Friday - October 15, 2004:

To be honest, the strip that prompted me to draw this and the past two, Bean, was nowhere to be found for a couple of days last week. I hadn't checked in a while so I thought it must be gone for god, but it's back now with a vengeance, four whole pages. Ok, not stellar output yet, but I've got hope after a several month dry spell. I do love the third panel in Today's strip though because it's so true. True fans will wait forever.

My Dad is into wood turning. it's a nice, tangible contrast to the computer work he does the rest of the day. Anyway, wood-turning involves tools, lots of times old ones. In order to figure out whether or not an old tool's worth the asking price, Dad bought a price guide. At an antique shop in Florida, he ran into another couple copies of hte guide and bought it because there aren't many out there. He thought he'd give a shot at selling them on e-bay. The book was last published in 1998 and to what I can only imagine must have been a small audience. Wood turners and other tool folks have been waiting for the past six years for the next edition of the book to be published, all the while being told by the writer that there would be one more edition. He recently announced there would be no more editions. We posted a copy on e-bay and boydid the fans come out to bid. A twenty dollar book, six years old went for nearly three hundred dollars. Even beat up copies run into the hundreds. And it's not speculation like I got used to in the comic world. I recently talked to one buyer who let me know he uses it every day.

Money has become lots more interesting to me since I don't have any coming in. I sat at a comic show with thousands of my books in front of me. I brought the great stuff and the junk. I slashed the prices, most to a quarter. After subtracting fifty for the table, I cleared thirty dollars, a two hour drive and six hours of sitting inside on a beautiful Sunday for thirty dollars. The following Friday, I was hit hard with a cold, but the stock market went up a little more than 100 points. I cleared a thousand more (or as Dad says, "nothing," because I didn't sell it all). What an odd world money. Bean, the comic in question above, is moving to a pay site. You'll have to pay just under $3 a month for access to its archives and that of thirty other cartoonists. If he does very well, fifty pages of time-consuming beautiful work might net him a hundred dollars, eventually. Ten years ago, I was paid by a college newspaper ten dollars a day to draw four panels I would be embarrased to create today. In three years creating web-comics, I haven't yet reached ten dollars in income, total! That's including a five dollar donation and a year as an artist on one of the 'pay sites.' What does it mean? (Either I'm not any good at art or there's aserious descrepency in value in our society.)

I'm actually more interested in what it means for human creativity than for money. I honestly believe that some of the most innovative cartooning and art in general will be created and distributed through the interenet over the next few years, whether someone comes up with a way to get payed for it or not. We are history's starving artists, but we're starving in our part-time jobs and our commission work. I will go back to teaching. Most of us will move on and maybe that means that the medium will wait even longer to reach maturity or die out, but I hope not. There are several periods in history when the arts sped up. I've always told my students to look out for one. Where and when will the next Florence or Athens or Gerturde Stein's Apartment or Greenwich Village be? I won't suggest the interenet is the next one, but it sure has lots of the ingredients. In ways unimaginable just ten years ago, artists can communicate and create and share and invigorate one another with this interent. But will it rise to that something more? Or will art fall victim to the stagnant cycle of expired domains and half-finished projects that it sometimes seems to be.

Even without a job, I continue to contend that the answer might be in some compromise between this world and that. These tools we use to publish these colored pixels are too complex, too slow, too expensive for the part time artist. And the economics of this interent aren't yet there for the full time patronage That's needed.

For my own work, in comics, I'm not sure we ever get past the word's funny implications.

-Bob Stevenson