What Comes Next? (Patreon)

(Preview panel from next week’s comic. How gorgeously did Matt color this? It takes my breath away)

What comes next?

I have so many ideas for projects I want to do, stories I want to tell. I want to draw that silly, short 18th century statue-comes(cums?)-to-life porno comic I started last year. I want to draw the fictional, young adult graphic novel that my friend Brendan Adkins and I wrote (I mean, he wrote it, I just weighed my suggestions heavily). I want to do a series of short memoir essays, about finding my chosen family, about seeking validation through my art and performing on the internet as a way to plug the bottomless hole that occupied my heart for most of my life, about the dynamics of my parents’ co-dependent, destructive relationship and how everything in my life is a reaction to the way I was raised. I want to do a book that talks about the absurd adventure Matt and I went through to become engaged, married, and immigrated (Trust me, it’s a really bizarre story that I haven’t shared in my earlier comics).

All my time is taken up with Oh Joy. Which is great! What a fucking miracle that I have the privilege of supporting my catfamily on my creative work! It’s not something I take for granted. But. (And there’s always a “but”) But I have other stories I want to tell too. I’m running on a treadmill, running myself through the wringer to produce the same type of comic over and over each week. I try to improve, try to bring fresh creative choices into our formula, but the whole point of having a formula is that it’s an established structure that takes out some of the heavy lifting of creating original content.

There’s even projects I want to do WITH Oh Joy that Matt and I just don’t have the time or money to invest in making it happen. I’d like to produce a coloring book of my naughty drawings. Matt wants to write a smutty longer-form story and hire an artist to illustrate it. I want to publish full books of other cartoonists’ work. Looking at that list, we both just want to produce more books, really.

“Maybe we could apply to an arts grant?” I suggested as we drove home this afternoon. “Then we could afford to hire an artist to draw your story?” But it’s not just the money, he reminded me. It’s the time. Both our days are already full, even if paying for an artist weren’t an issue, then turning those pages into a well-produced book and distributing it is its own full-time job. Neither of us has the hours to take on that additional task. “We’d have to hire two full-time employees (Plus the artist as well),” Matt explained. We don’t have the time to do it ourselves nor the money to hire others to make it happen.

“I didn’t want to make you worry,” he went on. “but this year has me real nervous.” Switching our ads from our old network to take them in-house, losing out on revenue from our jamesdeen(dot)com affiliation, our traffic seems to have reached its saturation point and has not been increasing; to judge January 2016 to January 2015, this year looks like our income will be taking a pretty large hit.

How long can we keep this up?

How long until Matt needs to get a part-time job to make up for lost income? How long before I completely burn out on this crushing weekly schedule of producing the same formulaic story again and again? We already have planned down-time weeks for me to recuperate when I reach my breaking point, but they come at a cost. It’s typically $500 per guest comic, and that doesn’t include the time Matt invests to chase down our artists and actually get them to deliver, and then any editorial feedback they need to incorporate. It eats up so many hours, days, weeks, months, in some cases over a year just for one guest comic. Whenever I take any time off for my fragile mental health, Matt has to take on that extra load that I normally carry; and he’s already doing so much, I hate adding more weight onto his shoulders.

I want to do so many things. None of them will ever be as financially successful as Oh Joy. I feel so lucky to have this job and so trapped by it at the same time.

How long will this last, I wonder every day. What will we do next.