How to Restart a Comic Writing Career
Part 1 of 5 - Introduction
The last two posts were, as one fellow creator put it, a “sobering read.” So much so, in fact, that I had at least one industry friend extrapolate that I was planning to quit comics.
Nope. You can’t get rid of me that easily.
Those two posts (How NOT to Start your Career as a Comic Book Writer. Part 1 & 2) were meant to provide a realistic foundation for a much-needed restart in my comics career. Hopefully, one that will result in a sustainable comics writing career that doesn’t put me in the poor house. In the next four posts, I want to present my plan.
To my fellow creators reading this, please know that parts of my strategy may apply to you, while other pieces will be the product of my very unique circumstances and stage of life.
I don’t hide the fact that I am old as dirt, and my wife is even older forever 27. Being “Generation Jones” has implications. In April, we will be living on a modest fixed income, so extra cash will be hard to come by. However, we are also at the stage of life where our housing costs will be limited to property taxes and home maintenance. We also plan to sell our suburban Vancouver home and move closer to our children and our new grandson. This offers the opportunity to ensure we are finally debt-free. Fingers crossed, we won’t end up downsizing, but if we need to in order to clear our debts, we will - mainly because we have to. The summary: low income, a place to live, modestly busy, and without debt. The only other time this was my backdrop was when I was 16 and still living at home.
What is very different for me now than when I was a teenager is the sense of urgency that permeates my life at this point. Time is precious. There is a 50/50 chance that my comics career will last longer than my teaching career. But based on the data for males my age here in British Columbia, there is also a 4% chance I will be dead tomorrow. The possibility that the stories in my head might never be told is a tremendous motivator.
It is those untold stories1 that will keep me from simply walking away and focusing my passion for learning on something like pickleball.
But if the goal is to tell stories, and I am a writer, why not simply shift to prose? The truth is, in the coming year, I do intend to allocate time to finishing my YA novel. The first draft of “Powder” is approximately two-thirds complete. Even though I have hardly touched this manuscript in the last two years, scenes from this story still come to mind frequently. Being haunted by a story is a sure sign that you need to finish it.
If worse comes to worst, there is also the potential that the remainder of The Lump Sum Saga story arc could be told as an illustrated novel. But that would be an unwelcome compromise, so I plan to do all that I can to continue the story as a comic. Call me a control freak, but I want people to really see what I have imagined for my strange alien world, and Sergi’s art makes that possible.
If my first years in comics have taught me anything, it is that comics are their own medium, and some stories were just meant to be told as sequential art. I have comic stories to tell and hope to stay in the industry for a long time to come so they can be told.
But how, especially given the backdrop of my previous articles? In a series of posts each day this week, I will lay out my plans in four interconnected categories:
Cutting costs,
Collaboration,
Community, and
One Critical Change.
Will all my plans work well for every creator? Probably not. But I hope that you will find something of value in this series that you can apply to your unique comic career.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings