over his tweet about Nadia, because it mentioned experimentations with microgrants (HELLO), which then led me to her very clean and pleasing site.

I bopped around for a while, delighting in the short-form Notes and reading a few blog entries before adding the feed to my RSS reader. The joy in doing this (depending on how often someone updates their blog) is getting to jump back a few months or years in the timeline to see what they were up to before. That’s how I landed on this post about The Creator Economy from 2021. There are so many gems in here; things I think about all the time, but also things I don’t! She probes further beyond where this conversation usually ends, asking the kinds of questions the post suggests we should all be asking.

When I imagine a cultural renaissance that inspires me, I think about working together to address unsolved questions, tugging on threads in conversations that need unraveling, creating enduring artifacts for generations to pore over and iterate upon. The “publish or perish” model that nudges people to rack up more followers is not the pinnacle of creative freedom; it’s indentured spiritual servitude.

Indentured spiritual servitude! Hot damn!! This is precisely the situation so many of us cartoonists find ourselves in. Precisely the reason I feel so much resistance to the simple act of sharing a photograph or a passing thought on social media. However trivial, it still feels like something I have to do. It’s a matter of survival.

Towards the very end of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (which I finished in a glut yesterday morning), one of the protagonists gives a little speech about luck, and the circumstances of birth that led to their company being able to succeed at making video games where and when they did.

“[…] I think, because of the internet, we would have been overwhelmed by how many people were trying to do the exact same things we were. We had so much freedom—creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren’t even watching ourselves.”

And just before that:

“It’s so easy to make a hit when you’re young and you don’t know anything.” “I think that, too,” Sadie said. “The knowledge and experience we have—it isn’t necessarily that helpful, in a way.” “So depressing,” Sam said, laughing. “What’s all of this struggle been for?”

They almost felt like too much, these tidy conversations at the end of the novel, because they’re exactly the conversations I have with my peers about “making it” in comics. But they were also so accurate I found myself nodding along.

I don’t have a tidy wrap-up for this. I just want to be watching myself less. I want to go unsurveilled.

Rhymes

I haven’t historically been someone who reads a lot of books simultaneously, but I won’t lie: it’s doing a lot for me right now. My brain is scattered and anxious and burnt out and overwhelmed and uncertain, but allowing pattern recognition to come into play as I’m reading across genres and timescales…that I can manage. It helps things feel as if they make sense.

Of course, sometimes the patterns I recognize are massively uncomfortable. Here’s three about habit, practice, belief, and enthusiasm:

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way:

A photo of a book that reads: As artists, grounding our self-image in military discipline is dangerous. In the short run, discipline may work, but it will work only for a while. By its very nature, discipline is rooted in self-admiration. (Think of discipline as a battery, useful but short-lived.) We admire ourselves for being so wonderful. The discipline itself, not the creative outflow, becomes the point. That part of us that creates best is not a driven, disciplined automaton, functioning from willpower, with a booster of pride to back it up. This is operating out of self-will. You know the image: rising at dawn with military precision, saluting the desk, the easel, the drawing board...

Over any extended period of time, being an artist requires enthusiasm more than discipline. Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process, a loving recognition of all the creativity around us. Enthusiasm (from the Greek, "filled with God") is an ongoing energy supply tapped into the flow of life itself. Enthusiasm is grounded in play, not work. Far from being a brain-numbed soldier, our artist is actually our child within, our inner playmate. As with all playmates, it is joy, not duty, that makes for a lasting bond.

An annotation in the margin reads "Jesus fucking christ, OKAY."

Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods:

"Right," said Om. "Now...listen. Do you know how gods get power?"
"By people believing in them," said Brutha. "Millions of people believe in you."
Om hesitated.
All right, all right. We are here and it is now. Sooner or later he'll find out for himself...
"They don't believe," said Om.
"But—"
"It's happened before," said the tortoise. "Dozens of times. D'you know Abraxas found the lost city of Ee? Very strange carvings, he says. Belief, he says. Belief shifts. People start out believing in the god and end up believing in the structure."

Fenton Johnson’s At the Center of All Beauty:

The thing about living alone is that—exactly like living as a couple—after a long time it becomes either a habit or a practice. A habit is a way of living that you follow because it's what you did yesterday and the day before and the day before that. A practice is a way of living that you create and renew every day. A habit is a way of being that controls you. A practice is a way of being that you control—a deliberate (ad)venture into the unknown.

I think I’ve listed these in the order I encountered them, but I can’t be sure. I just know I read the Cameron passage and felt personally attacked in that good, awful way that means something true is surfacing. I love daily drawing challenges. Arguably I’ve built a whole career on them. But I also, deep down, know that they can become a kind of ego trap. Fortunately there are all these other rhyming passages that offer alternative paths and approaches. Johnson underlines a truth I’ve already folded into large parts of my brain: that there’s a fundamental difference between a habit and a practice.


Bonus Kicker: I read Zina that passage from Cameron and she immediately latched onto the etymology of enthusiasm. “Did you know?” she asked. And I had to reply that I did, because there’s a phrase rattling around in my brain:

“The Greeks said that to be enthusiastic was to be filled with God.”

Why do I know this? Why do I know it with this specific wording? It feels like something I know through repetition, like I’ve heard it read aloud many times or included in a talk. I dig around in the filing cabinets of surface memory and find nothing.

At 11:30 that night I finally find it: a single quote pulled from a series of small stories written by Frank Chimero in, as far as I can tell, 2010. I’d written it down in 2016 in an old notes document where I kept links and things to include in my newsletter. A quick spin through the archives suggests that I never actually wove it into an update, but every time I went to write one I’d skim through that list of quotes and links and there it would be: a phrase.

I suppose this is how we learn.

A Current Impasse

Historically, I’ve been someone who uses what I’m doing as an indication of how I’m doing.

I’m far from the only person doing this, I know. Capitalism and America’s Puritan work ethic really get off on doing as a substitute for being. But the thing is…it used to work relatively well. My creative work gave me The Good Brain Drugs, and so when I was working effectively and a lot, I’d feel good. A lot of my angst over the past year has stemmed from the anxiety of waiting to start on this graphic novel, which makes sense in this model. Now that I’ve finally started rolling on the project, hitting the studio every morning for three straight weeks, the creative blockade is lifting.

So why do I still feel awful?

The truth of the matter is that my creative/productive self is doing exceptionally well, but my emotional self is not. I have no idea how to deal with this information.

How can I reconcile how excited I am by this project—how tangled up in the joy of designing new characters and solving page layouts like crossword puzzles every morning—with how utterly depleted and depressed and grief-riddled I am in the rest of my life? I’m not used to there being a mismatch. Usually I feel stymied creatively and emotionally until the former comes loose and I hit a rhythm of making that scratches the itch, at which point the latter resolves of its own accord.

Not so now. Hm.

New territory.

Making Noisy into Quiet

I don’t really care what I’m doing for money so long as I can write. And not write like I want a job writing copy, write like I sit down most days in my underwear and make noisy into quiet.

This phrase. Making noisy into quiet. I love it.

I scrambled out of the house yesterday with the words “If I don’t go to the studio and make headway on this project I’ll have a panic attack”. Dramatic, yes, but also probably true.

It feels like dying sometimes to watch the time I’d set aside to go make art slip through my fingers, gnawed at by obligation and muddle and distraction. But when I got to the studio, this little space I’m carving into something that feels nourishing and calm, I exhaled everything and sat down and the work was just easy and focused and joyful.

A light, airy studio space with a white desk, an office chair, and a flat file. There are pieces of art tacked to the walls and two windows looking out onto greenery. There's a white futon couch against one wall and a Persian rug on the floor.

Moments like that it feels as if I’m doing something right.

A weird thing people sometimes say to me is “I wish I was as [free, ok being alone, adventurous] as you” and I always want to say, “I’ve always been [lonely, anxious, scared] throughout any of it” but I think they’d think I meant it wasn’t worth it or that I was trying to teach them a lesson. What I mean is just that I didn’t trade an unhappy thing for a happy thing. I just found some balance.

(I really like Amanda Oliver’s newsletter.)

I Didn’t Come Here to Make Enemies

I’ll say it: I’ve been stuck.

In some ways I’m always stuck and just engaged in various stages of trying to wrestle myself free, but lately I’ve felt really stuck.

I cracked James Kochalka’s The Cute Manifesto in the studio a couple weeks ago because I’ve been trying to revisit formative reads from my early years of making comics and I couldn’t remember anything about it beyond a vague sense that it had been Important to me (although I was never really a dedicated reader of American Elf). The first piece is this:

Craft is the Enemy. I'm not exactly sure why I'm writing this letter, but I've been reading TCJ #188 for a couple hours now and my mind has just been racing and blood pounding. My excitement with the power and possibilities of comics mixed with the fear of a royally screwed-up marketplace... well, let's just say I've got a weird, shaky adrenaline rush.

I just felt suddenly like I had to write and say craft is the enemy! You could labor your whole life perfecting your "craft," struggling to draw better, hoping one day to have the skills to produce a truly great comic. If this is how you're thinking, you will never produce this great comic, this powerful work of art, that you dream of. There's nothing wrong with trying to draw well, but that is not of primary importance.

What every creator should do, must do, is use the skills they have right now. A great masterpiece is within reach if only your will power is strong enough (just like Green Lantern). Just look within yourself and say what you have to say. Cezanne and Jackson Pollock (and many other great painters) were horrible draughtsmen! It was only through sheer will power to be great that they were great. The fire they had inside eclipsed their lack of technical skill. Although they started out shaky and even laughable, they went on to create staggering works of art.

This letter is not for the established creators... they're hopeless. This letter is for the young bucks and does... let's kick some fucking ass!

“Craft is the Enemy” was originally published as a letter to The Comics Journal in 1996. It sparked a textual brawl between several readers and cartoonists (all, as far as I can tell, men) that lasted for months afterward. TCJ published an archive of all the letters on their blog, Blood and Thunder: Craft is the Enemy.

The debate exhausted me just skimming it.

I didn’t know about the fight when I opened the book. I just knew that somehow, a quarter of a century later, I was still the target audience for certain parts of this message: someone so prone to getting sidetracked by her own perfectionism that she was forgetting why she’d even walked into the room.

I am fucking petrified of starting work on my next project. I feel convinced that it won’t measure up to the standards of professionalism I’ve been cultivating from my own internal scripts and the constant barrage of everyone’s best selves on social media. I am someone who desperately needs the reminder that I have the tools I need to make comics RIGHT NOW, even if they don’t turn out the way I imagine they “should”. 

And look, before anyone brings it up, yes, I’ve been the person giving this reminder to others in the past. But it’s a role that’s hard for me to occupy right now. I needed to hear it from someone else. I needed it because I have plenty of proof that I’ll do well if I turn my attention to a project or task at hand, and that knowledge becomes a prison. Every project must be bigger and better than the one before. The line must go up and to the right. If you did well before you must do better now. The practice gets harder, not easier.

I fret and pace and gnaw my fingernails thinking about how much work it will take to cultivate the craft I think I need to make the thing I want to make the way I imagine making it, but no amount of craft will save me from the truth: nothing has EVER come out exactly the way I picture it in my brain. Not once. Every single time it’s a surprise. And I know from reading other artists’ accounts of their practice that this will continue to be true for the rest of my life. 

This is the struggle, but it’s also the joy of the work. It’s endemic to the practice. It’s a liberation.

Why do I keep forgetting?

I don’t want to obsess about what will make my work perfect. That’s an impossible benchmark. I want to engage with the parts of the process that bring me joy. I want to tell stories. I want to explore with words and pictures. I want to get closer while still knowing I’ll never reach the finish line. A lot of the time this goal makes me think of Hokusai:

[…] all I have done before the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy-five I’ll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At one hundred, I shall be a marvellous artist. At 110, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before.

And yet, even he fell prey to it—right to the end.

If heaven had granted me five more years, I could have become a real painter.

I’m trying to keep skipping back and forth between dedication and gentleness, discipline and play. That’s what makes it a practice. Ním recently finished writing his Theory of Conceptual Labor after years of exploration and refinement. There’s a lot of craft at work there, but the text itself is also about this nebulous space of flitting from adherence to exploration and back again. (Writing about the Theory is a whole post in itself, so I’ll leave it for now, but I couldn’t not throw it in here.)

Years ago, on Twitter, I polled people on how they’d describe their relationship to creativity. I asked whether it felt like a job or an obsession or a calling. Everyone who responded to that poll had their own suggestions to include. I’ve thrown them all together into a loose mind map below:

A mind map of terms for creative practice gathered around color coded sections called Compulsion, Religion, Hobby, and Business.

This whole map feels true.

I have, at varying times, thought of myself as a craftsperson, a business owner, a religious zealot, a hack. I’ve pored over pages and relished the presence of thoughtful choices in composition and line weight. I’ve also seen the toll a dedication to craft can take on someone who’s being crushed in the vice of a traditional publishing deadline. I’ve copied and pasted and traced. I’ve insisted on using an Ames guide. I’ve worked digitally. I’ve worked traditionally. I want all of it. Is that so bad?

The roundup of letters from TCJ feels so deeply, seriously (and often cruelly and condescendingly) concerned with Rightness. Who is going to win in this fight? I wonder whether there’s more room these days for “This advice is exactly what some people need to hear, and for some other people thinking of comics as a craft is what THEY need to hear”.

Like…why fight about it? The relationship is between you and your work. What works FOR YOU in THIS MOMENT?

And then I realize where I’ve seen this pattern before. It reminds me of the ways I see queerness operating in our culture right now—working as a verb. There is, of course, still a lot of Discourse about identity and rulesets and gender and all the rest of it. The same patterns of policing abound. But I also feel like the increasing queerness of these spaces makes more room for a mentality of Yes, And instead of Either/Or

A trippy mess of overlapping circles labeled with things like ownership, mindfulness, kid self, hula hoop, trickster, ecosystem, low tide, and interdependence. The background is colored in with blues and greens.

When I look at the immeasurable wealth of queer identities and relationships and backgrounds at play in my circles, I see an enormous field of willingness to accept paradox. I see people engaging deeply and earnestly with the question of how they want to be seen and what they want to be called and who they want to get into bed with and how they want to love and where they want to fit in, but really, far more importantly, what makes them happy.  

And I see people supporting each other by applying a simple metric: 

“Does this nourish you? If so, I celebrate it.”

It makes so much sense to me.

When Tom Spurgeon interviewed Kochalka in 2008, he closed by asking whether craft was still the enemy. Kochalka replied:

Yes. However, because I draw so much, so hard, I almost can’t help but to improve my chops and solidify my craft. I have to purposefully cultivate a situation where I can still be surprised, where the new and unexpected sneaks in and overpowers my years of experience. 

Some people are very concerned about mapping and naming, plotting and quantifying. I run the risk of being that kind of person from time to time, too. Someone asked me the other day how long I’d been in unconventional relationships and I struggled to answer. I felt that pressure to be able to explain. To know.

But I never felt like I had a good name for what I wanted, so I just kept stumbling along a path without a map, until one day I looked up and found myself somewhere that felt like home. These are the ways queerness operates: by circumventing the boundaries of the expected. By overpowering experience.

Anyway, craft and queerness. Yes, And. Forage for what feeds you, leave the rest.

Let’s go make comics.