Tag: time tracking

Brain Food, Comics, Reading

“I draw the path to walk”

A page from Laura Knetzger's comic with lush black and white forests. The text reads "My friends don't come so often when I call anymore. It's my fault. They're children, and I asked them to earn me money instead of just playing."

Still thinking about this short comic on creative practice by Laura Knetzger.

Last night I sat in a cloud of campfire smoke with a friend, talking non-stop about the balancing act of creative practice. He’s a printmaker and a bookbinder, two disciplines that require a great deal of precision and craft. We agreed that we want to encourage everyone to make art, to make music, to dance, to be unrepentantly bad at things, to understand that there is art we make because we are dedicated to a craft and art we make because it’s an expression of our innate human desire to play. How it isn’t contradictory to preach the necessity of both. Sometimes I do feel like a hypocrite, cheerleading people who believe they “can’t draw” while internally upbraiding my own ability to put pictures in boxes. But these things are not exclusive.

Lately I’ve needed the energy of 2010-era Alec Longstreth, delivering this lecture at The Center for Cartoon Studies. Alec—who had, at the time, sworn not to shave or cut his hair until he finished his graphic novel, Basewood—was a human lightning bolt. He embodied that spirit of craft and professionalism, but with a punky, DIY energy that made it all feel both radical and attainable. I was so fired up after hearing him give this talk that I actually pulled all-nighters (something I was loath to do even at the tender age of 19).

A page from Alec Longstreth's zine Your Comics Will Love You Back all about setting reasonable timelines for your work by tracking progress and number of pages finished over time.

This image of his encapsulates everything I’ve come to rely on in the process of drawing Seacritters. I’m not perfect—I still occasionally underestimate the time things will take and fall prey to distraction and despair—but I’m committed to this idea.

That summer at CCS I found myself surrounded by 36 other people who wanted to take making comics seriously. I had never been in a room with people who shared that dream. It’s hard to remember what that was like now, having worked in studios full of creative professionals and lived in cities lousy with cartoonists and traveled all over the world to huge conventions and tiny festivals crammed with passionate people hawking zines and graphic novels and minis. But it felt propulsive at the time, and right now I need the creative equivalent of jet fuel.

I need the reminder that there are other people out there touching the lightning bolt for the first time, and channeling sparks into the page.

Brain Food

Relative Pricing

Robin and I were texting about Arion Press yesterday, drooling over their edition of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales. I mean, just look at this thing:

A photograph of two fine press editions of The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde by Arion Press. Both are exquisitely bound in sage bookcloth with understated type and illustrations.

HOMINA HOMINA HOMINA. That BINDING! The ILLUSTRATIONS! The DROP CAPS!

Also it starts at SIX HUNDRED AND EIGHTY DOLLARS!

A screen shot of a conversation between Robin and Lucy. Robin says "Agh. Oh sorry, I was not scared by the themes of the book, but by the effing price tag. If I wince at the price of a book, you done fucked up." Lucy says "I mean it takes an unbelievable amount of time to typeset a book by hand. I get that. It's an interesting conundrum. Kind of like what would happen if...Oh! Oh! I have an idea." Robin says "Here we go. Let er rip. Get em."

OKAY SO.

Creative work is often priced on a bafflingly subjective scale of value—one which can deviate wildly from the amount of time invested in the piece depending on a variety of other factors (edition size, physical scale, desirability, intended audience).

With commercial art, the equation is often simpler—although of course we’re all raising our rates over time to compensate for increased skill and swiftness in execution (right?). We often bill more like tradespeople than “fine artists”.

But with a fine press book, there are two vectors: the status associated with the object itself, yes, but also the sheer enormity of time required to typeset an entire book by hand. This is the first example that’s really resonated in my head as a decent point of comparison for how long graphic novels take to produce.

It’s a lot.

I’m tracking my time on Seacritters! because a) I love data and want to understand exactly how long it’s taking me to do everything and b) I think it’s going to be really valuable (read: sobering) to sit with the reality of how long it takes to make a graphic novel relative to the money involved.

I’ve only roughed in 73 pages of a book that will likely clock in around 350 and it’s already taken 63 hours of labor. For roughs. There are still refined pencils, inks, and colors left to go. My guess is that it’ll be about five hours of work per page at least, which means we’re looking at 1,750 hours just to complete the art itself—not including time spent fielding notes from the editor or anything aside from pure drawing. (The average American full–time (i.e., benefitted) employee works 1,801 hours per year.)

If I were to apply a freelance rate of $90/hr to that time estimate, I’d clock in at $157,500 per book. I’m guessing at an overall timeline of 2 years per book, so that shakes out to $78,750 a year. The publishing industry isn’t currently paying artists that kind of money, so where would it need to come from?

The fine press book market feels like one potential answer to this thought experiment.

What would it really take for cartoonists to be paid fairly for the work they do? What happens to the accessibility of my work if I’m paid what I’m worth? Would the cost be passed on to the consumer or shouldered by the publisher? Who could afford the resulting product?

I really believe that art is meant to be shared. I want to make things that people can afford. When I was just starting to learn about the world of fine presses and letterpress and Artists’ Books in college, I remember being deeply frustrated by the fact that these creators—many of whom were working with themes of tactility, interaction, and accessibility—were making work that got sold for hundreds of dollars to private institutions, who then kept it in small rooms known only to a small subset of people.

It all felt so prohibitive.

(Something I’ve always loved about McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is that they publish some truly batshit Artist Book-like objects, but they’re generally under $30 a pop. That’s accessibility.)

But wait.

A line drawing of setting type by hand. Right right hand holds an individual piece of type, the left holds a composing tray full of letters.

Do I really know how long it takes to typeset a page by hand? I text Glenn, because one should always have a letterpress nerd on speed-dial. He sets me straight: maybe a little over 2 hours per page by hand, but 5-10x faster by machine (Monotype). I dig a little deeper and find that the Arion Press edition is set in Monotype with some bits done by hand.

So maybe it’s not quite the same.

Still, this was useful.