TwedeeNimbus just made a VERY deep post.

Today I saw that TwedeeNimbus, who’s been gracing us with her fluid art and wisdom here on Dreamwidth, just put up a post on her views of art and art in business. The post struck a chord with me because it brought back memories of my own history and continuing journey as it relates to art, and I saw many common themes in both of our experiences. This is my detailed response to her post, and to her I wanna say:

Twedee, you hit the nail on the head in so many parts of this post.

I’m what some people call a “self-taught” artist. I think the first things I ever drew were pictures of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek and many drawings of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I remember there was one drawing I replicated off a Ninja Turtles “Turtlecopter” toy box that my dad loved so much he had it pinned on his office cubicle wall. It wasn’t until I visited my cousin in London that I really dove into drawing; that was when I played the first video game that really opened my eyes to character design: Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Genesis.

Sonic the Hedgehog set me on the path of cartooning, leading me to eventually create illustrated books featuring him and his friends, which wowed my teachers and my classmates in elementary (my parents loved them too to an extent, but wound up encouraging me to draw other things as well, and getting me to cut down on the Sonic stuff sometimes). Later, I met a friend with a bunch of Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog comics, which was the spark that got me into evolving my picture books into comic books. As time went on, I started drawing comics that featured my own characters (many of my characters today still have a slight Sonic-esque feel to their design, due to the influence of the art style in the Archie Sonic comics).

When I got into high school, I started playing around with human anatomy. The whole “putting pieces of a mannequin together style” way of drawing was interesting. I never had any real education in rendering human anatomy until I attended a one-week summer 2D/3D animation program at the Art Institute of California, San Francisco. The 2D animation was my first real dip into human anatomy (3D also was, but to a lesser extent). When I entered college, my real training in human anatomy began, with mannequins as well as nude models. What I noticed what that though I already had a decent handle on human anatomy, the classes taught me things I never knew beforehand, like perspective. Every now and then I go back to the basics to hone my skills, and usually I wind up learning something new.

When I got my first job, though, that’s when I started thinking about monetization. Of course, to do that, I’d have to make the art into a sellable and tangible form. So, I used some of my earnings to get my stuff professionally printed in comic book style from various print-on-demand vendors. I think around late 2007, I had printed my first graphic novel. Of course, as you did, at one point I became obsessed with going into selling my stuff fully. And, as you also discovered, reality knocked me on the head with a sledgehammer. I found out that one doesn’t just make something, try to sell it, and make big bank. The infamous “if you build it, they will come” façade isn’t infamous for no reason. Moreover, as many have learned the hard way in book publishing – and to a slightly lesser extent, the comics industry – that drawing and publishing a book/comic/graphic novel is a passion or hobby but selling them is a business. And in business, there are certain rules to follow, and fierce competition to reckon with. In book selling, you need capital, you need a market, you need a target audience… and in many instances, luck.

My dreams of making a living (or even a killing) from my graphic novels were quickly shattered once this realization sank in. And man, it took a LONG time – a little over a decade – and a lot of overspent money on printing costs, for it to sink it. The point was, as good as I believed myself to be, in the business world, the more established writers/artists (as the general public believe) were FAR better. One of my comics, The Viper, was brutally compared negatively to “Big Two” (Marvel/DC) comics on grounds that it didn’t follow the “traditional” superhero rules. A graphic novel of mine, Lil’ Hero Artists, was criticized for its “confusing plot points” (which I admit, there were a few), a mistargeted age group (it was billed as “All Ages”, but judged as more aimed at kids) and occasional subpar art. At a time, it was once traditionally published by New York small press publisher Alterna Comics, but even there, I struggled. The book is a co-creation between me and my friend Nick Vollmer, and we both soon agreed that our progress sales wise was less than optimal, never mind the traveling we'd have do for conventions and the like. And the competition. My God, the competition... That led us to decide to leave the publisher scene and go solo (after parting ways admirably with Alterna, of course) Lastly, when I tried to get local bookstores to stock it, only 1 out of 4 stores I talked to would do so. However, for the first store, my first volume was incredibly expensive to the common customer. Fortunately, the owner believed in me (and still does), so she never forced me to come back and pick up the books that didn’t sell. Still, while all this was happening, I had my job and college at the time, and while my job was progressing well, my college studies were slowly declining. The time I spent away from work was spent more on the comics than my studies, and I began to think that maybe college was less important than my job and my “business”.

Fortunately, many factors got me back on the right track: My family and a few close friends were able to pull me away from this delusion that I’d strike it rich like the big comics/graphic novel stars and live an idyllic life by warning me about the dark side of the comics industry, I took a few classes in college that strangely captured my interest and drew me away from running the “business”, and finally, two books delivered the liberation I needed: Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech in book form, Make Good Art, and Scott McCloud’s Making Comics. Both brought the truth I didn’t want to learn but needed to learn in that instant—that the most important thing in comics, or any creative endeavor for that matter, is NOT fame and fortune. It’s about doing something you enjoy. Any kind of art done for money is art done on the assumption of what sells. But in this business, what sells has generally already been established, and that isn’t changing anytime soon, if ever. With that in mind, you must be incredibly lucky with your idea to even make a dent in that establishment, and even if you do, that dent will eventually buff right off. Not to mention that if your main goal is money, that’s what will drive your work, and you’ll cave to things like deadlines and trends—things that the pros do, and that they’re not exactly proud of when the paycheck comes, especially if the work they’re doing is corporately owned, or “work-for-hire”.

Understanding that fact, as well as the ugly truth about the comics industry exploiting its writers and artists (sometimes to their deaths) and chiseling them by paying them pocket change in earnings while its corporate arm pockets the lion’s share in print sales and licensing/merchandise earnings, I finally saw that this was a battle I wouldn’t ever win. I had the skills, but I wasn’t skilled enough for the market, and I had (and STILL have) no business know-how. So, I decided to just make the art for myself. And when I did, the art/comics I made from that point on indeed brought me more joy over time. I still have a day job (and it’s an AWESOME one), because the reality is that I cannot realistically rely on my comics to sustain me. If I tried to this point, I would surely get to a point where I’d be hating my work right now, because I’d have a pitiful number of sales and my life would be in dark place—broke, maybe even homeless, and indeed, “starving”. What brought the whole thing full circle in understanding for me was that “good” and “bad” art are entirely subjective. What one considers “good” art, another will say is “bad”. The saying "You can't please everyone" is real gold here. And to go even further, to me, there IS no such thing as “bad art” UNLESS its purpose is to do anyone some kind of harm. If you’re using your artistic gifts to hurt someone or a group of people out of pure malice, then yes, your art is, in my opinion, “bad”.