2018 & The State Of Things (a looooong blog) (Patreon)

*deep breath* …okay. I’ve dreaded writing this for a while. I’ve started this blog, wrestled with it for weeks, and thrown everything out and started over five or six times at this point. I really, really, REEEAAALLY don’t wanna write this blog… which is why I HAVE to do it. There’s a lot I’ve avoided confronting for way too long, and a lot of things that aren’t going to get better until I do. So let’s just get it over with. Let’s dump all this mess out in the open where I can’t ignore it any longer, and hopefully then I’ll finally be able to move on from it all.

Way back in the latter half of 2016, it’d become obvious that something was wrong with my comic making process. Updates were taking longer to finish, projects were getting put on hold, schedules were becoming more and more iffy, and I probably set fire to myself a few times by accident. Basically, things were getting really unprofessional. So I wrote a big ol’ blog post blaming it all on Artist Alley and promising to spend the rest of 2017 getting myself back on track. I even suggested there might be a whole series of blogs on how I recovered creatively and got myself back on schedule. Obviously, none of that happened. In fact, 2017 ended up being roughly 4,523,780 times worse than 2016 ever was. Even more stuff got put on hold, even the most basic of updates was inevitably late, and I think I might have caused a sun in the deepest reaches of space to collapse into a black hole of despair. That’s not to say I wasn’t trying to get things back on track, or at the very least track down the root cause of the problem. Even as things repeatedly and consistently fell apart, I tried to stay mindful of just what was going on and trace the chain of events back to their source. And after over a year of increasingly uncomfortable nitpicking and self-examination, I think I’ve found the one common thread running through all the individual hang-ups and disasters, the one thing I’m ready to blame for all my cartooning woes.

In the previous drafts of this blog, I kept dancing around the actual issue; putting off the reveal until the last possible moment and hemming and hawing over all the stuff it WASN’T. It was an annoying waste of time… but also kind of appropriate, since my reluctance to really face this issue is what allowed it to get as bad as it has. So this time around, I’m just gonna drop the reveal right away, and do all my hemming and hawing afterwards.

I am completely, utterly, from the bottom of my soul DONE with the convention scene and fandom in general.

And right away, there’s two things I need to clarify. One: don’t worry about this bold ending with me quitting Conventional Wisdom or renouncing anime and all things nerdy or anything like that. It ain’t happening. Two: I complain about fandom all the time, how is this supposed to be news? Well, because I’m usually saying it as a JOKE. That’s how I avoid actually confronting my real feelings about… everything ever. I grab it the second it starts to form in my head, encase it in several layers of sarcasm and absurdity, and render it so silly that I can’t remember what was there before the joke. It’s all a big joke, everything’s a joke, hahahaha. 

But no, seriously. No sarcasm, no hyperbole.  This isn’t me using ironic detachment to distance myself from the isolated portions of fandom that I don’t like, because there is no isolation portion, it’s the whole thing. My interaction with this otaku/geek/whatever community has cause deep, lasting emotional and psychological damage, which I’ve allowed to fester and deepen through years of denial. I no longer belong to this culture. In fact, I’m not sure I ever really did.

In all the previous drafts of this blog, I launched into this big, crazed insult comic routine after that, trying to play up the “I hate everything about conventions” angle to such an absurd degree that no one would be able to take offence at it. It never turned out as funny as I wanted, which means it would have just offended EVERYBODY and thus been a failure TWICE over. (Incidentally, this is where that April Fools comic with me ranting in a trash can was about) Besides, I don’t actually have to say anything. You already know it all. I just have to flash the words “fandom” and “convention” and “drama” before your eyes, and at least SOMETHING I’m thinking about will spring to your mind without me saying a word. I know this to be the case because there’s not a single beef I have that I haven’t already heard somebody else complain about of their own volition. Everybody’s got their one thing they hate about the con scene, I hear them go on about it all the time. You’ve probably gone off about your pet peeve within the past couple of weeks, whatever it is. It’s just that MOST people have a multitude of things they like to balance it out. Unfortunately, I fall victim to everybody else’s negatives all at once, AND get rubbed the wrong way by most of their positives too.

…yeah, I can’t get away with being that vague, can I? Okay, let’s double back a bit and return to that thing I USED to blame all my professional problems on: Artist Alley. You’ve heard me say it several times by now, how the time and energy I was putting into making stuff to sell meant less time and energy for making regular comics, and how the money I got out of it didn’t justify the decrease in output, and it’s boring being stuck at a table for so long, and blah blah blah probably something about an itchy butt from sitting a lot. None of that stuff is untrue, but they’re secondary problems at best. Little bubbles of annoyance floating on the surface of a deep, inky pond of unhappiness.

In the midst of all that time/money complaining, I did let slip at least a little bit of the deeper problem. One of the most basic bits of advice everyone gives about things like Artist Alley is to not worry about whether or not your stuff will be popular, just make the kind of stuff YOU’D want to buy, and its audience will find it. That’s really good advice… but there’s a couple big assumptions that are being taken for granted there. See, there’s the thing: I genuinely can’t remember the last time I actually bought something in Artist Alley, that stuff just doesn’t interest me anymore. I don’t just mean that I don’t like the specific artists or don’t care about the current crop of fanart subjects, I’m talking about the whole idea of buying prints or commission or what have you. It just doesn’t hold any appeal to me anymore. Back when the raw novelty of nerdy things existing AT ALL was fresh, maybe, but those days are long past. Today, I couldn’t care less about owning a big sheet of cardstock with a picture I like printed on it. What’s even the point? If you DO like that stuff, more power to you, go buy yourself a ton. It just doesn’t do anything for me. And that’s the problem with that “just do what you want” advice up above, if you DON’T want any of this stuff, you’re just left adrift. Sure, it’s possible to luck out and stumble onto something other people will buy even if you don’t get the attraction, but you can’t build a sustainable business on blind luck since you probably won’t be able to repeat it. And besides, us artsy types aren’t supposed to be in it for the money, right? The absolute first thing any aspiring artists learn is to do something they like doing whether they make money off it or not, because they probably never will. If the act of doing it is its own reward, then whether or not it rakes in the cash doesn’t matter. If I don’t get any enjoyment out of making posters to sell at conventions, it really doesn’t matter if some of them make money or not, I shouldn’t spend time doing it.

But that’s still dancing around the root of the problem by focusing on the business side of things. The fact that I just don’t care about buying Artist Alley stuff says a lot about the Artist Alley community, and how little of a place I have there. Because make no mistake, there’s more to AA than just “this is the one room where people are allowed to sell things”. There’s a whole community down there of talking shop, commissioning things, swapping gossip, doing art trades, and all that other “independent artist” stuff that I JUST. DON’T. CARE. ABOUT. Again, if you DO like doing all that stuff, don’t let me rain on your parade, but don’t you expect me to march in it either. The simple fact of the matter is that I don’t belong in that community, all attempts I’ve made to worm my way in have been deeply unfulfilling and unpleasant, and it’s a waste of time to try and do business in Artist Alley if you aren’t in that community since those are the only customers you’ll get down there.

And so I quit. Again, you’ve heard me go on about this a lot over the past year, but there’s a couple choice tidbits I’ve kept to myself. Specifically, Artist Alley isn’t the only thing I gave up on at the end of 2016, it’s just the only one I’d been doing long enough for people to care about. Actually, I’d been toying with the idea for getting out of AA for a while before a particularly disappointing AUSA finally pushed me over the edge. I’d already seen convention guests and featured panelists being allowed to sell stuff in panel rooms, and that really seemed like a better way to go about this whole endeavor. You’ve already got your audience right there, all at one moment, after an hour or so of concentrated direct advertizing to them, so you can do all your business for the day in one blast rather than wasting all weekend waiting for them to trickle by a table somewhere. I already had years of panel hosting experience under my belt, so I figured I’d start making more of an effort to build up my standing there. My plan was two-fold. Obviously, one part was hosting more panels of my own, but that was the lesser half of the plan (since I knew I couldn’t rely on automatically getting my solo panel ideas accepted). The big deal main event plan was for me to weasel my way into more spots co-hosting other people’s panels via comic-making. I would put the word out among all the panelist people I know that I was willing to spice up their powerpoint slideshows with a few custom comics about whatever the topic of the panel was. I’d already been doing that with the Digimon panels Viga had me on, and it seemed to work out pretty dang well there. All I’d ask in return was a shout-out at the end of the panel and, where possible, a chance to sit in on the panel itself. Done right, this would get me all kinds of exposure and badge discounts, and hopefully make me enough of a fixture at conventions that I could start asking for permission to sell stuff outside the Alley.

Of course, none of that happened. The notion of hosting panels solo crashed and burned because, well, I crashed and burned while trying to do it. Let’s face it, I suck as a host. I mean, I’m not THAT bad as a sidekick, the color commentator who chimes in after the “real” host does the hard stuff, but it takes a very special breed of person to lead the conversation, take charge of a situation, and keep the panel rolling without any awkward pauses. Me? I AM an awkward silence manifested in human form. It only took a few tries to realize I’m just not good at being a solo host, or even lead figure in a group of co-hosts, and don’t enjoy trying enough to actually GET good at it.

So that left doing comics for other people’s panels, which also never happened, but for reasons more complicated than me wildly overestimating how many people would be interested in that sort of thing. Honestly, I don’t even know how many people WOULD be interested, because I had a moment of clarity right before I started soliciting my services. And then I immediately tried to suppress what I’d realized and convinced myself a minor secondary detail was my “real reason” for dropping the plan. I told myself that since the overwhelming majority of panelists I knew were just doing it for fun, swooping in with what was essentially a business promotion would end up being a stressful mess of clashing expectations for everyone. Again, that’s not untrue, but it also skims the surface of what was really bothering me.

A bit closer to the point, and thus something I was less willing to acknowledge out loud, was the fact that not all the panelists I was planning on talking to liked each other. In fact, several of them openly hated each other’s guts, and I’d heard plenty more talking trash about each other behind closed doors. I wanted as little to do with that mess as possible. Of course, I told myself it was “really” a matter of professionalism and I needed to avoid getting trapped in a situation where my cartooning endeavors were caught in the middle of someone else’s personal drama, and once again that’s not COMPLETELY untrue. But ALSO once again, that’s more of a rationalization than anything. Truth be told, the big picture, long term, professional consequences stuff didn’t matter to me, (mean, come on, I already devoted my life to drawing cartoons for the internet) I just didn’t want to get in that deep with most of these people. I sat down for a moment and seriously thought about the amount of time I’d have to spend communicating with these people, the level of interaction this project would require, just how much this would invite the convention world into my everyday life… and I had a minor nervous breakdown. No hyperbole here, I was a panicky mess for the rest of the day just over the THOUGHT of dealing with convention stuff for longer than I already was. Being as I’m a guy who draws a webcomic that’s all about anime conventions, you can see where there’s a problem.

Which brings us back around to that key point: I AM SICK OF THE CONVENTION SCENE… and also brings us back to me needing to assure everyone that I am NOT QUITTING. Really. Despite everything I’ve rambled on about, and everything else that’s to come, I actually do still like conventions. I LOVE conventions. I will keep attending these things until they stop letting me out of the old folks home to go. I wouldn’t trade going to conventions for anything. This is not a contradiction, I am not writing an otaku zen koan, it does make sense. I love conventions as EVENTS. I love the thing that I go to and watch for several days. I love the sights and sounds and energy of all this STUFF going on. It’s exciting and stimulating and rewarding and I NEED it in my life. I just can’t deal with the culture that’s grown up around these things, the community that exists within and behind the events. I love the cons, I just don’t care much for the people. I know, I know, not only is that a cranky sociopathic thing to say, but it goes directly against what the convention scene has always said about itself. We always hear that it’s the FANS that make the convention great. The shows and events are just the sprinkles on top of a cake made of friendship and positive social interaction. It’s all about relationships, man! Anime conventions are one big happy family! I believed that for a long time. I told myself I believed it for even longer. Honestly, that’s where all my problems began.

Let’s jump way back. Waaaaaaaaay back to when I went to my first Animazement. I’m a shy little dweeb, fresh off of an entire adolescence as the single, solitary geek in a small rural town otherwise given over entirely to college sports and NASCAR. The only friends I’d had were people I’d swap posts with on Digimon forums. The only common interest I had with anyone around me was with the local kids who got into Pokemon. I was well and truly used to being the only person in any given building who even KNEW about the stuff I liked, let alone had an interest in it. And suddenly, BLAM! Here was an entire HOTEL full of other people who liked the stuff I liked! Screens constantly showing things I’d always wanted to see, room selling stuff I’d always wanted to get my hands on, people walking around in costumes I’d always wanted to wear, just the fact that everyone even KNEW about the stuff I was interested in, let alone enjoyed it too. It was a dream come true! A promise of new, satisfying contentment.  After years of feeling isolated and smothered and directionless, something inside me said “THIS is where everything is finally gonna come together for me. THIS is gonna make everything better!” And why not? All around me were people acting happy and friendly with one another, artists finding an audience for their work, and industry guests going on and on about how they used to be fans Just Like You™, why NOT believe this was where my future lie? I wanted to believe that. I NEEDED to believe that.

…so much so that I subjected myself to over a decade of emotional damage and mental anguish by repeatedly throwing myself into toxic situations on the promise that everything would be fine. I’ve watched those happy, friendly people viciously turn on each other at a moment’s notice, leaving me terrified of saying the wrong thing lest I be next. I’ve been trapped in between various groups who hate each others, so that I couldn’t help but absorb the worst from all sides. I’ve watched this community chew up stable, rational, healthy human beings and spit out broken, neurotic, psychopaths with horrifying regularity. I’ve had my own plans blown to pieces as collateral damage to some other crazy event I wasn’t even remotely involved with. I’ve been abused by people who just needed someone to lash out at and I was the poor schmuck who was there. I’ve felt pressured to suck up to people I’d otherwise have no reason to ever interact with for fear that they could destroy everything I was trying to accomplish. I’ve… really reneged on my promise to not go into detail, haven’t I? (If you’re rolling your eyes at this point, bear with me, really)

And yes, I know there’s plenty of people who have far greater grievances that “the people at this convention aren’t as nice as they pretend to be!” …and that’s part of the problem. I’ve known so many people who’ve endured real, actual harm at the hands of other congers that acknowledging my own problems just seemed petty. So I just choked down my own unhappiness and pretended everything was going great… which, as we all know, makes emotional problems BETTER and never causes them to fester and get worse. Oh, and also never mind the fact that, if it’s so easy to find examples of people having an even worse time than me, then maybe, just maybe, that’s only further proof that this environment isn’t as safe for anyone as it imagines itself to be?

But yeah, long self-pitying story short: I went year after year telling myself the bad environments, destructive choices, and damaging personal interactions weren’t having any kind of effect on me. Even those times when I recognized they were happening, I insisted I could shrug off those bad vibes as soon as the situation passed and get on with all the good stuff that was happening. And so it festered, curdling my emotions in ways that totally contradicted what my brain had decided I was supposed to be feeling. It all became horrifyingly clear the night before Otakon last year. There was a time when the night before a con trip felt like the night before Christmas, I’d be all giddy and unable to sleep from excitement, it was great. But this time? This time I realized wasn’t looking forward to the weekend at all; I was bracing myself. I couldn’t wait to have this thing over with and get back home. It was the exact same feeling I’d have before going to a job I hated. How does that even happen? How does the guy who had once greeted anime conventions as little less than his own salvation wind up treating them like some unpleasant chore he has to grit his teeth and endure? That was when I really had to stop and take stock of my real feelings on… everything, really. Not just conventions, but EVERYTHING. That’s the sneaky thing about emotions, they stick around long after the thing that caused them is gone. And since I was already living in denial over where these emotions were coming from in the first place, that just made it even harder to recognize they was they were infecting my life away from the con. Like, say, my attempts to draw webcomics.

Yep, at long last, I’m FINALLY bringing all this back around to the point people actually care about: why comics have been taking so long to come out. Pages and pages of rambling to finally say “it’s hard to write funny comics about conventions if I don’t have fun at them anymore.” Except, again, I DO have fun at them. I gotta keep stressing that, for all my bellyaching, I really genuinely do love going to conventions. If I absolutely hated EVERYTHING about the experience, I wouldn’t be struggling with any of this handwringing. Instead, there’s all these incredible, exciting, stimulating good things the praise and enjoy, with destructive, poisonous bad things swirling all around them, and I keep gulping down hazardous amounts of the later ‘cos I’m so hungry for the former. Eventually, the effects of all that bad start bleeding over into the good, ESPECIALLY when a person is in denial about it being there in the first place. I’d come home with a notebook full of material I was really excited about, then go days dreading the thought of even looking at them. I started second guessing comic ideas for fear that they drifted too far into a negative attitude I didn’t even want to admit to myself I had, which just made everything take longer. I started looking for weirder, more convoluted ways of venting these emotions while detaching them from their source, which inevitably made the creative process that much more unnatural, unpleasant, and SLOW (not to mention the results were NEVER as funny as they’d be if I hadn’t tired so hard).  Guilt over both the delays and my own sour attitude drove me to try and make the eventual updates bigger and flashier and longer than ever before… which just  made things even later than they would have been otherwise. And then I’d feel sick at the thought engaging the whole convention social media swarm to promote the comics, only to constantly beat myself up for daring to think such bad things about my precious fellow otaku, and… well, it just turned into a big spiral of guilt and bad vibes at that point.

Oh, and it wasn’t just confined to Conventional Wisdom, either. This toxic downward spiral is also why Far Out There has gotten so chronically late, why those promised Becky & Gilb sequels and Digimon fan comics never happen, why Patreon updates are so abysmally rare, heck, I could probably blame all this weight I’ve gained on it if I tried hard enough. Here’s my excuse: these bad vibes swirling around convention community have tainted my ability to enjoy everything even remotely connected to cons and the making of comics thereof, and that covers a LOT. I don’t know if I’ve actually watched a single anime over the past decade that wasn’t, in some way, connected to either a con or Conventional Wisdom. It USED to be just a thing I watched because I liked it, but before I realized what was happening it was all preparing for panels, or for a comic, or for a cosplay project, or so I could stay conversant with the fandom, or looking for funny screencaps I could post on the comic’s social media outlets, EVERYTHING was tied into this project to make me into the ultimate comic-slinging otaku man. And when that started to go sour, it soured my enjoyment of everything connected to it, until eventually I couldn’t so much as LOOK at the stuff I used to like without getting sick to my stomach.

(That isn’t even hyperbole, right there, I’m being one hundred percent literal. There’s whole playlists of JRock and Jpop I can’t enjoy anymore because they used to be my go-to “stay awake on the drive home” music, so now hearing them provokes that queasy, nervous sensation that normally only comes from too many energy drinks and too little sleep. Pavlov wasn’t kidding around, man.)

This is a serious problem for me, because my creative process is largely reactive. That’s fancy talk for saying “I can’t make stuff up unless I have something else to rip off.” Okay, okay, maybe not rip off (usually) but I do need a constant stream of stimulating material entering my brain if it’s gonna start churning material out of its own. Sometimes, it’s because I saw something cool and want to do something else just like it. Other times it’s because I saw something disappointing and I thought I could do better. Occasionally, it’s just the fact that somebody out there is doing something at all and I start to feel competitive. One way or another, though, all my best moments creatively have sprouted from a fertile bed of anime and manga… so I’m in big trouble if I can’t enjoy those things the way I used to. I’d SORT OF realized this back last year, though at that point I chalked it up to more of a “don’t combine your work with your hobbies” kind of thing than deep emotional distress. My plan at the time to just MAKE myself watch stuff that wasn’t work related didn’t account for the sheer amount of emotional baggage I needed to sort through, but it at least acknowledged why I was feeling so creatively spent. Rather than watching the kind of anime that had always got me fired up, I was spending all my free time watching the history of various British microcomputers or 40 Things You Won’t Believe Happened at The Royal Rumble or somebody’s comedic review of The World’s Greatest Sinner or whatever random dross YouTube coughed up. Nothing wrong with any of those things, mind you, they just don’t stoke the furnaces of my creativity the way good anime always has… and yet, the trend continued. I may have known what I should be putting in my brain, but emotions are messy and complicated and “knowing” what to do is rarely a guarantee you’ll be able to do it. I kept on running towards entertainment that didn’t remind me of a decade’s worth of bad memories, even though I knew they wouldn’t actually give me anything. And thus, the year got suckier and suckier. You can just look at my lack of updates for the proof of that. 

That’s not to say, once again, that my initial belief that this was all a problem of time management and bad work habits was COMPLETELY off base. It is a verifiable fact that I SUCK at pacing myself and getting things done in regular, sustainable intervals. Instead, I generally lounge around like an inert lump not accomplishing anything for as long as I can get away with it, then explode into a frenzy of intense micromanaged activity when something absolutely HAS to get done. Neither mode is very healthy, and honestly the two tend to feed into each other. But still, I can stay on top of things when I absolutely have to, when I know there’ll be immediate consequences if I don’t Here’s the thing, though: I’ve never really learned how to stick to a regular, incremental work schedule where my comics are concerned because, for the longest time, I never needed to. It was an exciting, rewarding pastime that I never had to worry about “making myself” get anything done. If anything, I had to make myself STOP because I was overdue for a break. Back when I was mainly doing Digimon fanstuff, I literally had to hold stuff back on occasion because I’d made too much stuff over the past few days to squeeze into a single website update. For a long time, I was cranking out so many pages of Far Out There that it actually had around a week’s worth of page buffer by default. And remember back when Conventional Wisdom would come out within a week of the actual con wrapping up? The point is, for years and years, the notion of reining in the urge to go do what I felt like doing in order to sit down and draw comics was an absurdity. Drawing comics WAS what I wanted to do, so the whole thing took care of itself. But now it doesn’t work that way. Now there’s so many ugly memories and bad vibes attached to everything that I have these irrational impulses to wander off and something, ANYTHING else and it’s not something I’m used to dealing with.

Happily (hey, remember happiness?), recent events have suggested that there is, indeed, a way out of this mess, even if it does mean admitting a lot of things about myself I’d rather keep ignoring. The first big breakthrough came at Anime Weekend Atlanta. At the moment, AWA is far and away the… um, farthest away convention I attend. Most of my usual con buddies can’t make the trip, and none of the panels or events I traditionally take part in were happening as a result. I had none of my usual people to hang out with, none of my usual things to do, nobody to travel with, heck, thanks to some trouble with the key cards I barely even saw my own roommates. And you know what? It was the best convention experience I’d had in YEARS. No jobs to do, no expectations to meet, no responsibilities to worry about, all I had to do was wander around and take notes for three days. It was GREAT. And not only was it a fun weekend, it was a PRODUCTIVE weekend. I actually managed to get over half the comics for that update penciled right there at the con, a lot of them were even inked before I left. That NEVER happens anymore. Sure, the writing process slowed to a crawl again once I got back home and sank back into the morass of bad vibes, but for those precious few days while I was there, I really remembered what I loved about anime conventions again. What I ACTUALLY loved about the experience, not what I’d projected onto it. That excitement, that energy, that inspiration that breeds creation. Here was all of the good and none of the bad, and for a brief fleeting moment, I loved it all again. And then I came home to a broken computer, and you can imagine what wonders THAT did for my mood.

Before trying to read too deeply into that experience, we have to acknowledge that it COULD have turned out to be a fluke. After all, as I’m so fond of telling everyone, AWA is only a few minutes away from where I grew up, and I’m WILDLY susceptible to the warm fuzzies of nostalgia. My good mood could simply have been something I brought with me due to seeing my old home again mixed with the relaxation of not having any jobs to do at the con, not a reflection on the actual con experience itself… but then MAGFest happened.

In a lot of ways, MAGFest was everything AWA wasn’t. It was full of the people I normally run into at every convention, I interacted with the same social circles I normally do, I actually helped host a panel at MAGfest for the first time, basically, if it weren’t for the absence of an Artist Alley table, I’d say I did every single thing I’d blamed my souring attitude towards cons on. Oh, and let’s not forget that I spent the whole weekend right across the river from the one place I had more bad memories about than anywhere else on Earth. And yet, when everything was said and done, I had just as much fun at MAGFest as I did at AWA. For all my complaints about the weather and hotel logistics and being constantly worn out from the combination thereof, it was another GREAT weekend that I looked back quite fondly on. While the Conventional Wisdom update this year was still later than I would have liked (and still had to be broken up into parts to get out at ALL), it was still WAAAAY less delayed and overblown than last year. Remember: the whole reason I couldn’t do an April Fools update last year was because the 2017 MAGFest comics dragged out THAT stupidly long. This year was practically finished overnight compared to that, and it never would have happened if I was still in as deep a funk as I was last year.

So what happened? What’s the connecting thread between these two wildly different weekends that allowed me to walk away with such similar good feelings? Well, if we’re being honest here, it’s that I still barely interacted with anyone at MAGFest. Thanks to the weirdness in accommodation arrangements, the people I was rooming with weren’t the people I rode there and back with, which cut the time I’m normally around a lot of people in half. All that walking back and forth across National Harbor itself ate into a lot of the time I would have otherwise spent hanging with folks too, not to mention really wearing me out with the whole “bludgeoning me over the head with freezing winds” and what have you. As a result of that, I spent a BIG ol’ chunk of the weekend just sitting in the back of the concert hall rather than, you know, actually going around interacting with people. And when I DID go wandering around, I was inevitably trying to make up for all the pictures I hadn’t been taking before, so I was too busy running around to be sociable then too (remember what I said about either being an inert lump or a maddening flurry of activity?). Heck, even the panel I was on was Awesomely Bad, and we’ve done that so many times that Kurt could probably just announce it happening somewhere and a panel would spontaneously manifest out the ether without any of us even needing to be in the room. There wasn’t much planning or setup required, is what I’m saying.

So, what then? The end result of all this soul searching is really just “convention culture is bad and being around other geeks makes everything worse?” You can see why I tried to turn a blind eye to what was going on for so long, and why I’ve been even more reluctant to be open about it to other people. I didn’t exactly relish the thought of publicly announcing “Hey, guess what people I’ve been friends with for over a decade? I’ve realized that the very foundation of our friendships is a lie and the quality of my life is lessened by your presence in it!” Anyone who’d be eager to go around declaring something like that is a person everyone ELSE is better off not knowing. Fortunately, I guess, there is a little more to the whole thing than just that. After all, I’ve been saying this whole time that there’s stuff I haven’t wanted to admit about MYSELF, not just everybody else.

I mean, think about it: for everything I said about MAGFest and AWA, it’s not as if I spent those weekends in some kind of containment suit. I still had SOME kind of interaction with other human beings. I still ran into SOME friends and hung out with them a LITTLE bit, just nowhere near as much as I’d previously told myself I was “supposed” to. And those little interactions didn’t bog the weekends down; despite all my pages of complaining, THOSE just ended up being another part of the good times. So what the heck?

Actually, hold on. Let’s double back a little further. I went on and on about how unhealthy and poisonous convention culture is, but you know what else is full of bad people who do bad things to each other? LITERALLY EVERYTHING EVER. No, seriously. I’m not just being overly negative for comedy, this really is one of the most basic facts we have to learn to cope with in order to become functioning adults. Drive defensively because there are people out there who drive recklessly. Lock your apartment because there are people out there who will take your stuff. Don’t respond to e-mails from Nigerian princes who need you to send them money because there are people out there who lie about that sort of thing. Life is full of bad stuff, and unless you plan on living on top of a mountain somewhere, life means learning to function in spite of it.  I probably pass twenty things more poisonous, soul-damaging, demoralizing than anything con-related just walking down to the neighborhood gas station, but you don’t see any rambling blog posts about I just can’t deal with the gas station anymore. So what gives?

Well, my visits to the gas station don’t last whole weekends, for one thing. I don’t have to spend days, if now WEEKS, making arrangements for lengthy road trips to get to the gas station.  I don’t have to spend three to five days constantly interacting with the gas station without any kind of break. I haven’t tried to build a career out of drawing webcomics about how awesome the gas station is. At no point did I ever emotionally invest myself in the gas station community as something I expected to be the answer to all my problems. And I don’t have to worry about the gas station bothering me over social media weeks after I’m done with it and desperately need all that mess in my life. Gas station… is going to sound really weird to me for the rest of the day now.

Ugh, I’m really dancing around this one, aren’t I? Again, this is something I’ve really tried hard not to think about, let alone acknowledge in a public setting. That, or I’m severely overcompensating in my attempt to avoid doing the whole tumblr “I have no professional psychological training whatsoever, but I know a lot of buzzwords and trendy abbreviations, so listen to my condescending rant about how introverts work.” Cos yeah, we’re going there.

It’s gradually dawned on me that, among all the other lines the convention community tells itself – nestled between “We’re all nice to each other”, “Nobody’s being warped in ways that’ll leave them damaged for their whole adult lives,” and “Everything I’m doing to support the industry totally matters” – are some choice lines about how making new friends and fostering relationships with others and how it’s all about the interaction and other stuff that takes it for granted that the person being told these things is in any way an outgoing individual. As anyone who’s met me in person knows, however, I am as outgoing as a wet clump of dirt. My natural state of being is sitting silently in the corner of an empty room, for days.  Something as simple as hanging out with friends for a few hours requires a LOT of mental preparation and takes a lot out of me. That doesn’t mean I don’t like it, but it’s EXHAUSTING. Like, legitimately wearying.  Just after a few hours of sitting around talking with pals, I have to go collapse somewhere and rest up like I was carrying something heavy.

Now imagine up to five DAYS of constant close-quarters interaction with people: lengthy road trips in cars jammed full of people, multiple nights tripping over people dangerously overcrowded hotel rooms, intense person-to-person planning from panels or photoshoots, staying in constant contact with people ‘round the clock to stay on top of changing plans, cranking up the energy enough to entertain a whole, the *shudder* constant terrifying threat of someone daring to *gasp* strike up a conversation without warning and expecting a instant reply without several hours of emotional preparation! THE HORROR! But seriously, that much high-octane interaction with that many people, having to be “on” for so long without interruption, it absolutely DESTROYS me. I can handle just being AROUND people, like in crowds and stuff, but direct interpersonal interaction just gets more taxing and more difficult to sustain the older I get. It’s completely, soul-drainingly exhausting.

…and, again, that’s with people I ACTUALLY LIKE. That’s the end result of people around people I WANT to be around. Now factor in everybody else, all those people I was complaining about in the first half of this rant. If that’s what I feel like after interaction with people whose presence I genuinely enjoy, what do you think a solid weekend of the awkward, delusional, neurotic, egotistical, shrill, unstable, petty, perverted, psychotic blight of humanity that is That One Con Goer does to me? (WOW, I really got over my reluctance to get too specific)

In fact, I think this is part of the reason why it took me so long to come to terms with how much I’d soured on the whole convention scene, an might even be one of the reasons that happened in the first place. Again, it’s part of the overall Myth of the Anime Convention that this is where all the otaku gather to mingle and socialize and support one another and definitely not spread malicious middle school drama about each other to hide their own crippling inadequacies (Okay, seriously, me. Cut that out.) One of the foundational assumptions there being that everybody going to these conventions actually WANTS to interact with other people, that it’s something everyone naturally draws energy FROM, not requiring energy FOR. Clearly, anybody who DOESN’T get a charge out of complete strangers walking up and talking to them and expecting to stay in contact after that point is A TOTAL WEIRDO, right? Right? …okay, no, most conventions don’t say that, and seeing as how they’re at least PARTIALLY run by awkward internet freaks themselves, they’d have to. What matters is I told MYSELF that, because I saw plenty of other people who were wired that way, and since I wanted to do everything ELSE I saw these people doing, I wanted to do that too.

Now, I’ve already rambled at length about what a bad idea it was to constantly throw myself into interactions with people whose presence in my life could only lessen its quality, but this isn’t just a case of how bad everybody OTHER than me is. After all, I’m the one who willingly chose to subject myself to these situations for years. If I stick my arm in the fireplace repeatedly, I can’t really act like IT bears all the blame for my extensive burns.  I’m the one who spent years pushing myself to the point of burnout trying to maintain an illusion I wasn’t emotionally capable of living out. If I already get worn ragged just being around people I WANT to be around, doing things I genuinely want to do, what do you think happens when I’m stuck listening to an unemployed dropout angrily lecturing me on how he knows what the anime industry needs to do to survive, or some real life redditors snarking about how the con shows favoritism to that one cosplayer they hate or DANG IT, ME! I SAID TO STOP DOING THAT!

Okay, but anyway, that’s what all that weird rambling about the gas station was about earlier. I’m confronted with evidence that the world sucks all the time, but USUALLY I can just sigh, shake my head, and go on trying to make my little corner of the world a better place in defiance of the rest of it. With this whole anime convention/otaku culture/nerd community thing, though, that’s not happening. A lot of people can just shrug it off when they have a bad run in with that one venomous sociopath ranting about how Cartoon Network buried that one show (THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING, ME) because they’re ready to deal with that sort of thing, their shields are up at full strength. Frankly, that’s how it should be. But what about me, Mr. Exhausted By The Act Of Being Polite? If I’m already getting so burned out just by talking to people at ALL for four days, keeping those shields up just isn’t an option. Instead, every single shred of that ugly awkwardness is free to burrow deeeeeep into my psyche where random encounters with random strangers shouldn’t have the power to get. And they just sit there, dragged along home with me, gnawing at me for days after the con’s over, making it that much harder to get over the experience as a whole, souring my memories of the experience and everything connected to it, poisoning my ability to rejuvenate myself by enjoying those “connected to it” things, and making it really really REALLY hard to draw cartoon about what a good time I had.

So it’s not just a matter of avoiding the bad stuff about conventions long enough for my mood to change, because it’s not only the bad stuff that’s been screwing around with my mood in the first place. And what does that mean, exactly? Am I saying I’m gonna start placing strict time limits on how long I allow myself to hang out with anyone period? …maybe? I don’t especially WANT to, but it’s become excruciatingly clear that I want things at aren’t in my own best interest, so that may not matter. And, honestly, this has already been happening over the past year or two anyway, whether I intended it or not. Last Otakon, after spending all morning driving up to DC and getting all checked in, how did I spend the rest of the day? I took a walk by myself miles away to the other side of town, then went straight to bed as soon as I got back. In fact, I’ve been going right to sleep rather than interacting with the other people in my hotel rooms for a WHILE now. These are not the actions of a person who’s having a good time playing with others. So… yeah. I really may have to just start saying “Thanks, but I’ve exceeded my limit for being around people today.” It goes against everything conventions have told me about how I’m supposed to spend the weekend, but as we’ve already established, conventions have lied to be about a LOT. And besides, I don’t think anyone is really missing out if they’re denied an extra hour of me standing around in awkward silence because I already used up all my talking XP for the day.

All I really know is that, as I finish this thing up, Animazement is right around the corner, and I can already feel that dread kicking in again. This is supposed to be the homecoming convention, the one that started it all for me, yet I’m still getting that icky desire for the whole thing to just be over already. Sure, I don’t have Artist Alley to worry about any more, and AZ’s close enough to home that I’m not even staying at the hotel, but this is still where the roots run deeeeeeeep. More than anywhere, there’s a lot of old reminders to get over, a lot of lessons to unlearn. That’s a big part of why I finally pushed through finishing the ugly monstrosity of a blog post, to finally clear my head and get all this gunk out in the open before diving into another Animazement.  Because along with that icky sense of dread, I can also feel that same old deceptive desire to be a good little otaku lingering somewhere in the back of my brain. It’s still there, whispering that I’m just being too negative and the con scene isn’t THAT bad and I’ve just been going through a bad patch, becoming me to dive face-first into another spiral of behavior that I KNOW will just end with me in another listless, uncreative funk for months. Heck, the past month has been the hardest for me all year, creativity-wise, mostly because of how it’s felt like this weekend (and, to a lesser extent, this blog post) was hanging over me. I’ve had two good cons in a row, I don’t want Animazement of all things to be the one that breaks that streak. And if being embarrassingly, excruciatingly candid about things is the first step in making sure that doesn’t happen, then so be it.

Which finally, FINALLY, brings us to the end of this horrifying stream of dribble. To the handful of people who actually stuck through to the very end, I extend my most heartfelt congratulations and deepest apologies. I can only assure you that, no matter how tedious it was to read, I hated writing it even more. But on the upside, I feel fairly confident in guessing that anyone dedicated enough to actually read this far must be someone who likes me enough to NOT be one of the people I kept lashing out at earlier. I mean, good Lord, even I haven’t gone back and re-read most of this thing. I can’t begin to imagine what typos or slip-ups or mangled sentences are lurking in those angst-filled paragraphs. But the important thing is, all that mess is finally out of my system and in the open where I can’t pretend it doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe, just MAYBE, now I’ll be able to start getting over all these hang-ups and start cranking out a decent stream of comics for you people again. After all, after Animazement comes Okaton 2018, Conventional Wisdom’s big Ten Year Anniversary. I have GOT to be in tip top shape to give you all the kind of celebration a milestone like that deserves. Because, once last time, I DO LIKE DOING THIS. I really do like going to conventions, I like drawing cartoons about conventions, I like being that guy who goes to conventions and draws cartoons about them. Really. REALLY. The whole reason I’m trying to filter all this other crud out is because I genuinely, truly DO love doing this. And above all else, I need to thank all of you who’ve kept reading these comics despite all the distractions and schedule slips and rambly indulgent blog posts. It really does mean the world to me that you’re out there reading any of this stuff… even if I’m apparently too anti-social to hang out with you and talk about it for very long.

…sweet merciful crap, this is thirteen pages long. That’s just horrendous. Okay, enough whining about the past. Animazement is up next. ON WITH THE FUTURE!