A Decade of Autobio Comics

I started rambling on Twitter last night and wrote the following as way too many tweets. Posting it here because WHY NOT. #ItsSoHardToBeAnArtist #BackOfHandToForehead ------------------ Looking over the inventory we have left of the DAR! books, just down to several boxes of each. I think I'm gunna have a final "get 'em while you can!" sale and then discontinue selling them online, sell the remaining copies at cons. Ideally I'd like to collect everything into one giant uber book, but I've got so much going on that I don't know when I can make it happen. If 20-year-old me could have seen that 31-year-old me would still be selling actual BOOKS with ISBN numbers of my inane journal scribblings... The first thing cartoonists always ask me is how to get a bigger audience, how to get people reading their stuff. It's like DUDE, enjoy your anonymity while you have it! Get all your stupid and bad comics out of your system now while no one's watching! Enjoy figuring out how you tell tell stories. Make totally pointless, self-indulgent work. Find your voice while no one's paying attention. Because then when people do notice you, you're not given any leeway. You've got standards you have to live up to, judgement to shoulder. Once people start paying attention and ripping you to shreds for every single word and line you make, creating is not so spontaneous anymore. You don't just BAM make a comic, you've gotta analyze every possible angle it could get attacked from and decide in advance if it's worth it. I don't know where I'm going with this. 20-year-old me just never would have imagined that people would buy collections of my angsty scribbles a decade later. I guess that's why I'm ok with letting the DAR! books go out of print for a while. My work is so intentional and thought-out now, but back then I was just farting out comics without any forethought at all. Just: BAM! I had a thought? MAKE IT A COMIC. It's kind of a relief to think that the 20-year-old version of myself can go in hibernation for a while and just let me be a 31-year-old now. The nice thing about keeping a journal webcomic is that you have this specific time of your life frozen in amber. The bad thing about keeping a journal webcomic is that YOUR DUMBASS KID SELF IS FOREVER PRESERVED IN AMBER FOR ALL TO SEE 4 EVER. I'm at the very least grateful that my pre-teen and (gulp) pre-adolescent garbage isn't online. I find twelve-year-olds getting into fights on Instagram and I'm like THIS IS BEING PRESERVED FOR EVERRRRRRRRRR. Anyway, so I guess this is my unplanned, soft announcement that I'm discontinuing online DAR! book sales Sept 30th http://erikamoen.myshopify.com/