The time has come when you’ve written all you can write. You’ve got two drafts down and await that epiphaniment that should accompany a brain blast of new ideas. But those ideas don’t come – the well is dry and no cloud in site. For a comic author this becomes a simple task: the pencilwork, linework, coloring, lettering, and editing come next. For a successful comic artist it’s even simpler: now it’s the artist’s turn.

But what happens to the hapless independent? The scrub whose funding is not-so-fungible? Every dime I put into my creative ventures comes directly out of my pocket. There is no artist to wait for. Until success rears its big beautiful head it’s me that is the artist! And, boy, what an artist I am.

Art, as in penciling and not the art of a specific craft in the way that one considers writing to be an art, is not something I particularly relish in the act of. Sure, I enjoy the occasional stress-free doodle every now and then, but when it comes to letting the rubber hit the road I fold like a house of cards in a diarrheic hurricane. The stress-free nature inverts itself and I feel like a naked man in the cold, grasping desperately for warmth, and – in this case – warmth translates directly to talent.

I’m not the worst artist in the world, but I’m also not good enough for my own standards for what I want to see laid out on paper, which is incredibly frustrating. With no formal talent it becomes eye-openingly apparent that I need to do something to curb either the funding necessary to gain an ally to my venture or this feeling of… is it perfectionism?

Whatever these feelings are I hate them and need them to end, because with obstacles comes procrastination, and with procrastination comes rejection of the idea in-whole. I’ve gone too far and borderline overdeveloped this idea to quit now.

At this point my entire blog seems to be a scathing indictment of the concept of procrastination, but that is the bile that haunts me at every turn. Each day is a master class in “do I get off this couch and stop watching The Leftovers and finally lumber over to the computer?” and each day almost inevitably leads to a failing grade. I will have bursts of insight that manage to quell that insatiable hunger for not doing a damned thing, but they are few and far between.

But at least I haven’t given up. These images are an ode to that resilience I have managed to muster in these times of writer’s block and artist’s block and whatever-the-hell-else block. If you’re drinking while reading this, please raise your glass in toast to the days one can push past all the baggage and get down to brass tacks in your creative venture, because they come quite seldom for the vast majority.

Now to get back to it, because even this writing venture was probably used as a crutch to make me feel better – a welcome reprieve from actually getting to work. Somehow a meta conversation on the act of creation is a welcome solace vs the actual creating of the thing itself. And now that meta has extended beyond its use and I’m having a meta conversation about the meta conversation. Thanks Charlie Kaufman!

UPDATE: Apologies for the strange formatting, I’m still trying to figure out how images congregate with text and it seems to be oddly formatted on computer monitors.