On quitting Death To The Extremist
Welcome to my blog. I’m very late to the blog party, so I don’t know if I need to make a grandiose mission statement or something. Mainly I’m just hoping I don’t come across like I think my ideas are totally important just because I installed WordPress.
So, I recently quit writing my comic, Death To The Extremist. I’ve been writing DTE on a schedule since sometime in 2001, albeit with some large gaps over the years. So far it’s kind of nice to be off the schedule, since DTE was getting a bit stressful. I never figured out a writing method more streamlined than “open Photoshop and attempt to have hilarious idea”, so each comic took hours to make. In the last year or so, my self-imposed deadlines caused me to run comics that sounded funny in my head but didn’t survive the trip out, and some I just wasn’t happy with. That comes with the territory, of course, but when you’re doing anything creative it’s important to have fun with it. Now that I think about it, it was probably a mistake to step up my schedule so aggressively. I did it to attract more readers, but really, if you don’t like my comic, I’m not sure 50% more of it is going to help. Anyway, that’s the long version of why I quit.
It was a tough decision, though! I will miss being able to turn a sudden obsession with an old L.L. Cool J song into a comic. Also, a bunch of people wrote in to say they were sorry DTE was going away, which is really flattering. I’ve always felt like the most basic version of “making it” as an artist (cartoonist, whatever) is to have people enjoying your work who don’t know you personally. The fact that my crazy talking circles comic “made it”, to some degree, is kind of hard to wrap my head around.
What’s next? There are a bunch of things I’ve been wanting to spend time on, and they’re not all Guitar Hero. I intend to learn Flash, for real this time. I haven’t written or recorded any music in a while; it might be time to get back into that. Maybe I should try stand-up comedy? Well, the main purpose of this blog is to share whatever I happen to do. I guess I could also just write in the blog. We’ll see how it goes.