Thursday, September 17th 2009Cartoon News! and The Cartoonist's Impasse
I recently applied for a cartoonist position at the school paper in response to a want ad they printed a few days ago. I used a few of the tamer comics here as examples, but for some bizarre reason have not yet had the position eagerly lauded upon me, complete with total creative control and even some broad editorial powers over others parts of the paper just for good measure, and a sizable salary even though it's a volunteer position. It's almost as if they don't have the God given sense to know when there's gold in them thar hills and how to appropriately scurry ahead with pickaxe and gold pan in hand ready to strike it rich rich rich!
You may ask yourself, "But how would you keep up with a daily/weekly/anything newspaper cartoon when you can't even update your very own goddamn site once a fucking MONTH you lazy shit?" And you would be insightful, if not also terribly rude. But the secret is I have definitely had time to keep this comic up, and could probably get back to my once-a-week schedule what with all the classwork I've been avoiding lately, except that I DON'T GIVE A FLYING FUCK. If I'm able to salvage this comic after such a long delay, the wisdom I come away with is something I should have learned from Matt Milby's
Malfunction Junction (sadly no longer online), which is that continuity is the bane of the amateur webcomic's existence.
It's actually a principle I've had ample opportunity to learn (hell, the current
F@NB0Y$ "Red Letter Day" storyline has pretty effectively triggered an update quagmire) but Milby's demise was especially epic.
Malfunction Junction was a simply but artistically drawn recreation of Milby's life viewed through a kind of
Curb Your Enthusiasm lens, focusing on the absurd stories he mined out of the drudgery of working in a gas station.
(sorry for shitty size, but it's hard to find images of dead comics)
Despite fitting the amateur webcomic stereotype of jittery updates, for a few years Malfunction Junction fairly consistently put out some of the top-down funniest comics of its time. Then Milby decided to finally set to work on a project he'd apparently been thinking about for a long while. The storyline WHY I CAN'T GO BACK TO CINCINNATI was a multi-part "gone drinking" story that seemed like it was meant to be sort of the "movie version" of the episodic comic. It certainly lived up to this idea in its length.
In spite of its fairly straightforward plot by the bullet points, CINCINNATI ballooned to around 20 or so strips (the comic rarely used continuity other than in following ongoing semi-connected events of Milby's life). The endeavor clearly drained the shit out of Milby, as updates became further and further apart as it went along. It's something
The Hussie talked about concerning
Problem Sleuth's epically spiraling ending: at some point, there's a dual pressure to fucking end the thing already but also legitimize all the time you've already spent and give it a
proper ending. For a king like Hussie, walking this tightrope is clearly no big D, but lesser men find this pressure frustrating, and it leads to long delays for a lot of webcomics. Given that I'm on only the third strip in a row for my "story," you can get a sense of where I lie on the spectrum of artistic fortitude. Eventually Milby finished his story decently enough, but after a few stutter-steps of new strips he eventually stopped updating, and evidently stopped paying for hosting of his site altogether. And to dig it in just a little deeper, I'm pretty sure excessive continuity is what killed his desire to continue his previous comic,
Gin and the Devil.
Getting back on topic, in most cases it's not so much a problem with ego, but with motivation. The fact is, with a continuous storyline everything's planned ahead and there's really none of that spark of creation (this would be one distinction that might have aided Hussie, whose comic is quasi-improvised by reader input). The comic I've been very very slowly drawing lately is one I'd conceived of months ago, planned out more specifically around the time of
Super Bear Returns, and have had sketched out for weeks. There's nothing left to do but the job of inking and coloring, which kind of HAS TO BE REALLY GOOD to legitimize all the time I've spent dicking around. But it won't be, because I can't just magically be better, and I don't have the enthusiasm to spend an inordinate amount of time on it. So... that's the impasse.
Luckily, at some point I will realize that nobody will give a shit whatever it looks like other than me, and I'll slap something down so I can finally get on with writing new stuff. The Comics & Animation class I talked about last post has taught me a very slight amount about panel composition, and I'd like to see what I can do. But even more importantly, it's once again fooled me into thinking comics are important or worthwhile in any way, which is close enough to inspiration for this kind of work.
