Circle ‘Yes’ or you’ve failed it
Where do you find the time to do comics? I’m so busy!
If your biggest deal is that you don’t have time to do comics, then you’re not like all the people I know who actually do this for a living. When they were nowhere near getting paid for it, they were still drawing things. They weren’t even thinking about making comics for a living half the time, they were just drawing comics because they wanted to.
This is a job where the application is one question! Here it is: Would you be doing this if no one was paying you, Y/N? Circle one. Circle ‘Yes’ or you’ve failed it! Comics are a labor of love, because they have to be, because I sure wish we were all rich but that ain’t the way it works. Charles Schulz’s famous quote is something we’ve all heard. “Cartooning will destroy you, it will break your heart.” When you understand what he meant, you also understand why he did it for most of his life all the same.
When there was a death in my family I made comics that I can’t even look at now, and if I were to go back I don’t think I’d have done it again. We’re human, no one can be a creative machine all the time. But if you don’t have time to make Craig Thompson’s Habibi, that’s ok, you don’t have to get hung up on the fact that there aren’t enough hours in the day. Make smaller things, be less painstaking about it if you need to get things finished. Yes, many of us are legitimately busy with things. Adjust your goals. Do anything, but don’t tell me you don’t have time, because you have time.
This is maybe the best advice I’ve ever read on “how to make comics,” and it’s advice that I in particular need to heed. (Incidentally, Beaton probably could have answered every question in that Q&A with “Just do the work.”)
