Navel-Gazing

Yesterday I found myself descending into one of my periodic "What’s the point of blogging?" funks. It quickly morphed into a larger "Where do I go from here?" funk. I’m on a cusp of some kind, folks. A creative discombobblement of uncertain duration has me thrown off-stride. Once I’ve completed cover art for a print version of my webcomic series "Mark the Art Guy," that Adobe-commissioned venture will begin receding into the past. It’s been a challenging commercial endeavor, and Adobe has deep enough pockets to have made it rewarding. But it’s been a real time hog as well, commandeering the lion’s share of my working hours ever since I was invited by a charmer in the software giant’s marketing branch to undertake it back in March of 2006. That was roughly a month after this blog went online. Since then, as fate would have it, I’ve enjoyed an uptick in freelance opportunities on top of the long-running Adobe gig. That’s been a welcome change from the previous several years of comparative drought, so don’t take anything I say about its ramifications as a complaint. Between the payments from Adobe and the fees from other clients, I’ve been able to take comfort in better bank balances for a while. That’s been an unfamiliar sensation. There’s been a downside to that income boomlet, though. I’ve had frustratingly little control over my own time, which means that the "real" part of being an artist—"following my muse," to use a term that has a grandiose ring but nevertheless cuts to the bone of my tender psyche—has gotten short shrift. And now summer approaches. That almost always means a slowdown in freelance assignments, so unless something unexpected crops up the way Adobe’s proposal did last year, I’ll have at least a temporary increase in thinking time accompanied by a rise in anxieties over (a) money, and (b) my future. Some of my time is already booked, of course. I will be leading a two-week comics-creation workshop at BArT, a charter school in Adams, beginning next Tuesday, and there are a couple of other personal projects-in-progress await completion. But hovering over everything is my need to find fresh ways to earn a living even as I toy with freeing my beleaguered muse from her cage—a cage I’ve been forced by circumstance to leave her pacing back andf forth in in for so long it hurts. Freeing one’s muse! That sounds like a Good Thing, right! Artists should do that kind of thing. But that muse of mine is one flakey dame when it comes to helping me earn a living. Allowing her to roam about my battered brain, free as a bird, can be emotionally harrowing unless I go whole hog and truly give her free reign. Then she gets spoiled by freedom (don’t we all?) and throws a tantrum if I show any sign that I have more cage-living in mind for her. The bond between her soul and mine runs deep, and I know from experience that forcing her back into hibernation after allowing her some time outdoors will be torture of a high order for both of us. The ideal situation, of course, is to be paid sufficiently by some publisher, sponsor, or patron (dream on about that last one!) while taking whatever path my muse wants me to take for however long is required. That actually happened in 1990, when DC Comics contracted me to write and draw Stuck Rubber Baby. It had happened before that in 1983, when The Advocate signed me up for what became a nearly six-year stint drawing the Wendel comic strip series. But it hasn’t happened often during my decades of professional cartooning, and there’s no particular reason to think that it’s going to happen this summer. Which leaves me wondering: should I be spending what time I do have available at this juncture composing blog entries for free? It’s hard to know. Color me uncertain.