Highs Below Zero

There’s a new festival in town! The St. John’s Comic Arts Festival is happening this weekend, and I am lucky enough to participate in a small way, as a vendor!

Here’s the thing: I have nothing to vend.

I have a few prints, but I am otherwise merch-less. I have been extremely reluctant to sell anything related to my art before because handling money and taxes makes me want to heave.

The festival organizers have been very open about what goes into planning a new festival, so I thought I’d share my experiences about what it’s like to be a new vendor.

My Comics Story

I was obsessed with comics as a kid. They were my first literary love, the reason I read. I wanted to make them, and I did when I was a child. In my teens, when I was looking at careers, I realized I didn’t have the skills – nor the patience to develop the skills – to be a full-time cartoonist. I could write though. Love writing, writing was always so much easier than drawing, and easier than speaking, too. I decided I’d be a writer.

But alas, writing was a dying art in the early 2000s, don’t you know. I was told there was money in it, to not bother pursuing it, to find work that made money. I just wanted to make, but you gotta make money to make anything else. So I worked.

I didn’t even try to attend art school or go for an MFA. I knew I didn’t have what it took, and it would take too much money to get those skills, and too little money back to make it work. I guess I assumed that? I researched that. So I worked at a job I wasn’t suited for, and I stopped doing what I loved – writing, making comics for fun. I got depressed. Boo hoo. I felt bad, so I tried to make comics to feel better, but it made me feel worse, and I stopped drawing altogether for years. Boo hoo again.

Some stuff happened, and I started feeling more like myself, and realized I’d shortchanged myself all those years ago. I’d never really put in the effort, I just “knew” I couldn’t. So this is me, putting in an effort.

That’s my story to date. I was in love, I fell out of love, I fell in love with something else, and now I’ve come back to my first love. I’ve spent the past year seeing if I can rekindle my romance with this art form. I wonder if it’s still what I’m into. People change. I still love comics, but do I love making them?

We’ll see.

Making Comics

There’s two parts to making comics. There’s making them, and making them available to others.

For most of my comics making “career,” the latter has consisted of me self-publishing on blogs and social media, aka posting. MY comics, writing, art, and videos are scattered to the winds, under different profiles, different sites. It’s fine. Low demand, low risk, low reward. Most of it was not very good, in my opinion, so it didn’t matter if it got noticed or not. Posts come and go, like all internet content.

The advice you get nowadays is to keep up a high pace of posting to get noticed, but I can’t keep up. Working against AI, I don’t think anyone can – the quality is shit, but the regularity is unmatchable.

I put too much work into my work to have it compete with the content-making machine. Not to say my stuff is good — it just takes me a long time to make. It’s not practical for me to pretend I’m a robot. I can’t churn it out; I’ve tried and I’ve failed.

So here’s a new attempt: Curating. I’m taking everything I like, that I think is ok enough, and turning it into print magazines. See how it fares in a more physical world. Hopefully it’ll be found again by the digital world, now all organized and assembled in one nice place.

Here.

I’m starting small. A few prints, a few zines, to test the waters.

It’s been hard, starting from zero again. But I’m hopeful.

Stay tuned to see how it goes…