CSotD: Drawing The Line
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"Rudy" itself ended up on the losing side of that fine line. You can read more about it here at Stripper's Guide, where Allan Holtz sums it up:
How do you doom a comic strip to a short run? Well, in the case of Rudy by William Overgard, you make the humor smart and character driven. You add great art. You build it all on the basis of an unusually intelligent and involved story. Once you've got all those great ingredients, not even a talking monkey can save a strip from oblivion.
Well, yes. But it's Rudy's message rather than his fate that we're discussing today, because a pair of good comics sites are pondering the same question, and it's one that occasionally looms here.
How do you keep a roof over your head and food on your table while doing something you love?
It's not just an issue for cartoonists and writers, either. In this clip from "Uncle Meat," Jimmy Carl Black lays the matter out.
So you have Rudy suggesting that you not be too proud to work for money, and Jimmy pointing out that he's not living too extravagantly and that pretty much sets the parameters: Keep both your pride and your needs within control.
And, by the way, if you've got time to put together a clever meme about how nobody should ask artists to work for free, you've got time to go find someone who doesn't. Or go flip a few burgers. But quit whining, because everybody gets asked to do stuff for free, and sometimes they say yes and sometimes they say no.
The same thing applies when someone asks you to do stuff for money and you know that either the work sucks or the people suck and that's where Rudy's advice becomes a little more nuanced, because that's where you have to face up to your decision.
Turning down chances to do free work is easy.
Turning down chances to sell out, ah, well, thank god you were put in that position in the first place.
Of course, the age-old solution is to work for money during the day and do the thing you love at night, which is why we have the old saying, "Don't quit your day job."
Most artists and writers and musicians never get the chance to.
Nor do they generally resent it.
The problem comes when your day job quits you, and both Heidi MacDonald at Comics Beat and Tom Spurgeon at Comics Reporter have faced that situation and contemplated the issue of how to keep up their websites without the back-up of a regular gig.
Those linked blog pieces are very much worth reading, not just to see the specifics of their dilemmas but also the specifics of how they're dealing with it.
I'd probably face the same problem, except that either I'm a true Son of the Sixties and believe that money doesn't matter, or, to look at it another way, I'm a complete idiot when it comes to managing money anyway so wotthehell.
Heidi concedes she and Tom are hardly the only two facing this, and she's pretty upfront about one aspect of her situation:
For some insane reason, I live in NYC, where working two jobs 14 hours a day to pay for a room in an apartment with three other people living in it is pretty common. A 260-sq. foot apartment built from Legos in the middle of a park full of homeless people across the street from a mental hospital rents for $2000 a month here.
That's three months rent for me, though I'm not splitting it four ways but, then again, I'm not arguing over whose refrigerator shelf is whose and it's always my turn to clean the bathroom.
So you make choices and you try to stay out of the bread line, and I am lucky to be empty-nested and waiting for my first Social Security check, though I can hardly live even my Benedictine existence on that.
But it's still my choice: I keep CSotD on a low level: It's a niche site with a respectable, faithful following that doesn't provide anywhere near the kind of numbers I'd need to capitalize on it.
There's more to life than hits. I've drawn attention from Reddit a time or two and they bounce in, read the comic but none of the commentary, bounce out and never come back.
I think a lot of "good numbers" include the kinds of non-customers who cash in the coupon for the free soda but never buy a sandwich.
*shrug*
In any case, I'm happy with the numbers and the quality of readers that I have. As Bill Holbrook noted a decade-and-a-half ago, huge numbers aren't necessarily the key to wealth.
My Amazon widget pays the cost of the site (Thank you!) though it doesn't cover the time, which is the equivalent of a full-time job. Or the equivalent of an obsessive hobby, because I put in more than 40 hours a week doing things my clients pay me for.
If I thought of this as another job, I'd have to quit.
Meanwhile, Heidi MacDonald and Tom Spurgeon each have Patreons, and those are their links.
I've thought of starting one, but I can't come up with any extras for patrons, particularly since I'm deep enough into "fair use" as it is, and would certainly be pushing it with any sort of quid-pro-quo.
Maybe the landlord would let me put a brick patio in the yard, each paver suitably inscribed with the donor's name.
Or I could just print up some certificates and Photoshop the alleged patio.
In any case, as Ann Landers said, nobody can take advantage of you without your consent. Get a grip. Say "Yes" to things you want to do, say "No" to things you don't want to do, and don't say "Waa-Waa-Waa" at all.
As Rudy says, it's not a matter of selling out.
It's a matter of facing up, if only to the choice you've made.
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