how_i_do_things_i_dont_know_how

(Originally published November 21, 2016)

Today, November 21st, 2016, marks the release of my 200th CritelliComedy Comix strip! That milestone is noteworthy because I now have literally hundreds of pieces of evidence that you don't need to know what you're doing in order to do it.

HOW IT BEGAN

CritelliComedyComix #1 was drawn June 2nd, 2015, the same day my girlfriend (now fiancée) Jill sent me a link to an open call for professional cartoonists. I don’t know why she did - I didn’t draw comic strips back then - but because she did, I drew and posted this:

13 people LIKED it, so I drew two more that week, including this one:

The following week I wanted to do more, but I didn’t have any ideas, so I borrowed a standup routine I’d never gotten to work...

...And it worked! 9 more LIKES and 2 comments: "Don't stop this effort" and "I LOVE these."

After three weeks, a friend of a friend, annoyed, asked my friend, “How does Mike just DO stuff?”

How do I do stuff? A magician never reveals his secrets.

But I'm no magician...

#1 - IF YOU SEE SOMETHING AND SAY, “I COULD DO THAT,” THEN DO IT IMMEDIATELY

When I was a kid I read comic strip books. (Not “comic books,” books of newspaper cartoons. I actually hate “comic books,” which makes my other decision to live in LA and work in film seem awfully stupid now.) My favorites were Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, Dilbert, and, later, Perry Bible Fellowship.

I'd never in my life attempted to draw my own comics, but I’d read so many over the years that when the "casting call" came, the form felt familiar enough to audition on the spot.

#2 - THE FIRST FEW TIMES, YOU WON'T BE GOOD, SO ENJOY BEING BAD

Rather than worry about embarrassing myself when trying something new, I always start by trying to do the worst thing I possibly can.

CritelliComedy.com is a domain I’ve owned since my early 20s. Formerly an audio standup hosting site, a joke-a-day compilation, a short essay blog, and a video link dump, I kept my “brand” in the title and added “Comix” with an “X” because it suggested the corniest, popsicle-stick-in-a-Cracker-Jack-box style of humor. I was even tempted to do CritelliComedy Comix with “K”s instead of “C”s, a la the classic strip “Krazy Kat"...

...But three "K"s is the least funny number of "K"s…

To make my strips "worse," I chose to underline random words vigorously and include excessive, senseless profanity. Behold my second strip (not posted to Facebook for obvious reasons):

#3 - YOU DON'T HAVE TO PLAN AHEAD. JUST FIX PROBLEMS AS THEY COME UP

If you post horizontal images on Facebook, they format small. If you post horizontal images via Tumblr links to Facebook, it crops out part of the image. But if you post square images, it shows the whole thing.

Once I figured that out, I went from stuff that looked like this...

...To this:

Going square allowed me to post on Instagram unedited, and it fit my unusual 2-panel format, so it became the new default overnight. Also, since people were now going to see my strips more easily, and I’d just accepted Facebook friend requests from both my mom and dad, I eliminated all the profanity.

Except for this last one:

You may be wondering, Where did the text on the sides come from?

The live variety show I’d been producing, Mike Critelli’s Cavern of Whimsy, featured pen-drawn posters by me, with hand-lettered text I was more than happy to steal and reuse:

Again, you may be wondering, You said you don't know what you're doing, but those poster portraits prove you're pretty good at drawing!

Yes and no.

As with the comic strips, I learned to draw posters by drawing posters. My friends Mike Trehy and Matt Noonan of "Clyde McFly"/"Well Done" performed at my last show on May 4th, 2016...

...But they also performed a year earlier, at my first. Tell me if this looks like I know what I’m doing:

#4 - YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE COMPETENT TO GET STARTED, OR EVEN TO KEEP GOING

When I drew CritelliComedy Comix #1, I didn't know how to “cartoon”...

...And I still don’t.

Any cartoonist worth her salt can draw characters from different angles with facial expressions appropriate for the situation.

Me? I type whatever I want to draw into Google (in this case, “people talking”)...

...And then I copy it as well as I can, which is very poorly, so no one can identify where it came from:

If you’re wondering why a lot of my comic strip characters wear business suits...

...It’s because most digital stock photography is of people wearing business suits:

And if you’re wondering why I use a lot of patterns, it’s because I sometimes forget to make people’s faces look different, but you still need to be able to tell them apart:

#5 - DON'T FORCE IT. MAKE WHAT YOU’RE DOING FIT INTO YOUR LIFE AS-IS

For many months I couldn’t do standup comedy because I was driving for Lyft full-time, and most comedy open mics happen during rush hour when fares and demand are high. But Comix were something I could draw between rides, by myself. I even learned how to measure my panels’ height and width using only my pen as a reference, because I kept forgetting to leave a ruler in my car.

(Vertically, my panels run from the base of the pen to the “i” in BiC. Horizontally, from the base of the pen to near where the ink stops.)

My early strips were more visually inventive because I'd sometimes have to wait up to 45 minutes between rides, stuck in some random district of Los Angeles with nothing to do but draw:

Later, when I stopped driving for Lyft and Uber, the strips got simpler because I didn't have as much time to kill:

My drawings and text are both sloppy because I do them as quickly as possible, but they’re even sloppier than you probably realize. Here’s a raw, unedited scan of a comic strip from my notebook:

See how I misspell words while thinking of the next word to write? Leave smudges on the page? Make people’s eyes the wrong size?

And for real proof I truly cannot cartoon, here are three different versions of me attempting to draw myself...

...Whereas, in real life, I tend to look exactly the same most days.

#6 - KEEP DOING WHATEVER YOU’RE DOING UNTIL BOTH OF YOU TRANSFORM

There’s value in consistency. Pure endurance makes the highs and lows blend together over time. I draw three days a week, every week. I’ve only taken one extended break, after this one:

After posting that, I left for a 3-day weekend, but couldn’t get a third comic out by end of day Friday. At the time, I was releasing them at random times, but 3-per-week was always the rule. OCD-style, I “broke my rule,” so I quit.

Fortunately, in the interim, enough people said they missed my Comix - people who didn’t LIKE them on social media but had apparently been lurking and enjoying them "on the DL” - that I decided to start again:

The break helped. I did fewer jokey-jokes and more social commentary. I also committed to a firm Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule - not just 3x weekly, whenever I came up with an idea - and never quit again.

I’ve wanted to, though. Many times.

Whether by my Facebook friends’ Comix Fatigue or the sour taste of several downer entries in a row, I’d sometimes get 1 LIKE on Facebook (from Jill) and feel depressed all afternoon, sometimes for five or six Comix straight, up to two full weeks.

Enough non-responses, though, and you stop caring, which is good. You also stop trying to chase the highs of your best ones, to imitate what seems to have been popular before. That’s good too. If you do something every other day for a full year (as I now have since my hiatus last December), it's like a diary. Your work grows with you. That’s how I went from simple misdirection jokes with lots of profanity...

...To small, human-scale tragedies...

...To philosophical musings...

...To reflections on personal milestones:

#7 - THE RIGHT THING FOR YOU IS THE THING YOU DON'T THINK ABOUT

When I started CritelliComedy Comix, I didn’t plan to draw 200. I didn’t think about what I was doing at all until I’d been drawing them for about three weeks (the shortest length of time required to develop a habit, by the way.) After the fact, the markers were obvious:

1. I could come up with simple jokes easily, a la standup comedy and Twitter, but...

2. A lot of my jokes have always been situational, descriptions of brief scenes or interactions, because...

3. I prefer to write dialogue and characters, having started as a playwright and then a screenwriter. Also...

4. I’d been drawing people's faces for Mike Critelli's Cavern of Whimsy for a full year, and loving it. Also...

5. I grew up enjoying newspaper comic strips, which must've stuck with me even though I hadn’t followed one in 10 years.

That’s why I draw Comix. 99% of the big plans, projects, and collaborations I’ve meticulously planned in advance have gone nowhere, and yet I keep drawing Comix.

SHOULD YOU DRAW COMIX TOO?

No. Unless you want to.

Fortunately, these tips also work for just about anything else.