All lives ebb and flow. Every arc has a valley. Every nutsack eventually receives a swift, merciless kick. For my nutsack, that crippling blow came in the form of last year.
2022 handed me some very cruel and brutal disappointments. Stupid conflicts with loved ones have essentially left me orphaned, or maybe more accurately shown me that I have ALWAYS been something of an orphan. Conflicting politics forced me out of my most hard-fought and rewarding cartooning gigs. Rising costs and a healthy dose of contempt have kept me away from comic shows. Continuing mental health struggles have alienated me from the delicate, sanitized junk heap that today passes as American popular culture. The proceeding year rendered me disillusioned, degraded, abandoned, lost, forgotten, and in turn I did the same to everything I worked for since I first put pen to paper, and to everyone I met along the way.
So with no family, no friends, no business, no colleagues, no fans, what have I been doing with myself? Carrying on to the best of my abilities, I guess. Limping down the highway of life, icepack cradled against my bruised and swollen gonads, making lemons out of shit heaps, taking the lumps life has delivered unto me and asking for more, reveling in the most basic of basics.
Having foregone cartooning as a livelihood, I’ve been earning my meager living in the retail non-profit sector, overseeing a small thrift store whose profits benefit a hunger insecurity organization. I sell shit and that money puts food in people’s bellies. It’s been rewarding, almost therapeutic, to redirect the various sales tricks I’ve learned into a communal cause. In some ways the frantic pace and cluttery chaos of dealing in junk reminds me of my old health care days, only with less vomit and no one dies if I make a mistake. Plus, I get to see all the good stuff as it comes in! It is a good, simple job, it rewards my efforts generously, and often my day’s greatest obstacle is avoiding the parade of Union Pacific trains that obstruct my daily commute like mile-long sunbathing snakes.
When I’m not running thrift I’m teaching myself Spanish. A lot of the thrift patrons are Spanish speakers from all over Central and South America, and they are some of our best and most joyful patrons. I began learning their language after I helped a Spanish-speaking high schooler get some cleats so he could join the baseball team, and the experience was so rewarding that I took the initiative to do better and do more. After a year of daily practice I’ve earned the vocabulary and grammar of a foul-mouthed toddler, and those efforts have earned respect among the local Latino community. I have honest-to-god relationships with multiple people in a language I couldn’t even speak a year ago. Sometimes folks come in just for the novelty of seeing the pinche hombre blanco quien habla poquito espanol.
When I’m not running thrift or teaching myself Spanish, I’m enjoying the few friends and family in my life. My beautiful bride of 12 years continues to be a superstar teacher, the toast of the school, a small town celebrity, and I love and am perpetually proud of her. Last spring we rescued our new little Chihweenie from a nutty animal hoarder in the community trailer park. Her name Rue Vampirella, although I call her “Woo” as a nod to the Nature Boy, and let me tell you that you can take the dog from the trailer park but not vice versa. Counting my blessings, I have one beautiful love, two smelly dogs, and a handful of friends, and I feel richer than all the world’s shitty billionaires combined. When one loses everything, anything regained is more precious than sunlight and air.
When I’m not running thrift or teaching myself Spanish or enjoying the few friends and family in my life, I’m expanding my horizons. I’ve been recording music and teaching guitar to deserving pupils. I screw around with AI and take long walks in the mountains. I photograph wildlife and practice yoga. I smoke A LOT of good weed and collect old nudie magazines. I sit in the sun and listen to the wind trickle through the aspen leaves. I appreciate the beautiful things in life while I’m still capable of appreciating them, because today I truly appreciate that those things can vanish RIGHT. THIS. VERY. SECOND.
With all these beautiful, wonderful things that whittle away my day, am I able to find the time to make comics? You bet your sweet delicious ass I do. Even at my lowest low, in the blackest black of my defeats and despairs, there wasn’t a day where I wasn’t drawing, writing, or dreaming up my next panel. Every goddamn day I rise before the sun, put on the coffee, take the dogs out to pee, and then get right to fucking work. A few months back I FINALLY finished some much needed edits AND the penultimate chapter of DOZER MANIFESTO, and am hard at work on the conclusion. The second season of NSFW is about 4/5 complete, and will be posted soon (you can still read the first season here.) The many next projects in my queue are all vying for attention, slashing and clawing at each other in my brain in desperation to be next in line.
Even though 2022 was the year I stopped being a cartoonist, I never REALLY stopped. Cartooning is as essential to me as food and water. Comics are my unshakable habit, my ruinous addiction, my unquenchable, shameful compulsion. If I’m not drawing it’s because my hands no longer work. If I’m not writing it’s because my brain has ceased to function. The day I stop is the day I’ve left the screeching clusterfuck that is the human experience. Even if I never again make another sad solitary dollar on my works, I will keep at it out of nothing but pure joy of creating and telling stories. I will let every completed page be my refute to the rejection letters editors never even bothered to send, every panel disregarding the dismissals from mouth-breathing critics and naval gazing peers, every line on the page bellowing a colossal FUCK YOU to the cliques and detractors and backstabbers that comprise the slowly dying industry I can’t make it in.
Smash my nuts into jelly worse than 2022 did, and I will use the chunky juice to draw you a pretty picture. I’ve lost everything, professionally and personally, and I am still fucking here. So forgive me if you don’t see me at the next con you’re at, or if I’m not maneuvering for a spot with some hot shit new publisher, or pitching the same rehashed ideas with the other hacks because that’s what people are buying right now.
I might not have much to show for myself these days, but one thing I do have is better things to do.
V