Calgary is frequently called “Home of 1,000 Beefs,” and I found this to be true. (The slogan, not Calgary being frequently called that.) I had beef at every meal, and between meals, I snacked from a one-pound bag of beef jerky. This bag, presented to me by a reader at the beginning of my trip, currently weighs 5.5 ounces.
Calgary Comic Expo is an incredible show, and as long as I’m welcome there, I will attend. I don’t know what it is — the climate, the ecosystem, the oil — but people there are hungry for comics. I can count on four fingers the number of times someone has asked to buy my entire catalog, and two of those times happened this weekend.
After Calgary came a two-day retreat in Banff with a number of cartoonists and other artists from the show. I roomed with Scott and Jim Zubkavich, who one night left open the screen door to the room I was staying in, at ground level, and there is a placard in every room instructing us how to be bear-, elk- and cougar-safe. In the rooms. For the remainder of the trip I had nightmares of getting my throat torn out.
I think the most fascinating thing to me about this career, lately, is the variety of ways people come into it. We bang the webcomics drum pretty hard around here, but there I was in a bus full of creators, most of whom were perfectly happy with the way things were working. I talked a lot with Doug TenNapel, Ethan Nicolle and Mike Mignola and I don’t think you could find a more diverse set of stories. The approaches are completely different, and I had an experience a lot like the one I had at the NCS Reuben Awards weekend in Boston. There’s so much to learn and break apart that it makes my stomach hurt. I don’t know that any one path to success is better than another; I just know what works for me. Or do I?
Another recent, bittersweet lesson I came away with is what my career looks like. The shape it’s starting to take I couldn’t have predicted two years ago. I made a chart of the tasks on my plate, creative and otherwise, and of the creative stuff I categorized them under “brand” and “not.” Stuff that fell under “brand” directly supported my overall package, what I present to people who have no idea what I do for a living. Chainsawsuit went at the top, as did Blamimations. The Scott and Kris Show will also be very me-representative. How did I get so fortunate that I would have all these projects? Any one of them might launch a career or some further phase. I could never make up my mind to stick with one thing.
We have started to hash out shooting and working schedules for Blamimations and our show, and they are, for the near term at least, grueling. I also have Starslip, and F Chords, which I restarted to prepare for Starslip’s eventual end. Except Starslip is still going with no end date planned anymore — and most amazingly, you produced our webseries, something I couldn’t have predicted either. I kind of started to feel like… I’d been ungrateful for this embarrassment of irons in the fire. I’m doing two webseries and three webcomics. Do I even have the right to be spreading myself this thin? Something is bound to suffer. Or worse, everything is bound to suffer.
I’m making a really tough decision for me, and that is to scale back on what I’ve committed myself to, in order to follow through on the strongest contenders in my portfolio. I’m going to tie up F Chords in the next few weeks and close Side Two for now. I’ll reapproach it once Starslip is over. It’s a bummer that again it’s not getting its full chance to stretch — and even ironic that it was going to deal with problems with being creative, one of which is not enough time — but maybe F Chords will ultimately always move forward in chapters that way. Ideally everything I did would work in chapters or stages, as though I were a novelist rather than a cartoonist, with every project carefully and thickly delineated by time.
I also had the opportunity to use a lot of brush pens this weekend, and there is a diligence and charm to them that I definitely am not reproducing in goddamned Flash. I want to experiment more. The big takeaway from Calgary and Banff for me was to let myself rethink everything, not to consider anything safe or a necessity.
Way too many things to digest at this point. I guess the lesson from Canada is to keep your eyes open? To friendship?? No, no tidy endings; I’m still pawing my way through this one.
