It’s Winter of 2019. New year, new apartment, new job, new lease on life. I decide to come out the gate updating all my comics and getting back to everything that’s fallen by the wayside in 2018 due to moving and fallout from my break-up. Back in the game! It’s gonna work out, right?
But as I sit down, I realize I hadn’t talked about the break-up in my diary comic, NO ONE CARES. My ex had a prominent presence there, it’d be weird not to acknowledge her absence, right? So I sit down, and I draw a comic about the time I was so depressed after the break-up I wanted to get drunk and throw myself off the St. Johns Bridge in Portland.
And after I post that raw nerve about myself and the last year of my life, I think of all the other sad or stressful things that led up what was then my present. And I think about re-living them again, rendering them in my comics for all to see and to forever be preserved.
And right then, one sentence crosses my mind, crystal clear:
“I don’t want to do this anymore.”
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A few weeks prior to this post, I let the domain of NO ONE CARES expire. It’s no longer online and I have no intention to re-post it or continue it elsewhere. It’s done.
When I started NO ONE CARES, I was coming off hitting a wall with OH GOODIE!, feeling I couldn’t continue it in its current form. But I got my new tablet and switched to Clip Studio, and drawing a comic relevant to my life as it was currently seemed like an apt thing to do as I began to enter the new mode of my life and my career.
Here’s the thing with diary comics though; they make you expose a lot of nerves. About yourself, about the people in your life, about the world around you. Maybe some people can do it. Maybe Robert Crumb can put all of his racial and sexual hang-ups in his work for all to see. Maybe Jeffrey Brown can share the grisly details of his failed relationships. Maybe others can do it, and no knock against them.
Me though? I just can’t do it.
NO ONE CARES didn’t become the story of my creative re-birth like I hoped. Instead, it became a log of a very unhappy time in my life, when I went through crippling unemployment, depression, and the slow deterioration of a long-term relationship. Make no mistake, I want to be honest and open with anyone who enjoys my work. But exposing personal nerves like that just isn’t for me, at least not on a consistent basis.
By contrast? I had something really upsetting happen to me last summer, after I had the idea to reboot OH GOODIE! for WebToons, and wrote it all out for the new script in one sitting. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve written in a long time, and I can’t wait to share it all with you. That’s taking my problems and putting it in a fictional contrast that can relate to others just as much as myself, which I’m way happier doing.
As for me? I’m doing fine, actually. I have my good days and bad days, but that’s just life. I had so much fall apart at once I’d lost that perspective on that, felt like it truly was the end for me. Turns out that wasn’t the case. I’m dating again, figured out my drinking, go to therapy regularly. I just try to take things as they come to the best of my ability.
And new comics and videos are on the horizon! My only complaint is I haven’t finished as much as I’d like because of time constraints. I thought OH GOODIE! would be ready by February, turns out I need more time. I thought the second volume of HORRIBLE NIGHT would be done by Halloween, that didn’t happen either, in spite of being half-finished. And I have so many new videos to show you, it’s not even funny. These things just take time though.
I just hope you’ll all be there when the time comes.
Thank you.
