BorderCrash

Well, it’s been a few months.  Maybe I should start putting some actual words on this website so I can get found in the search engines.

Mass Appeal for Deep, Deep Comics Nerds

Dave Sim's Cerebus

Here’s what’s going on.  I like really long, drawn-out adventure comics, with big doses of humor and pretty black-and-white art.  Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy is my all-time favorite in the genre.  E. C. Segar’s Popeye might be the funniest, most diverse example.  Right now I’m reading through all 6,000 pages of Dave Sim’s Cerebus(Except the dense parts that depart from the narrative).

All of these comics were hugely popular in their day, and a big influence on my artistic development.  I love ’em.  And so do at least ten or eleven other aging dudes across the country.  It’s not a big market to be entering.  Comics in America are a subculture, and black-and-white epics about grown-ups are a sub-subculture.  I could get more popular, more quicker, if I created a story full of hot, skinny school kids for teenage girls.  Or muscular and confident heroes for awkward twenty-year-old guys.  Or adorable little monsters for children.

Roy Crane's Buz Sawyer. Look at those excited captions!

Except I couldn’t, really, because I would never finish.  Unless an publisher was barking at me, I wouldn’t finish a story about a charming ferret who just wanted to make friends at his new school under the oak tree.  I’d start it, sure.  I’d think it had commercial possibilities, and I’d start drawing with the goal in mind of making some money.  But I wouldn’t care enough about the project after a few months, and it would get buried on my desk over time, and then it would just go away.  Because you can’t make yourself like doing work you don’t like.

E. C. Segar's Popeye

Making Money/Drawing What you Like

I’ve tried it.  When I found out that teenage girls were buying comics in record numbers, I tried to make a new series involving angst, cute guys, and an alternate reality where ideologies manifested themselves as animals.  Trying to combine my love of comics with a need to use my time wisely, I invented a Sunday strip about cooks, with a new recipe in each episode.  These projects never get polished enough, or executed with enough passion that someone takes interest.

So, ultimately, I have to just make a comic that I like.  Because, apparently, I do have to make comics.  Since I was 12, I’ve always had at least one comics project going on.  Can’t stop.  So it’s time to carve out that hour a day, forget about the money, and stick with one project until it becomes something.

I try to not care about the money, and control the time.  Bordercrash advances so slowly because I’m trying to give it one hour a day, six days a week.  That’s not a lot in comics.  It took some courage to develop and commit to a simpler style than I’d like, so this comic can update on a real schedule.  The exciting part, for me, is that it’s working.  It’s really happening.  I just posted page 14, where Beaudry walks past Ted in a massive dust cloud.  I could choose to be unhappy with the lack of gray tones, the minimal textures, the sloppy rendering and panel borders.  But I’m not.  The story is moving forward, and the story, I like.