Why don't you do some more of that thing you used to do?

[mmcirvin]

I get asked that question a lot, and I also ask it of myself frequently and feel vaguely guilty. It's probably because I've dabbled in too many different creative things without developing many of them to the level of public success. I am a dilettante at heart, and some of the things I like the most to do are things I'm not actually all that good at. These days I have to spend a lot of time working for a living, too, and the idea that the result of my extramural dabblings has to be good is an increasingly major inhibitor.

One of the things I've neglected the longest, and get the most prodding about from friends and family, is cartooning. This was a major preoccupation of mine as a kid. I remember it as a time when, since I didn't care much about having an audience, the inhibitions of self-criticism were almost completely absent. I plagiarized gags and characters with abandon (often with transparently minimal modifications that I thought made them original), wrote jokes that could only be gotten if you'd read a particular children's science book on insects, imitated the styles of the most pathetic stuff on the funny pages and found it sophisticated. If I could work in a drawing of a spaceship somehow, I would.

Over time, I got a little better at it, and my father started putting some of my work on his cube wall at the office, whereupon I got a fan base of three or four people. I started branching into editorial-page-style political cartoons, which I remember as being thudding, one-note, inane stuff, but, then, so are most professional political cartoons; in concept they weren't any worse than what you see in the papers.

I drifted away from that for a while and then came back to it in college; only this time, the cartoons were dreary, angst-filled, confessional stories about myself and my friends, passed around by hand, the same distribution method I used with the science-fiction stories that I wrote in high school. Matt Groening and Harvey Pekar were major influences. The stories were only any good if you knew the people involved, but my friends liked them.

So I have two different groups of people—my family and my college friends—who occasionally ask me if I've been drawing any cartoons lately. And today the Internet exists and can provide anyone's creative dabbling with a channel for public exposure. So I could easily put up a webtoon.

But it's so much work! I've never drawn cartoons on any sort of regular schedule, and I know for a fact that drawing them to look nice is hard. Also, my drawing, considered objectively, isn't really that great, and it would probably take years of regular effort to develop a really effective style, and in the meantime I'd be putting out crappy material.

Sometimes I think my standards have gotten too high for me to actually have the courage to create much of anything.

Comments

[swinehund.livejournal.com]

I always find it interesting to read through the archives of 5 years of a webcomic and see how the drawings (usually drastically) improve and cement into recognizable characters. I too would often like to put up a webcomic, but I can't possibly see myself updating it with any regularity.

I don't know how strongly your perfectionism censors you, but I've seen enough mediocre webcomics that I would think you've have nothing to worry about. If it turns out to be extremely popular, then it does and hooray for that. If you are just doing it for your own amusement and with a very limited fan base, chances are good that few people will notice if it is not perfect because they're off reading megatokyo.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm particularly fascinated by John Allison's Bobbins/Scary-Go-Round archives: he went from a shaky, grotesque style that looked like a college-paper strip to computer-drafted, very attractive but somewhat blandly similar characters, and in the past few years he's been subtly improving their individuality and developing a really wild visual style inspired partly by his digital medium.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

Don't do cartoons for an audience. Do cartoons YOU enjoy. Doing creative stuff for an audience is a dead end.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

That is, if you enjoy your work, others will. If you don't enjoy it, chances are nobody will

[jwgh]

This is supposedly one of the reasons why kids are so creative: they don't worry about the quality of what they create.

It's also why I liked alt.religion.kibology so much after coming from talk.bizarre: the pressure to post exclusively good stuff was less. (I'm not sure how much of this was self-imposed to begin with.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

yeah, and one reason I haven't been posting to a.r.k much (or at all) lately is that I've been holding myself to unnaturally high standards for stuff posted there.

[jwgh]

Yes, this is poison to me except in very small doses (I still posted to talk.bizarre on Fail To Suck Day for some time after I stopped posting any other time, and then there was my 12 Days of HMas thing this year, but those were aberrations).

Livejournal is in some ways even more freeing because people only have to read your stuff if they want to (killfiles aren't really relevant to this). At least, it's probably more freeing until a bunch of complete strangers start thinking you're a genius and start adding you as a friend, but this is not a problem I anticipate encountering (though it appears that journals like that exist, some of them quite funny).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...and when I think about posting something long and creative to LJ, I start thinking I should instead post it to a.r.k or put it on my static Web site (or even polish it up for print publication!) and then the It Has To Be Good demon starts to intrude...

[jwgh]

We demand more kung fu eunuchs!

[ex-askesis860.livejournal.com]

I still posted to talk.bizarre on Fail To Suck Day for some time after I stopped posting any other time [...] It's also why I liked alt.religion.kibology so much after coming from talk.bizarre

I went through the exact same pattern, and found a.r.k freeing for precisely the same reasons. Then Pacheco showed up and ruined it for everyone.

But back to the point: the most courageous thing I do in my life is not rock climbing or martial arts. It's making music. Music which, let's face it, isn't very good (http://www.askesis.org/music/). I know this, because I'm a really good listener. The joy of making it happen constantly battles with the It-Has-To-Be-Good demon, resulting in a pattern of long dry spells punctuated by short fecund bursts.

I haven't resolved this conflict yet. The music I love is what it is because the people who made it put years of passionate effort into it, and weren't afraid to fail. But how can I be fearless, when I suck so much in comparison?

[jwgh]

Hmmm, Pacheco doesn't post any more either.

[plorkwort.livejournal.com]

> Sometimes I think my standards have gotten too high for me to actually have the courage to create much of anything.

Yes. This is why I haven't written anything besides higgledy piggledies for months now.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

Well, my webcomic is in it's third year and runs in a dozen publications of various kinds, AND I saw a few of your cartoons way back in the halcyon days of Chantilly High School and State Correctional Facility. So perhaps I can lend some relevant words.

Even now, with the field completely choked with titles, you could easily start a webcomic and have a great deal of success with it. Since you've already got talent, the primary thing it would take is commitment. You would have to pick a schedule and stick to it.

If the main thing that worries you about doing THAT is this hangup about the quality of each strip, I'll have to refer you to what one of the Johns said in Gigantic: that they had to learn to be "less precious and more prolific."

I've learned this along the way. You never stop trying to hit a home run, but when you swing hard and it just dribbles down the baseline, you run like hell to first and hope they cheer anyway. They almost always do. Your worst stuff is never as bad as you think it is, and one home run excuses a lot of strikeouts in the eyes of the fans.

I mean, I hated "Bangs" and "Another First Kiss" with a passion, but that doesn't mean I hated the whole Mink Car album. As a fan I took my choice and my pleasure from what they were offering. If they let me down with those songs they came through with others. I was a lot happier than I'd have been if they had been so precious about the quality of individual songs that they never made the album at all.

Anyway, if you do decide to start a webcomic, I will throw the full might of my webcomic superpowers behind you. Mock them not. I'll send you all of the traffic and support I can, even if it leads to the entirely-plausible outcome that your comic eventually gets more traffic than mine. (It's happened before.)

I say, go for it! You'd be a trip on panels.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

Two things. My accidental misuse of the word "it's" in that post really grates on me, and as a fellow fan of Bob the Angry Flower I just wanted to apologize. Can't edit a post, though.

I also wanted to add that it's kind of astounding how often, when you HAVE to produce material, it comes out a lot better than it would have if you'd fussed it to death. My "under deadline pressure" stuff holds up to my "inspiration hath struck" stuff.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid that right now, my job is demanding enough that if I picked a schedule, it'd have to be something like "quarterly".

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, the fast version of "First Kiss" on "Severe Tire Damage" rocks ass.

[schwa242.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I think my standards have gotten too high for me to actually have the courage to create much of anything.

This is why I've been unable to draw anything other than figure drawing. At least with that, there's a set image that you are trying to capture. But I daren't be creative and make things up, for it might stink.

I am having fun with writing silly short stories from time to time, because I still tell myself it's an amateurish diversion and I'm Not Really Writing and besides, they are silly stories and not serious at all. I'm sure if I pursued it any further I would stop doing it, if that makes any sense.

-- Schwa ---

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That reminds me of the way that many famous authors have regarded their best and most beloved works as dashed-off trifles, and instead fretted over the lack of respect given to (or their inability to even finish) their truly Great Works destined to transfigure the soul of humanity. E.g. Voltaire's tedious stage tragedies, or Gogol's "Dead Souls, Volume II".

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Or Charles Schulz's insistence to his dying day that his 1990s strips were his best work.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that Shakespeare is a counterexample: he obviously held his comedies in some contempt (you can tell just from the titles: "As You Like It"; "Much Ado About Nothing"; "Twelfth Night, or, What You Will"—you can hear him straining not to title them "More of the Shit You Morons Eat Like Candy"), and his comedies really aren't as good as his big tragic works. But most people aren't Shakespeare.