It's true gazorenzoku...ice cream is a very good comparison. I love ice cream. People look at me in a weird way when I go out and buy ice cream in the middle of winter, wading through knee deep snow in -16 degrees Celsisus and eat it outdoors (don't know what that is in farenheit...but at least my ice cream doesn't melt in it). Cold is only relative to the amount of clothes you wear.
gazorenzoku wrote: find more stuff that makes you stressed out and write about it
Hehe...I might just do that. I'll probably be loosing my job in a few months as the film we're working on nears completion, and that might involve relocating to somewhere new to find a job (I've been considering NewZealand, Canada, BeNeLux, France, Sweden, maybe Japan and more.....suggestions welcome ). That might involve some stress, but hopefully mostly new and interesting experiences.
Since I started this thread, I've been playing around with game programming. I've had this little game idea in my head that I've wanted to make for ages, so why not give it a shot. I'm learning lots of new stuff including how to do a side scrolling game...which might turn out to be great for future infinite canvas comics.
I guess doing something technical (like programming) for a while, is going to leave me lusting for something "primitive" like paper, ink, brushes, pens and pencils.
Ragnar
p.s. I don't see loosing my job as a bad thing (it's to be expected in the animation industry), it's just the start of something new.
I've been rethinking this for the last couple of weeks.
A month or so ago I was seriously thinking that my little flirtation with webcomics was coming to an end. I was having fun drawing, but the stories and the character were doing nothing for me, and I couldn't find an angle to approach it that would change that for me.
What happened, and why my comic changed so drastically a few weeks ago, is that I was sitting here at my copmputer, feeling a great deal of ennui and disatisfaction, when my girlfriend said somethign to me that started me thinking in an entirely different direction. She drew my attention to a story I had told her about reading comics when I was eleven or twelve, and my connection with the characters in the comic book. Suddenly I had all kinds of ideas about where I could take things, and I got excited about it again.
Why do I do this? I do it because I am trying to articulate something, and experience, or a series of experiences, which I think are common to many people. Dealing with death, life, the unknown, makes it more real for me, and therefore more important. The thought that someone might read the comic and get any of that out of it only makes me feel all the more motivated to keep doing it.
For years in writing workshops and writing books I kept running across the phrase "write what you know," and I always thought that was boring, so I skirted it, but in the end I think that if you are producing something (a comic or whatever) that is relevant to you, and related directly to your world in some way, then you have all the motivation in the world.
I read what Cat had to say on the matter, and I can hear the fatigue there. he has been doing brilliant work for years, and he is still relatively unknown outside of the webcomic community, which is a real shame, because he is probably one of the most talented artists working in the medium. That's got to be hard somedays. There have to be times when you get tired and sick of it, and you want to pull the plug on it, but those are fallow periods common to any kind of creative endeavour, and if you've got the courage and the wisdom to stick it out, or take a break, they usually precede some of your best work.
Personally, I think if you need a break, take it. If you itch to do it again, go back to it. In Cat's case, I think that he has been working very close to an important vein, and I am hoping he will stick it out. His work on Cuentos seems personal and relevant, and I suspect that he if he keeps pushing the envelope he may find a reason to keep doing it.
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ragtag wrote:and that might involve relocating to somewhere new to find a job (I've been considering NewZealand, Canada, BeNeLux, France, Sweden, maybe Japan and more.....suggestions welcome
If anyone ever needs help moving to Japan, or wants info about how they can live in Japan, let me know. I am an American who has been living in Japan for 3 years now.
I thought I might add a little to this thread, even though it's ages since I started it.
I found that doing simple projects that I don't expect to be perfect or a 100 pages long was liberating and a good way to get going again if in a slump. Projects like 24-hour comix, 1 hour comix or simply improvised comix, like the one I just got up today. It's less silly and fun.
I've dropped programming (see previously in this thread), though I actually got quite far with an isometric game engine by the time I figured out that this was not for me. So it's all out comix and animation for me now (comix at home and animation at work)....yeah. Might give a shot at some print stuff next year, you never know what it's like till you try...right.
Hey Rag! Good to see you drawing again. Cute story you have there. It was rather Tin Tin like which is a good quality that more cartoonist should have. Keep up the good work, we want more!
I think I need to review my reasons, and give myself a kick in the pants. I have at least two different comics on the go right now, and I really enjoy doing what I do, but I have been letting myself get bogged down in some sort of ennui. At first I thought it was the Fall, but I think it has more to do with my frustration with wanting to do more than I can possibly produce.
I will ask Stella where she found her groove, and do likewise.
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I know what you mean about wanting to do more than you can produce.
I think for me, recently my main reasons have been:
1) The pleasure of having my own secret world that I can think about whenever I want and then dive into with pencil and pen at the drawing table (don't really have a real drawing table... it's just the dinner table)
2) The hope that I can reach out and communicate a story to people I don't even know.
3) A chance to draw whatever I want to draw.
There might be more, but those are the ones I can think of right now. My reasons have changed incredibly over the last few months. I used to be more interested in self expression. The work I did was almost more like poetry than a straight forward narrative.... at least it was just about as popular as poetry!!
Which caused me to wonder the other day, does anybody read poetry anymore? I have never really considered myself a poet, and I don't read poetry, but I always assumed that poets could make a living just writing, like a novelist. I wonder if that's true. I suppose most poets have to support themselves by teaching.....
That was why I took up the whole teaching gig in the first place. I had grand visions of teaching during the day and writing cutting edge poems and stories by night.
What a load of hooey.
The truth of it is that teaching really sucks you dry on an emotional level most days. I liked it, but I had very little left over to put down on paper. I was up every morning at 5 AM for awhile, just so that I could write before I went to work, and I've kept a journal or some sort of common place book for poems, story ideas, etc. for more than ten years now,
And then I started drawing again.
My life had been turned upside down, and for some reason I retreated into drawing - I was able to express things there that I couldn't put words to (because the words probably would have been too painful). The funny thing is that I kept drawing, and remembered that I used to love it, but had stopped doing it for reasons I no longer remembered (I didn't want my brother to feel as though we were in competition, so I let him draw, and I wrote).
Now I find myself wanting to use drawing more and more to express ideas and feelings. I've written a forty page improvisational graphic novel (still have to scan it btw), and there isn't even one stitch of prose in there anywhere. I was trying to compose it the way I might a simple, though somewhat clumsy poem.
Much of what I've done overthe last few months has had something to do with poetry, but I haven't quite found where the balance lies between what I want to show, and what I would like to say.
I'm not teaching this year, and that has helped immensely, as far as keeping my emotional batteries charged up most of the time, but I find myself unable to write and draw at the same time. I either do a lot of one or the other, but almost never the two together. Maybe that's okay, but I would like to think that there is a way to bring the two into allignment.
Blah, blah, blah. I'm beginning to sound like a big whiner, so I will leave it at that for the moment. There's something here I am trying to say but I haven't quite got the words right now (the hollow ring of irony).
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I'm a webmaster of two sites about comics from Argentina (http://www.portalcomic.com and http://www.caballeros.portalcomic.com) and now I'm trying to get some money of it. It's hard, but I think that eventually It will occur.
Talking about that: what do you think about my sites?
Thanks a lot!!!
). That might involve some stress, but hopefully mostly new and interesting experiences.
