Wednesday - October 13, 2004:

I wrote the Bean guy to apologize for the thumbs-down on his infrequent updates. I'm glad I did. He let me know MORE BEAN is on the way. It'll be moving to serializer.net. Meanwhile, the whole thing has ruined Today's and Friday's strip, sort of. My whole point was that we need to think about the balance between art and audience. There's a need to put out content so people keep coming back, but there's a need for it to be good content and that takes time. I'm still in the midst of my struggle with the whole thing. Forcing myself to post something every day is a bit grueling, but, well, I don't have an actual job at the moment so it's the least I can do. I do have some paying work, just not enough to call a career, a few websites in development, a few publishing projects and an extremely low-wage webcomic gig at graphicsmash.com, but most of my work is pro-bono, latin for something like, nobody's deemed any of it worth a penny but I'm doing it because it's the right thing to do, I think.

it's funny, I used to argue with cartoonists about pursuing comic art full time versus part time. A quick search and here is one of the more friendly arguments if you're interested: http://www.talkaboutcomics.com/viewtopic.php?t=5186&highlight . The gist of it is, there are never going to be enough paying comics fans to support full time work by all the people who have great comic stories to tell. Therefore, comics needs to be something people can pursue along with a full-time job. And those stories need to be told as comics, at least some of them, because the barriers to creating a movie or a novel are still very high, much higher than the barriers to creating comics, particularly of the serialized nature. The barriers to producing webcomics are crashing down around our ears. I wrote a bit yesterday about the perils of serialization for both the creator and the form. That doesn't mean there aren't advantages as well.

Have I become a hole in my own argument? Since leaving my job, I've been producing art at the rate of almost three pages a day compared to one or two pages a week while I taught full-time. Anyone who visits regularly is saying, "Three pages a day! Where the hell are they man?" I am still a little worried that I won't be able to keep up the pace so I've got a few pages lined up. Between that and sprinkling in the occasional last minute gem, I've gotten ahead a bit. Eventually, that may mean I move to daily updates of HB plus other work sprinkled in (oooh "daily updates plus" - scary words). I don't want to get very far ahead because the goal is for HB and the rest to react to the moment as much as possible. For now, I'm staying a few days ahead on HB and throwing the rest out wherever it fits.

I took two hours off last night to watch American Splendor. We were living overseas when it came out so I've just now gotten around to checking it out from the public library. Whew. Great film. What made it just a little weird though was, I'm sick and lost my voice yesterday, around mid-day. As Harvey Pekar, underground comic writer, rasped through the movie's first scene, my wife came running into the room saying, "Scared me. Thought it was you." Several other things about the film brought a lump to my throat, an extra lump on top of the sore throat. For example, I didn't know R. Crumb worked for a greeting card company. I've been tossing around the idea of creating a line of greeting cards for a few days now. it's been ten years since I had some printed and it was the most lucrative illustration work I ever did. I sold thousands of cards to pay off some debts as a grad students. It kind of turned my stomach to draw Daddy holding his kid up to put the star on the tree though. If I come across any of the old cards, I'll post one, but don't say I didn't warn you. I'm thinking of doing a set this year with some kind of humorous atheistic twist. The problem is, my Mom's a little concerned about me being unemployed so when I mentioned I was thinking of drawing cards again, she couldn't wait to help in the selling. Wait. I'm thirty two. If I want to scribble a couple of "Merry There is No God" cards, That's my business. Of course, it would make life lots easier if I just sucked it up and humped the sleigh, but boy would I love to see a set of cards that beat up on Santa just once. Those last three lines are just destined to come back and haunt me at some job interview or run for public office, aren't they? They seem to get me down there with Pekar though.

Tomorrow: -found some criticism of the old "Journey Into History" strip that might be worth talking about. In part, they're disappointed that I once broke the fourth wall. I wonder what they'll think about all of this mess?

Plug: -I'm not sure I mentioned it, so here it is. My review of "Loyola Chin and the San Peligran Order" is up at the Webcomics Examiner. The comic's a qualified must read. it's a little too heavy with the Christian references for my taste (see above atheistic statements). The review forced me to dig out the Bible, New Testament to boot. Was I fair? I don't know. I'm not even sure I understood all the references. It is a well-told, wierd story, worth checking out though.

-Bob Stevenson