When I set up this new blog six months ago, I made a very conscious effort not to start with a big statement of intent. No manifesto about Why Blogs or I’m Leaving Social Media For Good or anything like that.

I just posted a current thing — a photo I took from the window of a moving car — and then posted a few quotes next, and didn’t make it a big deal in any way. No big plan, no attempts at comprehensiveness. I just needed it to exist without needing it to be anything in particular just yet.

What I was looking for was a better way of being online in some approximation of “real time.”¹

Twitter is no longer an acceptable option, if it ever was. Its alternatives, even the good ones, all have the same problems — while they still serve some of the social functions, I need a better way of sharing work and pictures and thoughts in progress at my own pace, with more continuity, more permanence, and more depth (when needed)².

The blog did already survive the threshold of “two posts, then a three year gap, then an apology for not posting, then death” that most blogs don’t, but now it feels like I do need to decide on -some- approach to it before it sort of peters out.

For artists and creative people, the easiest, go-to model for an “online presence” is to share “process.”

Health and contracts often throw wrenches in that easy plan. My health seriously impacted what I could do for the past three years, and still does. There was less drawing than any point in my entire life. The total number of pages from this period is barely in double digits. About half of the work I did manage to do is under non-disclosure agreements, so it’ll be impossible to share that work indefinitely, possibly never. Any small personal projects I am attempting to work on through this time, I am allowed to share, but it’s meaningful enough that I don’t want to share it before it’s done.

The list of available easy material to post on the usual channels is rapidly shrinking here.

I can’t go anywhere to draw something from life and don’t have any interest in fan art (the usual bread and butter of stuff to post online, being fast to make and fast to like). Doodling is something I rarely do and am even more reluctant to share, because I need something concrete in there for things not to feel like a frustrating waste of your and my time, which, like the energy, is still so limited.

And, I have become almost allergic to the oversaturation of process, so I can’t even squeeze the most “content” out of every scrap I do make.³

So how to renconcile all of the above with a need⁴ to still be around, in some way, sort of regularly? To exist as an artist online. What do I even post? Archival material? Thoughts About The Medium?

I figured I could maybe write out a list for myself. Think out loud, in public, for a minute. Maybe not -the- Plan. Just asking what kinds of things I could see putting on here under actual, not imaginary, circumstances.

Five or six categories of stuff come to mind:

1) work finished or published
pictures, pages, covers, strips–

2) the umbrella category of “updates”
any work in progress that can be shared, process (some), live appearances (none), upcoming books and reprints, prints or other physical objects I make–

3) the archive
(basicaly the two categories above, only not current)–

4) study or thoughts about the medium
Probably incomplete, and in the shape of questions rather than answers. If I had comprehensive conclusions, I’d write a book. But like everyone, I do spend an absurd amount time in my own head while doing the work, and enjoy ruminating and breaking it all down to atoms. Sometimes I stumble upon interesting thoughts while smashing those together, like the world’s slowest particle accelerator–

5) interesting things that I ran into; pointing towards books or movies or places or people
this is what Twitter is at the best of times, and a good portion of newsletters. I would probably have to find some way to group these interesting things and not just send out posts like “hey, look at this one Roy Crane panel with the fish!” That would get pretty annoying very fast, I suspect. But I can put a few such things in a mini digest. “Some of this week’s program–“

6) Q & A
If there are interesting/frequent questions in the comments, or that I get through the main website, I can go through those a few times a year and respond. People sometimes ask for my advice on something and if I am able to reply (not as frequently as I’d like), I then go wildly overboard and end up writing a ludicrously long response, with diagrams and illustrations⁵. I respond on Twitter sometimes, where it is both unwieldy in the moment and then impossible to find afterwards. Here, at least it might be of use to more than one person–

So: new, updates, archive, thoughts, interesting and Q&A.
1 2 3 4 5 6. Fits in my collander-like brain. Can count them on the fingers of one cartoonist’s hand. Could even preface the post titles with those tags (my organizing brain leaps at that). I could color code them (!) if I could figure out how to format anything on WordPress.

That’s not a plan-plan yet, but still gives me a good sense of the building blocks to work with and to hopefully put together something sustainable⁶. This place can deal with all six better than any other platform I can think of. Can I come up with a good thing or two from any one of these categories every week or so? Probably, even on a bad week. Maybe I’m being too optimistic. Maybe more archival stuff and commentary during difficult times, and new material on better days. But it sounds like it could work.

Pulling a random thing from one of these six hats at a steady pace seems like an achievable and reasonable way of being online. Or at least of this “brief but substantial enough personal broadcasts, with a managable amount of meaningful communication with the reader” flavor of it that artists try to keep going.

Let’s see what I can put together now that I have those half dozen categories as a framework.

And, ultimately

And, ultimately: I grew up on blogs, and got a lot from them (and I still do). Darko Macan had blogs and a weekly column about comics, and those were huge for the 14-15-16 year old me. Many of my favorite artists had blogs, and they were treasures, schools, encyclopedias, and connections to some of the people I am now lucky enough to call friends 20 years later.

I’m sure they felt like maybe three people were reading them, and felt the same feelings of why bother with it, and how arrogant it can seem to post anything at all, and so on. But they really made a big difference to me personally. Every opportunity I get, I try to tell every single one of them that it made a huge difference, at least to me.

I was in a tiny remote town in southern Europe back then, and there was just no way around the distance. There was no way for me to physically hang out with Darko, in the north of the same country, even if I knew him at that point, let alone with the Norwegian cartoonist Jason (who has had the same blog since then), or with Mick McMahon (whose incredible blog no longer exists, but is archived), or someone in Japan, and talk about comics. Yet I did have this amazing luck of having a direct line to them through what they shared — pictures, books, histories, experiences, the disappointments and the joys.

But the same distance can happen even between two people working in the same room, daily.

There’s just too much going on, and this is often our most direct way to someone’s head and feelings, things that may be almost impossible to convey in person, because we don’t have the means or the capacity to do it. These efforts to communicate in posts and pictures and text; pieces of our experience of being alive and dealing with all of it in real time, that are then reassembled by the other person, they can bridge that gap, sometimes, a bit– so it seems worth trying, a different way, again.

If you’re still here, thank you for reading all the way through, and I’ll see you soon, with some new pictures (or worst case, some old pictures).

t.

(If I missed an obvious good category, please let me know in the comments. But as mentioned above, things like process videos or tutorials are unlikely. There’s a reason why this isn’t monetized or behind a paywall. Maybe I’ll address that sometime too.)

(I forgot photos. OK, seven categories. Still one pro cartoonist hand.)

Footnotes

because I wanted to test how they work, and how formatting works on WordPress, and that was also the only way to keep the main post from going past a thousand words (I did blow right past it, I got to 3728; this is the third, “short” draft. Maybe the blog and thinking in public can be a way for me to learn brevity? I just read a post about ADHD people, parentheses, and overexplaining and went “oh boy.”) Anyhow, footnotes:

[1]: As opposed to, say, a regular website (which feels more like an archive), or a printed collection of drawings or essays.

[2]: And a place where, for the most part, i control the power switch (as well as the amount of incidental hateful garbage, ideally zero at all times.) This played a big role in the timing. We spent years being the proverbial frogs being slowly boiled over there, then recent months just turned the gas stove knob as high as it goes. In that way the decision to escape was both impulsive and a long time coming.
Still, I don’t see myself entirely leaving Twitter, or whatever the more acceptable replacement turns out to be (Bluesky? or better, Mastodon, if it can finally reach critical mass?) because friends and colleagues are there, and it remains a casual enough way to check in on them without the obligation of emails or more insistent and linear chatroom communication of a Discord. The casual, asynchronous nature is why we started using the social media apps anyway. We’re not switching to emails any time soon. So most of my current use of Twitter is as a direct messaging app. I don’t even have the main timeline visible on my computer.

[3]: Process now seems to be the primary art product online. In sheer volume there’s at least 10,000 times the amount of process compared to finished pictures or pages of comics. It’s a necessary consequence of the platforms: it’s the easiest way to produce the amount of things you need to post to stay afloat in “the algorithm” and the best return on your investment (a flashy warmup drawing of Spider-man will do much better numbers than a Spider-man page from the same person, despite one taking 30 minutes and the other easily up to three days; both get two seconds of scrolling by on the Two-Seconds-Per-Picture App of your choice). While in general I do want to add to the available corpus of knowledge for learning about pictures, I don’t think a step by step process of every picture I make helps with that at all– it only teaches people that the process is the main end product, which I don’t agree with.

[4]: This need to be online is its own thing to dig into, probably under psychiatric supervision. But in the simplest terms it’s an important, and paradoxically, most direct link to other people for a lot of us. Words and pictures can often convey what we have a hard time getting across even in the same room, and many things that we can’t get across at all. And it has the added benefit of doing that even across space and time. It’s a valuable channel of communication.

[5]: “Well, if I’m responding to a question, I should respond thoroughly”

[6]: This just seems like tempting fate to create yet more novel ways of making me even more tired.

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