Excuses & Soul-Baring & New Goals for a New Decade

Well, it’s time for another “reflections on the past year/thoughts on the new one” blog post! Actually, it’s well past time, but I’ve kind of been super busy lately with website and computer stuff. Which, ironically, is the one of the main things this blog needs to talk about. Also, I maaaay have thrown out the first draft of this blog for being too mopey and depressing. That’s a promising note to start off with, isn’t it? So let’s dive right in! 

Obviously, the big story as we head into the new decade is what went down right at the end of the previous one. If you haven’t already heard, or only caught a few scattered bits, here’s the short (-ish) version:  SmackJeeves, the host of all my comic stuff for the better part of ten years, announced out of nowhere late November that they were drastically overhauling the entire site. Basically, it switched from being a host for WEBSITES that needed specifically webcomic-oriented tools over to being an APP that hosts comics for mobile devices. All the custom site layouts were streamlined into a single template, and the ability to include any additional links or buttons was removed. So, little things like online stores or ad boxes or just about anything else that allows the artists to monetize their comics pretty much ground to a halt. Needless to say, this meant SmackJeeves was no longer meeting my needs as a host, and that was the final push I needed to do something I’ve talked about doing for ages: setting up my own websites.

Of course, this just had to happen at about THE worst time possible. I’d just started a new set of Conventional Wisdom comics, and a full month of daily Far Out There Christmas comics were at the top of the queue as well. Thanks to all that distraction, the already arduous task of setting up three new websites (one for Conventional Wisdom, one for Far Out There, and a personal homepage at “blitzthecomicguy.com”) and porting over ten years of content across from the old sites has taken even longer than it otherwise would have. It’s been over a month now, and I’ve still only just scratched the surface. As a result, regular Far Out There updates have gone on hiatus while I focus on the rebuilding process, and Conventional Wisdom’s current series on NC Comicon 2019 will keep coming out after I’ve already been to Ichibancon 2020. Oh, and I’m also getting A NEW COMPUTER on top of all this, so I’m having to set all THAT malarkey up and learn a whole new set of programs and interfaces AT THE SAME TIME and the rest of those chores. Everything is a mess. All time tables are out the window. Dogs and cats living together. MASS HYSTERIA.

And that doesn’t even get into the big story of the OTHER eleven months of 2019… namely the fact that there WAS no story. Not much of anything. Conventional Wisdom’s updates took longer and longer to come out, and that’s after I dropped pretty much all of the established major cons from the schedule. Far Out There’s schedule slip got so bad that I just straight up started missing days in the later stretch of 2019. And let’s not even get STARTED on how little material has come out of Patreon this year, where nearly every one of those projects is on “unannounced hiatus.” What the heck happened? I can’t blame SmackJeeves for the other five-sixths of 2019, let alone the previous years’ delays. Why does it seem like I’ve been dedicating myself to doing anything BUT drawing cartoons?

Well… I kinda was.

Those of you with long memories may recall me talking about this before, but I’ve honestly been struggling with burnout and lack of motivation for a while now. On Far Out There’s side of things, I’ve been working on that comic for nearly twelve straight years, with no breaks longer than a few days. That’s a looooong time to do the same grind over and over, and eventually the brain starts recoiling and looking for escape, even if it’s from a thing you still WANT to do. It’s just a reflex reaction to tedium. And, of course, the harder one tries to force oneself to do that thing, the stronger the reflex to resist doing it. I got locked in the feedback loop of taking longer and longer to get pages done, which just made me force myself harder to get more done, which made the next one take even longer, and so forth. As for Conventional Wisdom… well, I’ve REALLY talked about this before, so I’ll try to be brief. Conventional Wisdom was born of a young anime geek’s excitement over finding an entire community based around his new interest. The whole creative process was fueled by that innocent excitement over the convention scene. As years have passed, mounting cynicism and bad experiences have severely dampened that excitement, to the point that I honestly don’t like being at cons that much, ESPECIALLY as the physical and financial challenge of traveling to bigger ones gets worse and worse. I mean, cons are still a fascinating spectacle, there’s tons of material to be wrung out of them, and it still seems like there’s some kind of niche for a comic like Conventional Wisdom to fill. Nevertheless, that youthful excitement has been gone for a LONG time, and without it, the process of going to cons and documenting them has become more of a chore, and an exhausting one at that.

If you actually do remember my previous rambles on this topic, you may recall me talking about how I’ve developed some counterproductive habits over the years: Hunkering down so hard to work on my own stuff that I don’t have time to take in other works that inspired me in the first place. Limiting the media I DO take in to stuff I can digest very casually, even if it doesn’t feed any creative impulses. Cutting myself off from things I used to like because of bad memories or sheer boredom attached to it. Only ever drawing work-related stuff, until the other portions of my creative centers start to atrophy. Writing grammatically unsound strings of sentence fragments. And so on. I’ve repeatedly said I was going to make big changes to my daily routine to combat these tendencies, but clearly none of it stuck. There’s all sorts of psychological whathaveyou regarding the reasons; a raging alcoholic can’t just snap his fingers and announce “Okay, I’m not gonna drink anymore!” after all. Well, okay, he CAN, but it won’t just work out immediately on the strength of that single moment of clarity. And while I don’t claim to have the whole thing figured out yet, I HAVE had an epiphany over the past few weeks that may be really important to breaking out of this cycle. And wouldn’t you know, it was a direct result of the whole SmackJeeves debacle.

If you’d asked me what my goals were back when I started Far Out There and Conventional Wisdom (and people did), I’d have told you I didn’t really have any beyond “get better at drawing” and “actually make some money off of this.” How exactly I reached those points, what might change along the way, and how the final product would differ from what I’d started with didn’t really matter. I wasn’t aiming to get hired by some bigger company or start my own indie comic empire or anything in between, specifically speaking.  I was just gonna keep doing what I was doing, and whatever happened would happen. That’s what I would SAY, and I genuinely believed it was true. But the human brain is a funny thing, and often it can be profoundly out of touch with itself. Or, more to the point, the upstairs “rational” part can chug along thinking one thing, while the downstairs “emotional” part acts according to something totally different, and neither department sits down with the other to make sure there’s no contradictions brewing. We can announce in our heads “I have no interest in doing this thing” and genuinely mean it, only for the thought of that thing to keep kicking around in the background, just as an idle daydream or silly notion. Eventually, our emotions glomp onto the idea of MAAAAYBE going ahead with it eventually, at some point, just because we’ve gotten so used to the concept sticking around. But then the rational department goes and does something that conclusively makes doing that thing impossible, and even though it’s exactly what we SAID was going to happen, the emotional department throws a fit anyway because a part of our reality it had taken for granted just changed. And change is scary and bad. As a result, our mood goes all screwy and we don’t really understand why, which just makes things even MORE screwy until we finally sit down and sort through all the conflicting data to figure out what we’ve actually been thinking/feeling/doing all this time. Long story short (hahahahaha):  I most definitely DID have goals for Far Out There and Conventional Wisdom when I started, crazy unrealistic goals, and over the years I’ve become more and more bummed out other the fact that they’re never going to happen.

That’s not just me being defeatist, by the way. Most of that stuff I absolutely do NOT want anymore.  I’m at a completely different place as a person than when I started all of this, and a lot of what I thought I wanted seems more than just unrealistic now, it’s downright repulsive. AND YET, I had them brewing in the back of my mind for so long that I can’t help but feel a sense of sadness and loss over their absence, especially since I never got around to replacing those goals with something else. But since I’d never truly acknowledged how much I wanted those things in the first place, I couldn’t get over those feelings or really even understand what they were; never mind realizing why trying to press onward in spite of them seemed so unfulfilling. So let’s lay out all those weird, embarrassing not-goals and see what I’ve been all in a funk over lately. Put on your eye protection, folks, this could get messy.

The Conventional Wisdom stuff is more obvious, since it’s basically just an outgrowth of what I’ve said elsewhere. When people in the con scene first started to notice the comic, I imprinted on that validation HARD, and I wanted more. I wanted Conventional Wisdom to become an institution, essential reading for anyone looking to get into the convention community. If not necessarily a “news source,” I at least wanted the comic to be a key glimpse into the heart and soul of the scene, which all the Cool Kids would read religiously. I wanted an appearance in Conventional Wisdom to be regarded as a sign that someone had “made it.” Heck, I wanted to be an institution MYSELF, that one guy everybody recognized and wanted to say “Hi” to. I wanted to get in deeper and deeper with con staff to the point that they’d start inviting me to other conventions. Not just idle “Hey, you should totally come to our thing one day” chitchat, but actual official invitations as a guest, with free badges and hotel rooms and pictures in the guidebook and shoutouts during opening ceremonies and official panels all about myself, the whole shebang. And I wanted to do a LOT of it. I hoped to eventually be on a cycle of doing a convention every two or three weeks, just staying home long enough to crank out an update and do a few pages of my other stuff to cover my next absence.

I don’t even need to tell you why that LAST dream needed to be dragged out in the back and shot, but the rest of it has largely fallen by the way side as well, and for good reason. Like I said before, I just don’t LIKE conventions as much as I used to. That’s as much due to a change in myself as it is the cons, but either way I’ve had to institute some very strict rules about how much I see and hear from that scene when I don’t absolutely have to. It’s just not a healthy thing to have in my life for very long, and I’m definitely in a better place for cutting down on it. But there’s certain unavoidable consequences to stepping back like that, and Conventional Wisdom has lost a lot of whatever prominence it once had. Officially, I accepted this as the necessary price of preserving my own mental health, but I’ve gradually come to the realization that I wasn’t fully onboard with my own decisions. There’s a little raging egomaniac deep down who gets offended any time I still have to pay my own way to a con, or I meet someone who “used to” read Conventional Wisdom but didn’t realize it still updates, and generally still wants to be nerd famous. Thankfully, that little jerk’s not too hard to ignore. More insidious, though, is the part of me that genuinely got used to thinking of myself as “The Convention Guy” and never truly figured out what to do with myself once that was taken away. Heck, I think THAT part of myself still holds a grudge over moving away from DC, since being closer to conventions was my whole reason for moving up there in the first place. Rationally, I know the couple of years I spent there were the single biggest mistake of my life, but I guess part of me never got over the fact that I “gave up” on that plan, ill-conceived as it may have been. Likewise, I’m no longer trying to impress the right people or make the right connections or get plugged into the heart of convention culture or whatever, even though that felt like EVERYTHING just a few years ago.  After letting go of those goals, part of me doesn’t seem to understand why I’m still bothering to do ANY of this cartooning business anymore. And the rest of me hasn’t help matters by not actually replacing those goals with any NEW ones, preferring instead to keep pounding away at more comics and… I dunno… whatever. “Whatever” is not a very effective motivator, so here we are.

And then there’s Far Out There, which I’m gonna have to unpack a bit, because at first it’ll sound like I’m talking about something different than what I actually am. In the back of my mind, I’ve always wanted Far Out There to have lots and lots of merchandise. And right there, I have to stop and explain, because on the surface that sounds like an even more materialistic version of the Conventional Wisdom goals. Clearly, I’m about to talk about how I wanted Far Out There to make me rich and famous by making millions off of cheap kids toys and shirts and overpriced marketing tie-ins, right? Well, I’d gladly accept millions of dollars for WHATEVER, don’t get me wrong; but no, that’s not what I’m talking about. Those of you who’ve actually read Far Out There know that I love building up the fictional pop culture of that world. I like having recurring brands and TV shows and pop stars and all this extra stuff going on in the background, and I’d LOVE a chance to unleash some of it onto the real world. I’m not just talking about making an actual version of that one T-shirt that one character wore, I’m talking BIG stuff. I want to hire bands to record real albums by in-universe artists, with the diabolical secondary goal of making my un-trendy musical tastes more popular, of course. I want actual physical copies of books and magazines characters read, complete with in-universe ads and reviews, which just so happen to look like the kind of stuff I’D read. I want real versions of the snacks and drinks people eat in the comic, and not just generic stuff with Far Out There branding but custom-made stuff with really off-the-wall unique flavors that by AMAZING COINCIDENCE happen to also be the weird flavors I like but can never find anyplace. So, yeah, I wanted to remake the world in my own image, one Far Out There-branded product at a time. But there’s even more to it than that megalomania.

I’ve always rejected the idea that merchandising inherently cheapens the source material or automatically has to be slapdash and poor quality. Both those things CAN be true, but only if they’re allowed to be, if the people making it explicitly aren’t interested in making it and are okay with doing a crap job. Anything can have creative, artistic merit as long as somebody actually TRIES while making it, even a can of soda or a toy in a cereal box. To sort of prove that point, I had all these mad dreams of DELIBERATELY bad Far Out There merchandise, stuff that goes out of its way to BE bad, in a calculated move to be funny and entertaining. Like, say, Far Out There board games that are needlessly complicated and built around giant, elaborate, battery-operated plastic contraptions, like those ones they made in the 90s in a desperate attempt to distract us from video games. Or heck, why NOT Far Out There videos games? Maybe a cheesy kart racer or a fighting game or some other genre built around an activity none of the characters would ever actually do, then have it constantly address how completely out of character everything happening is?  How about a point & click nitpicking adventure full of absurdly nonsensical puzzles that would make even the most sadistic Sierra programmers shake their heads?  Or maybe a simple little mobile puzzle game with some kind of MASSIVE hidden content which makes the gameplay into unwilling participation in some kind of elaborate ritual by an evil taco cult, just to see how long it takes some hacker to notice it’s there. Pointlessly stupid stuff, all for the sake of being pointlessly stupid, almost to the point of being a geeky kind of performance art. THAT’S the kind of merchandising empire I secretly dream of Far Out There spawning… which will obviously never happen.

I mean, yeah, there’s a hundred obvious reasons why none of these SPECIFIC terrible ideas can or should ever happen, but it’s not like plenty of objectively terrible things aren’t wildly successful. Success has never been dependent on actually being GOOD, it just has to be something that people WANT enough at any given moment to be willing to pay for it.  THERE’S the more fundamental problem: trying to do anything based on a webcomic that would require someone, somewhere to actually BUY something. Even the mildest scratching of the surface that I’ve done at Artist Alleys over the years was more than enough to teach me some very important lessons about the target demographic of webcomics. Namely, that demographic is people who will never, ever, EVER actually have money for things. Even artists fifty times more popular than me struggle with getting their fans to buy enough physical goods to break even on the manufacturing costs, and that’s regarding normal stuff aimed at normal people. I’m never going to have the funds to create all that performance art anti-merchandise and self-indulgent wish fulfillment in the first place, but even if I somehow DID, no webcomic reader would ever pay for any of it. At best, they’d see it on a shelf, laugh, take a picture to tweet out to their friends, then walk on. Just like they do with everything else. Anything I do under the Far Out There banner needs to be something I can produce on my own, with minimal money put into it, because only minimal money is ever going to come out of it. 

And I realize this is coming across as being really salty, but up in that rational part of my brain, I’m totally fine with it all. No, really; I genuinely don’t mind. In actual practice, I don’t even LIKE making physical stuff that much. It’s too stressful dealing with the constant fear of breaking something or my hand slipping or having a three dimensional object turn out different from the flat drawing. I just wanna draw, dang it, so rationally-speaking I SHOULD be just fine resigning myself to doing nothing but drawing. But again, the rational part of me isn’t the only part that’s got a say in this matter. Even as just a silly daydream, those goofy merch ideas were floating around my head for YEARS, and a lot of the stuff I put into Far Out There was wrapped up in them whether I meant it to be or not. Why do you think I keep posting all those Far Out There character soundtracks? It’s because part of me still wants to commission ACTUAL soundtracks, and YouTube playlists are the next best thing. There’s still a petulant little kid deep down who got way too used to the idea that all these things MIGHT still happen, and that kid throws a fit every time my Grown Up brain insists it won’t. And even Grown Up, rational me kind of struggles with the fact that all those stupid toy ideas had presented themselves as the “next step” in Far Out There’s development, the stage to come after whatever I’m doing now. Even if I never officially, out loud SAID that was my next goal, I also never gave myself anything else to work towards instead. And now that I’ve gradually written all that stuff off, the only thing Far Out There has to look forward to is… well, drawing more Far Out There comics.

And to be fair, my mad Far Out There Empire plot DID call for drawing more comics, similar to the Top WebComics Voting Incentives or those Patreon side stories. The idea was, if I spun some of the HUNDREDS of side characters off to their own comics set in the same universe (or even some out of continuity alternate universe stuff), then maybe the extended Far Out There franchise might draw in enough readers to finally justify some of those more outlandish projects. Obviously, that brings us back to the whole “totally unattainable goal” problem, but it also brings us back to the burnout problem. There’s only so much stuff I can DO at once, and repeatedly biting off more than I can chew has forced me to greatly scale back my ambitions. At this point, Far Out There can’t realistically be more than a single long-running comic and OCCASIONALLY one limited run side story at a time. The same as it’s always been… which in turn brings us back to the boredom issue. It’s hard to find motivation to move forward when the only thing in front of you seems to be the exact same spot where you already are.

And then SmackJeeves melted down and everything changed.

I’m gonna write a separate blog later to REALLY go in depth about my various webhosting experiences, but the short version is that the new SmackJeeves went online on a Tuesday afternoon, and by Tuesday night I’d thrown a few hundred bucks at Bluehost and formally announced my plans to migrate everything onto new sites. At the time, I was angry and scared and annoyed and freaked out and totally unprepared to be dealing with all this new stuff… but after a few days, I started to get excited. Like, REALLY excited. Amid all the aggravation and frustration, I was jazzed up in a way I haven’t been about comic stuff in YEARS. That’s when it hit me: in my scramble to set up all this new site stuff, I had a GOAL. In fact, I’d just ACHIEVED a goal. For ages and ages, I’d heard that getting off of free hosts and buying my own dotcom was the next step in my comics’ growth cycle, and I agreed. I just needed to get to a point where doing that made sense financially, and getting something for free makes a lot more financial sense than getting something for NOT free. That’s what I told myself, anyway, but honestly I think I was just too comfortable where I was and was scared to take on the extra workload if I didn’t absolutely have to. Well, now I absolutely have to, and it feels GREAT. When I was just a twerp only starting out, seeing a comic with just its name in the address and nothing else looked SOOOOO professional. Those guys were the Real Deal, not snot-nosed little amateurs like me. But now THAT IS ME! I just up and did something me from a decade ago even dreamed of doing! I progressed! I leveled up! I digivolved to Mega! And that’s not even the only thing, either! I’ve got three websites to finish setting up (plus various sub-pages for each), and each of those is another goal to work towards. Not some vague, pie in the sky daydream of a goal, but a practical, concrete, achievable one I can make measurable, quantifiable strides toward. Yes, it’ll be tedious and time consuming and mostly revolve around reposting and occasionally editing old content, but it’s still AN ACHIEVABLE GOAL and I’m genuinely excited about it!

And I THINK that’s a huge part of what was wrong with those previous attempts to whip myself into shape. Like I said before, you don’t break bad habits by saying “I’m just not gonna do that anymore” and having that be that. There’s still all the internal and external factors that helped push you into those habits in the first place, and as long as they’re still around they’ll do it again and again no matter how many resolutions you make. In my case, I think part of the reason it’s been so hard for me to shake off this lack of enthusiasm is because I didn’t really have anything specific left to be enthusiastic ABOUT. I’d stalled, or at least I felt like it enough for the feeling to become self-fulfilling. Maybe if I have stuff to feel excited about again, I’ll actually WANT to stick with all that other cycle-breaking, creativity-feeding other stuff instead of having to MAKE myself do them? If nothing else, maybe having new stuff to keep myself busy with might shake up some of these counterproductive routines. And the more little milestones I actually DO accomplish, the better I’ll feel as I plow on to the next ones. I obviously haven’t had much of a chance to test this little hypothesis out yet, but it’s SOMETHING, right?

“But wait!” says the handful of people who will ever read this far “Reposting old content on new sites will only take so long, and only barely counts as doing anything new in the first place! What comes next? Won’t you slip back into your old habits once the site-building is taken care of?” Thanks for setting up the ending of this blog, unnamed reader! Yes, I do have some new goals to work towards after the rebuilding is finished, and unlike the previous daydreams, they AREN’T blatantly unrealistic or based on dangerously unhealthy behavior. In fact, the first big one is a project that I never even would have been able to try WITHOUT the new site.

About the only new thing I DID do for Conventional Wisdom in 2019 was repurpose those ConCONcon comics I’d been doing for April Fools as a the new weekly filler series. Instead of being a big ol’ absurdist lark (in a comic that’s half absurdist larks to begin with), I started using it as a platform to make generalized jokes about conventions as a whole.  Basically, I found I could keep writing regular Conventional Wisdom-style comics without having to actually travel all the time or worry about ridiculing any specific group or fandom. That last part is important, because along with making up a fake convention, I started referencing fake anime rather than real ones. Not only did this mean I could vent my various frustration about nerd fandoms without having to directly insult any real fandoms, but I could also introduce all these new titles and characters and properties that could eventually be made into exclusive Conventional Wisdom merchandise! Yes, it wasn’t JUST Far Out There where I had that idea. Those comics aren’t what I’m talking about here, though. The next project I want to undertake with ConCONcon is much more achievable, and waaaaaay way stranger.

I’ve got pages and pages and pages of fictional pop cultural history written up for use in ConCONcon. Whole production histories of shows, rises and falls of entire fandoms, tales of popular fads and underground cult classics, and most of it never even made it into a comic last year because, well, comics need to actually be FUNNY at some point. What can I do with all this extra information? How can I make something out off all this extra narrative that doesn’t lend itself to the “one punchline per page” structure of a webcomic? That’s my weird idea: an wiki. Suppose some young ConCONcon staffer started to think that the higher ups running the con were out of touch with what’s popular with The Kids Today. What if he took it upon himself to compose a primer to educate the rest of the staff? This wiki would be full of summaries of anime, manga, TV shows, video games, movies, internet shows, wrestling, webcomics, bands, ANYTHING that could conceivably be referenced in passing in the ConCONcon comics. All completely fictional. All presented totally in-universe. It’d have rundowns on what all these things are about, assorted promotional art and “screenshots,” their history and backstory, helpful tips on what their fandoms are like and how they’ll act in a convention setting, and some editorializing by the author on whether they’re any good. That last part is hopefully be where things REALLY get interesting, as each page would also have a fake Comments Section that other ConCONcon staffers can use. And use they shall, reacting to the wiki author’s posts, adding extra details and corrections, arguing over the author’s opinions, and generally devolving into nerd drama. Other works that don’t get their own pages will be referenced in these comments, as would “real world” events happening outside the scope of the wiki itself, behind the scenes storylines among the staffers will unfold, and the only way to piece together the whole story would be to read all the wiki pages and cross-reference the comments. Hopefully, this will take what would otherwise be just pages of imaginary trivia and give it some sense of narrative and character. That, and be another way of making fun of how petty and weird us nerds really are.

I’m sure most of the people who actually read this far think a ConCONcon Wiki sounds like a complete waste of time and would have no interest in reading it, and… yeah, you probably already know right away if this is a thing you’d ever care about. But this is a world where stuff like the SCP Foundation exists and where certain people get super crazy into ARGs and the like, so there’s definitely SOME demographic out there who’d be interested in this kind of alternative storytelling. More importantly, it’s something I actually want to do, that I’m actually excited about exploring. Heck, it’s even an excuse to play around with all sorts of new art styles, and no doubt learn some new tricks I can apply to the “real” comics later. And better yet, I wouldn’t have to learn some brand new medium or pay a whole team of other people or some other departure from reality. This is something I can make happen on my own, with the skills and resources I already have at my disposal. All I really need is the time and energy to do it, and that’s exciting all on its own. Obviously, all the website restoration stuff takes major precedent over a side project like this, but even that’s a plus, since it means I’ve got something new to look forward to on the other side of all that work. Hopefully at least a FEW of you will be looking forward to it too.

And as for the rest of you, don’t worry. This freaky wiki project isn't the only iron I’ve got in the fire. Going back over all my old comics for the new websites has reminded me of something I’ve allowed to SEVERELY fall by the wayside over the years: books. After all this time, there STILL aren’t any decent Far Out There or Conventional Wisdom print collections! And I emphasize “decent” because, if you ever saw me in Artist alley, you know I SORT OF had Conventional Wisdom books. Well, more like fanzines; little hand-made booklets that compiled a few years of comics according to theme. That’s also how I made the Pre-History “book,” all new comic content, but printed in my room and stapled together by hand. Ironically, my main reason for doing this was more or less the very thing I “only just learned” about all those Far Out There merchandise ideas. Getting nice, professional-looking books made cost money. I’d either have to cough up a lot of cash up front, or give up all by the tiniest sliver of the profits from each sale. Or both. I was already seeing this happen with all the T-shirt services I could find, and it seemed to be the same issue with making books. I didn’t want to have to order crates full of hundreds of books and be stuck with them for years, but also didn’t want any sales I DID make to only earn me a few cents a piece. If I made the books myself, I could only make what I needed and pocket all the profits, right? Well, no. Again, I just wanna draw, I don’t really like “making” stuff. And if that’s the case, you can bet I like SELLING stuff even less. There are plenty of eager beaver workaholic types out there who can stay on top of managing their own store and traveling around to sell stuff in person and all that craziness, but I’m not one of them. Turns out I NEED somebody to handle that for me, even if it means giving them a cut of the profits. And really, the number of people who find a hand-crafted fanzine charmingly quirky rather than off-putting and sketchy decreases every day, so it’s not like I was actually selling that many of these things to begin with.

So, yeah, once the dust from the websites finally settles, I’m also going to be looking into collecting my comics in book form, both as physical print on demand books, and those newfangled digital ereader whatever things (somebody who claims to make a living on the internet really ought to know more about that stuff).  I already know there's plenty of options out there, I just need more time to sit down and actually pick the best one to use, which will probably be easier if I already have something ready to print. The most obvious first project, both in terms of demand and ease of putting together, would be a “real” version of the Conventional Wisdom Pre-History book. Even back in the day, I always sort of assumed the booklet was just a preview edition. After all, it only had room for the comic pages themselves, no additional commentary or anything else like that. The “final draft” of the Pre-History book will have all the same comics, presumably with the art polished up a bit and a few brand new ones thrown in, plus all the Author Comments the old booklets lacked (and possibly with some vintage pictures thrown in just to spice things up). Since half the content was already made years ago, hopefully this will make for the easiest possible First Step into learning how to actually put things together in a real, grown up book fashion.

After that… well, the previous few things were both Conventional Wisdom related, so let’s give Far Out There something to look forward too. One thing I’ve REALLY come to remember over the website rebuilding process is how often I’d said I was going to go back and re-draw the early pages of that comic. I think all webcomic artists complain about how terrible their first year or two of work looks, but in my case, it’s more than just Old Shame. A lot of the writing in those early pages is distractingly out of place compared to the rest of the comic’s run, with most of the cast acting out of character and bits of worldbuilding not making sense and a few major plot points being blatantly retconned later on. It’s really not great introduction to the rest of the comic anymore… or at the very least, there could stand to be a better first chapter out there. That’s the next project: re-drawing the first arc of Far Out There specifically for the purpose of selling it as a book. It wouldn’t replace the old pages on the website, but those pages WOULD be altered with big ol’ “BUY THE BOOK TO SEE WHAT REALLY HAPPENED” links under them. This version would have more accomplished art, sure, but also do a lot more to set up with later storylines and generally be more in sync with the tone of the comic as a whole. Also, I’m toying with the idea of writing it in such a way that a dozen-or-so pages could stand on their own as a sort of Intro To The Intro, something I could print up on its own and use as a handout. Coming soon to a Free Comic Book Day near you! Obviously, actually writing and drawing this much new content would make it much more of an undertaking than the Pre-History book, which is why that one would come first, but we’re getting more into long-term goals here. This would be something to specifically look towards doing after the previous book, so that there’s no “Well, now what?” lull afterwards. And speaking of long-term goals, I’ve been saying for AGES that I want to do A Far Out There Christmas Carol one of these Decembers, when am I finally gonna get serious about that? I’M GETTING TOO MANY GOALS. SLOW DOWN.

Last of all, there’s Patreon, which… I dunno. I probably feel worse about this than anything, since people are actually paying money for stuff and not getting it… but I’m honestly not sure WHAT to do right now. I mean, it’s clear that the current set up of four separate comic series was never actually sustainable, so SOMETHING needs to be re-arranged. Maybe have one month where I post pages of one comic, then switch over to another next month? But no, the Conventional Wisdom extra pages have to come out after the public comics wrap up, whenever that is. I dunno. Once way or another, I can’t get serious about changing anything up on the Patreon side of things until after the new websites are finished. Stay tuned for more. And again, I’m really, REALLY sorry for how little anyone has been getting back for all their generous donations. Hopefully the previous ten pages have at least somewhat explained why this mess was unavoidable, and maybe even provided a glimmer of hope that we really might be on the way out of it. Does that sound sufficiently positive and not desperate? …man, what a sucky note to end this blog on. And again, this is the NON-depressing version. I really do appreciate the fact that there's still anyone actually supporting me here at all.  I know a lot of people have had to either stop completely or greatly cut back on their donations, but at this point, anyone being willing to fork over a single cent is  both amazing and humbling.  Thank you so, so, SO much!