why won't you stop??

why won't you stop??

(Originally published July 13, 2017)

If 200 CritelliComedy Comix led to a piece about creative productivity, 300 Comix was meant to be the finale. That's what I told people leading up to #300, yet #301 is set for tomorrow, and I still don’t plan on stopping.

"Why not?" you ask. "WHY WON'T YOU STOP??"

Well...

#1 - VOLUME AND MEMORY

Life moves faster the longer you live. Going from 30 to 31 doesn't weigh the same as turning 4, and that same principle goes for anything measurable by volume.

Harper Lee published one book in her lifetime, To Kill A Mockingbird (and Go Set A Watchman posthumously, a never-intended-to-be-published rough draft of... To Kill A Mockingbird). That single, solitary, perfect book and its overwhelming popularity muscled out any other creative expression for the rest of Lee's life.

Meanwhile, Stephen King has 56 novels and counting, and I would guess the Stephen King of today couldn't recall all the side plots of It or tell you the full names of all the characters in Christine (published April 1983). Even though he spent months crafting those details, that was 35 years ago. A featured Amazon reviewer places it in his Top 10 all time, though it would be a minor footnote for its author. How could it not be? When that much volume fills the space between past and present, memories distort accordingly.

Whenever someone tells me their favorite "Comix" strip, I pause, because after 300 they're each only vaguely familiar. The more you produce, the less any individual thing matters... to you. Not necessarily to others.

When I was 17, the song that inspired me to learn guitar was "Medellia of the Gray Skies" by the Smashing Pumpkins, a rare B-side I found on Napster. Not only did I learn guitar, I wrote and recorded all my music on the same guitar I used to figure out how to play that specific song. 

A week ago I saw a Spin article called "Every Smashing Pumpkins Song, Ranked." It turns out there were 318 total Smashing Pumpkins songs as of 2015 — Billy Corgan was Stephen-King-level-prolific — of which "Medellia of the Gray Skies" was ranked #220. It doesn't even have a write-up next to its name, which is spelled wrong in the article ("Medellia of the Graay Skies"). Someone in the comments section points this error out, but it's not important enough for Spin to fix it. 

That's the song that personally inspired me to play guitar. (And it probably is their 220th best song.)

#2 - TIME

The things you make marks the time in which you made it, and solves for some of those volume-induced memory gaps. The period between #200 and #300 had huge ups and downs, the high note being my wedding…

…which took place barely a month after the passing of a dear family member and friend, Kevin, who loosely inspired this first comic and directly inspired the second...

...I crafted that one right after I heard the news. In the days and weeks that followed, I heard from many who knew Kevin that they appreciated my words. Without my “Comix,” I would never have shared them publicly.

For that alone, this is worth doing. That's why art exists.

(Good art, I mean.)

#3 - BOREDOM

Don't kid yourself: drawing three "Comix" a week, every week, is monotonous. But that's good. Infinite-term commitments are useful for impatient types. If you force yourself to stick to something, you will get tired of it. Then, unless you're a real masochist, you will make it better. You have to.

You can't help but get better, because what's the alternative?

You get more ambitious, because you've already put down the first ideas that came into your head, so new ideas crowd in. Why else would I attempt such two-panels topics as the pitfalls of democracy...

…Conformity…

…Depression…

…Men’s haircuts…

…and the MEANING OF LIFE…

The “Meaning of Life” theme showed up more and more when the finish line (#300) was in sight, but massive topics are my stock in trade. Almost half my Comix are about human stupidity. Not the everyday foibles, but the supreme illusions that, left unchecked, destroy lives:

#4 - INNOVATION

There are too many comics made for the web — not including those that start in print — already.

Of those I follow personally, @nathanwpyle is charming...

...@safelyendangered is hilarious...

...@theawkwardyeti is a brilliant concept executed without profanity...

...@fowllanguagecomics is a brilliant concept with lots of profanity...

...@catanacomics documents a young couple unironically in love...

...and @adamtots seems to be everywhere, all the time.

My Comix are less pretty than those I admire, and also 80% of comics produced anywhere. On the far opposite end, there are comics designed to be aggressively horrible to look at, as is their aim, and they achieve those goals with efficiency, leaving me somewhere in the middle-bottom as first impressions go.

If you start from nothing as I did — no experience of any kind — you must reckon with the fact that you're competing with people who have more experience, and will always have more experience, unless they retire. 

So don't play that game. Don't compete on those terms. Do something else.

For example, I find the prevailing attitudes of the day, the ones that reliably get clicks and LIKES, shallow and contradictory. It’s fun to see whose opinions are overly entrenched, and try to piss those people off:

Months before the 2016 Election, which Hillary Clinton was supposed to win in a landslide, I made this:

And 'lest you think I'm a Trump fan, I also made this:

Consider "The Adjacent Possible," from Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson. Innovation can't make great leaps out of nowhere, but from a given set of nearby possibilities. The further you go, the more you see.

Two easy examples…

EXHIBIT A: My other Instagram obsession is photographing our dog Daisy. People tell me I should do more strips focused on Daisy, a la Peanuts, and I occasionally I do:

But I needed something more. On our Honeymoon, I found a pocket children's book about a dog named Finse...

...Which I bought to learn how to draw dogs from every angle...

...By ripping off that book's cover lining illustrations shot for shot:

EXHIBIT B: While visiting my parents in mid-June, I performed standup comedy one night in New York after many years off. During my days, I browsed my childhood bedroom shelf and reread Shel Silverstein’s ABZ Book, a twisted early "not for children children's book" from the poet behind The Giving Tree.

A thought arose. What if I wrote out my standup like free-verse poetry, illustrating and formatting it like my Comix? That combination (standup comedy, illustration, poetry) would be truly unique, and set me apart from an impossibly competitive field that just does just one or two of those things very, very well.

Less than two weeks later, I banged out two prototypes…

The response? Good enough! More “Sunday Stripz” to come someday!!

And finally, there’s...

#5 - MOMENTUM

We aren't meant to do everything at once. Our brains only keep that which is useful. When you stop doing things for too long, they tend to end permanently whether you like it or not. Who you are becomes who you were.

I wrote my old stories in the two years before I turned 25. Beings Worthy of Respect was a massive weekly writing/directing/editing commitment that lasted half a year and then never again. Micklem’s Hardware was four episodes filmed in a one day marathon, with future installments planned that never came to be. My music poured out of me when I practiced guitar and piano daily. Now I don't, and it doesn't.

I could stop drawing Comix, but why? The ideas keep coming, as they have from the start. Each takes two hours at most, as little as 30 minutes if I’m in a pinch. If nothing's stopping me except the number 300, why stop now??