Paying Too Much Attention: Doing It Yourself

There are a lot of ideas out there. People are thinking all the time, and it isn't always about whether their jeans are too saggy in the butt, or if their breath smells, or if maybe one eye is slightly bigger (or slightly squintier) than the other. Those are very real concerns, yes, and mostly because these Smell Factories called bodies carry our minds around all day and night. Eventually we learn to curb these worries, and think about something outside of ourselves, something Other. When that happens the possibilities are only limited by where we're willing to let our heads go.

My head has continually gone toward the land of fiction for a while now. It's a great big universe where anything can happen, and usually does. I could cut this up into little finer slices of existence, but seriously, it is just so huge that I would be putting too fine a point on it. Fiction allows us to describe our lives (individual or collective) by talking about ANYTHING.

Fiction isn't constrained to prose, and realistically it isn't even confined within the realm of the written word. I certainly don't think that all fiction is art, but that's the great thing, isn't it? The subjective nature of art allows all of us to see something different in whatever form we're enjoying; or hating, consuming, watching, reading, just pick a verb and enter it here and you are taking part in the freaking amazing world of art.

I'm not trying to figure out what is or isn't art. There is no definitive answer there, at least not one that isn't completely colored by opinion. What I'm thinking about is the idea I mentioned earlier, at the beginning of all this: the astronomical amount of ideas and the amount of people having them. Not everyone is concerned with fiction, though, so that original number (which really only exists as a symbol) can be decreased. Now we're dealing with a more manageable amount of thinkers. Still though, everyone who has thoughts about fiction does not have the desire to create more, so again, we can subtract. It's a smaller amount gone, however, because if you are a reader - specifically of comic books - the chances are somewhat high you'll want to create what you enjoy. I would never say the comic book world is filled with people aching to create the art they love, more so than any other artistic field, but it probably wouldn't be too hard to convince me.

I read comics. I want to make comics. More specifically, write them. I've been working at it for a while now, and the amount of people (fellow comic readers) I've met who have ideas for comics is large. If looked at one way, this means the odds of becoming a comic book writer (or artist, inker, letterer, editor, etc.) are constantly shifting, steadily closing in to suffocate. Another way to look at it is that with more ideas comes more yearning for creation. So if cut up into two very rigid categories, we're dealing with either being disheartened or inspired.

Those aren't the only two options, obviously. One of them is incredibly negative, and the other can easily come off as arrogant or pretentious. It's possible to avoid falling into these traps (I think doctors call them emotions), and go after what you want regardless of the bullshit known as "the odds." No one can stop you from making comics. People can hurt you, but they can help you too, and the latter is hard to remember occasionally. One place that made me realize I haven't tried hard enough to make comics was Kickstarter. It's an amazing place, a freaking portal of inspiration. I found a comic project on there which clicked my head-gears over into a configuration where the thought of "I'm going to do this" wasn't so hard to come by. I didn't decide to start a Kickstarter project, but I did decide that putting together a small comic is something I'm completely capable of, and immensely passionate about.

Even if I'm not getting paid to do it, I feel like I have to make comics. I replace all my worries about whether my jeans are the right shade of denim for my outfit with thoughts about comics. If I'm not making a comic of some kind, then I'm wasting my time. So I'm going to put together a comic, and document the process on here.  Maybe no one will see it, maybe I'll show it to everyone because I took something out of my head and made it into something. It might suck. It might be mediocre. It might even be good. But it will definitely be.