the fence is done…

1 Comment

Yesterday, I finally finished putting up my new fence.  It was a lot of hard work but I did it.  15 days before I didn’t know what to do.  15 days later, I’m wiser and way sorer than I was.

Frank's fence finished

The reason I had to get it done so quick is purely and totally Frank:  Lucy figured out how to get over the temporary fence.  Lezley luckily grabbed her just in time… before she looked to her left and saw a gaping hole of freedom before her.  Once Lucy learns something, she can’t unlearn it.  In fact, she builds upon what she learns like a musician learning scales.  This means that her next escape would be a Great Escape... like Steve McQueen cycle jumping that wall.

Either way, it’s done.

 

Bob and Cosmos

This is a re-post from SQUIRRELOSOPHY…–

Cosmos and Bob the Squirrel

I watched the first episode of Cosmos last night. I was all set and comfy eager to be enlightened by Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson as he continued the work of his mentor Dr. Carl Sagan. I really wished I could accurately remember that moment right before the first episode… because that was the last time I;ll probably ever feel significant… in a universe is infinite type of way.

No disrespect to Dr. Neil at all… him and I have a history. Well, he responded to one of my tweets a while back:

neil degrasse tyson

Cosmos had a lot for me to wrap my peanut dust covered brain around. The series will go 13 episodes… at the end of which I may all but disappear completely… if I haven’t already. Cosmos is cool. Watch it and you too can feel just like me.

Reflecting on SQUIRRELOSOPHY: Year One

embracing your inner squirrelOn October 12, 2012, I launched squirrelosophy.com. I did not have a master plan, a thesis or a mission statement. The only thing I did have was a bunch of little things that didn’t quite exactly fit into the flow of my daily comic strip Bob the Squirrel.

You can see an awful lot in a reflection… especially a very clear one.

I started posting these extra panels of Bob expressing a view on bobthesquirrel.com in April 2012. I genuinely had no aspirations to make anything out of it…other than being a bit of a bonus for the daily readers. Maybe, one of these more timely panels would rope someone into reading the daily. They were going to be “whenever I felt like it” panels… no set schedule. But the ideas kept hitting me, some while I was in the middle of drawing another. If you do what I do, you know that when inspiration sends you down a raging river you need to go with the flow for as far as it’s going to take you.

A raging river can turn into a dry river bed in an instant.

By late September, it was pretty clear that I had to do something about this. There was a feeling that these single panels could take away from the strip. I didn’t want that, but drinking from the inspiration well was addicting. So, I started SQUIRRELOSOPHY. It was as separate thing from the strip…completely separate. That’s fine, but that also meant more work… two sites to maintain, two flows of content to maintain, two of everything. Oh well, I’m no stranger to hard work, right? I did graduate school full time with a full-time job, full-time strip and full-time family, right? Granted, at one point I though my stomach was going to rupture from the stress, but I lived through it, right? A website? Piece of cake.

Uh huh. Yeah.

It has decidedly NOT been a piece of cake. Not a cupcake, a brownie bite or even a cake crumb. It has been hard, stressful and minimally rewarding. It is an extra set of monthly costs and one more piece of time carved off of Frank’s day.
I have not promoted squirrelosophy.com as well as I should have. For that matter, I have NEVER promoted bobthesquirrel.com as well as I should have. And yet, eleven years later, the comic strip is still kicking, while many of my contemporaries packed it up long ago. Over the last decade I’ve thought of Bob the Squirrel as the best comic strip that no one has ever read… not only as a bit of sarcastic banter, but to make myself feel better for the lack of “putting it all out there”.

Along the way, I have earned (yes, I say ‘earned’) countless loyal fans…fans that have been with me through this journey. I am constantly in awe knowing that I’ve earned a little bit of their time every day. People that have been supporting me through art purchases, book purchases, making comments, telling me how they can relate and just reading every single day. It is an honor.

It has NEVER been easy. I’ve thought about packing it in myself on a few occasions. Board up the doors and windows and leave it. Move on to something else before this life ends… before it’s too late to have another choice. When I feel this way, and It always seems to be around the milestone moments, I think not about the hard work that will be off my plate, but the people who won’t stop by the site to read everyday. I think about how this comic strip, this sarcastic, crabby, pain in my ass squirrel has been with me for over one-quarter of my life. How, in 2007, when I was in the darkest, most desperate place in my life, he literally SAVED my life. I didn’t tell my problems, to a counselor, to a relative… I talked to Bob. He was (and is) there for me whenever I needed him or not needed him. That’s is how REAL he is.

The worst days of my new life are still a thousand times better than the best days of my old life.

I’m going to give squirrelosophy.com another year. If it doesn’t seem to be working out, I’ll close it down. This doesn’t mean that I will be any less devoted to it than I already am. I will not intentionally derail it to close it down… if I wanted to close it down, I would obviously just close it down. I owe it to my fans and I owe it to Bob.

Here’s to another year.

for what it’s worth…

1 Comment

It has taken me a long time to get to where I am… wherever ‘where’ is.  I’ve gone through a few forests of paper and pencils, swimming pools full of ink and rejection after rejection after rejection to definitively know that… I do not know.  On a normal week, I draw a minimum of 20-25 cartoons.  That’s not including sketches, separate side projects or the ones I end up trashing… that’s 20 from pencil to ink to Photoshop.  So give or take a few hundred, i draw about 1,040 cartoons per year.  The economic law of supply vs. demand says that if the supply is high, the demand is low… meaning that the market value of the supply is low.

Does this mean that the value of my drawings is low?  I am not suggesting that I turn out more material than anyone else… far from it.  I know I don’t.  If anyone out there knows me personally, you  know I am not one to boast or brag. (Besides, who would really care other than another cartoonist about my output volume?)  I’m sure there are cartoonists out there that routinely get 20-25 finished cartoons done in an afternoon.

This is what approximately one year of daily Bob the Squirrel strips (left) and about a year of Sunday Bob the Squirrel panels (right) look like in my well ventilated storage facility.

This is what approximately one year of daily Bob the Squirrel strips (left) and about a year of Sunday Bob the Squirrel panels (right) look like in my well ventilated storage facility.

This is what 15 months of SQUIRRELOSOPHY panels look like...keeping in mind that nearly 60 panels have been sold.

This is what 15 months of SQUIRRELOSOPHY panels look like…keeping in mind that nearly 60 panels have been sold.

There was a time when I myself put little value into what I do.  Like… two days ago.  Once the drawing was done, scanned and sent, it was out of my mind and I stopped thinking about it.  You really have to.  If you stop to dwell on each piece (being a daily cartoonist) you will fall so far behind you might as well be standing still.  That mindset lent itself to me not caring about the finished product.  It wasn’t until recently I felt the need to re-examine this process… like… two days ago.   And all it took was kinda sorta hearing my own words coming out of someone’s mouth for me to change.

I was asked for a copy of something I worked very hard on.  No thought from the other party of any kind of compensation for me and my work.  My ‘reward’ came in  knowing that my work would be used on someone’s project.  I should be honored that they thought my work was good enough to ask for.  Really?  Honored?  I almost wish I wasn’t asked and they just stole it.  That way, I wouldn’t have been so dumbstruck by the audacity asking me point blank if they could have it took.

I assume you know how this story ended.  This person did not get what they were asking for.  In their not getting what they wanted, I got something I didn’t think I needed.  It was another lever of pride in what I do… that no matter what, there IS value in what I create.  If the cartoonist/illustrator/artist can’t see the value inherent in his/her own work, why should anyone else think or see value in it?

I had this feeling once.  I developed it while working on my MFA.  As grad students, we were constantly poked and prodded by critiques to explain why we did this or why we did that.  Why would you use that mark to express that feeling?  Why that color?  Why that choice?  Why that choice?  By the end of my graduate work, I was a bear defending its young.  The day before graduation, the faculty gathered my class together for an exit strategy meeting.  We went around the room and told each other the one thing that surprised us about the program and what it did for us as artists.  I said, “I am surprised at how deeply, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ like I have fallen in love with my line…the mark I make on a piece of paper which defines me…I would do anything for that line, defend it with every ounce of blood in my body.  Everything else can be taken from me but that line is mine all mine.”

Okay, I know… it’s a little corny… but after those two hard years of work, in a constant defensive stance on my work, that’s what I felt.  It has been three years now since I made that little statement.  Obviously, some of that passion was lost since… in the day-to-day struggle to get new work out there, new eyeballs on that work and seeking new eyeballs for the work you have done and the work you will do.  It took that person asking me for something to get that passion back.

It has been said that something is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it.

Considering all that I’ve paid in getting to this point, I’d say it’s worth a whole lot.