I don’t remember the first time I picked up a pen or pencil and began drawing. What I do remember is, that at a very young age (3-4 years old) I began whittling away immense quantities of scratch paper and ballpoint pens at my mother’s hair salon in pursuit of the perfect brontosaurus drawing. When comics came into my life, an inconceivable 6 years from that 4 year old’s perspective, I was already in the practice of stapling together my own little booklets and drawing my own little stories.
You can ask a dozen working artists today, and I would guess more than half of them have stories ranging from intensely similar to virtually identical to mine. In my drawing classes at North Idaho College, I often tell my students that talent is just determination that has found its bliss. When you’re just a little snapper, one hopes that the surrounding adults entrusted with your care will also offer some encouragement, along with food and shelter. Sadly, this isn’t the case for everybody, but where encouragement can be offered, there is just as often aptitude in the offing.
Assumptions
It’s assumed here that, if you are interested in making comics, that you already possess some of this aptitude, or even talent for drawing. Or, perhaps you’re wanting to break in on the writing side. I’ve used the phrase, break in there, but comics isn’t some dragon guarded mountain in a fantasy world, or secure compound with armed sentries roving the perimeter. There are folks in it who may try to shoot you down, but they tend to be others like ourselves; wayward souls, prone to their own insecurities and the lashings out that those entail. It can be very difficult to pursue publication, wracking up rejection after rejection, failure after failure, and then be expected to be happy, even congratulatory of peers who appear to have unwittingly accomplished this dream you’ve been chasing for time out of mind. It doesn’t feel fair, and it isn’t. Nothing is. But, insomuch as your own struggle for publication and its attendant recognition is, was, or will be the work of many years hard graft, that Herculean labor is often masked by our own positive outward appearance. Social media has only served to worsen this problem as we publicize the overly rosy or hyperbolically dark versions of our lives and their relative circumstances. To put it simply, we should never assume that success comes easily to anybody. Everyone’s path is at least slightly different to everyone else’s. For whatever use it may hold to others, what follows—and will follow over the course of several “chapters”—is my own path, as it were, to becoming a professional comic book artist (and sometimes writer).
Marco & Kit
I mentioned encouragement, did I not? For those of us lucky enough to have gotten it from our friends and family, so much the better. Indeed, it is entirely possible to over water the plant, as it were, when encouraging young children in their early interests and pursuits. Say what you will about Participation Awards and the like, sometimes well intentioned adults can give children an overinflated or unrealistic view of their existing talents and abilities. My maternal grandparents were notorious for this, labeling me a “genius” at a very young age and never letting go of that particular illusion, long after my failure to live up to it had sent them spiraling into the blackhole of cognitive dissonance. While in the fullness of time I would one day occupy a job role titled Genius (I worked at an Apple Retail store for eleven years before going into freelance comics and teaching, full time) that’s about as close as I get to that particular honorific.
Interestingly enough, it was while working at the Apple Retail Store in Temecula, California, that I first met Marco Finnegan. If you’re not familiar with Mr. Finnegan or his work, Marco is a true student of comics in the purest sense of the term. His studies and experimentations with panel compositions and flow have been a source of near constant inspiration since I started following him on Twitter shortly after our first in person meeting. One fine Spring morning, as was my wont, I went out to the sales floor and connected an iPad Pro to our in store workshop display and began a free, public demonstration of the illustrative power of the Procreate app. My approach to this particular activity was a source of constant annoyance to my overseers. While it was technically what I was tasked with doing, my quiet, open approach was not in line with the more outspoken, snake oil salesman they were after. Maybe I’m the weird one, but connecting myself to a microphone and then speaking to no one in particular sounds like an exercise in futility, if not the very definition of insanity. Whatever the case, my spider-like approach of waiting for an unsuspecting customer to enter my web had lured in a swarthy looking fellow of approximately my own age.
“Hey,” he said, “can these things run Clip Studio Paint? Do you know?”
I explained that they could. However, unlike the desktop version of the app where users could buy a one time license at a flat rate, the developers had opted exclusively for a subscription model for the iPad port. I also explained that Procreate was a nice alternative, in most respects, as it was also a one time license and ridiculously affordable, even for that.
Through the course of conversation, I learned that this fellow was also a comic artist like myself, albeit one who had already celebrated some commercial and financial success in the industry. His name was Marco Finnegan, and I soon discovered there was a considerable body of published work to his name. Before our conversation ended, Marco asked me if I was on Twitter. At the time, I was maintaining an anonymous account to be able to speak openly about my employment at Apple without having the hammer fall on me, directly1. Marco suggested I get set up on there, if I wasn't already, as most of the paid work he had gotten had come from people seeing his work on Twitter. He also said that he'd follow me back if I gave him a follow, which was at least a start. I thanked him for the information, and, rather than dismissing it as one might, I took it to heart. More on that in a moment.
At almost exactly the same time, or at least the same week, I got another piece of solid advice from one of my then professors at Cal State Fullerton. In early 2017, I had applied to the Graduate Illustration program at CSUF. This was after a four year hiatus following my undergraduate degree in Entertainment Art/Animation. After achieving my BFA, I found myself at the precipice of a premature midlife crisis. My hatred of Los Angeles proved irreconcilable, and apart from a failed attempt at a storyboard test for Rick & Morty season 2 and a tech support job with the Family Guy team, I’d pretty much let my degree go to pot. As passionate as I had been about animation, my final semester as an undergrad and disavowed me of some very powerful illusions.
Anyway, enough about that. I was in my second semester as a grad student and making lots, and lots of comic book pages for a number of pitches I had planned for when I got closer to graduation. The dangling carrot of a diploma had also become something of an excuse for delay. I don’t know that I saw it that way, but thankfully, Kit Seaton saw right through all of that.
Kit Seaton, if you’re not familiar, is another prolific and talented comic book creator. She and her sister, Kat, have so far released two volumes of their Eisner nominated Norroway series of graphic novels. When I was coming back from a classroom break one afternoon, Kit ran into me by the door and asked about my intentions for some of the pages and stories I was working on. I told her that, probably closer to graduation, I might start getting some of these pitches out into the mill to see what happens. She was encouraging in this regard, but she added something I wouldn’t soon forget:
“You don’t have to wait for graduation to start making comics. There is no reason you can’t be doing this professionally while you’re still in school.”
If I had been hesitant to hang out my shingle on Twitter, that last part removed all lingering doubts. That very same week, I started posting some of the work I was doing, and to my surprise, I began to accrue a steady trickle of followers. More importantly, within two weeks of posting some current works in progress and expressing my interest and availability as a freelance comics artist, I had landed two paid jobs.
To Be Continued…
J. Schiek is a professional comic book artist, writer and professor of art at North Idaho College. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies including the inaugural Short Comics Contest Anthology from Platform Comics (Finalist) and BIG HYPE from Doug Wood. His first solo project as writer and illustrator, Hush Ronin, is currently available from Band of Bards, or wherever fine comics are sold.
There is, in fact, or was, anyway, a vast and expanding network, or “support group” of so called Apple Anons who took to the Twittersphere to air their grievances with the Fruitstand, and with the retail sector in general.