Like a lot of you, I first became aware of Tillie Walden when she started winning Ignatzen a few years back. The webcomic release of On A Sunbeam occurred in short order — nearly a year before Spinning — and I loved both (particularly the big, chapter-long chunks of story released of OAS, making the wait for updates rewarding and full of meaty story progression). But since :01 Books was kind enough to send me a copy of the print release of On A Sunbeam, and since I heard Walden talk about her relationship with her work at the Alaska Robotics Mini-Con¹, I’ve decided to revisit and share my thoughts. It’s going to be light on the spoilers, but I won’t say there are none.

On A Sunbeam is huge. It’s 500 pages (down from 700, Walden said in Juneau; she may not do much in the way of preparatory design or layout in her straight-to-ink process, but she’ll do a hell of a lot of editing later on²) worth of heavy, with a tactile paper and deeply-infused inks that retain hints of their original aroma long after being produced. To read this story in print is an undertaking, a confrontation of physical heft that lends weight to the story. She may regard the book as an afterthought to the act of creation, but when the book is this substantial before you even open it, you feel the work the story required. It demands your attention.

Walden’s not a fan of science fiction and doesn’t claim it as a source of inspiration, so naturally the book is up for a Hugo. Maybe the most radical departure from all but the most recent Hugo winners, the most speculative part of the speculative fiction is that Walden’s imagined a universe not just of life in space and far-flung communities in the firmament, but one where every character but one is female. It’s utterly unremarked-upon, there’s no backstory to say and that’s why there are no more men, it just is, a quiet fact lurking in the background until you realize there’s no dudes.

That one character that’s not female? They’re nonbinary.

Sure, much of the story takes place at a boarding school “For Girls”, or aboard a small ship where there don’t happen to be any men, but then the accumulated weight of the story kicks in. So many references to sisters and daughters, and casual reference to your or my moms. Is it a thesis statement or an aspiration? I think it’s more that there’s nothing in the story — school, bullies, love, family, loss — that requires the presence of men, so there aren’t any. It’s not a society that’s set in opposition to men, or defined by its separation from or absence of men, it just doesn’t have any and possibly never did. It sneaks up on you.

And it’s that casual display of the details of this universe that makes the story and the setting so beautiful. Little grace notes like shoes by the entrance of the spaceship and clutter everywhere tell us this isn’t sweeping space opera, it’s just life that happens to take place in space. Sure, the ships look like carp — complete with eyes and mouths and swimmy fins to keep them aloft — and homes, offices, and school campuses are their own, free-traveling craft, but it’s still just life. Live in a community in a weird part of space that may kill you getting in or out? Cool, you still need horses to get between towns. Want to set up a sports tournament between schools? They’ll need to rendezvous and dock with each other first.

The story is told initially in two threads, today and five years ago, paralleling the experience of the protagonist as she finds love and creates family. Bits of lore drop in conversation and become important, or are utterly forgotten (there’s an offhand reference to Earth, but it seems to be just another place you can live and not the cradle of humanity or anything). The plot in each time progresses on in the way that life does — often mundane, or frustrating, but rarely full of high adventure — until every hundred pages or so, Walden hits us with a showstopper. These moments come out of nowhere, and pack the emotional wallop that an entire series of comics might be built around³. There’s a character break that’s shocking and utterly earned. An act of bravery. A moment of fear and loss.

And in just about the exact middle of the book, the actual thesis statement for On A Sunbeam, and for Walden’s work as a whole:

Have you ever even considered that something that’s trivial to you could mean … so much more to someone else? You don’t get to take the easy road out and just respect the parts of people that you recognize.

That’s goddamn beautiful. More beautiful than the worldbuilding and imagination and the gorgeous illustrations. The most important thing is being willing to extend respect to somebody who’s different, whether you’re in a universe of fish-ships and schools wafting among the stars or not. You don’t get to decide what’s important for anybody other than yourself.

Take your time with On A Sunbeam; read it, exist in the story, listen to what it has to say. Set it aside for a day, or a month, and come back to it again; new little details will jump out at you, obvious now in ways they weren’t before. Read it again in a year, two, ten, and let it lead you back into that place where respect can be required, and love and family can be the foundation you build upon.

Spam of the day:

But if you’re still stuck on squats and lunges to grow your butt, you need to stop NOW.

Maybe you need to stop now, but my butt is friggin’ glorious.

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¹ And, at various points, we discussed other things, including what winning fuck-you lottery money would mean, desert island books, and Game Of Thrones. She’s really smart and utterly sincere and has become one of my favorite people.

² Which, if you recall our prior discussions of how Mark Siegel prefers to approach editing in :01 releases, is a unique way of working. Add to the fact that the story was done in about a year, including living overseas, and it’s pretty much inconceivable that the book actually exists. Only the most monstrous of work ethics could actually result in this story seeing completion.

³ Think Superman and Regan on the ledge, or Old Doreen and Old Nancy deciding to go back in time knowing it’ll reset their decades-long love, but they’ll find a way to recreate it.

More book reviews in the immediate future, friends, but I wanted to take a moment to catch up on some things that have happened in the recent weeks that I had previously missed. In no particular order, then:

• Know who’s cool? Lucy Bellwood. Like, adventuring around the world cool, has a better haircut than you cool, and teaming up with Scott McCloud to explain some tech stuff¹ cool. In this case, the tech stuff is federated learning, and the comic (story by Bellwood & McCloud, art by Bellwood) will bring you up to speed.

  In case you’re wondering about working for a giant behemoth that’s completely abandoned all pretense of having Don’t be evil as a guiding principle, may I remind you that Google has an enormous budget for things of this nature, and I sincerely hope that Bellwood and McCloud were given the equivalent of a dump truck full o’ money for their work on the comic.

• I mentioned the winners of the NCS division awards for webcomics² on Sunday but did I mention the latest Johnny Wander Kickstart? On Twitter, yeah, but not here so let’s talk about it now. Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh are Kickstarting a book of previously-uncollected (and new!) comics on the theme of travel in this, the tenth year of Johnny’s wandering. It’ll be great.

  In case you’re wondering how much you want to deal with Kickstarter given the news about the company not accepting a proposed union, may I remind you this is what’s happened when unions were proposed in all cases in the history of unionization except maybe three? Yeah, I had expectations of Kickstarter-the-public-benefit-corporation being better than this, but all this means is that the next stage of labor law gets followed: there’s a vote, and if the employees vote for a union they have to recognize it.

  Honestly, I think it’s just the reflexive distrust of anything other than rugged self-made mandom³ that is the hallmark of anybody that’s temperamentally suited to be a tech executive. The vote’ll happen, my money’s on it passes, and then the entire damn industry has a reckoning to face. And even at their worst, KS not embracing a union wholeheartedly will still damage comics creators a couple order of magnitude less than the shitshow aftermath of the Oni/Lion Forge let’s be movie producers together wankfest merger.

• Now that the Canadian {T | Van}CAFs are behind us, I’m thinking of things happening in about eight weeks in San Diego. Way too many people and way too much stuff, but I should point out that webcomicky types like Randall Munroe, Katie O’Neill, Carey Pietsch, and Ursula Vernon will be present as guests of the con.

  In case you’re wondering how I’m going to find an area of concern that balances out the news just to keep up the pattern, I’m not. These folks are great and you should read their stuff and let them know they rock.

Spam of the day:

{Well | Prince | Genoa | Lucca | arenow |justfamily | estates | Buonapartes | ButIarn | youifyou | tellme | thatthis | meanswar | ifyoustill | trytodefend | theinfamies | andhorrors | perpetrated | bythat | Antichrist | really | believe | heisAntichrist | willhave | nothing | moreto | dowith | youandyou | arenolonger | myfriend | nolongermy | faithful | slaveas | youcall | yourself | Buthow | doyoudo |

And that’s in the From: field of the email header. I leave it to your imagination how the body of the message progressed.

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¹ One may recall a day ten and a half years ago when the world was introduced to the Chrome browser by McCloud.

² Requisite disclaimer: I am part of the nominating/judging process for these awards.

³ Baaaarrrrrfff.

A few weeks before MoCCA Fest, the fine folks at :01 Books sent me uncorrected proof of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (words by Mariko Tamaki, pictures by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell) and I dove in. I held my review until closer to release date (which was, uh, two weeks ago) and then got caught up reporting on this year’s #ComicsCamp, so I’m late. But you know what? I got to read it a couple more times, so that’s okay. I’ve done my best to avoid spoilers — not much here you wouldn’t find on the back cover — but take care in any event.

My first readthrough caused me to think a lot about Kiss Number 8 by Colleen AF Venable and Ellen T Crenshaw, because they’re both about finding yourself, dealing with a shitty friend (and confronting the realization you might be the shitty friend), with LGBTQ identity to the fore. But LDKBUWM is less a parallel to KN8 and more a perpendicular. This is different time, a different place, a different reality in terms of LGBTQ freedoms. It’s not about finding yourself in the realization of sexuality or exiting a closet — most characters in LDKBUWM are either LGBTQ in some sense, or at least appears heteroflexible¹ — so if you take the coming out part of the teen story away, what do you get?

You get what was requested the Queers & Comics Conference: a queer comics character who’s bad. You get a character who can be a complete antagonist who happens to be queer, rather than a villain because they’re queer, or somebody that has to be presented as an exemplar of humanity to be a worthy enough queer to be included in the story.

Or if not a villain/bad in the traditional sense, at least a total dick.

Laura Dean is popular, hot, entitled, a mistreater of whoever isn’t in her favor at this instant (particularly her nominal girlfriend Freddie, who she keeps breaking up with) and a serial gaslighter; her go-to whenever called on her shitty behavior is Don’t be mad, making the subject of her mistreatment feel like they’re the one that’s at fault for overreacting. If only they’d been a better person, Laura Dean wouldn’t have had to act that way. Look what you made her do.

If Laura Dean were Loren Dean and presented as male, the story could be one step away from a cautionary after-school special about bad boyfriends that turn into abusers. As it is, she’s a user of people rather than an abuser, but if we check in on her in ten years I bet she’s got a TRO or two.

And as crappy a person as Laura Dean is, she makes those in her orbit worse, too. Freddie is neglectful of her friends, wrapped up in trying to get back into Laura Dean’s graces, knowing that she needs to make one of these breakups stick but half convincing herself that she can change enough that everything will be good in the future with Laura Dean. This is the finding yourself part of the story — deciding not how to present yourself as an identity, but deciding on how you choose to act.

Structurally, LDKBUWM is a little bit different; it doesn’t so much start as the reader begins paying attention to these characters at a certain point in time that’s really no more or less significant than any other. It’s arguably got a conclusion that it works towards, but really it just sort of fades out. The characters existed before page 1, they continue to exist after page 289, their stories continue and ebb and flow and branch and rejoin, like a river that we put our boat in at one particular place and pulled ashore again a few weeks later; we can see the extensions of the water upstream and downstream of the section we traversed and know that there’s more there.

Characters are revealed by small choices in their dialogue, but also in posture and visual habits. Freddie and her best friend Doodle both present as needing affection and attention, but they go about it in different ways. Freddie’s all public gestures and reactions, where Doodle is made of quiet implication. I spent my first read thinking that Doodle’s somewhere on the autism spectrum but have ultimately decided that she isn’t — but she was raised by a single parent who is. Her affect is of somebody that is learning to be demonstrative, having lacked the example of it at home. None of this is stated, and all of it may be completely off base, but it’s how the characters read to me … and it’s been a long while since characters on a page have left me with such distinct impressions of who they are by subtle implication.

That’s equally down to Tamaki’s plotting and dialogue and to the visuals, which let’s discuss. I’ve been talking up Rosemary Valero-O’Connell for about three years since I first met her. I said at the time that her minis reflected an unusually strong sense of page composition and design, and that her characters reminded me of two veteran manga creators whose work I love. Both have improved in the intervening time, especially her faces. Freddie has bits of Terry Moore’s Francine Peters in her big, expressive face, and Doodle says more with a raised eyebrow than a page of dialogue could contain². Crucially, and it’s the first time I’ve ever noticed this, Valero-O’Connell’s faces retain their expressiveness in 360 degree rotation; with remarkably few lines, there’s a shifting in the shape and weight of mouth, cheeks, eyebrows, and the entire skull shifts to convey mood.

She’s not afraid to have people speaking over their shoulder, and let the listener who’s facing us have the reaction; it’s astonishingly strong work. Plus, she does this one bit where a jerk jock is all homophobic at supporting character Buddy: we never see his face but can tell from the tilt of his head, the slump of his shoulders, the refusal to look at the gym coach who’s dressing him down, exactly what expression he’s wearing. Yeah, it’s our brains filling in what we can’t see, but it’s also the case that Jerkboy has the same blonde undercut as Laura Dean, and we’ve seen enough of her shitty girlfriend entitled smarm to fill in that detail. The reader, on an instinctual level (it took me four or five readthroughs to realize it), has been promoted to full partner in the visuals of the story.

And those visuals are lush. The characters — not just the named ones that we get to know, but all the backgrounders going through their own stories that we don’t get to eavesdrop on — are all unique. Skin color, modes of dress, hairstyle, size and shape — all of them are varied, giving the sense of a public school in a place that’s truly diverse (Berkeley, California), as opposed to TV or movies³ where a “diverse, random” crowd is 70% male and 70% white and all “Hollywood average” in appearance.

It’s not just people who’ve been on the receiving end of a bad partner in a relationship that will feel seen reading LDKBUWM, it’s just about everybody — there in the background, each character drawn with the same care and respect as the starring and supporting players. Someday, Tamaki will write or Valero-O’Connell will illustrate some of those stories, and we’ll see Freddie or Doodle or Laura Dean pass by in the background.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me is a stellar achievement in comics, and is the one to beat in my private list of best books of 2019. You can find it wherever books are sold, and carries my highest recommendation for the teen-and-up in your life.

Spam of the day:

You will be glad to know [spammer] which belongs to Bing and Yahoo, as one of the largest pools of advertisers in the world, they pay more to buy your traffic.

Ooooh! You belong to Bing and Yahoo! Know who else belongs to — that is to say, is findable via — Bing and Yahoo? Everybody.

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¹ Crowd scenes feature lots of seeming same-sex or gender ambiguous couples, which may be part of the script or may be a choice on Valero-O’Connell’s part.

² I’m reminded of longtime NPR Morning Edition host Bob Edwards, who could vocally lift an eyebrow over the radio with a single, arch syllable — Oh? — when interviewing some political powerbroker who was clearly lying.

³ Or too many comics, sad to say.

T’other day, I wrote the following regarding the 2019 Queers & Comics Conference on Twitter:

Fellow straight folks? Next time the #QueersAndComics conference comes to a city near you, attend. Listen. Ask questions. Learn.

And so in that spirit, some thoughts of what I learned, mostly in the form of things said by presenters in their own words¹:

• Asked about the motivation for their project: Spite.
• One of the best ways to change the world is to pretend it’s already changed.
• Asked about the tenor of their comic: Do you want to be depressed … but with jokes?
• Commenting on a recurring artistic theme: I wanted some Magical Boys [in the comic], there aren’t enough of them!
• Speaking about the creation of comics as a form of self-discovery: You’ve basically spoken to yourself … via other people.
• On the value of how readers react to your work: [A reader said] “Your comic made me realize that I’m trans” and I’m like “Huh.” … “HUH.”
• Our duty as queer artists is to resist. But also to create … new ways of looking at the world.
• Because we are smarter and more talented and hotter than [those oppressing us] we will win.
• Here at Queers & Comics, we have represented five decades of queer cartooning.
• I’m looking forward to when we can create queer comics characters who are bad.
• If you think trans kids are too young to know their gender, put all kids on hormone blockers.
• On challenging themes in kidlit: Kids are pretty self-censoring. They’ll just put the book down if there’s something traumatizing there.
• The reason I liked Bilbo Baggins is he didn’t know his own worth and discovered who he is.
• I’m not cisphobic. Both of my parents are cis. They’re very active in the cis community.
• I have a lot of kids in my life. I want them to read everything, read the old stories and break them down. To see why Cinderella is treated that way.
• On the box-checking of LGBTQ+ themes in kidlit: What I see is a focus on tolerance rather than a celebration of diversity.

I wan to go back to one of those: Our duty as queer artists is to resist. But also to create … new ways of looking at the world. It wasn’t addressed to me; in fact, pretty much none of what was covered in the day I attended (and I presume in the day I didn’t) wasn’t addressed to me, and that’s a big part of why I felt I needed to show up. As long as the world is made by and for the comfort cis/straight folks², it’s incumbent on those of us who are playing life on the lower difficulty settings to listen to those who are structurally disadvantaged.

If you think of yourself as a good person — and I’m going to wager most of us do — the absolute least thing you can do to make the world fairer and more equitable is to show up and listen when people say We’re being hurt. We’re being ignored. To take just a couple of hours and immerse yourself in a space where everything isn’t about you. To ensure that those who are trying to figure out their place in the world aren’t just speaking among themselves³.

And because this page is about webcomics, a note from the discussion on libraries.

Karen Green is a superstar in the comics/libraries world, having established the collection at Columbia University. I will listen to her talk on any panel, anywhere. And because she noted the unique challenges in properly archiving some of the more ephemeral forms of comics (‘zines, webcomics), she decided to do something about it. In conjunction with colleagues at the University of Chicago, and using technology from the Internet Archive, Green helped to establish the Global Webcomics Web Archive.

Got a webcomic that would otherwise be lost? Contact Green, and they can crawl it/preserve it. Not saying that maybe every webcomic that is ultimately dependent on Tumblr for its presence should do this but maybe I am. Also at risk for loss: e-file rewards. That PDF that’s unique to your Patreon or Kickstarter? Some day it won’t exist anymore. Green doesn’t have a good solution — if you wanted to send it to her, she’s got no place to keep it, and no right to circulate it. You could give her permission for circulation — say, after a certain date — but she’s still got no place to store it. Your physical copies, though, she’s happy to accept. Maybe you could print off and do a simple binding on a copy of that e-reward and let Green know you’d like to donate it?

Finally, because Green is one of the best people, she has a budget for acquisitions. I’d say make donations if you can (grab out a copy from a print run and send her an email to ask where to mail it), but point her at your store if that’s not possible for you. She also now has a line item in her budget for acquiring original comics art from the New York City community, so if you’re making stuff and you have an original that especially significant that you’d prefer to see preserved for the future? Contact her.

Karen Green’s email is klg19, which may be directed at Columbia, an educational institution of high repute. She’d love to hear from you.

Spam of the day:

You were recently chosen as a potential candidate to represent your professional community in the The 2019 Worldwide Association of Female Professionals We are please to inform you that your candidacy was formally approved Congratulations!

You have fundamentally misunderstood something about me, would-be identity thieves, but it’s an interesting coincidence that you came up today.

_______________
¹ Or as near as I could capture in the moment. All quotes are believed to be accurate.

² And let’s not fail to extend that to include white, male, wealthy.

³ The introductory/welcome session on day 1 was held in an auditorium with a posted capacity of 180, and I’d say it was about 70% full. The program for the conference listed 144 presenters. Granted, not everybody that was going to be at the conference was in the room for that session, but I’d say that not only do more straight folk need to show up to listen, more people who aren’t on the presenter list need to.

It’s still early days for the Q&CC (this was the third iteration), but you need to have a lot more people in the audience cohort than the presenter cohort to get the ideas really into circulation so the one community (queer) can effectively disperse ideas to the other (comics). Which again: straight people, but also all comics people regardless of orientation need to show up. It’s twenty bucks and some time.

Word is getting around on Twitter that at the Reuben Awards last night, the prizes for Online Comics — Short Form and Online Comics — Long Form were given to Cat And Girl by Dorothy Gambrell and Barbarous by Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh, respectively.

All three have been making comics on the web about forever, all three are at the top of their games, and all three are well deserved. Everybody feel good for Hirsh, Ota, and Gambrell!

A number of things happened while we’ve been going through the 2019 #ComicsCamp recap; for example, TCAF and a book that I loved, loved, loved released (review coming). A catch-up, then, for you.

There’s not one, not two, but three comics events take place in different corners of the continent starting tomorrow.

• Out in California, you’ve got NCSFest on the pier and surrounding public areas of Huntington Beach; it’ll be a Euro-style public festival, and feature the naming of this year’s Reuben Awards on Saturday. Follow the likes of Brad Guigar and Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett for news on the ground.
• In Vancouver, you’ve got VanCAF kicking off on Saturday, with appearances expected from Abby Howard, Alina Pete, Ben Passmore, Boya Sun, Catie Donnelly, Cloudscape Comics, Emily Carroll, Evan Dahm, Faith Erin Hicks, Gigi DG, Haley Boros, Heather Gilbraith, Kazu Kibuishi, Kel McDonald, Kory Bing, Lars Brown, Mariko Tamaki, Matthew Bogart, Molly Muldoon, Msassyk, Pia Guerra, Ryan North, Sam Logan, Sarah Becan, Sloane Leong, Steve LeCouilliard, Steve Rolston, Tony Cliff, and Zac Thompson. That’s just the name I recognized on a fast pass over the guest list, and that means there’s even more creators that I (and maybe you) don’t know yet and get to discover.
• And in New York tomorrow and Saturday, the biennial Queers & Comics Conference takes place at the School of Visual Arts. If you want to go to an event that’s all sessions, it’s US$20 to register for the whole shebang. Panelists on various topics include Mariko Tamaki (who may be jetlagged, so be kind to her in Vancouver), Magdalene Visaggio, Alison Wilgus, Beth Barnett, Phil Jimenez, Rachel Pollack, Karen Green, Josh Trujillo, Paige Braddock, Kori Michele Handwerker, Blue Delliquanti, Jay Edidin, Sophie Labelle, Sam Orchard, Gina Gagliano, Tony Breed, Bill Roundy, and a whole bunch of folks whose names I don’t recognize. I’m going at least on Friday. I may or may not be writing up my experience; I suspect that I’ll be shutting up, listening and pointing you to a bunch of people’s work.

Speaking of pointing to people’s work, there were creators I met at Camp¹ whose work is new to me, and you should check it out. In no particular order, then: Anastasia Longoria, AnneMarie Rogers, Michael DiPetrillo, Leila del Duca, Jessi Jordan, Colin Andersen, Beth Barnett, Megan Baehr, Ally Colthoff, Tori Rielly, Bekka Lyn, Payton F, The Giant Rat, and Lily Williams.

And if you read this page you damn well better know who Tillie Walden is, but her UK publisher has put together a starter kit of her tricky-to-find first three books (she was only able to sell me two of them in Alaska). Okay, might not want to spring for the shipping if you’re not already in the UK/Europe (on this side of the pond, there’s a limited supply at Retrofit), but I thought I should point out that she had books before Spinning and that you should get them.

That should do for now. I’ll try to get something together for tomorrow, but the Q&C Conference is going to take up pretty much the whole day.

Spam of the day:

Introducing the brand new Ho’oponopono Certification…Secrets that bring you to “zero.”

Oh yes, pair of white guys, please tell me more about how you have decided that you are the official deciders of how to properly enact a traditional Hawai’ian practice. That’s totally cool of you.

_______________
¹ You didn’t think I was really done just because I’d talked about everything that happened, did you?

And then #ComicsCamp was all done until next year; breakfast on Tuesday followed by an all-hands closeout session, followed by packing up and clearing out. Most everybody that attends is on a midday flight from Juneau to Seattle, and then onwards. Some few people will be on flights around 6:30 or 8:00pm, and a handfull of unfortunates¹ won’t fly out until 5:40am on Wednesday, generally because we’re making our way east across three or four time zones.

Those that need to be on the bus get their stuff together and say goodbye and help clean and pack up common resources until they have to leave. The dozen or so leftovers and locals stay until noon or so, sweeping and cleaning the main lodge and bathrooms, mopping the kitchen and packing out leftover food. By 1:00pm we’re checking into our hotel for the last night, and making plans for lunch and hang-outs in town.

The thing about 78 awesome people in close proximity is it can sometimes be hard to interact without a constantly-shifting population of participants, and a desire to pull ever more people in — it’s the usual convention Who’s going to dinner? problem writ somewhat smaller. But with a half-dozen people at The Rookery for lunch, or maybe ten at In Bocca Al Lupo for dinner (divided into tables of four), it’s easier to have a small conversation².

Thus, questions that have nothing to do with comics or creative careers come to the fore: If you won the fuck-off huge Powerball jackpot, where are you going first? If you were stuck on a desert island, what three books would you take? What one movie prop would you like more than any other?³.

Also, beers, and an invitation back to Rob & Pagan’s place to catch that week’s Game Of Thrones — the battle at Winterfell, y’all — with a big screen and an Aperol Spritz close to hand. If you ever have the opportunity to watch like your fifth GOT episode ever in a room full of enthusiasts and then have to go back to your hotel and immediately pack up your stuff to squeeze in 4.5 hours of sleep for a 4:00am taxi, I encourage it.

Multimedia:
Coincidentally, as I was wrapping up this year’s Camp recap, Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett shared his recollections of Camp, in the form of the latest Comic Lab podcast. I think that the infectious joy in his voice (which is hard to convey with words on the screen) is matched only by the infectious nature of his Ursaphobic Stan Lee impression (ditto). If I have to hear it in my brain until I die, so do you.

_______________
¹ Hi, how ya doin’?

² Or to share tater tots with those whose lunch order tragically does not include them.

³ My answers:

• Portland, to make legal arrangements with Katie Lane so I don’t fuck up my life.
• The Great Outdoor Fight, the collected Digger, and the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf.
• The dress jacket worn by Kenneth Branagh in his version of Much Ado About Nothing, which set off a lengthy discussion of the various versions of that play between me and Molly Muldoon, leaving Tillie Walden thoroughly bemused that we each knew so much of the text by heart.

  That Molly, though — she’s got opinions on Claudio (which I thoroughly agree with).

So there’s still some of #ComicsCamp Monday to discuss, and it all fits a theme, even if it didn’t all happen at the same time.

Kazu Kibuishi spoke about making a living at comics, and while he spoke about work process in terms similar to his public session on Saturday, it was more a conversation about finding what works for you. Remember the contrast between Kibuishi and Tillie Walden’s work styles? Let’s add a contradiction — in all that formal process, Kibuishi finds it helpful to draw at the speed that somebody would read the page.

Pages that are meant to make you linger and consider carefully? More time on that puppy. Middle of a fast action scene, flipping breathlessly? Speed it up. I’m tempted to call this a variation of Scott McCloud’s observation that manga panels have varying levels of detail to draw your eye to what’s important now (Understanding Comics, page 44 in my 25 year old copy).

Apart from that, Kibuishi shared that he’s putting more thought into character designs for future series, with an eye to make cosplay cooler and easier to build¹. Oh, and there was a great digression about the benefits of drawing to Dick Dale instrumentals, both because they’re super awesome, but also because of the wealth and breadth of inspirations behind them — Dale made surf guitar standards out of the Lebanese folksongs that his family taught him.

But if there was one thing that lay under Kibuishi’s talk (and multiple others) it’s that while he can discuss what works for him (process, satisfaction, definition of success), it’s different for everybody. Remember the session back on Sunday about financial stability? After that one, posterboard-sized sheets started appearing in the main lodge, each bearing an anonymous pie chart indicating sources of income. Some of them look vaguely similar, some have scant resemblance to most others, a few are gonzo-unique outliers. But no two are the same, and arguably no one is better than any other, even if each creator who shared their experience probably wants to change some things about their balance.

Let’s get back to that commonality thought for a moment — everybody’s experience is in some ways similar, and in other ways utterly unique. The act of working, for most cartoonists, in isolation can make it seem even more unique, especially when the doubts kick in. But when you look at the experiences of peers, and near-peers, and will-be-peers, the journeys to finding that unique set of success conditions start to look familiar. And during the secret session, that point was made again.

I’m being coy, so forgive me. You may recall that Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett made a film about comic strips, and the transition from the newspaper page to webcomics. It’s pretty neat. That movie is about 90 minutes long, and it’s built from about 300 hours of interviews, including with some of the biggest names of comic strips that you love with all your heart. There’s exabytes of stuff that didn’t make it into the film, and LArDK shared some of it. I’m not mentioning names because while it was judged that this likely wouldn’t cause the creator in question any distress, it’s also not meant for mass consumption. But I will share this:

Every creator, no matter how famous, also needs to hear from time to time that their work had an impact on readers. Every creator, no matter how successful, needs that reassurance that they’re doing good work.

Speaking of universality, after dinner on Monday night the question came up — in the same vein as the pie charts indicating proportions of income sources, could there be a report on the ranges of income? A bit of brainstorming among LArDK, David Malki !, and Ryan North determined there could be an income band axis, a years as a cartoonist axis, and some color coding to determine satisfaction². Brio supervised from the couch.

The survey sheet remained up until after breakfast on Tuesday morning, and people added their input. In some respects, no surprises — people at comics as career for a short period of time reported income clustered at the bottom of the range, and the top end was reserved for long-time vets. After about five years, the entire range of income was represented, and after ten years the satisfaction score was mostly positive — either because regardless of income, people found ways of working they enjoyed³, or those who weren’t satisfied with comics as a career mostly self-selected out before spending a decade of their life at it.

I suspect that if you put the easel up with the same income survey today and magically gathered all the same Campers to add their responses, there would be differences up and down the sheet, of only because much of the response came as the booze table was being steadily worked down so there would be less to pack up on the morrow. For my part, I did my traditional Create A Camp-Commemorating Cocktail duty, and came up with a tasty concoction that was eventually named for Brio:

2 oz Laird’s applejack
0.5 oz Aperol
0.25 oz simple syrup
0.25 oz St Germaine
dash aromatic bitters
dash citrus bitters
dash ginger bitters

Muddle one wedge of lemon and one wedge of lime to liquid ingredients. Shake over ice, strain, and drink carefully, musing on how we’re all figuring out our way in the world.

Pictures:
Even if you can’t see all the writing, you can probably see no two pie charts are quite like each other. Bonus views of the dioramas from Saturday night.

Income vs time vs satisfaction, with about 55% of Campers responding. Still not enough for real statistical significance, but enough to get the idea — you’re not the only one trying to figure this shit out.

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¹ The result, he said, of seeing an Amulet cosplayer with an intricate, complicated, difficult build of a costume and realizing that if he’d made the character a bit more work on his end, it would have made things much easier for the fan.

² I helped with the layout a little, and because I’m a stickler for such things, I asked if the income numbers were constant dollars and if they should account for US/Canadian exchange rates. However, I did not contribute data to either the income survey or the pie chart collection. For starters, my pie chart would look like a circle with one color for DAY JOB.

³ Plus, not everybody is trying to make comics their sole gig.

Congratulations, Kate and Morgan. We love you.

One of the things that I find most valuable about #ComicsCamp is that there’s a degree of honesty, of willing vulnerability that quickly becomes a cultural norm; you start out meeting strangers¹ and a couple of days later you’re sitting on a couch sharing your deepest insecurities about your career, artistic evolution, and/or life. In a couple of instances, you talk about them in a room of a couple dozen of your new best friends, simultaneously looking for and providing reassurance that it’s gonna be okay.

There’s a lot of raw edges at times, trying to find walking the line between feeling exposed for becoming totally emotional, and feeling comforted that everybody there has your back. And because of that, there’s an agreement in the culture of Camp, that we may talk about what was said, but not who said it or under what circumstances², I am in a couple of cases not even going to mention who was taking the lead in sessions. Here, then, is how Monday shook out:

Lot of open space during this day, time to mess around in impromptu groups and make it up as you go along.

• Scott C provided loose direction to three round tables of artists, each getting five minutes to draw another person before rotating to the next person at the table; after a while the tables were shuffled, and in the end you got a bunch of new portraits of yourself. I can’t draw for crap³ but I love watching it happen. Elsewhere, the mysteries of Clip Studio were deciphered by Gale Galligan and Lucas Elliott, and Alison Wilgus talked about creative collaboration, something she has a bit of experience with.
• David Malki ! is known for a bunch of things, but at Camp he’s known primarily for Always Doing A Bit With [Los Angeles resident Dave] Kellett. Are Dave and Dave being serious right now? was asked with increasing frequency as the weekend progressed. Nah, it’s a bit was the invariable response. It was a relentless iteration of voices and premises, polishing the humor ever finer until it shone like a laugh-chuckle diamond⁴.

  But he was also known for boardgaming, playing everything with cheerful ruthlessness (or possibly ruthless cheerfulness), and designing new games throughout the weekend and at the Jam. If you see him, ask him how to play Mine, which features tension and splodey things.

• Jen Wang knows a thing or two about organizing comics events, what with being one of the founders of Comic Arts LA. Pat and Aaron put one this one-day con and camping event that you may have heard of. Between the three of them, there’s a mountain of event planning experience, and if you get the chance to hear any of them opine on the topic, I urge you to take advantage.

The first of the big raw emotion sessions dealt with the serious condition of career burnout — there’s some data I’ll share later on about how folks in the various stages of their comics careers view success — and the feelings that Nothing Is Working Like It Should and This Sucks and the very real possibility of those mutating into I Suck. Folks from all ends and durations of comics careers contributed to how they experienced and dealt with feelings of burnout, and let me assure you — everybody feels those creative doubts, everybody is subject to imposter syndrome. Some thoughts, without names:

Because I put myself on the page, I have to figure out how to stay safe inside.

Best advice I ever received: Don’t let being an author take over from being a writer.

When caught up in [the work] I felt like I gave my life and soul and there was no way to stop.

I’ve had a self-made career, in the self-published, self-promoted space. But there’s not a [contract] that obligates me to that.

Everything I was asked to do, I said yes.

To do this, you have to ask others — family — to sacrifice.

I want to be able to maintain a relationship with my work that’s healthy.

There’s more (and plenty of crossover with the other big raw emotion session that afternoon, which was focused on self care in all aspects of life): family and friends that don’t understand the sheer amount of work that’s involved, even if you can do it on the sofa; money and how to keep it from interfering in personal relationships⁵; how to keep the career dream from colliding with the family/friends/relationship dreams.

My contribution to these discussions is pretty constant, and it comes from a place about as far as you can get from creating comics, and it’s something I want to repeat for everybody. As you probably know from reading this page, I’m an Emergency Medical Technician, and in my spare time I’m Deputy Chief of Operations for my town’s EMS agency. I also teach lil’ baby EMTs how not to kill their patients. The first thing — literally, the very first thing — that we teach lil’ baby EMTs is a simple three-word mantra:

I’m Number One.

When I roll up onto the scene of a horrific accident, patient(s) on the verge of death, onlookers everywhere, emergency apparatus hopefully screening me from the highway traffic whizzing by with too little attention paid? The most important person on that scene is me. In all circumstances, no matter what, I go home safe and whole⁶.

Second most important person? My partner. I will pull her back out of the way of a speeding car; I will not throw myself into her, knocking her free of the speeding death vehicle and take the impact myself⁷. Next? Everybody on that scene that is not already sick or injured. Don’t make more patients.

The actual person we’re called to help? They come last.

The goal is that the entire population of people in and around my response scene is no worse off than if I’d never showed up. I can only make things better for the initial patient if I (and my partner) can work, and nobody else gets added to the list of patients. If keeping everybody safe means that we can’t get to that patient and they die on scene? That’s too bad, and simultaneously the best possible outcome⁸.

There’s a reason why that emergency information card in the plane’s seat pocket tells you to secure your own mask before attempting to help others. If you aren’t able to protect yourself, you won’t be in a position to help anybody else, and now you’ve got more people damaged or dead. People will tell you you’re being selfish, but it is absolutely true — you must take care of yourself first.

Anyway. There was an uncertain laugh when I shared my screw everybody else, I’m going home alive rule, but I think the context — not a creator, but a representative of your audience — as giving permission for everybody to take a step back and take care of yourself first. We’ll be here when you’ve got something ready for us at your pace. You have to set boundaries, you have to be able to say no, you have to adopt a pace of work that will not injure you, physically or emotionally. Success can’t require sacrificing your life and soul.

More on how to reach that success, and what it looks like, tomorrow.

Pictures:
Up top, two portraits of the blogger with moustache. Lucas Elliott wasn’t at the Draw Each Other session, as he was presenting elsewhere at the same time; it didn’t stop him from doing a bunch of quick portraits during the remainder of Camp, including one of me. Shing Yin Khor did the other, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, delicate and perfect. Coincidentally, they are two of the finest cabinmates you could ever ask for.

The cabin where the the Burnout and Hard Stuff sessions were being held featured a loft. Not content merely being a giant among men Ryan North climbed the ladder and loomed even larger over we tiny creatures below. He’s so tall, it’s impossible to get all of him in focus at once.

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¹ Sometimes very strange.

² Barring explicit permission, which I have chosen not to ask for.

³ Give me a pair of drafting triangles and a circle template, and I’ll make circuit diagrams so beautifully symmetric it’ll make your eyes water, but that’s not what we’re talking about here, is it?

⁴ Either that, or by the 57th iteration, anything (no matter how stupid) is hilarious.

⁵ Especially in two-creative-career relationships. If you’ve never heard LArDK talk about the balance he and his wife struck to develop both of their careers without risking financial ruin, dig through the recent archives of Comic Lab.

⁶ I will admit for myself one exception to this rule: if there is a cadet on my crew, I have promised their parents that I will bring them home safe and whole. They’re number one-half.

⁷ There is a terrible sort of calculus in this logic. If my ambulance is hit by an idiot turning left through a red light, injuring me and my partner? It takes four additional crews to deal with that situation: one to help me and my partner, one to help the idiot that hit us, one to help the patient we were originally dispatched to, and one to replace us until we’re able to ride again. This self-protection is doctrine because my presence is a force multiplier for the general health level of my service territory.

⁸ Remember the tiger that got out at the San Francisco zoo a dozen years back and killed/injured multiple people? At one point on the security cameras, an ambulance can be seen coming up to where a person — maybe still alive — is laying in the road, and the crew doesn’t get out to render aid. They were excoriated as cowards for not rushing out into the open, not knowing where the tiger was, with nothing to defend themselves but a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff.

They did the right thing. EMS personnel are more poorly paid than you realize, not that any salary is sufficient to require tiger suicide as a job function. I’m a volunteer, and I sure as fuck am not getting killed to satisfy anybody with an opinion about my bravery for free.